Point in Time count: Homeless population up 8 percent
Census shows increase of people living outside, in shelters in county
By Patty Hastings, Columbian
Social Services, Demographics, Faith
Published: May 5, 2017, 5:56pm
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Tiffany Singleton builds a fire outside her tent on West 12th Street in Vancouver after a snowstorm in January. In a recent single-day census, The Council for the Homeless found 269 unsheltered people in Clark County this year, an 18 percent increase from last year. (Ariane Kunze/Columbian files)
Homelessness in Clark County grew by more than 8 percent this year, according to a single-day census of the homeless population taken Jan. 26. During the annual Point in Time count, case workers and volunteers counted 749 people, including 234 children, living in shelters or outside. In 2016, a total of 692 people were counted.
Andy Silver, executive director of the Council for the Homeless, which administers the Point in Time count, said the numbers are important, but they are not a particularly accurate reflection of homelessness.
The number of people in shelters doesn’t shift much because local shelters are consistently full, Silver said. There were 251 people in emergency shelters and 229 people in transitional shelters that include programs like Open House Ministries. In April of 2016, the nonprofit homeless service provider Share opened Women’s Housing and Transition, a 12-bed shelter for women that was based at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church during the winter.
“If we open another emergency shelter that had 100 beds, the number would go up by 100,” Silver said.
Or, if the census had been conducted on a severe weather night — when temperatures dipped below freezing — the numbers would have been greater as churches and other facilities opened their doors to shelter people overnight. Share’s family shelters and its day shelter also provided additional capacity during the rough winter. Some transitional housing beds were classified differently and moved to a different program, so they were not counted in this year’s survey, Silver said.
Those who are chronically homeless and living in shelters increased slightly, which Silver said is due to people taking longer to get out of homelessness and secure a place to live. Some people have high needs and find more barriers to securing housing that they can afford.
“The unsheltered number is the most important,” Silver said, adding that it shows where local shelters fall short.
Another way of considering the growth in the number of people experiencing homelessness is to look at the “new homeless” who contact the Council for the Homeless seeking services.
“These are people who have never been in our system as homeless before,” Silver said.
Between Oct. 1, 2015 and Sept. 30, 2016, there were 1,437 new people entered into the agency’s system. Eighteen percent of people who were homeless in Clark County last year got housing assistance.
Learn more
The Council for the Homeless is offering a four-part Homeless Crisis Response System Education Series that takes place 6 to 7:30 p.m. every Tuesday in June inside the first-floor community room at 2500 Main St. in uptown Vancouver. Contact Charlene Welch at 360-993-9564 or cwelch@councilforthehomeless.org for more information.
June 6: Overview of hopelessness and the homeless response system.
“The more teams that go out, the better,” he said.
Did You Know?
Four percent of all people counted nationwide during a single-day census of homeless people in January 2016 lived in Washington state.
Washington had an 11-percent increase in the number of homeless individuals between 2015 and 2016. An estimated 20,827 people were counted last year.
In Oregon, 59 percent of homeless people in families with children were unsheltered in 2016, the highest rate of any state.
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