During the middle of a rainstorm in mid-January, a team of five volunteers with flashlights, headlamps and a clipboard filed down a muddy path and hopped over a creek in the woods behind a motel in Seaford.
It was midnight, and after three hours searching for people living in tents, cars and abandoned buildings, their clothes were soaked through. In that time, the team found only one person experiencing homelessness: a man standing under the awning of a Royal Farms gas station – a place to charge a phone and stay dry.
The muddy path led the volunteers to two tents. One was empty; the couple who lived there – one a former art teacher – found a place to stay during the rainstorm.
The pair in the other tent were waiting for the volunteers to arrive. They shouted greetings to each other through the darkness as the volunteers approached.
The volunteers were taking part in Delaware’s point-in-time count, or PIT count: an annual statewide effort to tally the number of people experiencing homelessness across the state on a single night. In the course of a day, volunteers visit homeless shelters, drop-in centers, and encampments to count raw numbers and gather demographic information about Delaware’s homeless population, including the number of families, seniors, and people with disabilities experiencing homelessness.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development requires regional homeless services coordinators – organizations referred to as Continuums of Care – to conduct a PIT count every year. The numbers are used on a federal, state and local level to direct funding to homeless services and affordable housing development.
Delaware’s last PIT count produced startling results: during the pandemic, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the state had doubled.
The PIT count isn’t meant to be an exact science. Steve Metraux, the Director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Community Research and Service, says obtaining an accurate count of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness is challenging under any circumstances.
“The unsheltered count is notoriously inexact because you’re looking for unsheltered homeless people who are doing their best to blend into their surroundings to avoid being seen,” Metraux said.
But service providers warn that this year’s PIT count may show a drop in Delaware’s homeless population, even if the true number of people experiencing homelessness has grown.
Sam Parker, a volunteer on the team in Seaford, offered one reason why this year’s count might be especially inaccurate: the recent clearances of major encampments across southern Delaware, including one in Georgetown with over 60 residents.
“Milford has been cleared, Douglas Street is being cleared, the one behind Lowe’s in Seaford just got cleared,” she explained as her team of volunteers searched under a bridge for signs of life.
Sam adds the encampment sweeps have spurred smaller encampments to relocate or scatter to avoid detection, including by PIT count volunteers.
“People are going to be hiding,” she said. “Not because they’re not homeless, but because they’re afraid that if they get found, their encampment is once again going to get torn down and they’ll have to find somewhere else to go.”
For those who remain in their camps – including the pair behind the motel in Seaford – the recent encampment clearances have stoked rumors and anxieties.
“We’ve heard Seaford’s trying to ban every homeless person,” one of the pair told the volunteers.
Ben Spears, another volunteer with the team in Seaford, pointed out that the rainstorm itself would throw off the count.
“If on a normal PIT count on a nice night we could talk to 50 people,” he said, “tonight we’ll probably only talk to 30.”
Teams of volunteers elsewhere in the state ran into the same problem. In Georgetown, a flooded road prevented volunteers from reaching a fast-growing camp, and in Newark, volunteers found a small group of people sheltering from the rain in an indoor shopping center.
And while the team in Seaford was responsible for covering all of western Sussex County, it ran out of time before it could reach encampments in Bridgeville and Laurel.
At the end of the night, the Seaford team had found only a dozen people, most of which were living in their cars. But abandoned tents and scattered belongings made clear that there were others who volunteers wouldn’t find.
Beyond encampment clearances and bad weather, the PIT Count’s organizers say there is another, even larger reason why this year’s count may show a decrease.
Housing Alliance Delaware Director Rachael Stucker – whose the organization responsible for coordinating the PIT count – says that the end of Delaware’s pandemic emergency shelter program will almost certainly throw off this year’s numbers. That program, run through Delaware’s State Service Centers, provided motel rooms for thousands of homeless and unstably housed Delawareans until it ran out of federal funding last fall.
“A very huge percent of last year’s increase came from the State Service Centers,” she said. “In a count of less than 3,000 people, over 1,000 were in hotels and motels paid for by the State Service Centers.”
Stucker says the program served unhoused or unstably housed Delawareans who had been hard to find during previous PIT counts – especially families with children.
She adds that after the program ended, many of those families returned to homelessness or housing instability and – where the PIT count is concerned – fell off the radar.
“I think we’re going to see a decrease in family homelessness, but I don’t think it means that the housing needs have gone away,” she said. “I think it means the resources to help those folks have gone away.”
Stucker says the counts conducted at drop-in centers could help account for some of the people displaced in encampment sweeps, but she broadly agrees this year’s PIT count runs the risk of showing a decrease in the number of people experiencing homelessness.
The question on her mind and on the minds of other homeless services providers and researchers around the state is whether that undercount will matter.
Metraux says if a federal agency like HUD were to take Delaware’s PIT count data at face value, it could come to the conclusion that the state’s homeless service providers have found a path out of the homelessness crisis.
“Reductions in the population are positive indicators,” he said, “and you have a situation here potentially where you’ll have numbers reduce while the situation isn’t necessarily getting better.”
HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge adds that without an accurate count, her agency won’t be able to meet Delaware’s need for homeless services funding.
“Undercounts make a huge difference,” Fudge said. “It basically says to us that Delaware doesn’t need as much money to address this problem if there’s an undercount. Because we can’t provide the resources if we don’t know what we’re dealing with.”
In 2022, HUD granted roughly $9 million to Delaware homeless service providers – a $600,000 increase over the previous year. Most of those dollars are currently being used to fund permanent supportive housing programs.
Stucker notes that housing and service providers also rely on PIT count data to lobby local governments for support – a role that is especially relevant as city leaders in Milford and Dover mull whether to devote resources to building transitional housing for their growing homeless populations.
But Stucker underscores that the recent PIT count won’t be the only tool to measure the full scope of Delaware’s homelessness crisis. Homeless services providers generally track the number of people they serve month-to-month, and school districts keep data on the number of students experiencing homelessness during the school year, for example.
And according to a HUD spokesman, Delaware will be able to tell the agency if this year’s PIT data is an undercount, allowing them to rework how they assess Delaware’s funding needs. “The PIT count is just one of many data points HUD looks at,” the agency wrote in an email to Delaware Public Media, noting that it can assess changes in the number of people experiencing homelessness for the first time or on the average length of time people remain homeless as alternative measures of a community’s need or progress.
In the meantime, this year’s PIT count report won’t be complete until the spring, giving housing advocates time to find new ways to emphasize the scale of Delaware’s homelessness crisis.
