Margaret Woodruff

MARGARET WOODRUFF, then a graduate student at University of California, Irvine, California, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Productive Encounters: Bureaucracy, Dispossession, and Discourse of Unhoused LA,” supervised by Dr. Justin B. Richland. Every January, volunteers and professionals count unhoused people throughout Los Angeles as part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) funding requirements. Homelessness is both a universal and hyper-localized issue; homeless Point in Time (PIT) counts are organized by regional Continuums of Care (CoCs), leading to variations in count methods across communities. This research explores how different scales and geographies of governance influence the collaborative categorization of difference. To understand how count categories are made meaningful, participant observation in the 2024 PIT count across three sites (Venice, downtown Los Angeles, Long Beach), as well as interviews with volunteers and professionals who participate in the count, are analyzed alongside legal definitions of “homeless,” implementations of count data, and narratives about the count results. Additionally, comparing demographic and other categorical data about Long Beach populations from three sources — PIT results, the US Census Bureau, and count volunteer registration data produced in response to a Public Records Act request — underscores the disparities in who is most vulnerable and who is participating in the collaborative judgment of difference. The state-led process of visually identifying and categorizing homelessness enlists counters to transform people into transgressive bodies with differentiated value.