Tag: PIT survey

Winter is coming

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

In another sign that the universe has a dark sense of humor, the Valley Homeless Connection announced last week the results of its annual Point in Time (PIT) survey of the local homeless population. That was on Tuesday. Three days later, the Trumpian chainsaw approach to government slashed funding to an additional half-a-dozen federal agencies, including the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. The council, Trump said, was “unnecessary.”

As government agency budgets go, this won’t save more than pocket change: $3.6 million a year. But as far as meeting a social need, the cut eliminates the only federal agency charged with implementing “the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.” And yes, there actually is such a plan, adopted Dec. 19, 2022, one that sought to reduce homelessness by 25% by this year. That it has failed to do so is as much a statement about the size of the problem as it is about the government’s effectiveness in addressing systemic issues without adequate funding or political buy-in.

The local PIT count underscores the point. The annual snapshot of how many people are sleeping in homeless shelters and on the streets, in one capacity or another—tents, cars, cardboard boxes—found little change from a year ago, when the 2024 PIT found 157 homeless people in the SAW region of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro. This year’s survey, conducted on one of the coldest nights in many years—the temperature in Waynesboro dropped from a high of 22 to just 4 degrees—counted 146 homeless adults in the SAW region (another 10 were counted in Lexington and Rockbridge County). Nine of the adults also had custody of 16 children younger than 18, adding to the total.

The good news is that a greater percentage of the PIT-counted people this year were in emergency shelters, with 82 staying at the Valley Mission, 40 in the overnight shelter operated by WARM, and five staying at the New Directions Center, a shelter for survivors of domestic violence. All the children were sheltered, as well, and two people in the SAW region were put up in motel rooms paid by social agencies. That left just 17 people in the SAW region toughing it out in the cold, compared with last year’s 30 or more. Then again, as observed by Lydia Campbell of the Valley Homeless Connection, the severe weather may have forced any number of homeless people into other alternatives, such as couch-surfing with family or friends. And as always, there’s the question of how many unsheltered people were simply missed in the count, with the extreme cold forcing people to burrow in more tightly wherever they were.

Among the PIT findings that Campbell highlighted was an increase from 51 in 2024 to 71 in 2025 of people who reported they were homeless for the first time. “That is a wild thing,” Campbell said, reflected in such vignettes as the woman who sleeps in a car parked outside her husband’s Verona workplace while he works inside. Indeed, the PIT found “lots” of people sleeping in their cars in the Sheetz and Walmart parking lots, as well as at Cracker Barrel, Martin’s and Lowe’s. Meanwhile, as the number of newly homeless people suggests, the pipeline is filling up faster than it can empty out: the national plan to end homelessness reports that on average, 908,530 people became homeless each year between 2017 and 2020, while 900,895 exited homelessness each of those years.  That’s a remarkable turnaround from the period of 2010-2017, when national homelessness declined 14%.

Meanwhile, meeting the national plan’s goal of a 25% reduction in homelessness would require that this year’s PIT count not exceed 437,000, down from the 582,462 counted in the 2022 PIT census. The trend, alas, has been precisely in the opposite direction, topping out at 770,000 in 2024—and if the local numbers are any indication, the national 2025 PIT results are unlikely to have improved.  But because it takes many months to compile all the national data, just how much worse things have become nationally won’t be known until late this year.

Locally, the outlook is grim. The advent of spring inevitably pushes away concerns about people freezing to death, and the leafing out of the landscape tends to obscure homeless encampments: out of sight, out of mind.  The slash-and-burn practices that are hollowing out—if not completely eliminating—social service budgets and agencies are still to be fully felt locally, but Campbell says Housing and Urban Development funding for permanent housing is already drying up, and an array of services to help people cope with joblessness, substance abuse and poor health is evaporating. Even those who don’t lose sight of the problem can feel hamstrung and helpless to respond in any meaningful way.

Yet as often intoned in Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.” Even now, on the verge of the spring equinox. What then?

PIT count: more inconvenient truths

(Reading time: 11 minutes)

Key takeaways:

  • Based on last year’s PIT census, the local homeless population grew almost 29% in one year, outstripping the national increase.
  • The SAW area rate of homelessness as measured by the last PIT was roughly 12.8 for every 10,000 people, exceeding the 11 per 10,000 in Harrisonburg and Rockingham.
  • The SAW region has only one year-round homeless shelter, but because of a severe shortage of affordable housing, its average length of stay has more than doubled over  the past few years and demand for beds greatly exceeds supply.
  • Without adequate support services, most homeless people will cycle in and out of homelessness over many years. Each time they do, their mental and physical health deteriorates more.

LESS THAN A MONTH after the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development released its 2024 Homelessness Assessment Report, based on information gathered last January, the annual census is about to be repeated for 2025. The Point in Time survey, familiarly and perhaps ironically referred to as the PIT count, is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 22—a day forecast to be one of the coldest we’ve had in this area in several years. Can there be a more painful juxtaposition?

Described by HUD as “a snapshot of the number of individuals in shelters, temporary housing and unsheltered settings,” the PIT census is frequently criticized for producing significant undercounts of the homeless population, both because of its methodology and because of the transitory nature of homelessness. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, for example, cites estimates that the annual number of homeless individuals is 2.5 times to more than 10 times the number counted on any single night, as people cycle in and out of homelessness. Advocates for the homeless also take issue with HUD’s exclusion of otherwise homeless people “residing” in jails, hospital beds or detox centers on the night of the count, of people who are couch surfing with friends or family, and of other coping mechanisms that homeless people use. Still, the PIT is one of the few ongoing measurements we have of an extraordinarily vulnerable population, and so deserves our attention.

But there are other caveats. The fact that it took HUD nearly a year to release the results of a one-night count dilutes the PIT’s usefulness as a planning tool, even as it acts as a smokescreen for public officials reluctant to deal with problems of homelessness. Staunton, for example, defaults to the PIT count whenever it’s called on to provide estimates of homelessness in the city, asserting that separate data for the city itself is not available—a statement absurd on its face, since the data for each PIT count is obtained on a local level. Instead, the city observes in HUD filings that Staunton is a member of the Virginia Balance of State Continuum of Care, which is responsible for overseeing the PIT, and that the Balance of State CofC’s findings are as good an estimate as it can provide of local homelessness.

The Balance of State CofC, it should be noted, consists of 71 counties and cities from one end of Virginia to the other, so not exactly “local.”

Just how bad is the homeless situation? Here are some numbers to mull over. Nationally, the Jan. 20, 2024 PIT count found a 7% increase in unsheltered homelessness compared to the previous year, amid an 18% increase in overall homelessness. That’s grim, but much of the jump was attributed by HUD to a rising number of asylum seekers—with waves of border crossers being dumped in Denver, New York and other northern cities—and of several natural disasters, notably the Maui fire in Hawaii. Since neither of those causes had a significant effect on Virginia, it therefore may come as a surprise to learn that the Balance of State CofC clocked an even higher gain in homelessness, of 22% year-over-year.

If there’s one bright note in the 2024 Balance of State CofC PIT, it’s that the increase in unsheltered homelessness was a bit lower than the national increase, at 5.3%. This suggests that even though a greater percentage of Virginians became homeless last year than was true nationally, at least the counties and municipalities in the Balance of State CofC were able to shelter more of their increased homeless populations. But there’s another possibility: that the Balance of State CofC was simply less efficient at locating unsheltered homeless people, who can pitch a tent or park a car in many more nooks and crannies than a handful of volunteers can find. And with national and state land within the bounds of Augusta County, not to mention a largely rural and agricultural landscape, finding a homeless person here can be far more difficult than poking around the alleys of a big city.

HOW DO THOSE percentages translate into actual numbers, and what do we know about the extent of homelessness locally, Staunton’s obfuscation notwithstanding??

The Balance of State CofC that’s already been mentioned is actually divided into 12 planning groups, including our local Valley Homeless Connection, which consists of four counties and four cities: Augusta, Rockbridge, Highland and Bath counties, and the cities of Staunton, Waynesboro, Lexington and Buena Vista.  This week’s PIT count, as was true in the past, ostensibly will cover this entire region, but in practice—either because of limited manpower, or because homeless people gravitate toward urban centers for the support services they provide—past PITs reported only a handful of homeless people in Rockbridge and Lexington, and none at all in Bath, Highland or Buena Vista.

The great preponderance of homeless people, therefore, is in the SAW region—and those numbers jumped even more sharply from 2023 to 2024 than in either the Balance of State CofC or nationally. Specifically, the area of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro saw a 28.7% jump in the homeless population, from 122 in 2023 to 157 in 2024. The unsheltered population, meanwhile, registered a 46.6% increase, from 30 to 44. To put that into some kind of perspective, the SAW homeless rate went from approximately 10 per 10,000 population in 2023 (based on a SAW population of 122,770) to roughly 12.8 per 10,000 in 2024; by comparison, the Rockbridge/Harrisonburg area, which recently opened a $5 million dollar emergency shelter for the homeless, has a rate of 11 per 10,000.

That the unsheltered numbers in SAW weren’t even higher is due almost entirely to WARM, a consortium of local churches that offers emergency overnight shelter on a rotating basis, and which on the PIT night last year had 48 clients, compared with just 26 the previous year. How many it will accommodate this Wednesday is anybody’s guess, but in any case WARM has a maximum capacity of 50. Meanwhile, the only other homeless shelter in the region, Valley Mission, had 62 people in its beds during the PIT count in 2023, and increased that only slightly to 65 last year. Although it has a theoretical capacity of 90 single adults, that number is divided between 60 men and 30 women, so if there are fewer than 30 women needing shelter, some beds will go unused. In addition, since half of the beds are top bunks, homeless people with mobility issues—which is not unusual—may be unable to access empty bunks that require climbing a ladder.

Homeless people unable to find shelter with WARM or the Valley Mission, or with a friend or family member, in past years have ended up sleeping in a tent or car or, in at least one case, an RV camper. The dozen or so PIT census-takers last year reported people seeking shelter behind Martin’s Supermarket and Roses Discount Store in Waynesboro, behind the Walmarts in Waynesboro and Staunton, at a laundromat and the county library and along Coal Road in Stuarts Draft. But the survey made no mention, for example, of the homeless people camping behind the Food Lion on West Beverley, and there’s no telling how many other tent camps get missed.

(Also worth noting: because WARM operates only December through March, a PIT survey at other times of the year would result in even higher numbers of unsheltered homeless people.)

The Valley Mission was for many years regarded as the area’s safety valve for this sort of problem, providing short-term shelter and supportive services for homeless people while they transitioned to permanent housing—and, by providing an alternative to the streets, removing a civic discomfort. But the Mission’s capacity has long been outstripped by demand. Executive director Sue Richardson says that when she took her position, in 2012, the publicized expectation for Mission residents was a stay of three months—but as she quickly learned, the reality was closer to five. A lack of affordable housing, even then, made short stays difficult. And three months of support services, helping clients deal with substance abuse issues, psychological problems, unemployment and undeveloped life skills, was in many cases simply insufficient.

But the real hammer blow, Richardson adds, came with the pandemic and a sudden flood of tax dollars, designed to get homeless people out of congregant shelters—because of their heightened risk of COVID contagion—and into motel rooms and other single accommodations. Although such isolation may have made epidemiological sense, it also took the legs out from under the support services most homeless people need to become truly self-sufficient. The result was that a substantial number of Mission clients with various disorders got worse. Counseling and teaching that once may have resulted in sufficient improvement over five or six months was now, in the years after pandemic relief dried up, taking 10 months or a year—or longer. And meanwhile, housing availability only grew tighter.

Today, according to Richardson, the average length of stay at the Mission stretches from 12 to 18 months; in one extreme example, a woman sheltered at the Mission for more than four years. What was once a relatively smooth-flowing pipeline for the homeless, emptying out almost as quickly as it filled up, has now become an overflowing funnel. A growing number of homeless people are piling up at the intake, while only a trickle empty out the other end. And in the SAW area, that overflow increasingly is spilling into the streets because of not having anywhere else to go.

The severity of the problems faced by this population is reflected in the PIT results, which include a questionnaire that provides some crucial insights into who is homeless, why, and how often.  Of the 168 people surveyed across the four-county Valley Homeless Connection area last year, for example, 101 said this was not the first time they’d been homeless. Nor is homelessness a short-term speed bump in the road of life, as 82 had been homeless for more than seven months at the time of the PIT count, the great majority for more than a year.  

How did they end up on the street? Asked for the biggest reason they believed they were homeless, 24 said it was because they didn’t have a job and 18 said they had a disability that presumably kept them from working.  Fifteen had been evicted, six cited high rents and eight said they were underemployed, suggesting they weren’t paid enough to afford rent. An additional 18 were fleeing domestic violence or sexual assault, 17 said they suffered from serious mental illness or had substance use issues, and four cited general health problems. Ten had been released from prison or jail, while family issues, a robbery, and divorce pretty much rounded out the list.

In short, the homeless population spans a wide range of needs and disorders, requiring an equally wide range of support services for meaningful rehabilitation. It also is a population that is expanding at a faster rate locally than it is nationally, while the resources to meet its needs have increased far more slowly, if at all. This Wednesday’s PIT count may add some details, and it most likely will document a continued worsening of overall homelessness. But it almost certainly won’t tell us anything we don’t know already.