UW RDS PIT 2023

UW 2023 Seattle area homeless count Project: Main Page

In April 2022 King County Regional Homelessness Authority (King County Continuum of Care) with UW Faculty (Dr. Zack Almquist) ran a novel method known as Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) to estimate the total population of unsheltered people experiencing homelessness in King County known as the point-in-time count. This is based on the HUD reporting mandate, where every Continuum of Care (CoC) attempt to count the total number of unhoused residents in a single night (see https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/hdx/pit-hic/) every two years.

Because 2023 is skip year in the HUD requirement, a UW Team of researchers is going to run a second RDS PIT count for King County from April to June. Beyond running an RDS similar to KCRHA’s RDS PIT count we will also run an over sample of the Puget Sound Data Survey for people experiencing homelessness.

Policy-makers use this to make real change!

Previous RDS PIT count 2022 was reported in PubliCola, Seattle Times, Real Change, and the Washington Post. Results from these studies can be found on the HUD PIT Report for King County. The project this year will develop the method further and collect even more data that can be helpful for even more informed policy-making.

Project Leads

  • Zack W. Almquist, Associate Professor of Sociology
  • Amy Hagopian, Professor of Health Systems and Population Health
  • Paul Hebert, Research Professor Health Systems and Population Health
  • Nathalie Williams, Associate Professor of Sociology and Jackson School of International Studies

 

FUNDING

This project is supported by an NSF CAREER Award #SES-2142964. A University of Washington Population Health Initiative’s Tier 2 Pilot Grant and the Center for Studies in Demography and Social Ecology.