Outreach workers and volunteers fanned out across San Francisco Thursday morning conducting this year's biennial point-in-time count of the homeless.

A series of changes have been made to the methodology of the count this year, including shifting it from late-night to a morning count, in the hope of avoiding the undercounting problem that critics typically point to.

As advocate Del Seymour, a member of the Local Homeless Coordinating Board, tells the Chronicle, the morning count, conducted between 5 am and 10 am on Thursday, will hopefully be a more accurate picture, because unhoused individuals tend to hide themselves at night to keep from being robbed, and that could lead to them being missed.

"It’s kind of a controversial change, but we needed to make this change to see if we’re actually getting a correct count," Seymour tells the paper.

The other significant change is that outreach workers and volunteers were tasked with surveying the people they counted — something that in previous years happened in the weeks after the count.

The city is expecting this will provide a better picture of the homeless population, where they came from, and their circumstances — though given the early morning aspect, and the necessity of waking people up in some cases, this likely posed some challenges as well.

Reportedly, Oakland conducted their count in the morning hours in 2024, and they did so again this year.

These point-in-time counts are conducted in cities across the Bay Area and across the country, as part of a federal mandate from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for receiving federal homeless funding.

San Francisco's last homeless census in 2024 found 8,328 individuals on the streets, both unsheltered and sheltered, marking a 7% increase from two years earlier. Of those 4,355 were unsheltered, a number very close to the count of unsheltered people in 2022, which was 4,397.

A sign that this was a possible undercount was that in the same year, around 20,000 individuals accessed the city's homelessness services, but that could represent people who passed through the city on their way somewhere else, or people who exprienced temporary homelessness at some point during the year.

The final numbers from this year's census will be released sometime this spring.

Previously: Unsheltered Homeless Population In SF Nearly Unchanged Since 2022, Overall Number Rises 7%