Category: Point in Time Counts

If you ask provider of homeless services in your community what a “typical” homeless person in shelter looks like, they may give you an entirely different answer than a provider in my community would give me. Homelessness doesn’t look the same across the nation, across a state, or even across a community.

It’s true that homeless person is unique, which makes it difficult to understand what homelessness looks like in America, but here’s the catch: unless we understand the general demographic trends in homelessness, we cannot provide the most effective services to end their homelessness.

So how do we these trends of homelessness on a national scale? To address this challenging question, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) collects data from around the country throughout the year and synthesizes this information into two yearly reports called the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, Parts 1 and 2.

In the next two weeks, volunteers across the country will set out to conduct a count of all homeless persons in their communities. Though it may be too late sign up to volunteer in your community’s 2015 Point-in-Time Count (here in D.C., volunteer registration is already closed), you can still help us out at the Alliance.

Every year the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires communities to conduct sheltered counts of people living in emergency shelter or transitional housing. Every other year, HUD requires communities to conduct unsheltered counts of people living in a place unfit for human habitation (such as in an abandoned building or in a park). This year is one of the years that both counts are required, so every community will be conducting both a sheltered and an unsheltered count.

Here at the Alliance, we track this data as it is released. Different communities release their count data at different times, and we want to know which communities are reporting an increase in homelessness and which ones are reporting a decrease. Of course, there are a lot of communities across the nation, so we can’t do this without your help.

January is upon us, and that means the 2015 Point-in-Time (PIT) Count is right around the corner. This year, in addition to their annual sheltered count, communities are required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to conduct an unsheltered count of people sleeping in places unfit for human habitation, such as on the street or in a park.

As part of their preparation, communities around the country are training volunteers to conduct unsheltered counts. Unsheltered counts are generally conducted on a single night in January, which means that communities must rely on volunteers to find and count as many unsheltered homeless people as possible. Volunteers are critical to the unsheltered count process, as many communities wouldn’t be able to conduct unsheltered counts without them.

Counting unsheltered homeless people is a daunting task. Not only are many unsheltered homeless people hard to find, but members of some homeless subpopulations, like homeless youth and LGBTQ individuals, congregate in different areas than larger populations and may try to avoid being identified as homelessness. Locating them requires different strategies.