From Wednesday afternoon to Thursday afternoon, volunteers and housing advocates counted the state’s homeless population, a 24-hour national initiative known as the Point in Time count. That can mean extraordinary efforts in the Mountain State.
Wednesday night, volunteers walked by flashlight on a utility access road through the woods at the outskirts of Morgantown. They were looking for any signs of habitation: tents, tarps, mattresses.
“Anything that looks like somebody could have been here,” said Emily Hileman, the county captain for the Point in Time count in Monongalia County.
Those signs can indicate where homeless people are staying, so that volunteers with the count can find and add people living with inadequate shelter to their tally.
Hileman works for the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness (WVCEH), the organization that coordinates the count for most of the state. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires that organizations like WVCEH conduct the annual count of people experiencing homelessness – including those who are in emergency shelters or transitional housing on a single night. More than 300 volunteers took part in the 2025 census across the 44 West Virginia counties for which WVCEH is responsible.
“This is essential data that we need now more than ever, especially in our communities,” Hileman said. “We need more services. We need more resources for individuals, we need more housing.”
The funding for all those resources is directly tied to how many people are counted on this night. Last year’s count showed that close to 1,800 people experienced homelessness in West Virginia on a single night. Hileman said their count this year has been low.
“I would say that it seems like we’ve had less individuals this year,” she said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that homelessness is less prominent in the community this year.”
She said the low count can be for a myriad of reasons from the cold weather forcing people to take temporary shelter, to camping bans pushing people further away from population centers. But with tallies coming in from other teams as well as shelters over the 24 hour period, Hileman and her colleagues are confident an accurate count will be made.
Preliminary numbers are expected to be publicly available in mid-February.