Homelessness up slightly in North Idaho

Homelessness increased 6% in Idaho's five northern counties from January 2022 to 2023.

That's according to the Point-in-Time Count, an annual national survey that provides a snapshot of homelessness on one day in January, using local strategies to count the homeless people in a region.

Donna Brundage, with St. Vincent de Paul North Idaho community outreach, helps coordinate the count in Idaho's Region 1, which comprises Bonner, Boundary, Benewah, Kootenai and Shoshone counties.

“This year, we did a lot more outreach in the outlying counties, because we’ve had a lot of difficulty getting to those counties in the past,” Brundage said.

In January, volunteers in Region 1 asked people a handful of questions, including where they slept the night before. This year volunteers found 152 people, including 54 sheltered and 98 unsheltered. The average number of respondents who are unhoused has been around 171 since 2018.

People are considered sheltered when they can stay in emergency shelters or transitional housing. Anyone living in a car, tent or structure with no running water, power or heat is considered unsheltered.

The number of unsheltered people shifted up by 21, changing the distribution of the sheltered vs. unsheltered population this year.

From 2017 to 2021 more than half of people experiencing homelessness were considered sheltered. In 2022, 46% were sheltered, and this year that dropped to 36%.

The number of people found to be living in their vehicles nearly doubled from last year’s count, and non-housing dropped by two-thirds in the region.

“I think a lot of our sheltered vs. unsheltered people has a lot to do with what’s going on in Spokane,” Brundage said.

She said many people who come to St. Vincent de Paul's North Idaho warming center don't feel safe in Spokane.

“The Spokane homeless situation really impacts our homeless situation,” Brundage said. “Because we get overflow.”

In other results from the count, youth homelessness, or a household where no one is over 24 years old, nose-dived from 27 in 2022 to just four this year.

Volunteers also counted eight homeless veterans, relatively flat from nine in 2021 and 2022.

Statewide, homelessness climbed from 2022 by about 16% to 1,611 people, although those numbers don’t include Ada County. Of those, 41% were considered sheltered.

The data from the PIT does not paint a clear picture of the scope of homelessness in the region, but it does provide a reference point.

“I know that the numbers are higher than the count reflects,” Brundage said. “But getting the evidence to support that is hard.”

As a personal consolation, she also thinks the numbers are short every year, and volunteers just have to count who they can.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Idaho Housing and Finance Association compiled the results from the count into data used to allocate funding for support agencies, like St. Vincent de Paul or Safe Passage. They also take into account that the numbers are not an accurate picture, but the data at least is consistent. In 2022, Region 1 received $2.2 million from federal funding for homeless outreach.

Despite universally allocated funding, Brundage feels she's able to do more with less.

“Kootenai County, in terms of the rest of the state, we’re cutting edge,” she said. “We do have a lot more than the rest of the state does. We have diversionary programs and a mobile crisis unit. Other regions are just getting those things and we had them ahead of a lot of other areas.”

Kootenai County does have room to improve in access to men’s shelters, though, she said. But she’s hopeful the services in the region will continue to support people in the community, ideally before they enter homelessness.

“The No. 1 priority is to fill the gaps where a person with mental health enters the legal system,” Brundage said.

Once a person enters the system, she said, they typically fail to exit. So the goal is to find an early solution.

“To do that, we need more homeless shelters,” she said. “It gets them the care that they need."

In the shelters, people have more access to resources, she said.

“It’s a horrible life to be invisible and to not know where to turn for help,” Brundage said.

* This article has been updated to reflect a correction.