NEWS

LEARN MORE ABOUT: Nashville’s Point In Time Count

BY JUDITH TACKETT

New homelessness data, called the annual Point In Time count, was released in May and shows a slight decrease of people who experience homelessness on a single night in January. The best way to look at this PIT count data over time, and it shows that over the past six years, Nashville has seen a 19-percent reduction in homelessness on a single night.

But be careful in how you’re using this data. I believe, and explain so below, that the PIT count should be used with other data sets to provide a full local picture of homelessness.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires more than 400 Continuums of Care (CoCs) across the country to conduct a PIT count each year during the last 10 days of January. The Nashville-Davidson County CoC conducted this year’s PIT count the night of Jan. 27, 2022. People living outdoors were surveyed with an app to gather additional information about Nashville’s population experiencing homelessness.

This year’s PIT count shows a 5 percent overall reduction in homelessness on a single night compared to the count in 2020 (the 2021 data is limited since it did not include an outdoor count). The results showed 150 fewer people stayed in a shelter bed and 50 more people were found living outdoors overnight.

Additional findings from the 2022 PIT count include:

• 71% of the adult population experiencing homelessness on the night of the count were men;

• 42% of the adult population experiencing homelessness on the night of the count were Black or African American;

• 82% of unsheltered individuals said that lack of income was their primary barrier to finding housing;

• 52% of unsheltered people surveyed are experiencing chronic homelessness;

• 39% of unsheltered individuals reported problems with substance abuse;

• 48% of unsheltered individuals reported mental health problems;

• 12% of unsheltered individuals reported being survivors of interpersonal violence.

The PIT count is a one-night snapshot of how many people were sleeping in an emergency shelter bed, in certain federally funded transitional beds, in an encampment, on the streets, in cars, or other places not meant for human habitation. It does not include individuals and families sleeping in motels, in doubled up situations, couch surfing, or other temporary places that are out of sight.

Since it provides only a single snapshot once a year, the PIT count is controversial among advocates. The U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) released findings and recommendations about the PIT count in November 2021. In it, the GAO recommended that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provide CoCs with additional information regarding how the CoCs can use local administrative data to improve the accuracy of their counts. HUD agreed with that recommendation.

The PIT count is significant because HUD uses this data as a main source to report to the U.S. Congress about the nature of homelessness. Another data source called Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) as well as other local data sets such as those from the Local Education Agency (LEA) are critical for the federal government, and I argue, even more so for local communities to gain a full picture of homelessness.

Each data set looks at different definitions of homelessness and even collects data for different time periods. LEA data cover a July 1 to June 30 period; however, data on school children during the summer may be limited. HMIS data is reported to the federal government over a period from October 1 through September 30. PIT count data are for a single night in January.

Nashville has made great strides in improving its data quality from these sources and continues to do so. The most significance the PIT count provides for local planners is a trend line over time. Nashville has PIT count data leading back to 2004. Over time, methodology has improved, but the overall outdoor counts provide an estimate that predicts whether shelter and/or outdoor homelessness are increasing or decreasing. For example, the dip in shelter occupancy that we observe in the 2021 PIT count, confirmed anecdotal accounts that people moved out of congregate shelter settings during COVID-19 and outdoor homelessness increased significantly. At the same time, the decrease of the 2022-PIT count shows that the Housing Surge Nashville launched with federal homelessness dollars during COVID-19, was successful in limiting Nashville’s homelessness numbers two years later.

Bottom line, together with other data sets including listening to and learning from service providers and especially people with lived experiences, the PIT count can be a valuable tool for our community to better determine where to invest its resources.

We are now in a place in Nashville, where we will be able to compare data sets moving forward to target investments, such as the $50 million in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds that the mayor announced to invest in homelessness programming over the next three years. We finally have the tools to ensure that Nashville will see a huge dip in the PIT count data (and other data sets) over the next few years.