They spent the night in the streets cataloging the extent of homelessness in Philadelphia

Late at night on a quiet stretch of 23rd Street, Alfred Fleck approached a group of city volunteers carrying clipboards, surveys, and an enormous bag full of socks and gloves.

The volunteers were just a few of hundreds who spread out over Philadelphia on Wednesday night to conduct the annual point-in-time count, an accounting of everyone sleeping on the street on a January night within city borders. Fleck, 49, wanted to make sure he was counted, too.

He told the volunteers that he had been homeless in Philadelphia and Norristown for about three years. He’d lost his job during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, and then was forced to move from his apartment, which had black mold growing inside.

For a time, he drifted back into a drug habit that he’d struggled with years ago. And then a series of illnesses, culminating in a liver cancer diagnosis, made it hard to find new work. Lately, he had been sleeping on the streets in the city to stay closer to the hospital where he receives cancer treatment.

“I’ve had homelessness in my past, but it was a big event for me to go back to the streets,” he said.

Fleck was one of 14 people the volunteers would meet in about a 20-block radius in Center City over the course of the night, sheltering under overpasses, in church doorways, and over grates where steam hung in the night air. Each person the volunteers found was offered clean socks and gloves and contact information for shelter, plus a $5 gift card to Dunkin’ in return for answering survey questions.

The annual count, required by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, helps set federal policy on combating homelessness — allowing officials to understand the demographics of a national crisis and allocate funding accordingly.

It’s also a way for local officials to take stock of the situation on their own streets. Typically, said Beth Gonzales, the deputy director of the city’s Office of Homeless Services, volunteers count 700 to 900 people sleeping on the streets each year.

The city will not release the total count from this year for another few months, but for the last five years, the number of unsheltered people has decreased citywide, from more than 1,000 in 2018 to about 800 last year.

It’s still too early for local officials to paint a definitive picture of homelessness in Philadelphia, or to gauge what funding they might see from HUD, so soon after the count has concluded, Gonzales said.

Anecdotally, she said, counters had noticed an uptick of people with opioid use disorder outside of Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis. That may be because newly sworn-in Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has signaled that she plans to crack down on that neighborhood’s infamous open-air drug markets, although Gonzales emphasized that the new administration also wants to get more people with opioid addiction into treatment.

For many volunteers, conducting the annual count holds personal resonance. Shamia Ruff, who worked with Gonzales to patrol parts of Center City on Wednesday night, was once unsheltered herself.

Driving near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway late Wednesday night, Ruff pointed down the block to a muddy patch of grass near the Rodin Museum. “It’s crazy how I used to be out there,” she said. In 2020, Ruff had lived for months in a large encampment on the parkway, part of a protest over a lack of affordable housing in the city. Since then, she has moved into permanent housing herself, and taken an internship at the city’s Office of Homeless Services.

Now, she is helping the office catalog the extent of the problems she once protested from the encampment. “It’s a chance to make a difference,” she said.

From late Wednesday night into the predawn hours on Thursday, Ruff, Gonzales, and other volunteers drove down major thoroughfares and narrow side streets, peering under awnings and into alleys to spot people without shelter for the night.

On Broad Street, a man who gave his name as Smokey stood on the median, holding a sign asking for donations. He’s been homeless for a year, and was trying to earn enough cash to rent a room for the night, though he’s been working to secure permanent housing with a local organization for HIV-positive people.

“I try to keep praying, keep faith, and stay strong,” he said. “Some people are worse off than me.”

At a bus stop near LOVE Park, a young woman named L. said she’d been homeless since she’d been evicted from her home about a month ago. Finding new housing, even with help from city resources, has been confusing and frustrating, she said. “I have to have patience,” she said. For now, she huddled in the bus stop, wrapped in a blanket next to a pile of her belongings. “I’m just trying to get out of the cold and wetness,” she said.

Though city outreach workers regularly patrol hotspots looking for unsheltered people, Ruff said, it’s often difficult for unhoused people to consistently make contact with them. “We need all these contacts to get a place or to get services,” she said. “But they’re a hit or miss.”

Other people sleeping on the streets want to avoid shelters entirely. “I don’t hear good things about shelters — between people stealing, and the fights,” said a man who gave his name as Robert, 33, who said he has been living in Center City since his mother kicked him out of her house over his drug addiction.

Some shelters, he said, don’t allow residents to come and go after certain hours, and he worried about withdrawing from drugs inside. “No matter how many times I tell you how bad [withdrawal] is, you’ll never truly know,” he said.

Gonzales said that federal and state funding to combat homelessness typically is geared toward increasing long-term housing opportunities for unhoused people, while dollars from the city’s general fund support emergency housing.

Recently, the city inspector general launched an investigation into overspending at OHS — the office spent $15 million over its budget in four years; Gonzales said that spending was largely drawn from city funds, not state or federal money. (Matthew Heckles, the regional administrator of HUD’s Mid-Atlantic region, which includes Philadelphia, called the city “a great partner” and declined to comment on the investigation.)

Heckles, who also participated in the count on Wednesday, said the event is a crucial opportunity to assess what’s working in the Biden administration’s homeless policy — and what isn’t.

As rent and housing costs overall have increased in recent years, the administration has invested significant funding in housing initiatives, including one to create 40,000 housing units for people experiencing homelessness. But, Heckles said, the administration isn’t making sufficient headway.

“The problem is sort of getting larger as we go,” he said.

Heckles stressed that, though people experiencing homelessness are often stereotyped as struggling with mental health or substance use issues, that doesn’t paint a full picture of the nation’s housing crisis. The administration is seeing more families experiencing homelessness, for example.

“We’re seeing kids who are doing their homework in the school parking lots in the back of their cars, and sleeping there because that’s what they have available to them,” he said. “That’s why we’re doing this point in time to really understand [the problem] even better than before.”