Maria Young Published

The Count Begins: Tracking W.Va.’s Homeless Population

A homeless man sleeps next to a cart full of his possessions.
Workers and volunteers have begun the annual Point In Time count of homeless people across the nation.
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Hundreds of workers and volunteers have kicked off a  statewide effort to count every person in West Virginia who is experiencing homelessness. 

The 2025 Point In Time count kicked off Wednesday at 4 p.m. It’s an annual 24-hour survey of the number of homeless people on a single night in January. 

Workers ask age, race and gender but also try to identify what brought each person into homelessness.

Mandated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the effort goes hand in hand with similar counts taking place across the United States and serves as a kind of census for monitoring trends and identifying unmet needs. 

The final tally is likely to have an impact on funding and resources. 

“Once those numbers are collected, we get those population totals, those demographic totals, and those numbers are passed along to the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Paige Looney, a data management specialist with the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness, said.

“That feeds into the annual Homeless Assessment Report, which is a report to Congress that provides those nationwide estimates of homelessness that goes on to determine funding allocations be it for shelters, rental assistance, prevention funds, housing assistance and so on.” 

“We get information on veterans, folks fleeing domestic violence. We’ve reached out as far as why people are interested or not interested in shelters, necessarily, if people are experiencing some form of eviction process, how they came to be experiencing homelessness,” she saidd.

Looney said it would not be surprising to see an increase over last year’s count.

“There’s a couple different contributing factors. Obviously, the COVID 19 pandemic had a big impact on some of those numbers, and the effects of that are still very real. In addition to that, any COVID relief funding that we’ve had in the past and eviction prevention funds are more limited now,” she said.

“In addition, the big thing I’d like to stress is the lack of affordable housing.

Times are tough, and if you miss a paycheck, you can certainly end up on the street in these more rural areas, especially, it’s really, really tough to find an affordable place to live.”

Many volunteers offer blankets, food and resources even for those who opt not to participate in the survey. Final numbers are expected by mid-February.