As the sun rose on a chilly Thursday morning, San Mateo County Supervisor Lisa Gauthier and her chief of staff, Nicole Fernandez, walked down an alleyway in East Palo Alto. Their voices hushed as they walked past a man and woman sleeping on a mattress, wrapped in thin blankets.
Fernandez recorded the information in an app designed to collect census data on the homeless population. Gauthier and Fernandez, along with county employee Selina Toy Lee, were canvassing an area of East Palo Alto for San Mateo County’s biennial one-day homeless count. They were part of a team of 350 trained volunteers who walked or drove the entirety of the county early on Jan. 29, tallying the number of people sleeping in RVs, tents, parks and at bus stops – any place not designed to be a regular sleeping accommodation.
