To help the homeless, there’s an app for that

Shining her flashlight from the sidewalk below, Ms. Just, a retired state worker, offered a cautious “Hello?” A few moments later, two men emerged from the tent, and she conducted short interviews with each of them, recording their answers using another mobile app. The survey’s organizers introduced the two apps this year seeking to gain a more accurate and detailed census of the county’s homeless population, which the 2017 survey showed had climbed to nearly 3,700, a 30 percent increase from two years earlier. “You’re not going to find everybody who’s homeless,” says Arturo Baiocchi, a research fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Sacramento who oversaw data collection for the county’s survey.

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