The number of people experiencing homelessness on a single winter night in West Virginia increased by about 25% from 2023 to 2024, according to point-in-time estimates released recently by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

Point-in-time counts offer a snapshot of homelessness. Volunteers in communities around the country count both sheltered and unsheltered homeless people on a single night. The surveys are federally mandated to take place each year during the last 10 days of January. 

Advocates say the counts underestimate the true scale of the homelessness crisis by excluding some homeless people, for instance those who are staying with friends or family because of economic hardship and those in jails or hospitals. A state-commissioned report last year found that on average, between 2018 and 2023, on average 3,624 people per year in West Virginia experienced literal homelessness.

According to the HUD 2024 report, released in December, 2024 saw the highest number of homeless people in the United States ever recorded. On a single night, 771,480 people stayed in an emergency shelter, safe haven, transitional housing program or in unsheltered locations across the country, up about 18% from 653,100 in 2023.

Several factors are responsible for the increase, the report says, including a national affordable housing crisis, rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism have stretched homelessness services systems to their limits. 

In addition, public health crises, natural disasters, rising numbers of people immigrating to the U.S., and the end to homelessness prevention programs put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the end of the expanded child tax credit, made the problem worse, the report says.

In West Virginia, 1,779 people experienced homelessness on a night in January 2024, up from 1,416 the year before. 

Point in time counts are coordinated by West Virginia’s four continuums of care, which are regional or local planning bodies that coordinate housing and services funding for homeless people. 

Paige Looney, a data management specialist for the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness, said for the 44 counties served by the Balance of State Continuum of Care, multiple factors have contributed to an increase in recent years, including the ending of funding meant to mitigate damage from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“In these more recent years, as those COVID relief funds have kind of dried up, any eviction prevention funds are more limited now, that’s also been a contributing factor,” Looney said. She added that the continuum of care has gotten more volunteers in recent years, which likely has led to better counts of people in rural areas. 

Lack of affordable housing has also been a big contributing factor, she said. The Balance of State Continuum of Care covers mostly rural areas of the state. 

“We have very limited rental markets in some of those more rural areas,” Looney said. “And in the markets that we do have, [there’s] not a ton of affordable places for people to go. Obviously, times are tough, and if you miss a paycheck and you can’t meet rent, you end up in a very vulnerable position very quickly.”

Marissa Rhine is the director of the Resilience Collaborative, part of the United Way of Harrison and Doddridge Counties and the head agency in charge of leading the Point in Time Count in Harrison County. 

Rhine said the North Central West Virginia county has seen a steady decrease in its point in time count numbers since the area’s only emergency shelter closed in 2020. The county has a winter shelter that operates with the support of nonprofit organizations, but no emergency shelter, she added.

In 2020, there were 112 homeless people in the county. That number dropped to 41 last year, according to point in time estimates. 

“It’s not, in my opinion, it’s not necessarily that fewer people are experiencing homelessness who are in Harrison County initially when they become homeless,” she said. “It’s that a number of them, many of them, have to leave the county in order to access shelter services.”

Last year, the city of Clarksburg, the Harrison county seat, passed a law outlawing camping in public.

It was one of a handful of West Virginia cities and dozens nationwide that passed the bans after a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a similar ban in Grants Pass, Oregon. Morgantown and Bluefield have also passed the bans. 

Proponents of bans argue the camps have become a public health and safety issue. 

Advocates say camping bans not only do nothing to help homelessness, they make it worse by imposing fines, potential jail sentences and criminal records on homeless people and making it more difficult for them to get into permanent housing.

Rhine said Harrison County, particularly downtown Clarksburg, sees more homeless people during the summer months. Camping bans are not solutions to homelessness, she said, housing is. 

“I think that there’s a lot of misconceptions within local governments about how to go about addressing homelessness,” she said. “There’s been since the closure of our emergency shelter, local officials who have taken some pretty staunch positions against emergency shelter operating and emergency shelter operating within the county. And I tend to think that’s really sort of a problematic policy position to take.

“We have a large number of people who are becoming homeless and experiencing homelessness here in Harrison County,” she said. “We don’t have an appropriate emergency service response for addressing homelessness.”

President Donald Trump has said he’d work with states to ban urban camping wherever possible, saying that the country’s “once great cities have become unlivable unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted and the violent and dangerously deranged.” 

Trump’s proposal includes relocating homeless people to large swaths of land with access to doctors, social workers, psychiatrists and drug rehab specialists.

Traci Strickland, director of the Kanawha Valley Collective, the continuum of care that serves Kanawha, Boone, Putnam and Clay counties, said the 2024 point in time count for those four counties was 335, up by 42 people over last year, and the highest it’s been since 2016. There’s not just one reason for this year’s increase, Strickland said. 

“We’re seeing increases in first-time homelessness, which I think is around a lot of the safety nets that we had through COVID expired in 2022 and 2023,” she said. “So, as those protections went away, as eviction bans went away, as a lot of the supplemental funding went away, you ended up with people falling into homelessness for the first time.”

Strickland said as people lose their homes or move into apartments and start to rely on public housing for the first time, it results in fewer housing units being available to people with lower incomes. 

“We definitely have issues finding units for individuals,” she said. “So we have people that we can get housing vouchers for, but we can’t find a unit for them to lease up in, and that might be because the landlord doesn’t take housing choice vouchers, because the units won’t pass inspection. So it’s really kind of all of these different splatter points of things that are happening.”

Charleston, where the KVC operates a men’s emergency shelter, has a shortage of affordable housing, Strickland said. Apartments planned for the East End and the West Side of the city will help, she said. 

“A lot of the housing stock we have in Charleston is getting old, which then makes it harder to pass inspection [for HUD approval],” she said. “We have a greater need for handicap accessible units, and a lot of the independent properties, the smaller apartment properties aren’t accessible.”

The cost of rental housing has also increased along with inflation, she said. Substance use and mental health may or may not cause a person to become homeless but make it much more difficult for a person to get out of homelessness.

“One of the things we’re going to be seeing going forward, I think we’re going to see an increase in people experiencing homelessness that are elderly,” she said. “We have served multiple people this past year in their 70s and 80s. We’re seeing people with chronic health conditions, whether they’re elderly or younger. 

“Our number of individuals that have had limbs amputated seems to be increasing every month,” she said. “Health issues driving homelessness is is an issue.”