Tweaks to point-in-time count outreach could result in more accurate tally this year

A chilly ocean breeze blew in the Pleasure Point neighborhood as Sheryl Norteye and her husband, Will, walked along East Cliff Drive, the southern boundary of their designated tract in this year’s point-in-time count of Santa Cruz County’s homeless population, an area she expected to be “boring.”

“This is mostly residential, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing a lot of unhoused people,” said Sheryl Norteye, who works as a human services analyst for the county’s Housing for Health division. “But we will try our best.”

She has worked the PIT count every year since 2021, and has scanned areas all over the county from downtown Santa Cruz to the Felton and Boulder Creek areas. Her husband, a marriage and family therapist and mental health advisor with the county Health Services Agency, joins her every year.

“I’m getting my steps in, you know,” he said.

“The benefits of being married to me,” Sheryl Norteye said with a laugh.

The PIT count is a federally required effort intended to assess the state of homelessness in the county. While counties have the option to count every other year, Santa Cruz County has chosen to do it annually since 2021. Last year’s PIT count showed a 20% decrease in the county’s homelessness population, from 1,850 in 2024 to 1,473 in 2025. It was the lowest level ever recorded.

Housing for Health Director Robert Ratner told Lookout last week that he expects this year’s count to go up, because he has observed an increase in requests for housing help to his agency and because of federal and state funding cuts to social service programs. Sheryl Norteye agreed with that assessment, but said she hopes at the very least that this year’s count will be more accurate.

Norteye said this year, the county assigned a paid “guide” to as many groups as possible. These guides have lived experience in homelessness and can show volunteers where to look and what to look for in each tract. The guides are paid $20 per hour for their time. The county took a similar approach to the youth count, working with youth homelessness groups and service providers to get a better picture of this demographic.

“One thing Santa Cruz continues to demonstrate is wanting to be a part of the solution,” she said, adding that more than 230 people signed up to volunteer this year. “I’ve been doing this for five years and I’m seeing growth year over year.”

Norteye said the county conducted direct outreach with marginalized communities and city councilmembers to recruit more volunteers, cut back on in-person training sessions and stepped up virtual training sessions to allow more people to participate, which she said helped the diversity of the volunteer pool.

Still, in many cases, counting unhoused people is a guessing game. The couple came across a van and a truck with a camper parked in one of the scenic view parking lots on East Cliff Drive. Noticing the camper’s drawn shades and covered windshields, the Norteyes assumed at least one person was sleeping inside, but they couldn’t say how many. 

They marked these vehicles as a “suspected” dwelling in the phone-based app that each group uses, and noted the last four digits of the license plate numbers so analysts can look up the vehicle’s registration and determine its exact size to make a more informed estimate in the final report. This follow-up research takes time which is just one reason for the delay between the count and the release of the results.

Starting next week, volunteers and service providers will survey unhoused people about their current shelter situations, demographics and how they became unhoused. Norteye said that it takes two to three weeks to complete.

“We also have data from our shelters, which submit data,” since volunteers don’t count people staying in shelters on the day of the count, she said. “Then we workshop and extrapolate all that data and have the preliminary report at least by early summer.”

The Norteyes came across other vehicles, too, but it was hard to tell if anyone was sleeping inside. One van parked just feet away from the coastline looked like a potential dwelling, but had a wetsuit draped over its sideview mirror. Initially, Norteye planned to not count it, as it could very well have been someone partaking in a very early — and very cold — surf session. But when the couple spotted supplies tied to the top of the van, Sheryl decided to count the vehicle as “suspected.” Erring on the side of inclusion is standard practice in the PIT count.

As the sun crept over the horizon and more people headed to Pleasure Point to jog, walk their dogs or surf, the Norteyes finished their count by car, weaving throughout neighborhood side streets to cover the rest of the roads in their assigned tract. That yielded a few more suspected vehicles. They did not encounter anyone in tents or otherwise on the street.

By the time they had finished counting, it appeared Sheryl Norteye’s prediction was right — there were no confirmed sightings of unhoused people, and only a handful of suspected sightings. However, that’s still useful information for the statisticians who run the numbers to estimate this dynamic and elusive population.

“I think a lot of people think of a neighborhood like this and think there are no unhoused people at all,” she said. “But as we saw, there are.”

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