The number of homeless people in Clark County dropped for the first time since at least 2018, the year the Council for the Homeless first released its own data. But the number is still disconcertingly high, advocates say.
The slight decrease — from 9,032 in 2022 to 8,752 in 2023 — likely reflects a recovery from the financially challenging pandemic era, Council for the Homeless spokeswoman Charlene Welch said. The Vancouver nonprofit advocates for homelessness services.
In 2020 and 2021, the first two years of the pandemic, Clark County’s homelessness numbers shot up by 58 percent.
The most significant change in 2023 was the number of homeless veterans, which decreased by 25 percent. Part of this is due to an updated list of homeless veterans to clarify their housing status, according to a Council for the Homeless report.
The drop is also due to a specialized team that had regular case management meetings with a group of homeless veterans, resulting in a significant number of veterans finding housing, according to the report.
“We’ve been working really hard to get people off the street,” Clark County Veterans Assistance Center board chairwoman Sharon Tyre said.
More veterans are also reaching out to the center for housing assistance, she said, leading to more people being housed.
“We’re getting more veterans every day,” Tyre said. “It’s really hard for veterans to ask for help because you’re taught to be resilient on your own. I think that says a lot — that we’ve increased.”
Another significant reduction was in the number of homeless youth, which dropped by 7 percent between 2022 and 2023. That group — ages 12 to 24 — made up about 16 percent of Clark County’s total homeless population.
The number of children ages zero to 11 increased from 1,764 in 2022 to 1,846 in 2023.
The number of people 55 and older experiencing homelessness decreased by about 4 percent, with 1,187 people in 2022 and 1,144 in 2023.
However, more seniors requested shelter and fewer entered shelters in 2023, according to the report.
Homelessness among people of color in Clark County is still a concern, Welch said. Despite the overall number of homeless people of color dropping slightly, those who identify as Pacific Islander, Black and Indigenous are still significantly more likely than white people to experience homelessness in Clark County, according to the report.
The main reason people gave for homelessness was an inability to afford housing, with domestic violence following closely behind.
The number of people who identified as newly homeless dropped in 2023, with 58 percent of the homeless population saying they were newly homeless, instead of 69 percent of homeless people in 2022.
About a third of people became homeless in Vancouver, with most people becoming homeless in other parts of Clark County.
People who became homeless in Portland only made up 3.6 percent of the homeless population in Clark County, according to the report.
