Methodology
Methodology & honest limits
Trust lives here. If any of this is wrong, that’s a bug — see the bottom of the page.
- The count is BRACH’s by-name list, reported in aggregate. I never publish names; the list is confidential by design. I show the number, not the people.
- Different sources give different numbers, and they’re all right — they count different things.The headline number — 259 as of June 2026June 2026 · BRACH — is BRACH’s monthly active by-name total (259 in June 2026). The May 2026 State of Homelessness report cited a by-name list of 333 (a different date) and 703 people over the full year(annual flow, not a snapshot). A monthly active count, a point-in-time list, and an annual total measure different things — I say which is which so the numbers never look like they’re arguing with each other.
- The pressure gauge is evictions, and it’s a leading indicator — not a count of who became homeless. Housing loss is the biggest pipeline into homelessness, so a rising eviction count is an early warning; but most evicted households don’t end up unsheltered, and some who become homeless were never formally evicted. I show it because it’s the honest, sourceable upstream signal — and I label it as exactly that. Source: court records from the Legal Services Corporation (~94% of filings; the real number is a little higher, never lower). Scope note: the headline count spans the whole region (six localities), but this eviction gauge is Charlottesville City only — the cleanest monthly series I can source. Read it as the city’s slice of the upstream pressure, not the region’s.
- The gauge I’m missing, said plainly: the true monthly inflow/outflow (people newly homeless vs. newly housed) is what would tell you whether the region is solving this or just bailing. BRACH tracks it internally (Built for Zero) but doesn’t publish it, so I don’t show it — and I don’t guess. The blank is deliberate, and it’s a standing request.
- “Functional zero” does not mean no one is ever homeless. It means homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring — few enough that the system rehouses people faster than new people fall in.
- “Affordable housing” in a city budget usually means affordable to someone with a job — not to someone with no income. Technically it’s units at ~60% of area median income; a person with near-zero income can’t afford a 60%-AMI unit without a voucher on top — which is why the total housing dollars and the number of unhoused people don’t move together. I show both so you can see the gap.
- The objections are answered from research, not vibes — every empirical claim links to its source (no-horse where the fact is settled; named-with-a-lean where it’s a policy judgment, said as such). I represent the typical argument in my own words; I never quote or name real residents.
- On the astroturf question: this issue attracts manufactured amplification (out-of-town accounts, bad-faith actors). I note that once, here, so readers can calibrate — and then I answer every argument on its merits regardless of who’s making it. The page is not a combatant.
- Every number links to its source and its date. If a number is stale, that’s a bug — tell me — message me on reddit.