Wyoming’s weather is equally unpredictable and unforgiving; and without many homeless shelters in Wyoming, finding homeless residents in January is hard to do.

“We know there are more unsheltered homeless in Wyoming than we have counted,” said Brenda Lyttle, Homeless Services Coordinator and Senior Administrator for the Wyoming Department of Family Services.

An attempt is made each year to count how many people are homeless in the country for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s point-in-time homeless count — essentially a snapshot look at homelessness on a national scale that is used for determining where to allocate funds for homeless programs and shelters.

States like Wyoming get the short end of the stick as cold winters drive away homeless people or prevent them from checking in to be counted. The end result is not an accurate depiction of Wyoming’s homeless population, Lyttle said.

But, their approach to finding Wyomingites without homes is improving and the numbers back it up as 798 people were counted this year compared to last year’s 757. Out of those, 507 were sheltered and 291 were unsheltered this year compared to 563 sheltered and 194 unsheltered in 2014.

Lyttle believes this year’s count is more accurate than previous years because of the increase in unsheltered residents.

“Last year, we were pleased to see so many were sheltered, but we had a sense we didn’t get as many unsheltered ones because the winter was bad in 2014,” Lyttle said. “So we thought ‘well, OK, we will see what we get next year,’ and sure enough we got more unsheltered and I still believe there are unsheltered we are missing.”

Park County didn’t have any homeless people counted in 2014. This year, there were three sheltered homeless residents counted, two of which were children; and there were five unsheltered residents, three of which were children.

“This year we had eight (total) and last year there were zero in Park County — something good happened there,” Lyttle said, “They knew last year that zero wasn’t right, sometimes it is the luck of the night.”

Most of the state’s homeless people counted were living in some type of shelter, though not necessarily their own.

Homeless is more broadly defined than the traditional sense of having nowhere to go for the sake of the point-in-time count. A person is considered homeless if he or she is living in an emergency shelter and transitional housing. Unsheltered homelessness means a person is living somewhere not meant for human habitation such as vehicles, abandoned buildings, and outside.

Homeless Wyomingites have been known to live in some unexpected locations such as abandoned mines, caves and under bridges.

A person is no longer considered homeless if living with family or friends.  

Discrepancies in outcomes

There was no uniform approach to counting Wyoming’s homeless residents. Teams of volunteers worked in each county and the results varied disproportionately to their respective county’s population.

For instance, Natrona County reported 355 homeless residents and Laramie County reported 171. Although their populations are larger than the other counties, they are not that much larger than Campbell County which reported 62 and Sweetwater County which reported six.

Lyttle credited the discrepancy with Casper and Cheyenne having a more organized group coordinating their efforts and needing mentoring established for the state’s smaller communities. Both likely have more homeless residents, but with that comes more homeless services, which means an easier time finding and counting the homeless residents, she said.

“It is sort of a chicken and egg thing,” Lyttle said. “We need to start thinking more about strategy.”

A new approach will be taken for next year’s point-in-time count to encourage more homeless people to step up and be counted, and to have volunteers better equipped for the challenge of gathering and tallying up their county’s homeless residents.

“When we try to count someone, they disappear,” Lyttle said. “There is a section in Cheyenne that is off of Morrie Ave. with culverts and we knew people were living there and we couldn’t get to them the night of the count.  ...We know it is happening and we need to find a different way of counting those folks.”

A new approach

One possible option for next year is to do something similar to a veterans’ standdown, where homeless people can come in and receive provisions such as sleeping bags or even haircuts and dentist checkups in exchange for the few minutes it takes to discuss their homeless situation for the survey, she said.

“Another thing we are talking about is letting people know it isn’t a government invasive procedure,” Lyttle said. “It is hard if they’re unfamiliar with the government or had bad experiences and you don’t want the government to know you are homeless.”

Holding the count in the last two weeks of January is a HUD requirement. The idea behind it is more homeless people will be at the homeless shelters, making it easier to count them  — but for states like Wyoming where many counties don’t have homeless shelters it is a problem.

“It affects us a lot,” Lyttle said. “In the warmer states, there is more of a chance of finding folks on the street, but in Wyoming — especially in 2014 — they are holed up and hiding from the weather and it does affect it.”

One of the Wyoming Homeless Collaborative’s goals for 2016 is to have a second homeless count in the summer, she said.

 The Wyoming Homeless Collaborative is a nonprofit organization that works year-round to prevent homelessness in Wyoming. Their board will use this year’s point-in-time results when implementing their new program, “A Home for Everyone.”