Huron County's housing services manager says determining how many homeless people there are in the county is going to be a challenge.
Barb Hall says homelessness is not as visible in rural communities as it is in urban centres, because people don't tend to sleep on the streets but they do couch surf.
Hall says they're going to work with a number of organizations or agencies that are likely to be used by homeless people to try and get an accurate county. They will be contacting those agencies over the next month to enlist their help and then conduct the actual count over a one-week period next spring.
Hall says they have enough anecdotal evidence that there are homeless people in Huron County but it would helpful in addressing the problem if they had accurate numbers.
There is government funding available to help with some of the issues related to homelessness, but Hall says the enumeration will help them direct that funding to the appropriate solution.
"That involves a coordinated multi-day count of people who are homeless or potentially homeless or precariously housed and it access them through a variety of service organizations that are likely to be used by people that are experiencing homelessness," says Hall. "We know that we do have a homeless population out there. We opened a temporary shelter over the winter, Huron Out of the Cold, and we're hoping to run that again this year. We had people visiting that. But because we work in social services we do hear of a number of situations where people are homeless."