Who goes around counting the homeless? Could this be an issue of who does the counting rather than how many homeless there are?
Excellent point. And, I suspect, whatever number they actually count, they multiply it by, say, 1.6 for their “best guess estimate” for reporting purposes.
How do they know they are homeless?
Do they smell them?
I’ve heard that some cities have done a census of people in the streets. And they go out overnight and count people out in the streets.
Such a process will have some guesswork and estimated numbers used. But with a fluid mobile vagrant population, we will never get more precise correct numbers.