Department of Statistics, UCLA

Over the past two decades, a variety of methods have been used to count the homeless in large metropolitan areas. In this paper, we report on a recent effort to count the homeless in Los Angeles County, one that employed the sampling of census tracts. A number of compli- cations are discussed, including the need to impute homeless counts to areas ofthe Countynot sampled. We conclude that, despite their im- perfections, estimated counts provided useful and credible information to the stakeholders involved.