Oregon Point in Time Count (PIT)
“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.” For more details click here.
Oregon has one of the highest rates of homelessness of all states. See https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/.
The Oregon Housing & Community Services website contains the repository for Oregon’s latest counts. See https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/homelessness/Pages/index.aspx. 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: 1,000+
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. As of June 1, 2021 the state is still reporting the 2019 count as the latest. See https://youtu.be/8zerK2nMXpo?t=1396.
In the 2019 PIT count (the latest count published as of 6/1/2021) Clatsop County still has the highest rate of homelessness in Oregon. It’s also significantly higher than other rural counties.
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.