Homelessness rose again in 2024.
The Community Shelter Board released the findings from its annual Point-in-Time count of the homeless population on Thursday. The count was held on one day in the last week of January.
The count logged 2,556 homeless individuals in Franklin County, marking a 7.4% rise in overall homelessness. Combined with smaller increases the last few years and the staggering 22% increase in homelessness in 2022, the Community Shelter Board reports Franklin County is experiencing the largest cumulative increase in homelessness in the community’s history.
“We are still in a trend line of seeing the worst homelessness year after year after that we’ve ever seen,” said Shannon Isom, president of the Community Shelter Board. “From predictive modeling, we expect that unsheltered homelessness will continue to increase.”
Isom said eviction rates in Franklin County still remain high and are on the rise.
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An ongoing housing crisis
Michael Wilkos, vice president of United Way of Central Ohio and the chair of the Continuum of Care, said that because Franklin County is growing, the county would see more people experiencing homelessness even if the rate of homelessness stayed the same.
“But because we’re not building enough housing…homelessness last year went up six times faster than the population growth of Franklin County last year,” Wilkos said.
The Community Shelter Board released the Point-in-Time results at Simple Church on Gender Road in Reynoldsburg, outside the I-270 belt. The church serves a homeless population, and Wilkos said the choice of location was deliberate.
“This is not something that is only in the urban parts of our community. It is all over central Ohio.”
Warming centers
Isom pointed to some promising statistics as beacons of hope. This year’s count found 11% fewer people living outside – 455 people, down from 514 in Jan. 2024.
The count also found more people living in shelters or transitional housing.
“That's the good news, because what's selling us is that we potentially have some strategies, some tools, that are working at concert to mitigate the growth,” Isom said.
Isom said one successful strategy has been winter warming centers.
The Community Shelter Board found a 95% increase in people who used warming centers this winter.
Jasmine Franklin, founder of the 3rd Shift Warming Cooling Center, said warming centers are most successful when people don’t have to leave first thing in the morning and quickly get connected to case workers and resources. She said her goal at her warming center is to get people back to their families as quickly as possible.
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Demographics
Of the people counted, 57% were men and 42% were women, with 1% identifying as nonbinary or more than one gender. More than half were Black, while about one-third were white.
The number of single adults experiencing homelessness rose by 14% while the number of families decreased by 9%.
Unaccompanied youth rose 31%, from 158 children and teens counted in 2024 to 207 this year. Emergency shelter use among youth more than doubled, and the number of youth who were unsheltered decreased. The number of youth with children of their own who were experiencing homelessness dropped slightly from 39 to 31.
Fewer people self-identified as experiencing mental illness, and fewer reported being survivors of domestic violence. Those who said they were chronically homeless also decreased slightly, by about 1.8%.
Six more homeless veterans were counted this year, making for a 7% increase from 2024.
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Keeping people sheltered
Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin said the shelter system is working, but it needs long-term, sustainable funding.
“The issue in central Ohio is that this problem is growing faster than the resources that we have available to address it,” Hardin said.
He called for bold strategies and pointed to a $500 million affordable housing bond that will be on the November ballot in Columbus. He said over the last four years, Columbus has spent more than $100 million on emergency rental assistance and keeping people in their homes – but that money largely came from pandemic relief funds, which have run dry, and federal funding.
“With the federal cuts that we are seeing, we are very concerned about how to keep folks in their homes and not facing eviction,” Hardin said.
Isom called for more collaboration and a regional response to homelessness.
“You will hear from the community shelter board that believes that shelter isn't housing, but housing is shelter,” Isom said. Housing is becoming and will be our number one priority. That means that I want to walk alongside developers and thinkers and creatives. I want to walk alongside people who know hotels and motels. I want to walk alongside a community who says, ‘yes, in my backyard, we believe strongly we have the resources.’”
