After Two Years of Rising Homelessness, D.C. Again Counts the Unsheltered

The Washington Post

10:52 JST, January 31, 2025

In the glow pouring out of the windows of downtown Washington’s Martin Luther King Jr. library, a team of outreach workers gathered around Meghann Abraham on Wednesday night.

“Where are you sleeping tonight?” Rachel Pierre, the interim director of the D.C. Department of Health, asked the young woman originally from Maryland’s rural St. Mary’s County.

Abraham lifted up her hands, pointing to the nest of blankets where she sat.

“Here,” she said.

Across the city, dozens of volunteers and outreach workers were spreading out for the region’s point-in-time count, an annual tally on a single night in January that helps jurisdictions determine the size of their unhoused population.

Although critics have long questioned the efficacy and accuracy of the count, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires local municipalities and homeless service providers to conduct the annual census. Those numbers are the basis for the amount of congressional spending allotted to the issue.

“We need this count to help the District and the region bring more resources to the table to make sure homelessness is rare, brief and nonrecurring,” said Christy Respress, CEO and president of Pathways to Housing DC, a service provider for the homeless and the agency who took the lead on Wednesday night’s count.

The 2025 census comes at a particularly fraught time for D.C.’s homeless response. The number of unhoused people has risen by double digits across the region in the past two years, including a nearly 12 percent jump in people either living on the street or in a temporary shelter across the region between 2023 and 2024. The District was among the local jurisdictions with the largest increase of unhoused people last year – with 5,616 on the street or in temporary shelter.

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” Respress told The Washington Post in an interview before Wednesday’s count. Respress noted that seniors continue to make up the largest portion of people experiencing homelessness for the first time. Minorities also make up a disproportionate slice of the homeless population.

“More than 70 percent of the people experiencing homelessness in the region are identified as Black or African American,” she said. “Factors that have to be addressed in our work include economic mobility, housing affordability and criminal justice reform.”

But this week’s count also comes as nonprofits brace for possible disruption of the federal dollars fueling their efforts. This week, the White House budget office issued an order – and then rescinded it – freezing all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government.

The order could have upset many nonprofits making up key pieces of the social safety net – the very same health, hunger and housing assistance keeping people out of homelessness, Respress said.

“We are thrilled that the pause was lifted. … It could have been a huge thing,” Respress said. “Any time you pause and delay lifesaving services, you are disrupting people’s lives.”

Abraham, the woman bundled up outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, will be among the new homeless people counted in this year’s census. She arrived in the District in October.

“I became homeless three years ago, and I actually came up here because St. Mary’s County does not have any homeless services, really,” she said. “I came to be where the resources are.”