Pierce County has more homelessness, gets less federal money than Snohomish County. Why?
Snohomish County has a smaller population than Pierce County and has reported fewer people living unhoused within its boundaries, yet it has received three times more homeless funding from the federal government in recent years, The News Tribune has found.
Pierce County Human Services director Heather Moss told The News Tribune that the county and its partners have worked “hard locally to identify and address our challenges in this space.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awards money to coalitions that coordinate housing and services for homeless families and individuals. Those regional planning bodies are called Continuums of Care (CoC). There are more than 400 such organizations across the country competitively applying for billions in grant funding.
According to Pierce County, its Continuum of Care consists of representatives from a variety of sectors, including local government, public-housing authorities, schools, health care, law enforcement and faith-based communities.
According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data from 2022, Pierce County has a population of roughly 927,000, while Snohomish County has about 840,000.
HUD mandates that counties receiving federal funding to address homelessness do an annual one-night survey to count the number of individuals experiencing homelessness, known as the Point In Time count.
In 2024, Snohomish County reported 1,161 people experiencing homelessness — a 9% decrease from the previous year. Pierce County reported 2,661 people living in shelters or on the streets in 2024, a 23% increase from the year prior.
The method of using volunteers to tally the number of folks staying in shelters, vehicles and outside has been regarded as not being entirely representative of the true scope of homelessness, but the Point In Time numbers are used by local and federal governments as the best available way to gauge the unhoused population in a given region.
For reference, Pierce County estimated roughly 6,335 were connected to its homeless crisis-response system at the time of the survey.
From 2021 to 2023, Pierce County’s Continuum of Care received $13,002,963 from HUD, while Snohomish County’s continuum received $42,234,574.
According to Christina Williams, a spokesperson for HUD, the department has set up the funding process to be competitive in a way that “prioritizes maintaining the overall funding level in each CoC as well as a competitive aspect that results in a CoC possibly gaining additional funding or losing some funding depending on how competitive they are.”
Williams told The News Tribune that HUD evaluates and scores each continuum as part of that process.
“HUD evaluates several factors when scoring CoCs, including system performance measures, efforts around coordination, and demonstration that the community uses a fair and equitable process for making funding determinations,” she wrote to The News Tribune in an email. “Among the system performance measures HUD evaluates are the overall level of homelessness, the length of time people experience homelessness, the rate at which people exit homelessness to permanent housing, and the rate at which people who exit homelessness subsequently have another experience of homelessness.”
HUD also provides competitive funding opportunities for new programs. Williams said some recent opportunities for new projects include funding set aside to assist survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault or stalking.
When asked why Snohomish County receives significantly more funding than Pierce County, Williams said Snohomish County has a much larger portfolio of existing projects to be maintained.
“This is likely because Snohomish County has a longer history of successfully applying for CoC Program funding,” she told The News Tribune.
A consultant recently shared a report on Pierce County’s Continuum of Care that found the region’s effort lacked direction, accountability and transparency in how it funds services and programs.
The consultant reported that federal funding doled out through Pierce County’s continuum to organizations and efforts did not seem to come with specific direction and intent to ensure funding was in alignment with the priorities for the homeless-response system. The report also found that the continuum’s efforts lacked performance metrics to determine if programs are cost-effective.
““Without a CoC-wide defined performance target, its unclear to providers and the community what performance expectations are and what the intended goals are in reducing and ending homelessness,” the consultant presented.
The consultants, Technical Assistance Collaborative, have evaluated continuums across the country and suggested those problems impact funding.
“HUD allows CoCs flexibility in determining the most effective way to shelter people experiencing homelessness in their community. However, HUD reviews the performance data and other information collected in the competition to evaluate whether the CoC’s strategy is resulting in fewer people experiencing homelessness,” Williams of HUD told The News Tribune. “Thus if the shelter programs are effectively helping to reduce unsheltered homelessness and help people move to permanent housing, they will help the CoC’s performance and increase the funding they receive.”
Cynthia Stewart and Michael Yoder serve as Co-Chairs on Pierce County’s CoC Board. In an interview with The News Tribune, they said the problems the Technical Assistance Collaborative found with Pierce County’s CoC were ones they were previously aware of.
“Since the beginning, the CoC was not staffed properly,” Stewart said in an interview. “The applications to HUD were poorly done.”
Yoder said the homelessness response in Pierce County has always been “fragmented,” and the way the CoC operated was evidence of that.
The two maintained that the structure CoC is undergoing change to bring stronger leadership and direction in a way that satisfies HUD’s expectations for funding. They said the roles of CoC partners will be clearer and the organization will take more responsibility of funding applications to be more competitive.
“We are systematically trying to improve what we submit,” Stewart told The News Tribune. “And it might be years until we are competitive with Snohomish, but we are optimistic.”
