The sight has become familiar in communities throughout New Mexico, but is particularly prominent in the state’s most populous city.

How many people are homeless in Albuquerque and across the state? Accurate estimates are hard to come by. But teams of volunteers set out during a four-day period late last month to count those who are perhaps most visible and vulnerable — the street homeless — as well as those living in shelters.

The annual Point in Time Count, conducted nationwide, is the largest data collection effort focused on the homeless population. It found 771,000 homeless people across the U.S. in 2024, the most ever recorded. That compares with nearly 4,700 counted in New Mexico in 2025 — with almost 3,000 in Albuquerque alone. While the PIT Count’s numbers largely are considered a significant undercount of the true homeless population, advocates say it’s the best method available to assess a growing problem.

“The PIT is a deeply flawed survey, but it is one of the best tools we have,” said Sara Lucero, a development director for Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless, who coordinated an outing Jan. 28 to count — and connect with — the city’s homeless.

A small group of volunteers and staff members departed from the headquarters of Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless — at 1217 First St., about a mile north of the Alvarado Transportation Center on Central Avenue — with a rolling cart full of snacks, water, hygiene kits, socks and other cold-weather gear.

While distributing the supplies, gratefully received, volunteers also asked homeless people where they had spent the night and if they would be willing to fill out a survey offering more details on their experiences.

One woman said she had slept on the street in downtown Albuquerque. She had previously spent time at one of the city’s shelters, she said, but left after being harassed. She would rather be on the street, she told a surveyor.

One man asked if there was any reimbursement for participating, which there is not.

“Time is money!” he said with a laugh.

A man with the street name Buffalo, who said he has been homeless for 23 years, said he had been surveyed by PIT Count volunteers a day earlier but accepted some snacks and a hand warmer. He was playing music he had recorded on a portable stereo and said he dreamed about producing an album and performing for record executive and TV personality Simon Cowell.

One of the volunteers in the group was Dr. Elizabeth “Bee” Cumby, who came from her home in Los Lunas that morning to pitch in. It was her first time volunteering for the PIT count, but she had worked at Health Care for the Homeless during her career as a medical doctor, much of which had been spent as a contractor with the federal Indian Health Service.

Cumby was troubled by the increase in visible homelessness in her community following the coronavirus pandemic, saying many more people seem to be living in recreational vehicles on other people’s property or along the bosque of the Rio Grande than she recalls seeing previously.

She also wondered about the connection between mental health and homelessness, a question with no easy answers.

Part of her medical training involved going to the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas, which she described as “a sad place.”

Still, she said, people living on the street are vulnerable to many of the same problems as those who are institutionalized, including physical and sexual violence, neglect and theft, and she wondered if the shuttering of residential mental health facilities in decades past was wise.

“On a cold night like last night, I keep thinking if we had kept all these facilities going, at least these people would be housed, and getting food,” she said.

Lucero encouraged people the group encountered to come to Health Care for the Homeless if they needed help with medical conditions.

One woman said she had a prescription for arthritis in her hands, but the medication was discarded during a city sweep of a homeless encampment. She was one of several people the volunteers encountered during a shift who said they had lost items during a sweep.

More stringent enforcement of bans on camping on public property has impacted the PIT count, advocates say, making it more difficult for volunteers to locate and survey homeless people. The New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, which oversees the state’s PIT Count each year, cites the city of Albuquerque’s “aggressive decommissioning policy” of homeless encampments in its 2025 report as an impediment to the effort.

The Point in Time Count, an annual survey of the nation’s sheltered and unsheltered homeless people on a single night in January, is mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for organizations that receive funding through the federal Continuum of Care program.

While the count is for a single night — Jan. 26 this year — the department gives organizers up to a week to do outreach, and the New Mexico coalition conducted a four-day count this year.

The nationwide endeavor largely is carried out by volunteers who venture into city streets, parks and out-of-the-way places to find and survey those living without shelter. It’s not an easy task.

William Bowen, a program director for the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, said several factors lead to depressed numbers.

The midwinter count is contingent on volunteer participation, which widely varies by location. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s narrow definition of homelessness, which does not include people who are couch-surfing or families doubled up in a home, also fails to capture a large number of homeless people.

More recently, the PIT Count has been affected by encampment sweeps.

Still, Bowen and other coalition officials say the count is the best system of collecting large-scale data on homelessness and can be used to identify trends.

“No one else is trying to do this,” noted Axton Nichols, a director with the coalition’s Continuum of Care team.

Bowen said the Point in Time Count data, as the name implies, is only intended to capture a snapshot in time and reflects the transitory nature of the homeless experience. If the count was taken again several months later, even if the numbers were similar, there’s no guarantee it would be tallying the same people.

“People cycle in and out of homelessness, I think, a lot more rapidly than the public maybe understands,” he said.

Nichols noted measures are in place to prevent the same people from being counted more than once.

How much of the homeless population remains uncounted is unclear.

Bowen said the coalition believes the PIT Count is capturing about 50% to 60% of the Albuquerque’s true homeless population, but the statewide numbers are harder to estimate.

The survey is not conducted in every county in New Mexico, as it relies on volunteers being available and willing to organize it in their communities. It was administered in 18 of New Mexico’s 33 counties in 2025.

About 200 volunteers participated this year in the Albuquerque count, Bowen said.

A study last year by the New Mexico Department of Health, based on hospital data, found the state’s homeless population could be two to four times higher than numbers reflected in the PIT Count, at more than 9,000.

Data collected under the requirements of the federal McKinney-Veto Act, a law that requires public schools to serve homeless children, shows 10,533 homeless students in New Mexico during the 2024-25 school year.

The McKinney-Veto Act uses a broader definition of homelessness than the federal government, which includes only people who are living in shelters or on the streets.

Nichols said that leads to homeless youth and women being particularly underrepresented in the PIT Count, as they are both hard-to-reach populations.

That contributes to a perception that the average homeless person is a man, Nichols said, which makes it more difficult to prove there is a need for resources for some of the most vulnerable groups of homeless people, including those engaging in sex work.

He provided an example: A person who “used sex work to pay for a hotel one night, but otherwise they’d be on the street — HUD considers them housed.”

Along with asking people where they were sleeping on a designated night, PIT Count surveys ask how long they have been homeless and inquire about their race and gender, if they have a disability, substance addiction or mental illness, and what barriers they have experienced when it comes to accessing housing.

Some of the questions can bring up painful emotions for people. Lucero reminded volunteers people can decline to answer questions, even after they’ve agreed to take the survey.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development requires certain questions, but survey coordinators can add additional questions. One added by the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness inquires about where a person is originally from, and if they were homeless when they arrived in their current city.

Half of the people surveyed in Albuquerque in 2025 reported being from the city, and 58% were from somewhere in New Mexico. Of those originally from out of state, 64% were not homeless when they arrived. Surveys of people in Santa Fe and other areas of the state showed similar numbers.

The majority of out-of-staters were from the Western U.S., including Texas, California, Arizona and Colorado.

Nichols said a popular sentiment, especially in major cities, that homeless people travel there from other places to take advantage of resources is not reflected in the numbers: “The data has never borne that out.”

The coalition’s 2025 report points to a slight increase in homelessness in Albuquerque compared to the past year and a slight decrease in the numbers from other areas of New Mexico.

Something shown in the count’s data over time are “persistent racial disparities,” Bowen said. The percentage of Indigenous people who were homeless in 2025 was more than double the percentage of Indigenous people in the state’s population. For Black people, the rate of those who were homeless was more than triple.

More than half of homeless Indigenous people surveyed in 2025 were from the Navajo Nation, with small numbers from New Mexico pueblos and a few from out-of-state tribes.

In recent years, Bowen said, reports also have identified a rise in the homeless senior population, mirroring a national trend that has been seen in Santa Fe.

About one-third of women surveyed said their homelessness was due to domestic violence, according to the 2025 report, and 9% of unsheltered homeless people reported having served in the U.S. military.

For all its shortcomings, Bowen said one advantage of the PIT Count is that it gives people the opportunity to meet with those in their community in need and other people who want to make a difference.

“Even if the general systemic benefit of PIT Count is maybe debatable, it’s an opportunity to connect with people,” he said. “And I think that that has value as well.”