28-01-2025
Volunteers conduct biennial count of Austin-area homeless population
In the wee hours Sunday, Pamela Bryant drove to a sprawling encampment in South Austin where about 40 people experiencing homelessness live in tents and other temporary shelters. Her car was loaded with donated clothes and groceries.
Bryant, the founder of the religious service organization Walking by Faith Prison Ministry, was among 600 volunteers who traversed Austin and Travis County from about 3 to 9 a.m. Sunday to tally the region's unhoused population — and hand out supplies.
'When I go out, I try to relate to people just as much as possible so that we can save lives through food and relationships,' said Bryant, who herself has experienced homelessness.
The biennial point-in-time count is required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The process has serious limitations — bad weather, for example, can skew results — but it can capture larger trends that help the agency decide how to dole out federal funding. The latest numbers won't be available until spring, so it's impossible to say whether homelessness has increased locally since the last count.
But recent reports estimate rates of homelessness nationwide are at an all-time high, and various figures kept locally suggest the Austin area might be a part of that trend.
The nonprofit Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, or ECHO, coordinates Travis County's point-in-time count and keeps its own, more comprehensive running total, which it calculates with the help of various local organizations that keep track of people requesting services.
The most recent point-in-time count, conducted overnight in January 2023, showed there were 2,374 people experiencing homelessness in Travis County. The one before that, in 2020, logged 2,506.
ECHO's running tally from last October puts the total at about 5,300. That much larger number could be evidence of an actual increase, but outreach services also have expanded, meaning more people might be getting services and thus included in ECHO's tally.
ECHO spokesman Chris Davis noted that the 2023 count showed the city's camping ban and a change in service providers had drawn the homeless population farther outside downtown Austin.
Evette Sutton, another count volunteer whose day job is being a housing supervisor for Integral Care, said Sunday that she thinks any increase in homelessness is not being driven by people who are newly unhoused. Rather, she said many people she's interacted with recently have been experiencing homelessness for a prolonged time, with some having come from out of town and others recently released from prison with nowhere to stay.
"The numbers have increased because the situation and circumstances have changed," Sutton said.
Austin's count comes as the city is struggling with dwindling federal aid doled out during the COVID-19 pandemic that it has used to boost its supply of permanent supportive housing units. But its efforts might not be enough to keep up with the growing demand. ECHO estimates thousands more bed spaces will be needed in the next decade.
Data that ECHO provided to the Statesman last May showed the number of people seeking homeless services in Austin had doubled between 2021 and 2024 — though experts said that seemingly staggering metric could be a reflection of increased homeless outreach.
A report ECHO released earlier this month revealed a staggering increase in the mortality rate among the homeless population.
The leading causes of death, according to the report, were drug overdoses, accidents involving vehicles and heart disease. It also found that the number of deaths caused by narcotics — namely, methamphetamine and fentanyl — increased threefold between 2018 and 2023.
Bryant, one of the count volunteers, said fentanyl is everywhere now.
'It's like heroin,' she said. 'When they don't have it, they get sick.'
Bryant said that finding housing for people is often not enough to help them turn their life around. They need to learn life skills and have someone to check on them, especially in the first few weeks, she said. And Bryant and other volunteers said they have come across people who don't want to go into housing. One man she recently spoke to said it came with 'too many regulations.'
At the South Austin encampment, Bryant and her fellow volunteers began their count as people emerged from tents.
Foxx Long, who has lived in the South Austin camp for about six months, said he became homeless after his fiancée died of an accidental drug overdose three years ago. The pair were living in Houston at the time — Long was working as a bartender and his fiancée ran an online resale store. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment and were making a substantial income.
"Then she died, and I lost everything," Long said, acknowledging that he has recently struggled with substance abuse.
At one point during his time in Austin, Long said a police officer who approached him helped him get into the Northbridge shelter — one of the hotels the city converted during the COVID-19 pandemic. He stayed for a few days but ultimately decided shelter life wasn't for him.
As Long headed back to his tent, Bryant and others continued combing the camp — coaxing its residents to answer the point-in-time questionnaire. Some happily answered; others were more hesitant or declined outright.
One, a soft-spoken woman who said she had fled a domestic violence situation and has been homelessness off and on for years, had only recently begun to sleep in the camp.
As she answered the questions, Bryant draped a red coat over her lean shoulders and handed her boxes of food.
"It's like Christmas," the woman said.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Volunteers conduct biennial homeless population count in Austin area
