Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Northwest Arkansas Point-in-Time Count
Volunteers with Hark at the Center for Collaborative Care counted 474 residents experiencing homelessness in the region for the 24 hours of Jan. 25. The demographics of the count include the following. An individual can be in more than one category.
■ 266 male
■ 205 female
■ 3 transgender
■ 369 white
■ 50 African-American
■ 55 Other
■ 60 sheltered veterans
■ 20 unsheltered veterans ■107 living in an emergency shelter
■ 216 living transitional housing
■ 151 unsheltered out who gets what amount of money. The continuum’s by-name list is suppose to keep track of cases and find solutions to effectively end homelessness in the region by 2025, advocates say.
The annual federal report may be used to allocate money, but its narrow methodology can backfire, said Megan Hustings, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
“It is meant to be a snapshot of the overall issue,” she said. “It’s not meant to be a complete accounting of everyone who might be experiencing homelessness — but its messaged as, ‘this is how many homeless people there are in the country.’”
The bottom line, Hustings said, is there really is no reliable figure. The 553,000 counted as homeless nationally in the most recent count is way too low, she said. The Department of Education counts about 2.4 million children as homeless, and those children have families to account for, she said.
The coalition estimates about 3.5 million people are homeless in the United States.
Continuums of care need to get on the same page statewide in order to effectively tackle the issue, said Sandra Wilson with the Arkansas Homeless Coalition. Different regions handle counts differently, and there’s very little interaction between agencies, she said.
State officials used to use a formula taking how many people were living below the poverty line and made a percentage estimation, Wilson said. At some point, the methodology changed, and the numbers drastically dropped, she said.
Wilson remembered years ago typically counting around 7,500 homeless people in the state.
“Do you really think we went from about 7,500 to 2,000?” she asked.
The next point-in-time count for Northwest Arkansas is scheduled Jan. 24.