Grants Pass volunteers brave cold for annual homeless count

On a Wednesday at the end of January, Amber Russo — a homeless services provider with the nonprofit UCAN — walks along the train tracks in Grants Pass, pulling a blue wagon filled with supplies like backpacks and tents.

Along with other employees from UCAN and Adapt, a health care nonprofit, Russo is searching for signs of homeless camps, scanning the brush along the edge of the tracks.

It’s a sunny day with blue sky, but a layer of frost coats everything, and I can see my breath in the morning air.

Related: 100-plus US cities banned homeless camping this year after Grants Pass ruling

First, we come across a tent in the woods, with clothes spread out over a log. But there’s no one around.

“We have — it’s called the unsheltered observation count, so I would count it,” Russo says. “There just wouldn’t be anybody there for me to talk to or give supplies to.”

They pull out their phones and enter what information they can into an app, which contains a list of questions to gather demographic information from homeless residents. They log this site as an “unsheltered observation.”

Further down the tracks, there’s an abandoned wagon tipped over, full of suitcases and sleeping bags. Below us, in a ditch, is a wheelchair.

That’s another unsheltered observation.

Rachel Castellano with Adapt tucks a couple of her business cards into the bags.

“We do have a lot of people who are like, ‘I don’t want to answer your questions,‘” Russo says. “That’s why we get so many supplies like this, so they’re willing to answer our questions.”

This is her seventh year doing the Point in Time Count, or PIT Count.

Meanwhile, teams are spread out throughout the county, looking in city parks, greenways and other spots where homeless people are likely to be.

Here in Grants Pass, we keep walking and find a path through the brush, follow it down to a secluded campsite by the river — but, no people.

Eventually, we turn around. Just as we’re about to leave, we see a man walking up the tracks. His name is Michael Ledbetter, a bearded man who looks older than his 39 years.

Clayton Roberts with UCAN interviews Ledbetter and enters his answers into the app.

At the end, Russo hands him a backpack stuffed with supplies: food, a hygiene kit, a sleeping bag and a tent.

“It was nice talking to y’all,” Ledbetter says, then walks off.

Related: Grants Pass sued again over ‘objectively unreasonable’ homeless ordinances

We drive to the next stop, another area along the train tracks known as Devil’s Slide. The group expects to find a lot of homeless people here, so they fill their backpacks with supplies: socks, tarps and food.

We set off down the tracks again and soon come to a camp on a hill, with tents and canopies among the trees. But surprisingly, there’s no one here — except a cat, meowing from inside a tent.

Still, there are a lot of signs of life in the area: a mattress, tarps, trash. At one point, the group thinks there might be people in a tent down the hill, but no one responds, so we leave them alone.

Every campsite gets logged into the app.

At one point, we have to step off the tracks as a train barrels past.

Homeless people in Grants Pass might be more spread out today than they would have been a week ago. Five days before the Point in Time Count, the city cleared its largest homeless campsite, dispersing the residents.

Eventually, the team heads back, still laden down with supplies. We drive to the Josephine County fairgrounds, where the count is also happening. It seems lots of homeless residents have taken the bus or gotten a ride to be counted here instead.

There’s food, clothes, hair cuts and tons of resource groups: social service nonprofits, Oregon Law Center, the Department of Human Services and others.

Related: Grants Pass clears city-owned homeless campsite after decision by new leadership

Christine Locke is volunteering to count people. Locke says she was formerly homeless herself. She jots down answers as she interviews Ron Queary, a man using broken crutches.

“I’m homeless cuz people sold their home and that took my house away from me,” he says.

When they’re done, Queary heads to the tables filled with information about services, and the packet with his demographic information is filed away.

Final data for this count isn’t available yet, but last year’s count in Josephine County tallied 559 homeless people.

All this data, gathered piecemeal by local groups, will be sent to the federal government to track how big our country’s homeless problem is, and, hopefully, how close we are to solving it.

This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

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