Every January, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development asks communities that receive federal funding for homelessness services to conduct a Point-in-Time count—a survey of people experiencing sheltered or unsheltered homelessness in that community on a single night.
The counts offer rough estimates of the scale of homelessness in a given community from year to year. HUD uses the data to distribute funding to local service providers. The providers themselves use the data to measure their effectiveness and tailor their work to the community’s needs.
Last year, volunteers counted 992 people experiencing homelessness in Wake County. That number has been relatively stable since 2020, aside from a spike to 1,534 in 2022. In Durham, volunteers counted 415 people in 2024, an increase of 10 percent from 2023, but roughly 10 percent below the 2022 count of 459 people. This year’s figures won’t be available for a few months.
As INDY staff writers, we followed along with trained volunteers in Wake and Durham counties as they completed their PIT counts. What we saw underscored the ubiquity of homelessness in our communities, and the human toll of our housing shortage.
Wake County
Since Wake County is so large, its PIT count takes three days. From January 23 through 25, volunteers interviewed people experiencing homelessness about where they’d spent the night on Wednesday, January 22. Temperatures dropped down to 19 degrees that night, and the county opened its emergency white flag shelters. Still, volunteers told INDY they’d spoken to people who had slept outside.
On the morning of January 25, INDY followed a group of volunteers canvassing parts of Garner and Raleigh. Their first stop was Garner United Methodist Church, which opens its doors to people experiencing homelessness on Saturday mornings for a meal and a shower. At 8 a.m., the church’s multipurpose room was filled with about 40 people.
“Good morning everybody, how’s everyone doing today?” Brittany Jackson, a peer support specialist at Veterans Services of the Carolinas and the leader of the volunteer group, greeted the room with a wave.
“We’re volunteers who are out trying to get information and services into the area. Anybody who might have been unsheltered on Wednesday night, if it’s OK, we’d like to talk to a couple people. If not, that’s fine.”
The volunteers fanned out to introduce themselves and begin their surveys. Jackson explained to INDY that some of the people volunteers encountered wouldn’t want to participate, out of privacy concerns or distrust.
“A lot of these people are traumatized, and it’s understandable,” Jackson says. “I think we’ve all been through some level of trauma that has caused us to lose trust in the system.”
Jackson spends her workdays doing outreach to unhoused people around Wake County. She tries to visit the same people multiple times in a week to check in, offer supplies like tents and sleeping bags, and spread the word about shelter services and mental health resources.
“We go into the woods, we go into abandoned houses, under train tracks, whatever we gotta do to get out to the people,” Jackson says. “But you have to be consistent with it. That’s how you build trust.”
The volunteers’ next stop was an encampment a few miles down the road, in a wooded area across the street from a sparkling-new neighborhood on Raleigh’s southern edge. The encampment looked like it had been abandoned or cleared out. There were no people and no tents. But signs of life were strewn across the forest floor: plastic packaging, water bottles, glass bottles, shoes, clothes, tampon applicators, children’s toys, and several strollers. Someone had erected a wall of wooden pallets on one edge of the clearing to block the noise and lights from a nearby interchange.
The volunteers tried another location they knew about down the road. A week ago there had been an encampment there, but on Saturday, a bulldozer was clearing the land for construction.
Wake County’s overall growth trajectory “doesn’t tell the whole story,” says Katie Cardenas, a volunteer from Garner who serves on the town’s affordable housing task force. “That doesn’t tell how many people are being pushed into other counties.”
PIT counts provide much-needed data, but they’re also unscientific and widely understood to undercount the actual rate of homelessness. Jackson offered an example of an encampment she’d visited the day before where she only counted three people, but they told her there were several more living with them who didn’t want to participate in the count.
“We only laid eyes on three people, but we know for a fact there were 14,” Jackson said.
Durham County
In Durham, the PIT count is held one night a year, this year on January 27. Around 150 residents—elected officials, real estate developers, Duke University and North Carolina Central University faculty and students, and other volunteers—joined forces to conduct the annual count. The volunteer effort is led by Housing for New Hope, a Durham supportive housing nonprofit. Russell Pierce, the group’s CEO, said that this year, the organization had more volunteers than it could handle. Pierce noted that organizations like Housing for New Hope, Haven House, and other groups providing homelessness services across the Triangle need support and resources year-round, too, not just during Point-in-Time counts.
Our INDY team in Durham joined a group canvassing a small area of East Central Durham near the intersection of Alston Avenue and Holloway Street. We stopped at a BP gas station at the heart of the intersection, a major hub frequented by unhoused folks in the neighborhood, according to neighbors we spoke with. People stood outside the gas station talking with each other or yelling to get the attention of friends they saw walking by the parking lot. A car sat with its engine running in one of the parking spaces; the driver was in and out of sleep curled up in the driver’s seat.
Durham’s homeless population, just like the community overall, is not a monolith. Folks just on the one block of Alston and Holloway ranged from old, young, white, Black, male, and female.
Our group was accompanied by Cassaundra Martinez, a crisis response clinician with the city’s Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams (HEART). Martinez has been with HEART for about two years, and knew our group’s assigned coverage area well. As we engaged with neighbors, many of them recognized Martinez, or at the very least, were familiar with the HEART insignia on her fluorescent work vest. She says her team often makes the rounds to check on folks and provide support, when possible.
“It’s important that we know our neighbors’ faces and understand their needs,” Martinez said.
Sloan Edemann, one of the group’s volunteers, said she spent a lot of time researching housing and homelessness in recent years as she earned her master’s degree in public policy from UNC-Chapel Hill. Edemann echoed Martinez, saying that the PIT count was an opportunity to actually hear directly from those facing homelessness so that local service providers can create programs and resources that have an even greater impact.
Edemann and a colleague participated in both the Wake and Durham County PIT counts this month. Last year, Edemann volunteered through Oak City Cares to join the PIT Count in Wake County. Now that she’s done the count two years in a row, Edemann says that even in her day-to-day life in Raleigh, she feels more equipped than her peers to support unhoused neighbors when she encounters them outside her apartment or elsewhere in the community.
“I feel like a lot of my friends don’t know how to react in those kinds of situations where you’re face-to-face with someone that’s experiencing a lot of trauma,” Edemann says. “I think things like PIT count equip you when you’re able to spend time with the folks and hear their stories.”
Just before the Durham count began, Mayor Leonardo Williams and Pierce, of Housing for New Hope, addressed the crowd of volunteers. Both raised concerns about how changes in federal leadership could negatively impact housing work on the ground in Durham. Earlier this week, Families Moving Forward, which provides temporary housing and case management in Durham, called upon its supporters to help bolster the organization’s funding due to the threat of a federal funding freeze. Williams said that the pressure from Washington shouldn’t force our communities to choose between which issues to invest in addressing.
“I hope that, as we’re moving forward, we’re taking this information and we’re being really strategic,” Williams said.
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Chloe Courtney Bohl is a corps member for Report for America. Reach her at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].