The number of people living on the streets of Pasadena is the lowest in more than a decade, according to results of an annual city survey.
Volunteers who performed the Pasadena Homeless Count on Jan. 23 documented 772 people living outdoors, in cars or in homeless shelters. That’s a roughly 15% drop from the 904 homeless counted in January 2012, city Housing Director Bill Huang said.
The total is also a steep drop from 2011’s peak of 1,216 and the lowest since regular counts began in 2000.
Federal housing officials require cities to perform annual homeless counts to qualify for grant funding. Pasadena’s count is led by the nonprofit research group Institute for Urban Initiatives, based at Fuller Theological Seminary.
Institute President Joe Colletti credited economic recovery and new city strategies for addressing homelessness as contributing to Pasadena’s declining homeless population.
Instead of requiring homeless people to navigate a complex network of social services to be eligible for housing assistance, officials now work to provide housing first and then wrap services around it — reducing the number of homeless who “wash out” of programs, he said.
“The approach is to end homelessness rather than manage it — looking at the main immediate need, which is housing,” Colletti said.
One example of the new strategy is Project Housed Pasadena, a public/nonprofit partnership that since last year has identified and found housing for 32 of the city’s most vulnerable homeless residents, Housing Department planner Anne Lansing said.
Pasadena Homeless Count results show a decline in the numbers of chronically homeless, defined as those who have been homeless for more than a year and suffer from a disabling condition.
The number of homeless families also declined, but the number of homeless children stayed about the same — 106 in 2012 compared to 104 this year. The trend suggests larger families have found it more difficult to recover from homelessness, Colletti said.
Fewer young adults, seniors and women were homeless than last year.
Evidence of a shrinking transient population is also a sign that homelessness is a problem that actually can be solved, Colletti said.
“The public sometimes has this image of an endless line of [homeless] people who need an endless bag of resources. But when you break things down … there’s an end to it,” he said.
-- Joe Piasecki, joe.piasecki@latimes.com
Follow on Twitter: @JoePiasecki.