20-02-2025
‘We're exactly where we were at 2016': New data shows backslide in local homelessness rates
COLUMBUS, Ga. () — Homelessness remains a persistent issue in Columbus. This year's Point in Time count data showed an 11% increase in homelessness since last year.
In January, United Way of the Chattahoochee Valley's Home For Good Program paired up with SafeHouse Ministries to conduct the 2025 count. It aims to track unhoused individuals in shelters and on the street.
'We're exactly where we were at 2016. And those increases we've only seen in the last three years,' said Pat Frey, Vice President of United Way of the Chattahoochee Valley. 'That's a little scary, that in three years we negated, what, five years of work?'
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Columbus homelessness hit its lowest rate since 2016 back in 2021, with about 240 individuals counted. That number rose in 2022 and 2023, hitting a brief plateau in 2024, but rising once again in 2025.
This year, more than homeless 300 individuals were recorded in the Point in Time count.
Frey says the number one reason listed by newly homeless individuals interviewed for the count was a rent versus salary disparity.
'Rent has gone up three to four times more than their salary has,' Frey said. 'We've seen a 50-plus percent increase in rent since 2020 and the income just has not kept up.'
Nearly 83% of those counted in this year's Point in Time were newly homeless.
Persons are not counted as 'chronically homeless' until they have been homeless for at least 12 months, or for 12 months out of the past three years.
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Frey hopes the community will come together to create long-term solutions to the complicated local homelessness issue.
'I think for all of us is as just community members [we] have to take a look at root causes and be willing to invest a little more time,' Frey said. 'Unfortunately, time means money, to get to those root causes and not look at, 'oh, we we accomplished this many numbers,' but I would rather have so much more success and less recidivism than have great numbers.'
More than 15% of the local homeless population were children.
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