Dallas and Collin counties will count its homeless residents Thursday evening in a federally mandated annual point-in-time count.

Housing Forward, the lead agency for the counties’ homeless response network, and an army of volunteers will canvass the streets of North Texas cities. They’ll search streets, wooded areas, under bridges and near the city center where many services are located, to find unsheltered residents.

Nearly 1,000 volunteers with homeless service nonprofits will document how many people experience homelessness on any given day. The data is used to track community trends.

“It really provides a snapshot of a single night in January,” said Sarah Kahn, Housing Forward interim CEO. “This is the only measure available to us of both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness. So by using the [point-in-time count] we can combine both information from our shelters, as well as this unsheltered count to be able to provide that estimate from year to year.”

Overall homelessness in Dallas and Collin counties dropped 4% from 2022 to 2023, following increased efforts to close encampments, which helped spur an 18% increase of people exiting into permanent housing.

The two counties also saw a 14% decrease in unsheltered homelessness and a 32% drop in chronic homelessness, which means a person has been unhoused for more than a year and lives with a disabling condition.

“We’ve really transformed our approach to tackling homelessness,” Kahn said. “And today, because of those efforts, we’re housing more people than ever.”

The Dallas and Collin counties’ homeless response system is finding homes for about 200 unhoused people each month, compared with only 80 people per month in 2019, according to Housing Forward data.

The system’s success with rehousing people who lost their homes earned Housing Forward unprecedented levels of federal funding, which opened up 480 new permanent supportive housing units, Kahn said.

Subpopulations of unhoused residents saw double-digit increases since 2022, including a 21% jump in veterans, an 18% increase in youth and 15% among families.

Black households make up about 20% of the general population in Dallas and Collin counties but 59.5% of the homeless population, according to Housing Forward data.

“Data tells a clear story about the impact of structural inequities, which have very consistently led to very striking racial disparities of who’s becoming homeless and Dallas and Collin counties,” Kahn said. “I think that over-representation just underscores the importance of our system continuing to prioritize racial equity.”

Housing Forward will present findings from the count at its State of Homelessness address to the community in April.

Nationwide homelessness rises 12%

More than 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness nationwide in 2023, a 12% increase from 2022, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development data.

Between 2021 and 2022, the number of people who became unhoused for the first time jumped by 25%, likely because of a combination of factors such as a tight rental housing market and the lapse of pandemic-era protections and programs aimed at preventing eviction.

California leads the nation in unhoused residents with 181,000, according to 2023 HUD data, followed by New York with 103,000 people experiencing homelessness, Florida with 30,700 and Washington with 28,000.

Texas is fifth in the nation for people experiencing homelessness with more than 27,000 people, a 12% increase since 2022. From 2021-23, Texas saw a 58% increase in overall homelessness.

Texas’ statewide “continuum of care” – which covers vast parts of the state not near metro areas – served 9,065 unhoused residents in 2023.

Dallas and Collin counties had the highest number of unhoused residents of any other metro area in 2023 at 4,244 people. The Houston area reported 3,270 people experiencing homelessness and San Antonio’s Bexar County counted 3,155 unhoused residents.

In the Fort Worth and Arlington areas, about 2,776 people were unhoused in 2023 and in Austin and Travis counties, 2,374 people experienced homelessness.