The people living outside near Share House, 127 people at last count, may be the highest concentration of unsheltered people anywhere in Clark County.
“We’ve certainly never seen anything like that in Vancouver,” said Andy Silver, executive director of the Council for the Homeless.
Anyone who walks by the downtown encampment will see many tents, each of which can house multiple people.
The crowd near Share House is just a sliver of the total homeless population, though. Dorothy Rodriguez, an advocate for the homeless, knows of 16 other homeless camps around the county, as far north as Battle Ground, that many people don’t know exist.
“That’s just the ones we’ve been able to identify,” Rodriguez said. “They’re all over the place.”
During a single-day snapshot last January, the Council for the Homeless counted 206 people living unsheltered and another 226 living in emergency shelters.
“We look at that number always as a minimum because there’s no way to count everyone who’s out there,” Silver said.
Between Jan. 1 and the end of September this year, 2,578 households sought emergency housing assistance from the Council for the Homeless.
“In the same time frame, we only placed 809 households into emergency shelter,” Silver said.
Some people may have stopped bothering to call the emergency housing hot line, he said, given the lack of available shelter space. “You get told ‘no’ a few times, and you think it’s a waste of your time,” he said.
Even more people who are staying with other families or living in hotels or transitional housing could also be considered homeless. School districts keep information on homeless students and use this broader definition of homelessness. Evergreen Public Schools, for instance, knows of 464 students experiencing homelessness, among which 384 are living in other people’s houses.
About 20 to 25 percent of homeless people have a severe mental health illness, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. About half of the chronically homeless have co-occurring mental health and substance abuse problems.
It doesn’t necessarily mean those issues cause homelessness, Silver said. People may start abusing substances to cope with the trauma of being homeless — to stay awake or to deal with abuse at the hands of other transients — and that exacerbates existing mental health problems.
Silver predicts Winter Hospitality Overflow shelters will quickly fill up when they open next week at two local churches. Generally, when the weather cools off, the number of camps dwindle as people more aggressively seek shelter space, said Jessica Lightheart, spokeswoman for Share, which oversees the overflow space. Given the lack of shelter space, however, it’s unclear how the cold season will play out.
“We know certainly with (Winter Hospitality Overflow), there’s a finite number of beds and people line up to take them,” Lightheart said.
After those fill up and the shelters are full, there’s really nowhere else to go.
