5 days ago
New Mexico report reveals far higher homelessness numbers than federal count
May 29—Before calling the sidewalks of Albuquerque home, Trina Hunter was a manager at Wendy's while volunteering at St. Martin's Hospitality Center on the side and raising a teenager.
Four years after escaping domestic abuse, Hunter said she has felt the effects of homelessness in various ways — mental illness, slipping hygiene and constant relocating. But the 40-year-old said she wakes up every day with hopes of something better on the horizon.
"I survived, and I'll keep surviving," she said, sitting on the sidewalk surrounded by everything she owns — all stuffed into two suitcases. "We've got to swallow it, choke it down, and keep going. Some of us do so much to make our way back home, but for some of us, it's too late."
It's no secret that thousands of New Mexicans experience homelessness every year. But a recently released state Department of Health report found that number could be at least as high as 30,000 people homeless from 2019 to 2023, a number 2-to-4 times higher than other counts.
The NMDOH study relied on hospital visitation records with indicators of homelessness instead of traditional point-in-time methods.
"We're able to capture a lot more in this system," said NMDOH epidemiologist and one of the study's researchers, Hayley Peterson. "And so I definitely think it's a good, reliable way that we've done it here, but I definitely don't want to discount the good work that (the New Mexico) Coalition to End Homelessness has done."
Research by Peterson and NMDOH epidemiologist Dylan Pell reviewed data from the New Mexico Syndromic Surveillance Program (NM-SSP), which collects visitation records from most nonfederal hospitals across the state from 2019 to 2023. They found that 30,882 unique patients, an average of about 9,100 per year, had at least one hospital record indicating homelessness across the state.
Their method relied on records from medical facilities with diagnosis codes for homelessness, inadequate housing, or housing instability — or if the patient's listed address contained the word "homeless" or some other indicator. They also looked through patient records, for terms such as "homeless," "unhoused," "unsheltered" and "transient."
Bernalillo County had the highest number of people experiencing homelessness, according to the NMDOH research. The report stated that 18,611, or about 60% of the total, were in the state's most populous county. That was followed by Santa Fe County, at 2,052 (7%), Doña Ana County, at 1,792 (6%), and San Juan County, at 1,479 (5%).
Many governments, including the city of Albuquerque, rely on the yearly point-in-time, or PIT, count to assess the number of people experiencing homelessness. The count occurs yearly on Jan. 29 and has dozens of volunteers counting the number of people staying on the streets and those in shelters.
For Peterson and Pell, the goal of their research was to supplement the work of PIT Count volunteers, not replace it.
"I would say it's also a reliable measure of homelessness as it exists in health care systems in New Mexico, primarily emergency rooms," Pell said. "But we're not counting people who don't go to the emergency room. We're not counting people who aren't patients in these health systems."
That work falls on the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, which states in its yearly reports that the PIT count likely undercounts the population of unhoused New Mexicans.
"There are limitations to the PIT Count — inherent to the definitions and regulations that the U.S. Housing and Urban Development requires counts to adhere to — that inevitably result in an undercount of the true size of the population of people experiencing homelessness," the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness 2024 report stated.
Mark Oldknow, the associate director of the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, said it takes a small army to complete the yearly count. But that data serves a different purpose.
"We all know that even using different methodologies and different sampling structures, we're never getting to anything other than a number that suggests that this is the floor, not the ceiling," Oldknow said.
But there's no feeling of competition between the two methods, Oldknow said, since the mission to understand the true scope of the problem is shared.
"I'd like people to understand that this is a daunting problem. It's a social problem that affects us all, whether or not we pay attention," Oldknow said.
For Peterson, some of the more striking findings included higher-than-expected populations of people experiencing homelessness under 5 years old and over 65.
Their research also concluded that people experiencing homelessness require more frequent medical care. On average, the report found that unhoused residents visited the hospital 5.9 times over the five-year study period.
"A person with poor health might be unable to work or more likely to lose their job leading to financial instability and unstable housing, and a person without stable, clean, and safe housing will be more likely to experience negative health outcomes," the report read.
The report also noted disparities in gender and racial data.
Over two-thirds of the patients were male, about 39% were Hispanic, another 39% were white, 5% were American Indian or Alaska Native, 6% were Black, and less than 1% were Asian or Pacific Islander.
None of what the study examined came as a surprise to Rachel Biggs, the chief strategy officer of Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless. For Biggs, whose work includes advocacy and oversight of the health care system mandated to serve those without housing, the report can have a significant impact.
"We can point to some data points that show real numbers here in New Mexico, from hospital data to show the extent of the problem, to show the disparities across race and ethnicity, to show that the solutions need to be focused on housing," Biggs said.
