Montgomery county has released the results for the annual point-in-time count or PIT. This is required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to get a sense of how many people are experiencing unsheltered homelessness across the country.
This year, the county says there was an increase in the number of unsheltered people in the region. The PIT overnight, conducted in January, included 790 people, 106 of whom were unsheltered. County officials say this is over a 20 percent increase from the 2020 pre-pandemic PIT Count total.
WYSO’s Ngozi Cole talked to Montgomery County’s Kathleen Shanahan about these numbers.
(Transcript edited lightly for length and clarity.)
Kathleen Shanahan: The point in time count is actually a requirement of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or HUD for any communities that receive their funding to do shelter housing services for people experiencing homelessness. We did see a fairly sizable increase in our point in time count this year. We also look at this over the course of time for 2022, which also showed an increase over the prior years, and a return to the pre-pandemic numbers that we saw in our community of people experiencing homelessness in 2019. When we compared just that single night snapshot to the pre-pandemic numbers of 2020-which was right before we realized we were on the brink of a global pandemic — it really showed an even bigger increase there.
Ngozi Cole: What caused these numbers to go up after the pandemic?
Kathleen Shanahan: There were a number of things during the pandemic that helped the numbers go down; the eviction moratorium, a lot of additional financial resources for people, even just a willingness by family, friends or landlords to be a little more forgiving and allow people to stay rather than evict them during a pandemic. And so those things have kind of gone away and a return back to sort of normalcy has really fueled this larger increase in unsheltered homelessness.
Ngozi Cole: What do these high numbers mean for Montgomery county?
Kathleen Shanahan: Having the numbers be that high for us, to think about 790 of our neighbors not having a place to sleep other than a shelter or being unsheltered is really startling. So the solution to homelessness is really housing. It sounds simple. It's not necessarily as simple as that, but to make that happen when it's safe, affordable housing, that is why people are experiencing homelessness.
Our community is still feeling the impact of the 2019 tornadoes, which for many of your listeners, may seem like a distant memory, but we lost thousands of affordable housing units in our community that have not returned or not returned yet. And so that is impacting all kinds of people in the community and their ability to afford their housing, to find housing, to move into another unit. That's all exacerbated by rising housing costs, inflation, higher food costs, and wages that are not keeping up with that.
Ngozi Cole: What can we do as a community , to help?
Kathleen Shanahan: The homeless assistance system certainly cannot solve this problem on our own. We also need people to be compassionate and to recognize how many different people and people from all parts of our community, every part of our community who may end up experiencing homelessness and why it's important to have that safe, affordable housing located throughout the community, including in areas of opportunity so people can advocate with their local legislators and federal legislators around the need for more affordable housing and for less restrictive zoning that would allow that housing to be scattered throughout the community, including in areas of opportunity, and then on a more direct, perhaps individual level.
On an individual level, we have on our website a list of all of the different partner agencies who are doing this work to either try to prevent homelessness or connect people back to housing once they've experienced homelessness. So people can go to those websites and look at all of the partner agencies and see where they might want to share their time or talent or resources to be able to help those agencies do their work.
