FEBRUARY 20, 2026 HOMELESSNESS Do you count? Point In Time Count 2026 STEVEN Groundcover contributor One night, many years ago in the deep cold, ensconced in our bedding atop our cardboard beds after the sun had gone down, our small group of outdoor dwellers under the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Ore., saw a group of well-dressed strangers approach. They briefly attempted to explain that they were conducting the Point in Time (PIT) Count. They got as far as explaining that PIT is a nationwide governmental attempt to get an idea of the extent of the homeless population in the United States. But they were interrupted by one of my campmates rudely chasing them off. I shrugged and tucked back in against the cold January air. This was my first exposure to the PIT Count. I was intrigued. It seemed on its face stupid and unscientific. One data set from one night in January, of all months? When it was cold so fewer people would be out? I wondered. My buddy had chased them away before we could get much into the questionnaire, so I didn’t know what that might entail. All in all, I was glad to have been counted. It was one of the very few times as a homeless single man I felt that I counted for something, even something so inherently, obviously inaccurate. It's better than no count, I concluded. I went to sleep and didn’t think on it again for many years. All these years later, I’ve been more often homeless than not, and I’ve never been counted since that night in Portland 2,000 miles away. Here’s the reasoning behind the PIT Count, per the National Alliance to End Homelessness: “The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires that communities receiving federal funds from the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants program conduct a count of all sheltered people in the last week of January annually. Electronic administrative records are used to enumerate people living in emergency shelters and transitional housing. Unsheltered counts are required every other year, although most communities conduct an unsheltered count annually.” This is a lot to unpack, so I’ll try to do it justice in broad strokes. The Homeless Assistance Grants, administered by HUD, were first authorized by Congress in 1987 as part of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. This act was an attempt to legally define homelessness, and established an Interagency Council on the Homeless. It was later updated by the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act. These are the laws HUD follows to inform its decisions on what organizations get what funding. The PIT Count is one of HUD’s mechanisms to determine need per community, in our case, Washtenaw County. Each year in January, teams of volunteers go out to track down and count people who may be homeless. When possible, they use a specific questionnaire to gain more information than just a count of homeless people on one cold night in January. Some of the 2025 PIT findings in Washtenaw County, according to the County Office of Community & Economic Development, included: • 350 people were considered sheltered because they were in emergency or transitional housing. • 23 people were considered unsheltered because they were on the streets or a place not meant for human habitation (such as a tent or car). • Total homelessness in Washtenaw County has increased 77% since 2022. • Veteran homelessness is down 73% since 2021. • 97 children under 18 were homeless, representing 26% of the county’s homeless population. The detailed questionnaire has some, in my view, very problematic questions. Some of the questions I have issues with, and I think many other homeless people may have issues with, involve giving your full first and last name and a nickname. It asks for your date of birth, and instructs the census taker to guess their birth year if there is no answer forthcoming. It asks what specific psychological or emotional issues you may have, with depression and schizophrenia cited as examples. It asks what gender you identify as, and whether you have AIDS or an HIV-related illness. The questions at the end of the survey, couched in a vague promise of unspecified “help,” ask where and when a person might be found on any given day. So, so what, right? These make sense, right? You don’t want to count people more than once so they should give you some personally identifiable information. It's good, isn’t it, to know how many homeless are homeless because of mental illness? Don’t we want to know if being transgender is a cause of homelessness? But the personally identifiable information could be used to steal your identity. And do you really Visualizations of 2025 PIT Count data from Washtenaw County. want to put your full name on a federal form then list yourself as mentally ill? As having AIDS? The questions are especially problematic after you read HUD’s recent announcement indicating major shifts in policies in awarding funds. Putting aside the very real fears of what an authoritarian regime might do (has done) with this information, let’s look at HUD’s recent changes for charities or organizations receiving funds. In a news release in November, HUD encouraged faith-based organizations to apply and said it, first, reserves the right to “reduce or reject” a project’s application for using “a definition of sex other than as binary in humans,” and second, will reject projects practicing what’s known as harm reduction — a way of addressing the risks of drug use through measures such as free syringe programs or fentanyl tests. HUD is indicating it can keep money from harm reduction programs and anyone subscribing to nonbinary gender identification. And in its PIT survey, HUD is asking homeless people if they are drug addicts or nonbinary. Here are some questions I didn't see on the survey. There was nothing about cost of living increases or wage increases (or the lack thereof), not even a question on if the person is employed. Was being incarcerated a reason for not gaining employment or losing housing? I know several people firsthand who lost jobs and homes over even just a few days of being in jail. A major part of why I became homeless was my rent increasing from an already too high 39% of my income to 49% of my income in three years. These numbers and statistics are (mostly) useful knowledge. If our government is going to function in a way to allow people to go hungry and unsheltered, then I guess we should try to figure out how many of our citizens are experiencing this. Or maybe use a minuscule percentage of the U.S. budget to just house and feed anyone who wants it? In the meantime, this is what we’ve got. Washtenaw County is 14% Black, but Black people make up over half (52%) of the homeless population. As noted above, 97 children under 18 walked our frozen January streets in 2025 not knowing where they might sleep on any given night. The first PIT Count was in 2005. We now have 20 years of data, and here we are with hundreds of disenfranchised, underrepresented people stripped of their agency, living as less-than in our own communities. The questions the government asks do not hide their conflict of interests and anti-trans, faith-based biases. The questions not asked stand in sharp contrast to the ones that are asked. No questions about economic or housing insecurities caused by rising rents, rising food costs, rising child care costs, rising gas prices, rising energy bills. Plenty of questions about what did you, you degenerate homeless person, do to end up in this sad lowly state? Which was it? Drugs? It was drugs, wasn’t it? GROUNDCOVER NEWS 9
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