Homeless census offers insight into growing numbers, changing culture, on Peninsula streets.

It’s early, well before sunrise on Jan. 28, but Tom and Sandra are eager to cover lots of territory, and fast. They’re volunteer guides for the bi-annual homeless census, a count of the county’s homeless population.

They know these streets in detail, and can guide a census team in searching out certain vehicles – a blue van, for example, with a father and son duo always parked on the same Seaside block, or a battered RV that’s home to a middle-aged woman with a dog. Tom, 33, and Sandra, 36, are homeless themselves. (Their names have been changed at their request, due to safety concerns.)

They accompany Terry Bare, executive director of the nonprofit Veterans Transition Center, in his pickup on a drive through this census tract, covering ground in Seaside, Sand City and Monterey. To start, Tom and Sandra direct him to the Staples store off Canyon del Rey, where there are people sleeping under blankets, with two bicycles and a shopping cart stashed next to them.

As Bare drives the dark streets, Tom keeps track of dozens of homeless people and cars doubling as homes. They look for telltale signs that someone is living in a vehicle: condensation or privacy screens on the windows. They know many of these people by name, and their histories: They call child molesters “chomos,” and they know who’s mentally ill.

The bi-annual homeless census is conducted as a requirement of the U.S. Housing and Urban Development, which last year provided about $2.1 million to county homeless service providers. United Way of Monterey County contracts with Watsonville-based Applied Survey Research to crunch the numbers; the census report will be published by May.

Tom and Sandra are among dozens of homeless guides helping with the census. Their knowledge comes from three-plus years they’ve spent on and off the streets on the Peninsula. Now they live in a tent in the Del Monte Forest, in a location they decline to disclose; they’ve found a temporary sanctuary where they’ve been unbothered by law enforcement – and perhaps more importantly, other homeless people.

After two guys started following Sandra to an old campsite on the former Fort Ord, Tom bought her pepper spray. It was stolen. They spent just a half a night, years ago, camped out at Laguna Grande Park, which straddles Seaside and Monterey. “They always told us it was dangerous there,” Sandra says.

She was a friend of Charlene Leslie, a 58-year-old homeless woman who was found dead in the lake at Laguna Grande in September.

Since then, officials have cleared out brush and encampments in Laguna Grande, but Tom and Sandra say some more fringe people have stayed behind.

“You wind up with all the wrong people, because they run the good ones off,” Tom says.

Bare knows a homeless man whose hands were slashed with a knife by a newcomer to the Laguna Grande woods, where something of a turf war has played out with the oldtimers.

Bare’s mission is to help the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs achieve its bold goal of ending homelessness among vets by the end of this year. One of those vets is Tom, who first met Bare last summer at the Stand Down, a resource fair for homeless vets. Tom was one of about 100 vets there in search of a DD-214, showing military career dates and discharge status. It’s the document vets need to prove they served in order to get medical and other benefits.

“We were able to verify [Tom’s] veteran’s status,” Bare says. “We’re now trying to tackle housing and employment.” That starts this week with a job installing irrigation at VTC.

The next major hurdle they face: housing. Because Tom and Sandra aren’t married, they can’t live together in transitional VTC housing, available for up to two years. They’ve been together for six years, and say they’re ready to get married: They just need money for a marriage license.