2023 PIT Count

Yesterday (Wednesday) was long. Started by taking my daughter to school early for choir practice, and didn’t end till well after midnight after participating in Delaware’s PIT count. It also involved what, for me, was a first – commuting to Newark (DE, from Philly) by train for my workday, coming home, and then driving back down there that evening to count homeless people.

The point-in-time (PIT) count is an annual, nationwide count of the homeless population demanded by HUD for jurisdictions that receive HUD assistance for homelessness. In recent years I’ve alternated between participating in Philadelphia and Delaware, which does one statewide count. Participation means to literally go in the field and count.

It’s also a social event of sorts. I’ll see providers, advocates, and others that I know through work on homelessness but who I don’t see much over the rest of the year. This year, both Bethany Hall-Long, Delaware’s Lieutenant Governor, and Matt Meyer, the New Castle County Executive, came out to participate.

Despite being widely referenced as a gauge for the extent of homelessness, the PIT count’s numbers are very imperfect. Criticisms of the results abound. As a literal tally of many homeless people, in Delaware this means that volunteers fan out on one night (and some to service locations the next day) to see how many homeless people they can find to count and survey. This generally works well for sheltered homeless, but less so for counting unsheltered homeless. Volunteers go to sites that are likely to contain some homeless people and see who they can find. Many who are unsheltered and homeless in not so obvious places are missed.

My prediction for this year is that Delaware’s homeless numbers will drop. State of DE stopped its pandemic era motel/hotel voucher program when federal funds ran out. This program, at its peak, sheltered more homeless people than Delaware’s shelter/transitional housing providers. The existence of this program resulted in Delaware’s PIT numbers ballooning, and reflected the large numbers of people (mostly families here) who couldn’t or wouldn’t stay in shelters but came out precarious housing circumstances (cars, other people’s living rooms, domestic violence situations, etc.) to go to the hotel/motel rooms and now have presumably gone back to such precariousness, where they won’t be counted.

Additionally, within the last couple of weeks two major encampments in southern Delaware, in Milford and in Georgetown, have been cleared. So people, maybe 50-75, who were unsheltered and in a known location, are now scattered to the wind. Finally, it rained mercilessly on Wednesday night, which meant that many locations we were directed to check out were empty, as staying there would have meant getting (and staying) soaked. All that should ensure that the unsheltered count goes down, and along with it perceptions of reduced urgency.

I spent last night with a team of two others: HUD’s local Field Office Director with whom I also rode with last year and very much enjoyed hanging out and catching up with, and a Housing Alliance intern who was smart, committed and good company for an evening. Our efforts for the night netted three people, all of whom were taking refuge in an indoor mini-mall type place on Newark’s Main Street... literally exiled on Main Street. Also gained a renewed awareness of how, as miserable as we were in the cold, persistent January rain, these conditions are one of the many, routinely faced miseries of living outdoors.

Perversely, Delaware governor John Carney mentioned homelessness in his budget address last night. On one hand, the attention, and the state assistance, that the governor gave to affordable housing issues was a heartening contrast to the dearth of attention that housing has been getting in Dover. He came out in explicit support of a couple of things that I’ve involved with, including tenant right to counsel and repair assistance for low-income homeowners.

His comments were marred however, when he qualified the housing assistance outlays in the budget (go to the 38:35 point in this video) by remarking that the proposed assistance:

does NOT support folks that are marginally housed at the moment… so people that are experiencing homelessness … it’s a very different problem, a trickier problem because there are other issues associated with it in terms of mental health issues, substance abuse issues, underemployment and all that kind of stuff but something else also that we are working on.

Why, guv, did you feel the need to explicitly point out (reassure people?) that homelessness falls out of the purview of housing assistance? Is anyone going to call him out on this?

Unfortunately, if my prediction about the PIT count is correct, the forthcoming numbers (check back here around May) are likely to further undercut any urgency that seems to be felt about this problem in Delaware, leaving homelessness relegated to “something else also that we are working on.”