AUSTIN (Talk1370.com) -- A point-in-time headcount of Austin's homeless population will be skipped in 2021 due to the ongoing pandemic, officials announced Thursday.
The Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, or ECHO, says it would be "irresponsible" to conduct the count this year, with the recent spike in COVID-19 cases and needing hundreds of volunteers gathering in groups and interacting face-to-face with those experiencing homelessness.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires the point-in-time count every two years in communities that receive federal funding to address homelessness challenges; however, HUD has been allowing communities to seek exceptions to a standard unsheltered count due to the pandemic.
"We have a responsibility to our neighbors experiencing homelessness, as well as to our staff, volunteers, and community, not to engage in activities that increase the risk of spreading the virus," said Sarah Duzinski, ECHO's Vice President of Quality Assurance. "Either we jeopardize the health of the very people we are trying to serve and hundreds of staff and volunteers or try to hold a scaled-back operation that would likely lead to an undercount; neither of those outcomes serves the best interests of our community. The PIT Count is a valuable resource to understand trends year to year, but ultimately we feel the risks this year far outweigh the benefits to our community."
Nearly 900 individuals were involved in the 2020 PIT count, ECHO officials said, which found 2,506 people experiencing homelessness - 932 in shelters or transitional housing, and 1,574 individuals who were unsheltered.
The group says it will use data points to estimate homelessness on a single day and release a report on its findings later this year, much in the same way reports have been released in past years. The data will be submitted to HUD, which will likely not negatively impact federal funding in the coming year, ECHO officials said.
Despite the pandemic, ECHO has a number of volunteer options for community members that would have helped out with the count. Those options can be found at ECHO's website.
