A man in late November on McCarran Blvd in northwest Reno sorts through his belongings.
In an email recently forwarded to County Commissioners, Dana Searcy, Division Director for Housing and Homeless Services, said there will be no Point in Time count in 2025 for the local unsheltered unhoused population.
She said this decision was made via a voting decision by the CoC, an acronym for the Continuum of Care program, designed to “promote community wide commitment to the goal of ending homelessness.”
The next one will be in 2026. Searcy said HUD requires one only every two years.
Searcy had previously recommended this option saying “we now have the by name list which is more accurate in looking at real time counts,” explaining the next step would be a vote of the CoC Leadership Council.
Prior to the vote, Searcy had added: “This event takes hundreds of hours of prep from many staff. Those staff could be spending their time working to house people and respond to law enforcement activities as this count is not required.”
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development website indicates “the Point-in-Time (PIT) Count is a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January.” It adds, “HUD requires that CoCs conduct an annual count of people experiencing homelessness who are sheltered in emergency shelter, transitional housing, and Safe Havens on a single night.”
Another part of the website indicates the count of sheltered homeless individuals is yearly, while unsheltered homeless individuals must be counted at least once every other year.
Assistant County Manager Kate Thomas had previously replied to the idea of skipping 2025, writing “I agree it would be a good move as we place more emphasis on the by name list and more appropriate data.”
The count has been celebrated when numbers have gone down, but dismissed when numbers have gone up.
After going up between 2022 and 2023, and again between 2023 and 2024, the Washoe County website indicated: “While there is a slight increase in the total number of people experiencing homelessness, the total number of people counted is very similar to last year …” and “Many communities around the country are seeing significant increases.”
The numbers have been going up despite the County’s Cares Campus, which opened in 2021, where the goal is to get the hundreds of people sleeping there to obtain stable housing.
Our Town Reno reporting, Dec. 1, 2024