Homelessness is increasing in Austin, but so is the number of people successfully housed

SOURCE: KXAN

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin’s Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (known as ECHO) has finished crunching the numbers for Austin’s 2020 Point in Time Count, the census of those experiencing homelessness in the community.

ECHO is the agency charged with leading Austin-Travis County’s efforts to end homelessness and to gather the required federal data for the region related to homelessness, such as this count.

In January, ECHO dispatched 886 volunteers to walk through different areas of Austin and Travis County in the early hours of the morning to count the number of people experiencing homelessness. If the people volunteers encountered were willing to participate, they would be asked a few survey questions too.

The numbers this year show an 11% increase in overall homelessness over last year, and a 45% increase in unsheltered homelessness. ECHO does not believe that these increases are the product of some kind of surge of people falling into homelessness, but rather a more accurate count enabled by more volunteers and better technology. The Point in Time Count numbers, when compared to Travis County’s population, have stayed at around 0.2% per capita over the past decade, ECHO explained.

ECHO’s Vice President of Quality Assurance, Sarah Duzinski, told KXAN what her organization has observed is that the Point in Time Count numbers seems to track with the county’s population growth over time and result in a per capita number that remains relatively constant.

“So what that’s telling us is that the work that we’re doing is making an impact, as the population of Travis County is growing and the and the homeless population is growing in conjunction with that, we’re staying on top of it by keeping that rate constant,” she said.

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The Point in Time Count is not meant to reflect the total number of people experiencing homelessness, but rather it offers a snapshot of what homelessness looked like in Austin on one January night. That snapshot is necessary for the Austin area to apply for federal dollars related to homelessness, and it is also useful for comparisons in making programs and policies.