County’s homeless crisis is far worse than the dire new Point In Time count suggests
The numbers are bad.
The reality is much, much worse.
If there’s perspective to be taken from the recently released results of this year’s annual count of Pierce County’s homeless population, it’s just that, no matter how nuanced or complex anyone tries to make it.
The homelessness crisis we’ve had in Pierce County for many years is getting more dire. Even with improvements in the number of people being housed or diverted from the street, it’s not nearly enough.
The truth is we knew that long before the 2020 Point In Time count revealed an increase of more than 400 people experiencing homelessness this year. We should have known it even in 2019 when the same one-day inexact snapshot suggested there had been a decrease in the area’s homeless population
Of course, that wasn’t particularly clear a year ago when county officials optimistically discussed the 2019 Point In Time findings — which is a big part of the problem.
During his 2019 State of the County address, Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier noted that “nearly 1,500 people experiencing homelessness” had been counted in 2019.
“While it’s still far too many, this is down 9% from last year. And more encouragingly, the number of unsheltered people is down by 16%,” Dammeier said at the time.
Flash forward a year, and in 2020 the same exercise identified nearly 1,900 individuals experiencing homeless. The number of people living in shelters increased from 857 to 983, while the number of people living without shelter jumped substantially from 629 to 914.
So what should we make of this year’s findings, compiled during a full day in late January, long before COVID-19 changed everything?
Did any process the county was making suddenly evaporate? Was the progress a mirage from the beginning?
Or, is it nonsensical to glean too much from a one-day undertaking that can be skewed by any number of unrelated factors, from weather to the number of volunteers, their evolving methods and where they conducted their searches?
The answer — just like every year, regardless of whether Point In Time number goes up or down — is the latter.
A more accurate tool
This week, Gerrit Nyland, co-chair of the Tacoma-Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness, compared the annual Point-In-Time count to “trying to find deer in Point Defiance Park.”
“How confident are you that on a single day you’re going to find them all? Sometimes they don’t want to be found, and sometimes you just don’t know where to look,” Nyland said, adding that the Point-In-Time count can be “really dangerous” because it “creates a data set that doesn’t reflect the reality” but still often gets used by elected officials to make decisions.
Accurately quantifying Pierce County’s homeless crisis is something Nyland knows more than most about. In addition to his work co-chairing the Coalition to End Homelessness, Nyland serves as director of client information systems for Catholic Community Services, one of the county’s largest homeless services providers.
In other words, Nyland spends many of his days making sense of what the county’s Homeless Management Information System — or HMIS — tells us.
For years, what the HMIS has told us, Nyland said, has been increasingly troubling.
For context, every year the county’s Homeless Management Information System records, tracks and analyzes who is making contact with local homeless services providers. Maintained over the course of 12 months, that means it provides a much more accurate picture of how the system is working, and how many people are relying on it.
For comparison, while the 2020 Point-In-Time count found nearly 1,900 people living in shelters or in areas unfit for human habitation, in 2019 the HMIS documented more than 11,000 separate people who entered homelessness — at least briefly.
“There’s a richness to the HMIS” that simply doesn’t exist with the annual Point-In-Time count, Nyland said.
“I know when they first touch the system. I know the engagement they’ve had. And I know when they’ve left the system,” Nyland said of using the HMIS to get a clear read on the situation.
In this way, the increases revealed in the 2020 Point In Time count didn’t surprise Nyland, because the fact that things are getting worse is what the HMIS already was telling us — in far more helpful and alarming detail.
If there’s one thing Pierce County residents and policy makers should keep in mind as they look at the numbers, Nyland said, it’s this inescapable reality:
Far more people are entering the system than we know are successfully exiting into housing, largely because of county economic conditions and a lack of affordable housing. While the county has made improvements — including in the number of people being successfully diverted from homelessness — it pales in comparison to the size of the problem, he said.
If we really want to know how well the system is working, and how many people need help, Nyland said, we need to focus on how many people are becoming homeless every week and compare that to how many are being lifted out of it.
The disparity, Nyland said, can be shocking.
According to Nyland’s analysis of HMIS data, during a recent week in June alone, nearly 100 people entered the county’s homeless services database in Pierce County — or reached out for help — for the first time.
Overwhelming capacity
Nyland’s assessment is one that Pierce County Councilman Derek Young, who chairs the council’s Human Services committee agrees with.
“To me, what this all says is that we do have a system that’s getting more people sheltered and into housing and diverted than we were in the past. ...The problem is that the scale of the issue is overwhelming capacity,” Young said.
“The problem is we have more people coming into homeless,” Young continued, adding that, “We have maybe let some of our success go to our head.”
That’s particularly reckless when people’s lives are at stake, which should go without saying.
So how should we most accurately view the county’s homeless crisis?
The problem was bad last year, it’s still bad this year, and unless we drastically improve and rework our efforts to address it, we’re going to continue to lose ground, Nyland said.
That’s it. That’s the press release.
And it’s certainly the stump speech any politician who claims to care should be delivering.
This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 10:44 AM.
