Houston Republic

The Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County is conducting its annual point-in-time homeless count, a normally involved task made all the more important and difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Catherine Villarreal, director of communications at the Coalition, told the Houston Republic that most of the local funding for responding to homelessness comes from the federal government through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

While the coalition is not a direct services provider, the 501(c)3 nonprofit helps to coordinate the work of more than 100 agencies around the region, a collective effort known as “The Way Home,” for which the coalition acts as the lead agency, she said. That includes ensuring federal funding through things such as conducting the annual count.

“The last time, our region got around $41 million, and that is not funding that goes directly to the Coalition for the Homeless, it’s actually funding that is dispersed throughout that whole response system,” she said. That funding supports efforts in Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties.

Normally, the count throughout the three counties would involve an entire team of trained volunteers, but with the coronavirus threat, this year the count is being conducted entirely by agency staff from The Way Home network, and has been extended an extra five days into this week, she said.

“We count people living sheltered and unsheltered,” she said. “Sheltered’s a little bit easier, because there’s a database that tracks all of that.”

For that portion, the agencies can simply pull up numbers that have already been gathered. But getting a count of those living outside of shelters becomes much more involved.

"We actually have to go out and find them,” Villarreal said. The count began on Jan. 20, and will continue this week through Jan. 29.

Still, last year’s total of approximately 4,000 homeless throughout the three counties – with the majority living in Houston – was a major improvement over the situation in 2011, when Houston was targeted by HUD as a region with a serious homelessness problem, she said.

“All of these agencies working together, under the leadership of the Coalition for the Homeless, we’ve actually decreased homelessness by 54% since 2011,” she said. 

In that time, they have housed approximately 20,000 people.

“Houston actually is a national model for the work that we’ve been able to do,” Villarreal said. “We actually get calls, pretty frequently, from other cities that want to know, how can they replicate our success.”

Many have been asking how those numbers have been affected by the pandemic, and the current count should be able shed some light on that, she said.

“We’re not expecting to see a huge spike or anything like that, just based on what we are seeing out in the community,” Villarreal said.

It is possible unsheltered numbers will be larger, in part due to social distancing requirements at shelters, she said. However, the efforts of the Community COVID Housing Program and the federal CARES Act money that went to meeting emergency housing needs with permanent solutions will have likely helped to keep the homelessness situation from getting significantly worse.