AUSTIN (KXAN) — Barry Jones is one of the many people in Austin who have found themselves living on our streets while fighting debilitating mental illness. For Jones, it’s major depressive disorder (MDD).

“I get to a point where my brain just won’t handle certain situations anymore and that’s it, there’s nothing I can do about it,” Jones explained. That’s even with the medications he’s been prescribed.

Jones said that disorder is the reason he’s been in and out of different subsidized housing and then city shelters — including the Marshalling Yard. Nothing stuck, and now, he lives in a camp outside. His last resort.

“It’s been really bad. Emotionally it’s been really bad. Every time I lay down at night I’m breaking the law. It’s violent out there,” Jones said. He’s one of the people working with Vocal Texas, a group that focuses in part on issues tied to homelessness.

While many Austinites would gladly argue that people like Jones need extra help, there are also a number of people frustrated at how little they know about what the city is doing to get there.

The man who took over Austin’s Homeless Strategy Office late last year knows it.

“What we haven’t done a great job of is frankly telling that story, is making that information accessible and transparent. And what happens in that void is people make up their own stories about what’s happening and what’s not happening,” David Gray, the city’s homeless strategy officer, said.

Breaking down the Point-in-Time count

Often times, the confusion is as simple as: What is the scope of the problem we’re facing as a city? How many people are experiencing homelessness here?

To answer that question, we’ll start by breaking down something called the Point-in-Time (PIT) count. It’s a federally mandated method of hand counting the number of people sleeping outside on one night every other year.

It involves volunteers breaking into teams, asking people at night to unzip their tents and exit their cars, wake up off their spots on Austin’s sidewalks, and answer questions passed down from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

“Right now it’s our country’s only way to effectively count people experiencing homelessness the same across multiple communities,” said Matt Mollica, the executive director of the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO). That’s the group responsible for conducting the PIT count in Austin.

But the PIT count is not the holy grail of data collection — and is a well-established undercount, something ECHO has been clear about previously.

“We could see a tent or we could see multiple tents, but if folks don’t come out and talk to us, we can’t count those folks. And again, that’s not something that we’ve decided here in Austin, or the community in Houston decided to do it that way, those are federally mandated rules,” Mollica said.

During the 2023 count, more than 2,300 people were identified as being homeless in that overnight count, we previously reported. Of those, around 1,300 were people sleeping outside or in cars and around 1,100 were people sleeping in shelters or transitional housing.

But again, those numbers are well short of how many people are actually experiencing homelessness in Austin right now.

So…how many people are homeless in Austin then?

The shortcomings of that methodology are why on the day-to-day, neither ECHO nor the City of Austin rely heavily on that federally-mandated data for policy making, or determining the scope of need for services.

Instead, ECHO has been using a system for years where service providers — think outreach groups and emergency shelter workers — plug information into a centralized database as they go. ECHO then uses that data to much more accurately estimate the number of people experiencing homelessness in our city on any given night.

The latest data shows an estimated 5,530 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Austin and an estimated 1,153 in shelters. That’s 6,683 people who are homeless in our city.

“I think one of the things we’re doing is we don’t shy away from giving people multiple pieces of information and sometimes that can make it a little bit more complicated, but I think part of that is that we’re trying to be transparent about the different pros and cons of the way that we collect data and that we use this data,” said Akram Al-Turk, senior director of research and public policy at ECHO.

But that can also result in people comparing ECHO data to ECHO data — often not realizing they’re comparing data sets from the same group, and often to prove a point. We’ve seen prominent figures in our community do it, even other news outlets.

That can make it confusing for you. After all, without a good idea of the scope of the problem, it’s hard to commit to a solution. ECHO said it’s working on a better communication strategy for just that.

“It’s incumbent upon us as an organization to be out in the community having these types of dialogues with various community partners or just community members in general. We have a commitment to doing that over the next year,” Mollica said.

Where is your money going?

The City of Austin said it shares in that commitment. It recently brought in a consultant to make recommendations about how the now standalone homeless strategy office could better educate the public about what it’s doing, Gray said.

Of the recommendations, a city dashboard, which Gray said his office is working on right now. He did not have a timeline for when it would be published, but said they’re presently working to gather all of the pieces of data that would go into that new resource.

“It’s going to be an easy-to-use tool so if you want to know how many folks in our community are experiencing homelessness, what’s the utilization of our emergency shelters, how many permanent supportive housing units do we have in our community and other data points that can really speak to the investments that we’re making,” Gray said.

Gray confirmed that one of the elements of the dashboard would be the ability for Austinites to track city contracts and see where city dollars are going when it comes to homelessness.

“I’m a firm believer that the public should know how their money is being spent, where their money is going.”

David Gray, Austin homeless strategy officer

Collecting data on homelessness presents significant challenges

While the data presented on ECHO’s dashboard, and what will soon show up on the City of Austin’s dashboard, is a much better estimate of people experiencing homelessness than the PIT count, and can give you a clearer picture of the need for services — ECHO acknowledges it’s still not perfect.

Gathering data on homelessness is “very difficult,” as Al-Turk — senior director of research and public policy at ECHO — put it. There’s no flawless method for this type of data collection.

For example, if someone enters the database because they’ve made contact with a service provider one time and then resolves their homelessness or moves out of town without reaching back out to that service provider, that person may still be represented in the data.

“On the other side of that is we don’t really know how many people are not being served at all by our system,” Al-Turk said. He noted there are a number of reasons people may not connect to services, including mistrust of the system because of previous experiences.

But for people living outside who have made contact with that system, like Jones, the idea that a better understanding of the scope of the issue could be coming — is a good thing. It means a more educated public demanding their taxpayer dollars go to better services for people like him.

“It’s incredible trying to find help. Somebody who’s never done it, they just wouldn’t believe it…A lot of times it just makes me want to quit. But that’s just the way it is,” Jones said.