  Over the past two decades, a variety of methods have been used to count the
homeless in large metropolitan areas. In this paper, we report on an effort to
count the homeless in Los Angeles County, one that employed the sampling of
census tracts. A number of complications are discussed, including\^{E} the need
to impute homeless counts to areas of \^{E}the County\^{E} not sampled. We
conclude that, despite their imperfections, estimated counts provided useful
and credible information to the stakeholders involved.
