Over 25 Percent Increase in Homeless DC Families, Annual Count Finds

I knew we had a homeless family crisis in the District of Columbia — as I suppose did just about everyone who’s reading this. But I was still stunned by the new one-night count figures from the Metropolitan Council of Governments.

On a night late last January, 1,231 families in the District were in an emergency shelter or transitional housing. This represents a one-year increase of about 25.2% — and a mind-boggling increase of 109.7% over 2008.

At this one point in time, 2,236 children were homeless and with parents or other caretakers. The District’s report to MCOG also identified five unaccompanied homeless youth, who, by definition, were under 18 years old. Would this were an accurate count!

Homelessness apparently increased for virtually every other population the report breaks out, but the family increase outstrips the rest.

For example, the count identified more unaccompanied men and women, i.e., those who didn’t have children with them — 3,953, as compared to 3,696 in 2013. Yet the increase in the number of people in families — adults, plus children — is well over two and a half times greater.

The 6.95% increase in the number of homeless individual men and women may be a blip, since the number had been trending modestly downward since 2010. Not so the homeless family increase, which has risen every year since 2008, when MCOG first began reporting families as a unit.

We also see what may be a blip in the recent (also modest) downward trend in the number of chronically homeless individuals, i.e., adults who have a disabling condition and have been homeless for at least a year or recurrently during the past four years.

This year, 1,785 were counted — 21 more than in 2013. This is nevertheless a decrease of nearly 18.3% since 2008. We can credit it largely, if not entirely to investments in permanent supportive housing, though the count clearly supports the need for more.

The District reports that 3,500 individual men and women are formerly homeless — and thus not counted — because they are in PSH. It also reports 858 families so housed. The huge homeless family increase would thus have been even greater without PSH.

At the same time, the number of chronically homeless families counted, i.e. those with at least one adult who meets the official definition, was virtually the same as in 2011, when they were first added to the count. And it was 50 families higher than last year.

A smaller number of families were counted as formerly homeless because of rapid re-housing, i.e., housing that’s temporarily subsidized and typically paired with some services.

At the time of the count, 635* families who’d been homeless reportedly had housing — at least, for the time being — through one of several rapid re-housing programs. Most of them had been moved from emergency shelters via the main rapid re-housing administered by the Department of Human Services.

The DC Council is expected to vote on the budget for next fiscal year two week from today. Before then, the Human Services Committee has to wrap up its proposals for homeless services.

It’s got three sets of recommendations from advocacy and service provider organizations — each focused on a different segment of the homeless population, though families have a place in all three.

The count, in different ways, lends support to all of them — The Way Home, which aims to end chronic homelessness in the District, the “roadmap” for homeless family services and the Bold Strategy to End Youth Homelessness, which, among other things, calls for an “extended point-in-time study” to give us a better fix on how many homeless youth there actually are.

The count also reinforces the urgent need to act on some other recommendations — obviously, though not only larger investments in programs to make housing affordable for extremely low-income individuals and families. And for the 42% of homeless adults who reported no income of any kind.

The Council doesn’t need the new numbers to know we’ve got a large, complex homelessness problem in the District — and a worsening homeless family crisis. But maybe the numbers will galvanize agreements to increase funding where it’s so obviously needed.

* This, at any rate, is what the housing and shelter “inventory” indicates. The report isn’t altogether clear on whether all units for families were occupied. For PSH, it seems that not all were.