Metro

The Center for Community Action Wednesday evening conducted the Blair County portion of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual, nationwide Point-In-Time (PIT) count of homeless people.

During the few hours of the count, teams of volunteers located a total of 10 individuals in six or seven family groups who were staying outside, mostly downtown or in other parts of the city, according to Victoria Bowser, coordinated entry specialist for the CCA.

CCA will organize the data it collected in the count before sending it on to HUD’s Eastern Pennsylvania Continuum of Care program, which will return it with analysis in about a month as part of HUD’s national effort to get a handle on the scope of homelessness — while helping to provide guidelines for sending money to programs designed to prevent homelessness or to assist homeless people, according to a CCA news release.

The teams of two or three volunteers each covered “a good portion of Blair County,” including Tyrone, Duncansville and Hollidaysburg, Bowser said.

The CCA planned the routes taken by the teams based on where people have been reportedly living outside, she said.

The snowy weather likely drove some homeless people to find some sort of shelter that kept them from view by the teams, while a preference not to be found may have encouraged others to “kind of hide away” during the PIT count, Bowser said.

The teams attempted to survey the homeless individuals they encountered to get demographic information, to learn if they are disabled and to learn about their overall situations, including how they ended up without housing, according to Bowser.

The teams offered those individuals they surveyed backpacks with items that could be useful, along with a folder with information about agencies that can provide them help, Bowser said.

The teams did not conduct surveys with two or three homeless individuals they counted, either because those people signaled that they didn’t want to be approached or because the teams were unsure that they could approach safely, Bowser said.

It would seem that Wednesday’s count does not come close to documenting the full number of people in Blair County who are struggling with homelessness, based on a report in November at a meeting of the, at which it was reported that 271 individuals were on the county’s “by name list” at the time.

“A by-name list (BNL) is a real-time, comprehensive database of every person experiencing homelessness in a community, detailing their name, history, health, and specific housing/support needs, used to coordinate services and help communities effectively match people to housing and resources to end homelessness,” according to a compilation of online sources.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.