Quick Take
Clearing the Coral Street encampment days before the point-in-time count won’t house anyone — it just hides the problem, writes Food Not Bombs founder Keith McHenry. By scattering unhoused people out of sight, the City of Santa Cruz can claim progress while worsening daily survival. McHenry writes that he sees up to 200 people every week in rising meal lines in the city and folks complaining about lost tents and property. If Santa Cruz wants honest data and real solutions, he believes we have to stop mistaking displacement for success.
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On Jan. 22, Santa Cruz police and Santa Cruz city staff pushed people living on the streets out of their encampment in the Harvey West neighborhood. I believe they cleared the encampment, which was at Coral Street, in an effort to help this year’s point-in-time (PIT) count give the impression that the city, county and nonprofit programs are reducing homelessness.
I just returned from the Food Not Bombs meal, and some people who live on Coral Street are worried the city will not let them return or get their belongings. As a result, Food Not Bombs, which I founded, spent another $500 this weekend to buy tents and sleeping bags for those who lost them in this latest “encampment resolution sweep.”
This unfair and inhumane practice does nothing to help our unhoused.
The 2025 Santa Cruz point-in-time count claimed there was a large reduction in the number of people who were living outside in the county. The PIT count identified 1,473 people experiencing homelessness in Santa Cruz County, which the city noted was a 20% reduction since 2024.
Mayor Fred Keeley repeatedly hailed this supposed reduction as “proof” that local governments were doing a great job at housing the homeless. Those of us struggling to meet the needs of our unhoused neighbors knew this was a lie.
Many of us who work with the unhoused community have been pointing out that Housing Matters and the City of Santa Cruz swept Coral Street and the surrounding area a few days before the census. This scattered people who would otherwise have been easy to count into the woods, doorways, riverbanks and roadsides. I believe this is what resulted in the much-touted reduction.
It looks like the city and Housing Matters are following the same playbook this year.
As someone who has participated in these counts, I know how difficult it is to find people when they are driven out of sight. One year we did the count during an atmospheric river. And yes, the number of homeless neighbors in the county had decreased.
The reason the count is done in the winter is that those designing the process believed the census would be simplified by counting the number of filled beds in shelters by those seeking to survive the harsh weather. That is not an option in Santa Cruz as the shelters have been filled to capacity most nights since at least 2013.
Food Not Bombs is seeing a steady increase in the number of people seeking food at our weekend meals. We shared well over 200 meals on Sunday. We shared meals to over 150 people in the days before the previous point-in-time count. That was not a 20% decrease in the number of people relying on our meals.
Like other compassionate members of our community, we also deliver food to the people living around Housing Matters. These sweeps are making it difficult to help those who live outside since everyone is forced to disperse. People can no longer get the warm meals they rely on.
The point-In-time count has always been inaccurate. I helped organize the first census of homeless residents in 1990 when I lived in San Francisco. Even though we had none of the one-day restrictions of the point-in-time method, we still found it difficult to get an accurate count.
Right now, the PIT count is the only source of point-in-time data that records the numbers of sheltered and unsheltered unhoused people nationwide. The count determines how much the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will offer a community for funding. The county gets approximately $7 million annually in HUD Continuum of Care (CoC) funding.
But we know the process is flawed, as a 2017 report by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty shows. “Unfortunately, the methods used by HUD to conduct the PIT counts produce a significant undercount of the homeless population at a given point in time.” The report adds, “A 2001 study using administrative data collected from homeless service providers estimated that the annual number of homeless individuals is 2.5 to 10.2 times greater than can be obtained using a point-in-time count.”
Santa Cruz should stop pretending our problem is getting better by pushing unhoused people into hiding so we can celebrate our success.
These sweeps not only force people to find alternative locations to sleep where the police are more likely to force them to move in the night, while being deprived of what survival gear they can’t remove in time, it makes it more difficult for the community to provide support.
Like other compassionate members of our community, we also deliver food to the people living around Housing Matters but these sweeps are making it difficult to help those who live outside since everyone is forced to disperse.
Our city might be providing good paychecks for those managing the system, but it is doing little to help those who are left to the elements outside.
Keith McHenry is the founder of Food Not Bombs.