Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Point-in-time count begins this week, and South Carolina cities are looking to leverage the data

FILE - A man stands near tents on a sidewalk in San Francisco, Nov. 21, 2020.
Jeff Chiu/AP
/
AP
FILE - A man stands near tents on a sidewalk in San Francisco, Nov. 21, 2020.

On Jan. 22, volunteers around the state are set to take to the streets to meet the people who live there.

Unless the weather forces a delay, Wednesday is the first day of the annual point-in-time, or PIT, count, which seeks to tally the number of people in various communities who are experiencing homelessness. PIT happens in the last week of January, as it has since its inception in 2007.

Last year, statewide, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported 4,593 individuals experiencing homelessness, by PIT estimates.

The important context in that number is the word “estimates.”

“The PIT count is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Melissa Carlyle, operations director for the Catawba Area Coalition for the Homeless in Rock Hill. CACH is one of four main overseers of the 2025 PIT count in four quadrants of the state. “This really is just a snapshot, a sample of the overall population.”

IN fact, Carlyle estimates that for every individual counted during PIT, there are likely seven others not being counted. The reasons, she said, can be complex. Some people experiencing homelessness might be at work, for example. Some might be staying over at someone’s house or couch surfing – they have a temporary place to stay, but they don’t have permanent, stable housing.

But because volunteers don’t knock on private doors to see if anyone inside is unhoused, volunteers don’t know how many there are. Other people experiencing homelessness might just not be at one of the places volunteers are most likely to check – shelters, libraries, certain untended areas.

And others might be children.

“We always reach out to the schools during the PIT count and we typically go ahead and get their McKinney Vento numbers,” Carlyle said. “But unfortunately, because we're talking about kids, this is really sensitive information that's protected. That's really all we get. It's just a number.”

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act makes sure children experiencing homelessness can attend school without barriers. Schools, in turn, keep running totals of children who meet McKinney Vento criteria.

In 2024, the South Carolina Interagency Council on the Homeless reported how many children were identified in 2023 as experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. That number was 13,770, which was a 13 percent uptick from 2022 – and three times as high as HUD’s PIT count number.

So as even agencies overseeing PIT recognize that any numbers they come back with are undercounts, coordinators like Melisa Carlye are looking at the practical uses for knowing the kinds of information any data could bring.

“If you're applying for a HUD grant, it really helps to have a PIT count,” she said. “There’s a lot of grants out there that want to know, how many people are you talking about really? So being able to at least capture a subset of the population helps us show that there is a problem and there's a need for more funding and more resources coming into this community to be able to combat that problem.”

In Rock Hill in particular, Carlyle wants to use PIT data to see how many people are utilizing city services, mainly through Pathways Community Center, Rock Hill’s hub for social services like housing, shelter, and substance abuse providers.

She also wants to track two particular data points – employment among unhoused residents and the length of time someone has been experiencing homelessness or housing instability.

“ Ideally, we don't want anyone experiencing homelessness, but if they do, we don't want it to be longer than 30 days,” Carlyle said. “ Right now we just don't have the affordable housing options, the resources, the funding to be able to transition people that quickly.”

Having PIT numbers could put CACH, or other agencies, in front of more funds to expand its programs, she said.

“I think just getting out there and asking really does help us improve our programs,” she said.

Meanwhile, in Columbia, Mayor Daniel Rickenmann recently told South Carolina Public Radio’s Maayan Schechter that he is trying to focus the city’s services to provide more end-to-end care, like Rock Hill does, because homelessness is about so many things at the same time.

“ We've got to do something to help centralize services and make sure that we're getting people out of the street,” Rickenmann said. “ The numbers are increasing and we're seeing it. It's not a downtown issue. It's North Main, it's Leesburg Road, it’s Harbison. I mean, calls are coming from everywhere. So we've got to do something to address this.”

The goal, Rickenmann said, is to get people to in front of a suite of services.

“It's not just about a shelter and a place to spend the night,” he said. “We really got to get the people help and engaging with our mental health community, [our] addiction services, which seem to be the two biggest categories that we're dealing with. I'm hoping that we can get everybody to the table.”

Rickenmann, however, acknowledged the gulf between big ideas and the money to see them through.

“How do we centralize that?” he asked. “There’s just not enough dollars to have centers all over.”

He said centralizing could reduce calls for emergency responders at the city’s various agencies.

“Just one of our resource centers here has had over 2000 calls of service between ambulance, fire and police,” he said. “I mean, we're tying up resources to think about if we could redirect those into somewhere where they actually could get help and bring in our health care partners, all of them to the table to fit that piece.”

As for when 2025 PIT count data will be in the hands of local agencies, Melissa Carlyle is hoping it’s much sooner that it traditionally is. The data are sent to HUD, which releases general numbers – like that 4,593 number – and some general context, but does not get into specifics about communities like Rock Hill, Chester, or Lancaster, where CACH’s volunteers will be conducting PIT surveys.

This year, with a freshly expanded phone-based survey, Caryle said local PIT information will be in CACH’s hands sooner.

But she also cautions context when analyzing PIT data.

“We counted 36 percent more people… in 2024 than we did in 2023,” she said. “So we definitely saw an increase. [but] it's hard to know how much of that was attributed to just the fact that we got better results. better at conducting the PIT count.  I do think we got a little bit better at the PIT count, but I do also think we truly saw an increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness in our region.

Scott Morgan is the Upstate multimedia reporter for South Carolina Public Radio, based in Rock Hill. He cut his teeth as a newspaper reporter and editor in New Jersey before finding a home in public radio in Texas. Scott joined South Carolina Public Radio in March of 2019. His work has appeared in numerous national and regional publications as well as on NPR and MSNBC. He's won numerous state, regional, and national awards for his work including a national Edward R. Murrow.