Houston Chronicle: Houston's unsheltered population falls 17 percent, with more finding refuge in shelters than in tents

R.A. Schuetz, Houston Chronicle

As she waited for the results of a yearly census of the Houston area’s homeless population, Ana Rausch clicked open an email detailing the soaring number of eviction filings in Harris County. This March, 6,600 households had evictions filed against them, compared to a pre-COVID average of 3,800. 

As the vice president of program operations for the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, which coordinates the region’s homelessness response, she viewed the data with some worry. She hoped the count wouldn’t show a corresponding increase in homelessness.

Now that the results are in, she is relieved, she said. During a year that saw both evictions and funding for Houston’s programs combating homelessness soar, 2023’s overall count stayed flat from the year before, with the number of people living in tents, cars and other places unfit for habitation down and the number of people in shelters up. 

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Every year, thousands of volunteers fan out across the country to take stock of their regions’ homeless populations. It’s this census, known as the Point-in-Time Count, that has brought Houston national recognition for its success in reducing its homeless population by roughly two-thirds since 2011. 

The 2023 results, released Wednesday morning, showed the count of people living in tents, cars and other places unfit for habitation dropped 17 percent in the Houston area, to 1,200 people from 1,500 the year before. At the same time, the number of people living in shelters increased 18 percent, to 2,000 from 1,700. In the past year, shelters lifted the social distancing measures that sharply reduced the number of beds available during the pandemic. 

The count does not capture everyone who has lost housing due to eviction. For example, people crashing with family or friends or those trying to get by in extended-stay hotels would not be counted. The count report, however, also included a finding that over half of people staying in shelters were experiencing homelessness for the first time. For Rausch, this suggests that an influx of newly unhoused people has been offset by the rate at which the Coalition has been able to move others into housing. She hopes that people will see this as a success. 

“At the end of the day, we’d prefer people to be in the shelters than on the streets,” she said. “It’s a good thing — it speaks to the number of encampments that we’ve closed and all of our work on unsheltered homelessness.”

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Mayor Sylvester Turner also trumpeted the reduction of people living on the streets, in vehicles or in other unsheltered situations. Such a result "does not happen by mistake,"  he said in a release. "Rather it's the result of making it a top priority, enhancing our invaluable partnership with Harris County and the community, and strategically funding data-proven, holistic housing solutions."

In 2022, Houston, Harris County, the Coalition for the Homeless and their partners poured resources into a strategy of closing down homeless camps by offering everyone in them housing. The strategy has required opening a navigation center, where people moved out of a camp can stay while awaiting their permanent housing, and renting out units where people can stay longterm with supportive services such as caseworkers. The city, county and their partners housed 2,500 people in 2022, and more than 9,000 people who had been without homes were housed through their programs on the night of the count.

In a year when inflation spiked and many eviction protections ended, “We suspect that we might be somewhat unique and remarkable in the fact that we saw our unsheltered count go down,” said Catherine Villarreal, director of communications for the Coalition. However, many cities have yet to release their results from this year’s count, so it’s to be seen how Houston’s results compare.

The count is required for regions that get funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and is carried out to certain specifications. The surveys tally where people spend the night during a designated night in January, when, the theory goes, cold weather is likely to push a larger share of the homeless population into shelters, where they’re easier to count. 

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Because the Houston region is so large, it has gotten permission to conduct the count over three days. This year, roughly 400 volunteers walked or drove through every street in Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties to conduct the count.

In downtown, many instances of homelessness are easily visible, but in the less densely developed eastern Harris County, Eric Johnson and Molly Permenter had to get creative. The two outreach workers for the Coalition for the Homeless tried to piece together where people may be living out of sight.

Earlier that January day, they’d spoken to a handful of people, some of whom would be included in the count and some of whom would not. A woman scrubbing her rugs with soap and steel wool as her sopping sleeping bag hung to dry from the prior afternoon’s storm — a tornado had touched down not far from her tent — was counted. Another woman who, at 69, couldn’t find a place she could afford on Social Security and was living with her possessions and dog packed in her van, had crashed with friends the night of the count. She was not included in the tally. 

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That afternoon, along an access road for the Sam Houston Tollway, they were trying to find a man they’d driven by. He’d been walking in that direction, and they looped around to find him when they noticed what looked like a path worn by foot traffic into the woods.

“We’re looking for trails, where the brush is pushed down, fresh trash, shopping carts — things like that,” Johnson explained as the pair pulled over on the shoulder. “When you get outside of cities sometimes, it’s harder to find people … because they want to be alone.”

They parked and followed the path until it dissolved into ankle-deep puddles. Their calls of “Hello!” disappeared into the trees and shrubs. 

Johnson picked up a long-faced skull — “Deer,” he identified it — and they stopped and took stock.

“I mean, this is where I’d be,” he said. “But if they’re that far back, they don’t want to be found.”

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