Because of pandemic-related disruptions to counts of unsheltered homeless people in January 2021, these  findings  focus  on  people  experiencing  sheltered  homelessness.  In  response  to  the  COVID-19 pandemic, HUD encouraged communities to determine whether conducting an unsheltered PIT count posed a high risk of exacerbating COVID-19 transmissions, given the lack of widespread access to COVID-19 vaccines at the time. Many CoCs chose to not conduct an unsheltered PIT count because their capacity to conduct counts was limited due to other pandemic-response efforts and the risk of transmitting COVID-19 among  people  experiencing  homelessness,  homeless  assistance  staff,  and  volunteers.  There  were  226 communities  that  conducted  either  complete  or  partial  counts  of  unsheltered  homelessness,  but  those communities are not representative of all communities across the United States.

On a single night in 2021, more than 326,000 people were experiencing sheltered homelessness in the United States. Six in ten were individuals—that is, people in households with only adults or in households with only children. Four in ten were people in families with children. The number of people staying in sheltered locations decreased by eight percent between 2020 and 2021. While this continues a decline that began in 2015, the drop between 2020 and 2021 was steeper than those in recent years. A possible cause for sheltered reduction is that some emergency shelter providers increased  the  amount  of  space  between  people  sleeping  in congregate  settings  to  reduce  their  risk  of exposure, leading to fewer beds in congregate shelters. Other potential factors that led to the decrease: people’s reluctance to use available shelter beds because of health risk, and eviction moratoria, and cash transfers that may have reduced inflow into homelessness. It appears that the unsheltered population did not increase within the communities that conducted unsheltered counts. However, trends on unsheltered homelessness  are  known  for  just  over  half  of  communities,  which  accounted  for  only  22  percent  of unsheltered homelessness in 2020.