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Hundreds of volunteers went tent-to-tent and sidewalk-to-sidewalk throughout San Diego County on Thursday morning for the annual one-day, point-in-time homeless count.
The Regional Task Force on Homelessness spends about six months preparing for the count, which involves 1,700 volunteers and service providers, and then three months analyzing the results, officials said. The statistics collected are a key factor in the allocation of state and federal funding for homelessness prevention programs.
One of the county’s heaviest concentrations of unsheltered residents is in the East Village neighborhood of San Diego, along 16th and 17th streets close to the roar of traffic on Interstate 5. It is a mix of old, small, single-family homes behind bars and fences, with a few warehouses and gated parking lots, all in the shadow of new, high-rise apartment buildings.
“My plan is to get on my feet, be a man and work,” said Gabriel Perez, born in 1977. He’s been living on San Diego’s sidewalks since he got out of jail about a year and a half ago.
He’s an experienced landscaper, he said, but his life was thrown off track by the death of his 16-year-old daughter in a car crash.
A friendly man with a shaved head covered in tattoos, Perez agreed to answer an interviewer’s questions in exchange for a $10 7-Eleven gift card and a pair of new socks.
Not everyone was as cooperative. In a blue nylon tent a block away, two people agreed to participate, but...
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