An annual report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development found homelessness had decreased in Rhode Island by almost seven percent.
But Karen Santilli of Crossroads Rhode Island, the nonprofit which operates the state’s largest homeless shelter said the annual survey is just a snapshot. It does not catch some more nuanced information about the state’s homeless population.
“It’s also important to look at over the course of a year the total number of households that will experience homelessness,” Santilli said.
“It’s also important to look at how long they stay homeless. Are people languishing in shelters for months and months or years? Those are critical metrics that we need to understand how our system is performing,” she said.
Santilli noted that although total homelessness is down, the report says homelessness among families with children had increased more than fourteen percent. According to the HUD report, this trend is opposite of most of the nation.
The root of the problem might be the availability of housing in Rhode Island. Brenda Clements is the head of HousingWorks RI, a public policy information center about housing and homelessness in the state. She says housing prices have gone up in the past year and have trended upwards in the last few years.
“Because there aren’t available units, more and more people are coming into the shelter system,” she said in an interview Wednesday.
Clements blamed the low vacancy rate in Rhode Island on a lack of new building permits in the state. Last year, building permits granted by the state decreased six percent from the year before.
