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More Americans are facing the trauma of homelessness. This month, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge released the agency’s annual Point-in-Time count to Congress, reporting key findings related to homelessness in communities throughout the country. The Point-in-Time Count provides a snapshot of the number of people experiencing homelessness, both sheltered and unsheltered, in America on a single night. The one-night counts are conducted during the last 10 days of January each year. The count showed that 580,466 people were homeless in the United States on a single night in January 2020, an increase of 12,751 people, or 2.2 percent, from 2019. The count included 37,252 homeless veterans, 15,204 of those veterans, such as Alex Sangster in Miami, were living without shelter.
The HUD Secretary called the findings “startling.”
“What makes these findings even more devastating is that they are based on data from before COVID-19, and we know the pandemic only made the homelessness crisis worse,” Secretary Fudge said.
Half of America’s homeless population are in four states
More than half of people experiencing the trauma of homelessness came from four states hardest hit by the pandemic: California (161,548), New York (91,271), Florida (27,487), and Texas (27,229).
Despite being one of the four largest states where Americans are homeless, Florida’s rate of homelessness was less than the national average. Florida’s pre-pandemic 2020 numbers also indicate the largest decrease in homelessness since 2007. Many point to significant federal dollars that have come to Florida in the past decade to help the state overcome housing challenges, tax credits that have helped create hundreds of new affordable, supportive housing apartments in Miami-Dade County, and the many diverse private-public partnerships established through those federal programs.
One of those partnerships is Purpose Built Families Foundation’s Operation Sacred Trust collaboration. Operation Sacred Trust, known as OST, was established in 2011 for the purpose of ending veteran homelessness in South Florida’s largest communities: Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Significantly funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program, the nonprofit has been nationally-accredited since 2018. For the past decade, the agency has implemented a unique, data-driven approach that is constantly seeking to “follow the science” of veteran homelessnes