Thoughts from the 2020 Point in Time Count in Austin, Texas

Somebody is out there, they’re worth all the time and wet socks in the world; they deserve to be counted and cared for.

My friend Steve-O, displaying his award for a play he wrote and starred in about what it’s like to experience homelessness here in Austin, Texas

It was about 3:10am on January 25, 2020, and a team of two others and myself—a friend and a new friend—were trudging down a hill in East Austin, behind a church, near a bar, walking towards a fire lit off in the distance. We were all wishing we had worn better shoes because our socks were already frozen, and we had just started. It had just rained, so the slope we were walking down was muddy, we all slipped at least once, bracing and calling out to make sure the other person was alright.

The three on my team were part of a larger team of seven responsible for surveying Section 46—one of 74 total sections with something like 1,000 volunteers all across the city who had signed up to help count Austin’s homeless population as part of ECHO’s Point In Time Count here in Austin, Texas. A point-in-time count is an annual census of a city’s homeless population and it’s something that happens all across the United States. It’s not unique to Austin. The total number of homeless individuals is then tallied up and sent to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, and used to help divvy up funding for services based…