The Point-In-Time Count is a territory wide survey related to the characteristics of unsheltered homeless people and their housing needs. This survey is essential for counting, describing, and understanding the homeless people who do not use shelters and are typically found on the streets, in abandoned buildings, in the hills, on the beaches, or in other places not meant for human habitation.

Unsheltered homeless people are an important subpopulation of the homeless, and their characteristics and needs must be accommodated within any strategy to reduce homelessness. Collecting good baseline data about this subpopulation of homelessness is essential to understanding the causes and to designing effective responses, and can be used as a basis for comparison in future years. Moreover, continued data collection at regular intervals is needed to track progress towards reducing/ending homelessness in our community. The Point-In-Time Count of the unsheltered homeless is a step in this direction.