Grover Berry has laid his head in many places these past four or five years — in tattered shacks, on bleachers, or on the ground itself.

“The easiest place to find me?” Berry repeated a question Tuesday from an inquisitive visitor with a clipboard. “Right here!”

He says a falling-out with his sister has kept him on the streets near Mission 66 and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard more so than his personal vices.

“I was staying with her,” Berry said. “But, sometimes, you can’t hardly get along with your family. When it’s cold, I sleep out here. Or I find an abandoned house. I go eat at Salvation Army.”

Berry might find it lonelier on the streets these days than usual, as this year’s Point In Time Count in Vicksburg showed fewer homeless people due to more services for those with no place to go.

A final tally showed 82 people were counted homeless in the city, down from 135 last year and a high of 204 in 2012.

“We ended up with less because we have the shelters,” said Tina Hayward, executive director of Mountain of Faith Ministries, which runs Women’s Restoration Shelter and Faith House shelters. The facilities offer emergency and transitional housing for women and children. The ministry has organized the local count for the nationwide census of homeless for a decade.

Hayward said this year’s total accounts for those in a shelter and on the street. In Vicksburg, surveyors searched for homeless people around north Washington Street, near downtown, Marcus Bottom, around motels and in established shelters.

As per guidelines from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, volunteers are to count people as unsheltered homeless if they are at least 18 years old and found to live in cars, parks, abandoned buildings or on the street. People who meet that description are tallied and given a plastic bag of toiletries even if they refuse to take a survey.

This year, the surveys doubled to five pages so details such as mental illness and chronic substance abuse are nailed down. Information in the surveys keeps ministries and other entities that conduct the count nationwide eligible for federal grants.

“It takes a long time to go through these,” volunteer Gigi Tharpe said while interviewing Berry. “I know they want to just get on with it.”

Among questions asked the homeless on the expanded survey dealt with recent hospital visits, interaction with the police, risky behaviors such as prostitution and unprotected sex, and whether the person thinks anyone owes them money.

Tharpe, a Dallas native who helped perform the count last year in Lewiston, Maine, was among several AmeriCorps NCCC volunteers dispatched to the effort.

“I’ll see how this goes,” Tharpe said of the longer survey, which she termed a “problem.”

Cases like Berry’s — a fiftyish, single man without family members — go to River City Rescue Mission, Tharpe said. The facility offers a temporary place to stay and spiritual guidance for homeless men.

Whether the help lasts is difficult to gauge.

“I’ll tell you something,” said Clyde Wright, also among the small group of men interviewed as they killed time around the bleachers at Fuzzy Johnson baseball field.  “There’s about three or four different places he could have gone by now. I don’t want to hear anything about it.”