Latest news with #Point-In-TimeCount
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Denver sees historic drop in street homelessness: Mayor Johnston
DENVER (KDVR) — The annual survey on how many people in Denver are experiencing homelessness was released, and Mayor Mike Johnston said it marked the largest reduction in street homelessness in U.S. history. The Point-In-Time Count was released on Monday by the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, which looked into the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January across seven Denver metro counties, including Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties. Denver homeless population hits record high in 2024 count The survey found that across the seven counties, the rate of homelessness still increased from 9,997 in 2024 to 10,774 in 2025, but the rate 'slowed significantly compared to previous years.' Meanwhile, the survey saw a decrease in people experiencing homelessness for the first time, from 3,535 in 2024 to 2,992 in 2025. The survey also found that people in emergency shelters and transitional housing increased from 7,058 in 2024 to 8,625 in 2025, while the number of people sleeping on the streets, in cars or other places decreased from 2,919 to 2,149. In Denver, the count found 785 people on the streets of Denver, which the mayor's office said was a 45% drop from 2023, when 1,423 people were without a place to live. The mayor's office said these were the best results in the country among participating cities, and the data showed 'the largest two-year reduction in street homelessness in U.S. history' and the lowest number of unsheltered people in the country among participating large cities. Five-story family shelter opens on Colfax for homeless families, veterans The mayor's office said this comes after Johnston issued a state of emergency on homelessness on his first day in office in July 2023. Since then, he has permanently closed over 400 blocks to camping and helped 5,500 find permanent housing. 'Denver is proving that homelessness is solvable so long as we are willing to put in the work to solve it,' said Johnston. 'In less than two years we have gone from a city that swept people from block to block to one that treats people with dignity and delivers real results. This policy is not only morally just but effective.' The survey found that this was the first winter season where no one died from cold-weather exposure when sleeping outside in the Denver metro region. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Pierce County is spending more than ever to fight homelessness. Why is it getting worse?
In 2024, Pierce County budgeted nearly five times the money to address homelessness than it had five years before, yet data shows we are not any closer to solving the crisis. Some leaders in the fight against homelessness say the goal is to reduce it to 'functional zero' but that piecemeal funding systems that erode the sustainability of programs make that difficult to achieve. Threatened funding cuts at the federal level under the Trump administration aren't helping, they say. 'We are beholden to federal and state funders,' former county Human Services director Heather Moss told The News Tribune in November. 'It is a year-to-year risk, and we put a lot of risk on providers. Short-term contracts can be a challenge.' Two service providers told The News Tribune they are skeptical that the system is meant to make significant progress at all. One of them is Jake Nau, the homeless outreach manager at St. Vincent de Paul's Community Resource Center. He works with folks living unhoused every day and is familiar with the many moving parts that make up the region's homelessness response. Nau told The News Tribune there are officials and benefactors of the system that he described as 'protectors of the status quo.' 'There is no incentive to end homelessness,' he said. 'This is a system built to maintain itself.' Meanwhile, the numbers continue to grow. The county conducts an annual survey of those living unhoused, known as the Point-In-Time Count. On a single night in 2024, volunteers counted 2,661 individuals living in shelters, vehicles and outdoors in Pierce County — nearly three times the number of people that were counted three years before. Many in the homeless-service and outreach community say the Point-In-Time Count provides a conservative estimate of the number of those experiencing homelessness. According to Pierce County, 6,335 people were connected to homelessness response system at the time of the 2024 survey. From 2015 to 2023, the county spent more than $172 million dollars on its homelessness response, about $21.5 million per year. In 2024, the county budgeted roughly $75.7 million dollars to fight homelessness. What would it cost annually to make a real dent in the problem? Moss estimated in blog post in November that the county would need an annual investment of $157 million to meet the needs of those experiencing or at risk of homelessness, according to the county's Comprehensive Plan to End Homelessness. That is equal to roughly 70% of the 2024-2025 Pierce County Sheriff's Department's law enforcement budget. When asked how that level of funding would help to make significant progress towards ending the homelessness crisis, Moss said one of the largest efforts would be building and incentivizing more affordable housing — what she called a nationally recognized best practice to mitigate homelessness. At the end of 2024, the county was investing in approximately 1,500 new affordable housing units across Pierce County that are in various stages of development and anticipated those units being livable in the next two years. According to the Housing Action Strategy, that is not enough. The Housing Action Strategy, published by the county in 2022, estimated the region would need to create 2,300 units of affordable housing annually over the next two decades in order to meet the housing demand in the region. According to a consultant's estimation referenced on the Housing Action Strategy, Pierce County needed an additional $624 million to support that objective. Moss also said additional funding would be used to provide more interventions and resources for the chronically homeless population — a demographic of people who have been unhoused or unsheltered for long periods of time, or who have found themselves unhoused more than once. 'Until or unless we get to that level of sustained funding, our system will be insufficient to meet demand,' Moss wrote in her statement. As the current system of funding exists, the county is 'beholden to its funders' when it comes to organizing and sustaining its homelessness response system, said Moss, who was removed from her position by new County Executive Ryan Mello. The News Tribune asked county leaders why there appears to be a lack of political will to adequately address the homelessness crisis. Mello responded that the obstacles to adequately funding the fight against homelessness are not merely political. 'The county is significantly dependent on state and federal funding,' he stated in an email to The News Tribune. 'We are grateful for the state's recent historic investments in affordable housing, as well as initiatives such as the Encampment Resolution Program. But, as a whole, the funds are not adequate to the level of need.' Since the pandemic, federal COVID assistance and American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars have allowed for significant increases in homelessness-mitigation investments. Of the $75.7 million budgeted in 2024 for the homeless-response system, $23 million was from ARPA funds. Those funds will no longer be available for new allocations in 2025. Human Services receives funding through local revenues like document-recording fees and the Maureen Howard sales tax, state revenues like the Department of Commerce's Rights-of-Way Safety Initiative, and federal revenues such as the Emergency Solutions Grant or Continuum of Care (CoC) funding — which are granted through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Mello said counties are significantly constrained by state law in options to generate additional local funding. While on the County Council, Mello advocated for the Maureen Howard Affordable Housing Act. The act created a sales tax which serves as one of few county-generated sources of revenue for affordable housing investments. Much of the revenue stream is compartmentalized and can only be used for specific purposes like emergency shelter, street outreach, eviction prevention and affordable-housing projects. Pierce County Council Chair Jani Hitchen told The News Tribune unsuccessful coordination between parts of the homelessness-response system makes the system less cost-effective. She said the county has not made the necessary investments in the full spectrum of resources needed to mitigate the crisis effectively. Hitchen used the example of the need for increased shelter capacity as well as the need for affordable housing to help reduce the risk of homelessness. 'The money is daunting, but if we could get systems aligned, so anytime someone experiences homelessness, it is brief and not repeated, costs will begin to go down,' Hitchen told The News Tribune. Kari Moore, a spokesperson for Human Services, said there are roughly 18 funding sources for the homelessness-response system, and there are requirements attached to each funding source that mandate 'very deliberate' allocations of the funding. Many of the revenue streams can be made available by Human Services and offered as grants. Service providers can competitively apply for the funding. The grants often extend for a year or two of services. Service-providing organizations that often depend on grant funding to hire staff and continue doing work in the community often have to reapply for the grants. It is never guaranteed that Human Services will continue to receive funding for certain grants, which creates uncertainty for organizations. Family Promise of Pierce County has been operating as an organization fighting homelessness in Pierce County for about a year. In April 2024, the organization was awarded a $1 million grant to establish and operate the county's first-ever shelter hub — a place where any unsheltered person could go to get help. At the beginning of the year Family Promise of Pierce County was a small operation, working out of a portable on the lot of an elementary school in Parkland. Its small team of case managers worked to get families experiencing homelessness back on their feet. Now, with grant funding from Pierce County, the nonprofit is expanding. It has hired over a dozen employees and leased new space in an old school in Parkland to serve as the county's shelter hub. But there is no guarantee it will be able to sustain those operations outside of a few years. It does not know if the grant will expire, be renewed or if another organization will be awarded the funding. 'You are constantly on edge,' Family Promise's CEO, Steve Decker, told The News Tribune when asked about what it is like as a nonprofit relying on grant funding. 'We don't know if next year we will have to lay off employees or not.' He said Pierce County's system does not pay organizations up front. Often, organizations like his operate at a deficit as they do their work, so expense tracking and financial planning are crucial to the sustainability of the operation. Decker told The News Tribune that grant-funded organizations have to be extremely diligent in accounting and documenting every transaction they make in order to be properly reimbursed. His system includes tools for service providers to properly track their cell phone usage, car mileage and other expenses that public agencies require grant-funded organizations to track. Decker said the county can decline to reimburse for transactions its believes were too expensive. 'That is the fear that every nonprofit faces,' he said. Sometimes, organizations wait months to receive the grant funding they were awarded. Decker said Family Promise did not receive any of the grant funding the county said it was awarded in April until months later. It was owed tens of thousands of dollars, according to information shared at at one of its board meetings in October. The delay in funding did not stop the work. Family Promise continued to run the shelter hub, trusting it would receive funding at a later date. In November 2024, Decker told The News Tribune it had begun to receive the grant funding it was promised. Decker said it is 'pretty typical' for non-profits to operate with razor thin margins. When he was hired with Family Promise, he was told it would not be able to give him his pay check for the first several months of his employment. HUD's Continuum of Care (CoC) model, through which a collection of regional stakeholders work collaboratively to administer federal funding and manage a region's homeless response, was introduced in the mid-1990s. Before the CoC, organizations applied for funding through a few homeless-grant programs, and there was little-to-no collaboration among them, according to a report published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The CoC process was intended to promote regional coordination of funding and efforts. There are more than 400 regional CoC organizations across the country competitively applying for billions in grant funding. Organizations doing the work and providing the services that make up our homelessness response are almost entirely dependent on short-term grants — and the grants do not always last forever. Decker said that prevents his organization from making long-term plans. 'There is no money for sustainability,' he told The News Tribune. When asked what would happen if Pierce County's homelessness funding was significantly reduced, Moss said the department would have to do a full revaluation of the system involving input from community providers, jurisdictions and subject-matter experts to determine funding priorities and potential impacts. 'Sustainability has been a huge part of our strategy, as we've been intentional about the services and projects we've funded,' Moss told The News Tribune. 'Additional funding sources, such as the Maureen Howard Affordable Housing Tax and new dollars from the Youth Homeless Demonstration Program, are helping us diversify revenue sources.' According to Moss, most government funding comes with risks about predictability, but she said having some type of endowment could help ensure funding sustainability. The demand for homeless outreach and services is higher than current funding can support. With limited resources, the county has already made tough decisions about which organizations to award grant funding to and which ones to snub. In 2024, the county decided on how to dole out more than $17.6 million in annual funding for a wide variety of homeless-service providers. The investment is known as the Homeless Housing Program (HHP) and is the county's largest regular funding opportunity for homeless services. According to the county, 56 homeless service applications were filed for funding through the Homeless Housing Program and more than $32 million was requested. St. Vincent de Paul is an organization that does homelessness outreach in Tacoma. The organization's proposed outreach program, which received the second-highest rubric score of any outreach project, was not recommended for any funding — raising questions about the county's process for determining funding awards. Through his experience with the systems he describes as 'dysfunctional,' he has grown cynical - and questions if the bureaucracy the county has created is serious about addressing the crisis at all. In an interview with The News Tribune, Nau said some service providers are reluctant to be publicly critical of the county's systems for fear of retaliation. He said some are worried that to speak up would mean their organizations might not be chosen to receive the funding they need. Several service providers have previously described that dynamic as the 'politics' that impact the homeless-response system. In September 2024, a consultant's review of Pierce County's system for administering and dispersing federal funding found it lacked transparency and a clear decision-making process. The report incorporated feedback from the service-provider community, with some members saying they felt the system was governed in 'siloes without coordination, alignment or collaboration.' The report also included feedback from the community which identified power hoarding, fear of open conflict, lack of transparency, defensiveness and transactional goals and relationships. Nau said there are certain organizations that have been receiving grant funding to be a part of the homelessness-response system for years and are so entrenched in the system that they will not admit when the system is not working, even when it is obvious. 'These are dysfunctional systems we work within,' he said. 'And there is almost nothing we can do.' Tim Fairley is an advocate with Tacoma Outreach who recently joined Pierce County's Continuum of Care board. Fairley told The News Tribune that homelessness is a billion-dollar industry through which some have become very wealthy. The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) is one example of a nonprofit organization that has grown substantially in a political climate that has heavily incentivized affordable housing. LIHI owns or manages dozens of subsidized, affordable housing projects and tiny home shelters across the Puget Sound, including in Pierce County. According to tax documentation filed by the nonprofit in 2023, LIHI owns more than $410 million worth of assets. In 2023, LIHI reported receiving more than $93 million in contributions and grants. 'The Low Income Housing Institute operates across six counties, directly owns and operates 3,500 units of affordable housing, plus oversees a dozen enhanced shelter programs that have effectively lifted up the most vulnerable in our communities,' Jon Grant, a spokesperson for LIHI, told The News Tribune. During the Pierce County Council's last Select Committee on Homelessness meeting on Dec. 11, Fairley left the council members with a message. 'Homelessness is a billion-dollar business. Once we figure out who is profiting from it, then we can resolve the issue,' he told the committee. 'It is not that we cannot feed the poor. It is just that we cannot satisfy the rich.'
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Point-In-Time homeless count begins Thursday
SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — The annual Point-In-Time Count kicks off early Thursday as volunteers armed with gift bags of snacks and hygienic products for homeless people are gearing up to once again count as many unsheltered people as they can. The 2024 Point-In-Time Count found 10,605 unsheltered people living on the streets of San Diego County, a three percent jump from 2023. 'We are counting every single person we can see which helps us secure funding,' said Melissa Peterman, the CEO of Townspeople, a low-income housing services organization. Seventeen-hundred volunteers are joined by elected officials to walk the streets, and in many cases, wake up people who are sleeping to meet them and gather information on the circumstances that led to their homelessness. 'The reason why it happens in the middle of the night is because we are more likely to see folks,' Peterman said. While an enormous amount of financial resources have been poured into fixing the homeless issue, with little successes to point to, just recently a new survey found homelessness ticked down for the first time in over a decade. Peterman says some of the newest programs are showing signs of real improvement and there is guarded optimism that the Point-In-Time Count is helping government leaders start to get their arms around the problem. 'It's really helpful to get a sense as to what we're trying to solve on any given night. That helps us then create plans and direct resources more efficiently,' Peterman said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
