The homeless population increased in the Washington, D.C., region over the past year, even though homelessness fell in seven of the district’s nine jurisdictions.
According to the Annual Point-in-Time Count of Persons Experiencing Homelessness report, there were 12,215 homeless people on Jan. 28, 2016. That’s a 5 percent increase from 2015 to 2016 across all nine local jurisdictions. There were 11,623 homeless people in the region at the same time last year.
The count is done by thousands of volunteers in cities nationwide on the same night and then put into a report. The D.C. region report was presented to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Tuesday afternoon.
The District of Columbia and Frederick County were the only two jurisdictions with increases in the number of people experiencing homelessness from 2015 to 2016, the report found.
In 2016, there were 8,340 homeless people in D.C., an increase of 14 percent from the prior year. Frederick County increased by 12 percent, to 1,059. Those increases were enough to boost the overall homelessness rate in the region.
D.C. now holds the largest proportion of the region’s homeless population at 68 percent. Over the last year, the number of homeless families in D.C. rose 31 percent, from 1,131 in 2015 to 1,491 in 2016.
According to D.C., the rise in family homelessness can be attributed to “severe housing affordability challenges and increased demand for stable housing assistance.”
“Increases in the region’s already-high rents make it very difficult for extremely low-income households to find or maintain housing that they can afford. In addition, wages have not increased to keep pace with the rising cost of housing. A shortage of living wage jobs compounds the difficulty in finding and maintaining affordable housing,” the report said.
But the report was good news for other areas in the region. In Arlington County, Loudoun County and the city of Alexandria, the number of homeless people decreased by 27, 20 and 16 percent, respectively. Those three jurisdictions are also the only three with a single-digit level of homeless veterans.
The number of unsheltered people counted in 2016, 857, was also at its lowest number counted during the previous four years.
Last fall, D.C. announced a new policy to mandate families year-round access to emergency shelter, not just during hypothermia season.
“The decreases in most of the region may be attributed in part to the continued use of local and federal dollars to prevent homelessness, to rapidly re-house people who become homeless, and to provide permanent supportive housing to chronically homeless individuals and others with disabling conditions,” the report says.
The D.C. General Family Homeless Shelter has become the spotlight of of homelessness in the region. The shelter is an old, decaying hospital that houses roughly 270 homeless families, or more than 1,400 people. Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed shuttering the large shelter to replace it with seven smaller shelters in each D.C. ward. The cost of the plan is $660 million over 30 years and is currently stalled.
View the full report here.
