In the first moments of daylight on Thursday, a trio of volunteers peeked into the busted-out windows of an old transit bus on Oakland’s San Pablo Avenue. They wondered: Was someone living in there?

That was the question asked by more than a thousand volunteers in Alameda County on Thursday, who took to the streets and shelters to count as many unhoused people as they could find. Counties throughout the U.S. are required by the federal government to conduct these tallies, known as point-in-time counts. In Alameda County, two years have passed since the last tally found 9,450 people sleeping in cars, RVs, tents, shelters and sidewalks — up from 8,022 in 2019.

The counts are imperfect, but they’re important data informing government programs to prevent homelessness and get people back on their feet, said Edie Irons, a spokesperson for the nonprofit All Home, which tackles homelessness in the Bay Area.

“It is a really big deal,” she said.

Next week, San Mateo County and Contra Costa County will kick off their own point-in-time counts. Typically, counties tally their unhoused populations every two years. Santa Clara County conducted its own count last year.

These numbers will be closely watched when released later this year. Elected officials tend to take heat from critics when tallies show a rise in homelessness — or they celebrate when numbers decline.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced that the state saw a 9% decline in homelessness last year and claimed the state is “breaking cycles of homelessness that took decades to create.” In June, Contra Costa County reported a 26% drop, which officials attributed to beefed-up rent assistance programs and more shelter and permanent housing.

Litter and human waste surrounded the old bus on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, and down the block, a tent camp was quiet in the chill of early morning. No one answered the volunteers’ calls, even after they offered gift cards and toiletry kits. The group of three volunteers had walked a slice of West Oakland since 6 a.m. and counted only a handful of unhoused people.

They had better luck across the street, where a man bundled in a scarf cheerfully approached and asked: “Y’all doing a survey?”

The man, Quentin, who didn’t provide his full name, stared into space while he answered a series of intimate questions from an influential decision-maker in the politics of homelessness: Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, whose district includes West Oakland. She had volunteered for the count. Quentin said he slept in a truck that night. He fell into homelessness several years ago after developing drug habits. He had a substance abuse problem with cocaine, chronic health conditions and mental health maladies, he said.

After a few minutes of questioning, one of the volunteers handed him a gift card. Bas logged the information into a smartphone app called Counting Us, and the volunteers continued on their mission to find more people before the morning’s end. It was typical business during a point-in-time count.

But the landscape of homelessness had changed dramatically since the last tally, two years prior.

Lucy Kasdin, a volunteer and the deputy director of health and housing services for Alameda County, noted a June 2024 Supreme Court decision allowing cities to sweep homeless camps even when no shelter is available. Public opinion has also soured against encampments and blight in recent years, fueling election promises of faster solutions to homelessness.

Like San Jose and other cities, the City of Oakland has reported more sweeps under Mayor Barbara Lee and former Mayor Sheng Thao than during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s still official policy in Oakland that city workers offer shelter to displaced people, but activists say the need far exceeds capacity. Last year, city workers dismantled a longstanding tent city stretching along E. 12th Street, along with other major encampments.

The upshot? Fewer large encampments this year, Bas said, and more people scattered alone or in smaller communities.

That may make them harder to find and count. Sweeps often push unhoused people farther off the beaten path, underscoring a major limitation of point-in-time counts: experts agree that the approach — tallying unhoused people on a single morning — results in an undercount.

For instance, volunteers may not see people who are homeless but couch-surfing with friends or family, or those living in motels, said Irons, of the regional nonprofit All Home.

“You miss a lot of folks,” she said.

Even so, the tally is one of the government’s main sources of data, she said. Critically, the federal government uses the data to help decide how much funding a local government receives to tackle homelessness.

This year, the count totals arrive at the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development as the administration of President Donald Trump tries to divert billions of dollars in homelessness spending from permanent housing programs. Nationally, advocates have said the move could leave 170,000 more people on the street; in Alameda County, between $30 million and $60 million for housing annually is at stake, Kasdin said.

Opponents challenged the move, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out the plan.