More living in shelters, based on homeless count

More living in shelters, based on homeless count
February 02, 2012 8:52 AM
HOPE HODGE - DAILY NEWS STAFF
A survey of Onslow County homelessness over a 24-hour period found more than three times as many people living in shelters as were during the same period last year, organizers of the survey said.

Members of the Community Advisory Network-Developing Onslow, a United Way initiative that targets homelessness, met Wednesday at the Onslow United Way headquarters to tally results of the annual point-in-time count of the homeless. When finalized with the addition of data gathered from the community’s stand-down for homeless veterans on Tuesday, the data will be sent to the North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness in Raleigh, where it will ultimately be used to inform distribution of federal funding for programs.

Members of CAN-DO emphasized that addition of data from the stand-down, which had about 200 attendees, could significantly change the final count. But even the preliminary numbers led to some surprising findings.

When data from the stand-down came in, the leaders of CAN-DO said they were most interested in tallying up the number of homeless military veterans. In one shelter alone, the one maintained by Onslow Community Outreach, the number of military veterans in residence had gone up 77 percent.

“There are folks that are just transitioning out of the Marine Corps here, and we always assume they’re going to go home,” Pitchford said. “But sometimes they can’t.”
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