This year's homeless count was canceled. Is it time to rethink it?
Los Angeles County’s annual homeless count is a civic ritual bringing thousands of volunteers together in a common cause. It is also a reckoning with the shortcomings of all that’s been done to salve the county’s most perplexing human crisis. So its cancellation this year due to the risk of spreading the coronavirus has had a multifaceted fallout — a loss of civic engagement, uncertainty over how much the COVID-19 pandemic has added to homelessness and, possibly most consequential, the potential loss of federal dollars that would be triggered by a higher count. But for those who see...