State steps in to coordinate R.I.’s 2026 homeless census

For the first time, state housing officials will take an active role in gathering data for the annual census of Rhode Island’s unhoused population likely in late January.

The Executive Office of Housing will be the lead coordinator of volunteers who fan out across the state to conduct the yearly Point in Time Count, a responsibility handled by the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness for the past 16 years.

The state’s role in the federally-mandated count previously has been indirect — mostly looking over the coalition’s published numbers upon their release and allowing employees to go out and help with the census.

As the housing office continues to consolidate housing governance across Rhode Island, spokesperson Emily Marshall said the state can now support the count in a more direct way.

“Because the count is primarily conducted by these outreach teams, this new leadership role allows the state to strengthen and coordinate the effort in a more impactful and unified way,” Marshall said in an emailed statement.

The state’s new role doesn’t mean the coalition is ceding its authority in overseeing the yearly snapshot of how many unhoused people are in Rhode Island on a given winter’s night. 

Indeed, the organization will remain in charge of the state’s portion of the Homeless Management Information System through the end of 2028 under an agreement approved by the state’s Continuum of Care board on Nov. 6. The role requires the coalition to clean, validate, analyze, and submit the estimate of Rhode Island’s unhoused population to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 

But the coalition is still without many key players in that data management. Susan Gutner, the chairperson of the organization’s board of directors, told Rhode Island Current that the coalition is in the midst of searching for a new data analyst and data liaison.

That’s on top of the ongoing search for a new executive director after Kim Simmons left in early September after a little more than two years on the job.

​​Gunter, who is serving as interim executive director, declined to say why Simmons left.

“I can tell you that we are actively engaged in the search for an executive director and it is going really well,” she said in a recent interview.

Gunter referred any comment on the upcoming Point in Time Count to the Executive Office of Housing, but noted that the coalition has “always worked in partnership” with the state.

“There’s absolutely no change there,” she said.

The coalition has been in charge of Rhode Island’s Homeless Management Information System since 2009.

No firm date yet

The Point in Time count documents the number of individuals experiencing homelessness on a given night during the coldest time of the year — a time when people are more likely to use shelters. The counts, which are done across the country, are used by HUD to determine federal funding for states and organizations to manage their response.

HUD is responsible for setting the date a state holds the count, often in late January. But when Rhode Island’s volunteers will go out next year has yet to be made public.

Laura Jaworski, executive director of the Warwick-based nonprofit community development corporation House of Hope, said partner organizations like hers typically get a sense of when the date will be in late summer or early fall.

“Because of the shutdown, who knows if we’re still going to stick by that January date,” she said.

A HUD spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Rhode Island’s 2026 Point in Time date. Marshall told Rhode Island Current the state expects the date to be some time in the last two weeks of January.

This year’s census was held on Tuesday, Jan. 21 — a day when the temperature hovered around 18 degrees in Providence. There were at least 2,373 unhoused individuals across the state that night, representing a 2.8% decrease from the record high of 2,442 in 2024.

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While the overall number of homeless individuals was down, volunteers found more were people outside that night than in a shelter. To remedy that issue Gov. Dan McKee’s administration in late October committed over $1.7 million in grants to municipalities and nonprofit service providers to expand Rhode Island’s network of warming centers and emergency shelters.

The state has had some issue with how the coalition has counted in the past. Rhode Island Housing Secretary Deborah Goddard in a recent interview said volunteers used the coalition’s call center, which was used for shelter referrals, to see who may have been outside after the initial count was done, a practice that was allowed during the pandemic but no more.

“That’s not consistent with HUD guidelines,” Goddard said.

HUD guidance prohibits continuums of care from using any counting method that “does not involve some direct interaction with homeless persons “to determine their demographic and other characteristics on the night of the census or afterward

As of Oct. 1, the state no longer uses that hotline for shelter referrals. Instead, those seeking shelter must now go through the state’s new regional access points, walk-in centers across Rhode Island set up to connect people with housing and other services.

While the coalition deferred comments about the Point in Time Count, Jaworski was quick to defend the organization’s methodology, which she said is vetted and approved annually by the Continuum of Care board before it’s submitted to HUD.

“They’re following the guidance and letter of the law of what can and cannot be used,” she said. “I would find it hard to believe they were including numbers we cannot use.”

Having faulty numbers, she said, could impact how much grant money the federal government allocates to the state toward its response in addressing homelessness. Though even that now is in question as the Trump administration has imposed new restrictions on the funding — changes that face two separate lawsuits in Rhode Island’s federal courthouse.

Any issues with the methodology would mainly reflect on the organizations that go out to shelters and encampments that night.

“And there’s no lying or miscounting that we’ve been a part of,” she said.