Rural America has homeless people too
CARLISLE, Pa. — As freezing rain came and went, Beth Kempf drove across a segment of the vast expanse of Cumberland County and trudged through convenience store parking lots, tiny alleys between rowhouses, and fields behind closed businesses, asking those she met variations of the same question: Are you homeless?
Jan. 25 was a bitter night for people enduring homelessness, and not a good night to get an accurate count of them. Some probably sought better shelter until the storm passed. But Kempf ventured out to count them anyway.
Kempf, the executive director of the homeless services nonprofit Community Cares, was among about two dozen advocates and volunteers seeking out the unhoused in Cumberland County as part of the annual “point-in-time” count — a nationwide census of homeless people conducted each January that helps advocates track demographic data, which the federal government can use to decide where funds meant to combat homelessness should be spent.
Some advocates criticize the point-in-time count, saying it underrepresents the true number of homeless people. Those staying with relatives or doubled up in motel rooms on one freezing January night won’t be counted — even if they’re unhoused the other 364 days of the year.
Compared with her counterparts in urban areas, Kempf’s task was formidable. In D.C., for example, advocates must search a jurisdiction of about 68 square miles to find thousands of homeless people. Even after many of the city’s tent encampments were dismantled in recent years, homelessness is visible.
Cumberland County, a 555-square-mile region about 120 miles west of Philadelphia, presents a different challenge. Here, a much smaller number of homeless people — fewer than 100 in 2022 — are dotted across a great swath of land in locations unlike urban underpasses and encampments. Small towns. Woodlands. State parks. Farms. Truck stops. Abandoned motels.
Some unhoused people were easy to spot. Dewayne Meredith, 46, was living in his Nissan Xterra right outside the Community Cares headquarters with his dog, Spones. Meredith said he’d come from Arkansas to Pennsylvania, attracted by hiking on the Keystone State’s portion of the Appalachian Trail.
Meredith dutifully answered questions posed by one of Kempf’s colleagues. He is White. He is male. He takes a drink occasionally but doesn’t do drugs. He has no mental health diagnoses.
His dream home is a camper. He said Spones didn’t mind the cold — a frigid January night in Pennsylvania is like summer to a husky — and Meredith himself didn’t mind living in a vehicle.
“I’m not a real settled person,” he said.
Meredith is just one of many unsettled Americans. Federal authorities say about 582,000 people were homeless during last year’s point-in-time count as homelessness approaches crisis levels in some places.
After Los Angeles declared a state of emergency over homelessness and New York City announced plans to institutionalize mentally ill unhoused people, President Biden in December announced a plan to reduce the number of homeless people by 25 percent in the next two years.
Over the span of a few hours in late January in Pennsylvania, Kempf was trying to find a relatively small number of them in a very large space. If unhoused people aren’t counted, they won’t count.
“We’re kind of like an iceberg,” she said. “You might see a few, and there’s more hiding than you know.”
Biden’s December plan said homeless people living outside cities are “historically undercounted.” On Thursday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced $315 million in grants to address homelessness among people in unsheltered and rural settings in 46 communities.
“For the first time the federal government is deploying targeted resources to meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness in unsheltered settings or in rural areas,” HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge said in a statement.