He prefers to stay in Glendale and Eagle Rock because in downtown Los Angeles, “they’ll pick your pocket,” he said, drawing his thin wallet out for effect.
All the while, Rafael Matais, a street outreach case manager for PATH Achieve Glendale, logged Gutierrez’s information for the city’s biennial homeless count, a point-in-time snapshot required for millions in federal grant funding.
Of the 296 homeless people surveyed in 2007, 79 were found to be in Gutierrez’s category of chronic homelessness, those who are most often seen on sidewalks and loitering around park benches.
Dozens of volunteers in coordination with community development officials and the city’s Homeless Coalition, a network of homeless service providers, were to scour the streets of Glendale this week in an effort to track down as many transients as possible.
Officials said they won’t know the exact figures until early next month, when they’ve had time to untangle duplicate counts and compile the results, but more families were expected to be found on the street this time around.
Families made up about half of the homeless population counted in 2007, according to city reports.
The tallies are an essential part of the city’s annual application to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which currently funds $2.7 million of local homeless services programs.
Survey results from this week will affect Glendale’s HUD application for fiscal year 2009-10, said Ivet Samvelyan, a senior administrative analyst for the city’s Community Development and Housing Department.
City officials and Homeless Coalition members have in recent years been working to get transients off the streets and into more permanent housing, coupled with intensive case management to keep them there.
