On a cold night in January, Diane Hughes, a volunteer with the Point-in-Time Count, approaches a young person in tight jeans, smoking a cigarette outside a midtown Publix. “Hi, there,” Hughes begins. “I’m helping conduct a survey about people experiencing homelessness in Atlanta. Do you have a few minutes to answer some questions?” They nod, cautiously.
After confirming that her interviewee is unsheltered, Hughes asks them a series of questions from a form she consults on her phone and enters the responses they provide. What is your gender? “Nonbinary.” How long have you been living on the streets or in emergency shelters? “About two years,” they begin, telling Hughes how they arrived in Atlanta from a state up north.
At the end of the interview, Hughes provides them with a $10 Kroger gift card as thanks for participating and bids them a warm goodbye. Then she joins the rest of her volunteer group to head to their next location. By the end of the night—well past two a.m.—she and hundreds of other volunteers will have canvassed nearly all of the city. They’ll have talked to people taking refuge under bridges and sleeping in tents behind gas stations, gathering a picture of who is living unsheltered in Atlanta at a single moment in time…