Last Updated on April 22, 2024
Oregon Point in Time Count (PIT)
This page is focused on Oregon with an emphasis on Clatsop County. Two documents shown below depict the situation in all Oregon counties. If you are interested in Federal reports they can be found at https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar.html.
“The Point-in-Time (PIT) count is a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness that HUD requires each Continuum of Care (CoC) nationwide to conduct in the last 10 days of January each year.” More information on the PIT can be found at https://www.hudexchange.info/trainings/courses/point-in-time-pit-count-standards-and-methodologies-training/. Federal reports, including counts by state and region, can be found at https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar.html.
Oregon has one of the highest rates of homelessness of all states. See https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/. Oregon’s new governor has declared a state of emergency due to homelessness (see https://www.oregon.gov/gov/eo/eo-23-02.pdf).
The Oregon Housing & Community Services website contains the repository for Oregon’s latest counts. See https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/homelessness/Pages/index.aspx. As of April 22, 2024 they are still reporting “ancient” data… 2019. However, at some point they (1) migrated to Tableau as the data presentation tool and (2) stopped posting the underlying data in spreadsheet format. From my perspective the Tableau presentations they provide make it very difficult for me to fully understand the unsheltered situation in Clatsop County and/or the state itself. It doesn’t stand out from the presentation but Clatsop County continues to have the highest per capita rate of homelessness in the state. The following are recent PIT counts for Clatsop County by year:
- 2017: 680
- 2018: 790
- 2019: 894
- 2020: 724
- 2021: 928
More current data is available at Portland State University’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. See https://www.pdx.edu/homelessness/news/portland-state-releases-2023-oregon-statewide-homelessness-report. The 2023 report is at https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=hrac_pub.
2021 Oregon Homelessness PIT Estimates
Unsheltered Point in Time data for 2021 is particularly problematic. “First, two CoCs [Continuum of Cares] received a waiver for the unsheltered count from HUD in 2021. These included the Rural Oregon CoC, which contains the most counties of any CoC by far (26 of 36), and Portland/Multnomah, the CoC with the largest urban area in the state. Second, the requirement that CoCs conduct an unsheltered count only every other year means that some CoCs simply repeat the prior year’s count to HUD in the off year. Some CoCs (or counties within CoCs) do conduct actual unsheltered counts in off years, but the practice varies considerably even within the state. As a result, the last year for which we are certain that we have a full county-level unsheltered PIT count is 2019.”
Download the chart in pdf form here.
A table showing the rates of homelessness within Oregon (by county) from 2010 to 2021 (the latest year) is available here. Comparing data between both years and between counties is difficult due to procedures changing over time and differing implementation strategies.
Older information is available below….
During the May 13, 2021 Seaside Forum on Homelessness, Viviana Matthews, Executive Director of Clatsop Community Action (CCA), reported there were over one thousand homeless in the county for the 2020 PIT count. CCA is responsible for the count in this area. See https://youtu.be/8zerK2nMXpo?t=1396.
As of March 19, 2023 Oregon Housing & Community Services is still reporting the 2019 count as the latest. However, 2021 estimates can be found at Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative at https://www.pdx.edu/homelessness/statewide-homelessness-estimate-2021.
Get the document here.
Via personal email from Megan Boltan, OHCS Research Analyst, I did obtain the 2018 spreadsheet format PIT data. It can be retrieved at 2018-point-in-time-homeless-count PIT – All Summaries by County 2018_External. I did add two sheets to graph the counties based on per capita rates. I’ve never been able to obtain the 2017 & 2019 spreadsheet data.
While the information is somewhat dated, I find the 2017 Homeless by County – Oregon Public Health Division report to still be informative. It compares rates of homelessness across Oregon’s counties. There is the valid argument that the rate of homelessness is higher in rural counties, however, Clatsop far eclipses other rural Oregon counties.
A table showing the rates of homelessness within Oregon (by county) from 2010 to 2019 (the latest year) is available here.
Spreadsheet PIT data from 2009 to 2015 can be found at the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. The following is a snapshot from January 10, 2019 (opens in new browser tab/window and will be slow as it accesses the archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20190110192830/http://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/Pages/research-point-in-time-homeless-count-in-oregon.aspx. The spreadsheets for 2012 to 2014 do not break the data down by county.
The PIT data contains counts of the unsheltered, not rates (i.e. per capita). The best source of Oregon’s population (aggregate and by county) is from Portland State University’s Population Research Center at https://www.pdx.edu/population-research/. Combining the PIT and the population data can provide per capita rates.