Austin homeless population up 36% since 2023, according to latest point-in-time count

Yahoo

02-05-2025

The number of Austinites experiencing homelessness increased 36% over the past two years, according to a report released Thursday.
The biennial point-in-time count, which is federally required and always conducted overnight on the last weekend in January, identified 1,577 people sleeping outdoors, including in tents and under bridges. An additional 1,661 were counted in Austin-area homeless shelters for a total of 3,238 people experiencing homelessness.
That's compared with 2,374 people – sheltered and unsheltered – included in the previous point-in-time count conducted in 2023.
While acknowledging the increase as significant, Mayor Kirk Watson noted that a larger share of the population is now living in a shelter as the city has worked to add more beds over the past two years. In the 2023 count, 1,266 people were found outside while 1,108 were living in shelters.
'The greatest share of that overall increase is the 50 percent jump in the number of homeless in shelters (turns out, it's easier to count people when they're sheltered),' Watson wrote in an online newsletter Wednesday. 'Emergency shelter is not a stable housing solution, of course, but those people would've been on the street or in the woods if we hadn't focused on increasing our shelter capacity.'
The point-in-time count is required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The resulting report also includes responses to a survey that asks for demographic information and includes a variety of questions including when the person began experiencing homelessness.
The process has serious limitations — bad weather, for example, can skew results.
The Ending Community Homeless Coalition, or ECHO, which organizes the Travis County point-in-time count, keeps its own numbers that show a much larger homeless population in Austin.
Still, the point-in-time count can capture larger trends that historically have been used to help the federal agency decide how to dole out funding. (What HUD funding will look like under the Trump administration is unclear as it has proposed massive cuts to the agency.)
Matthew Mollica, executive director of ECHO, said there are several factors that could have contributed to the increase from 2023.
Like Watson, Mollica pointed to the increase in shelter beds. He also noted that a temporary cold weather shelter was open on the night of the count, leading to more people being inside. Additionally, he said the organization and the hundreds of volunteers who help conduct the count have gotten better over the years at recording and surveying people, meaning they might have been able to find more of them.
'We're getting better at understanding where folks are on the night of the count,' he said.
Paulette Soltani, co-director of the advocacy group VOCAL-TX, said the increase means volunteers were able to reach more people, and she thinks the city has done a good job of adding shelter beds and streamlining the city's homeless strategy office.
But she also said there's no doubt that there are far more people experiencing unsheltered homelessness than were reported in this year's count. That's because people are moving farther into the woods and away from the city center because they are afraid of encampment sweeps, she said.
'We're missing data because we're not able to reach people as easily because folks are being pushed further away from the city center,' she said.
The biggest thing that stood out to Mollica in the new data was the percentage of people who said it was their first time experiencing unsheltered homelessness, which he attributed to the lack of available affordable housing units.
Of the 561 unsheltered people who responded to the questionnaire from volunteers this year, 44% said it was their first time experiencing homelessness. (The rest of the people counted did not answer any questions.) In 2023, that number was 41.8%, and in 2020, it was 38.7%.
Soltani said it was "devastating" that so many of the people were newly homeless and attributed that trend to the 'affordability crisis in Austin.'
Thursday's report also showed that the number of people in the Travis County Jail who are experiencing homelessness has continued to grow.
According to the report, 36% of the jail's population (911 people) was experiencing homelessness at the time of the count. That included people who self-identified as homeless, people who did not have a permanent address and those who listed an address associated with a homeless service provider.
In 2015, about 400 inmates were considered unhoused — under 20% of the jail's population.
This population is not included in the point-in-time counts figures, though ECHO keeps track of it.
'People in jail have limited or no access to service providers who can help find a stable living situation, so when someone goes to jail homeless, they tend to leave homeless,' according to the report.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin homeless population up 36% since 2023, latest snapshot shows