Counting The Homeless In Hartford

Last Tuesday night I spent a few hours with outreach workers and volunteers as they conducted the national “point-in-time” count of Hartford’s homeless, a day of reckoning that the federal government mandates so advocates and officials can better understand the problem of homelessness.

As I reported in Sunday’s story,  nearly 770 homeless people lived in the capital city in 2012, including 141 children and 17 people who were “unsheltered” — those who sleep out in the cold, instead of the city’s emergency shelters or in transitional housing. A report on the 2013 point-in-time data will likely be released in late spring.

During the night, the census group I followed came across two men sleeping beneath highway underpasses in different parts of the city. They were counted. Here’s a photo gallery of Rick Hartford’s pictures.

Tony Mack, outreach coordinator with Immaculate Conception Shelter, shines a light on an area beneath I-84 where a homeless man built his own bedroom with 2x4s and plywood over the beams. RICK HARTFORD photo.