One day every winter, Wake County, N.C., counts its homeless. In the wee hours of the morning on that appointed day, staff from the county Human Services Department and Raleigh-area nonprofit and faith-based organizations load up their cars with food and clothing, and head to highway underpasses, cemeteries and campsites hidden in the woods behind the rail yard. They add the people they find there to the numbers spending the night in area shelters. It’s difficult work, says David Harris, the county’s director of housing services. The temperature hovers around freezing. Sometimes it rains. But mostly it’s that the homeless don’t want to be counted—most are drug addicts, upward of 20 percent have mental illness and they generally want to protect the last shred of privacy they have left. Last year local newspapers publicized the count ahead of time. “The homeless hid,” says Harris. “They knew we were coming.” As a result, the 2005 count netted only 1,106 individuals, a finding that severely underestimated what the community knew about its homeless problem.

The less-publicized 2004 count found 1,235 homeless people, yet all the evidence indicates that Wake County’s homeless population is growing, not shrinking. In Raleigh, someone earning the $5.15 an hour minimum wage would need to work 119 hours a week in order to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair-market rent. Census data indicates that 15,000-plus Wake County residents are living with friends or family because they can’t afford a place of their own. Studies show that this group is at extreme risk for homelessness, and many drift in and out of shelters and transitional housing at some point in the year. The result is that family homelessness in Wake County is rising 11 percent a year (and overall homelessness by about 20 percent a year). “The one-night count isn’t just inaccurate, it’s inadequate,” says Richard Fitzgerald, resource consultant for the Raleigh Rescue Mission.

Yet the face-to-face count has long been the only way to ensure that the same person isn’t counted twice. In order to get a more accurate sense of its homeless population, county officials and representatives from area nonprofit and faith-based organizations developed a plan to improve collaboration among the various agencies that serve the homeless, the jobless, the poor and anyone else considered at risk. At the heart of this goal is a homeless management information system (HMIS) that government and nongovernmental groups alike can use to create a single view of each homeless person in Wake County, track these people across the breadth of resources they use, and provide more informed and targeted services. Slightly more than a year after its October 2004 launch, 16 organizations are using the HMIS, and additional organizations, including local schools and hospitals, will be using it soon. And while Wake County will still hit the streets to count its homeless this winter (the one-night count is a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requirement), county officials now have real numbers from the HMIS they can use to obtain the appropriate level of resources from government and private-sector contributors.