photo by: Shawn Valverde/Journal-World

Tents at homeless camps are pictured in North Lawrence behind Johnny’s Tavern on Monday, March 11, 2024. As the city has expanded and funded programs to create resources for the homeless, the city hopes to advocate for statewide legislation that would prevent other agencies from dropping off homeless individuals in the city.

Lawrence definitely wasn’t alone in seeing a rise in homelessness in 2023. In fact, it was about average, according to new national statistics.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced Friday that federally required counts taken across the country in January found that more than 770,000 people were counted as homeless, which was an 18.1% increase nationally from last year. As the Journal-World previously, Lawrence also registered an 18% increase.

As the Journal-World reported in August, the results in Lawrence of the point-in-time count — a survey intended to give a picture of how many sheltered and unsheltered homeless individuals are in a community on a single — in January found 414 people were counted as unhoused this year in Douglas County on the night of Jan. 24 and morning of Jan. 25, up from 351 a year earlier.

Of the 414 people counted in the survey in Lawrence, 142 people, or 34%, were unsheltered, a big reason why increasing shelter capacity in Lawrence has been considered a priority by local leaders.

Other communities like Lawrence — college towns in the region — saw similar increases in the count of unhoused people in their counties.

In Boone County, Missouri, home of Columbia, Mo. and the University of Missouri, the number of unhoused people grew from 270 in 2023 to 323 in 2024 — a 16.4% increase. In Lincoln, Nebraska, 501 individuals were counted as homeless in 2024, a 14.4% increase from 2023 where the tally was 429.

In Iowa, Story County — home to Ames, Iowa, and Iowa State University, saw a 20.2% increase in the homeless population based on PIT counts. This January, 119 people were counted as unhoused compared to 95 in 2023. In Johnson County, Iowa — home of the University of Iowa and Iowa City — the increase was 11.6%, with 181 people counted as homeless in 2024 compared to 160 in 2023.

Federal officials cited a lack of affordable housing — alongside natural disasters and an increase in migration to certain parts of the country — as one of the reasons for the dramatic spike in the population of unhoused people. Historically, communities in college towns have higher housing costs than other neighborhoods.

One nearby college town that saw a marked decrease in its unhoused population was Boulder County, Colorado. Home to the University of Colorado, the county reported a 15.4% decrease in the homeless population in the region. 727 people were counted in 2024 compared to 839 in 2023.

Officials in Boulder said that they have seen a 10% increase in people in Boulder County enrolling in a program that helps unhoused people access public homelessness services and resources in the community, according to an article from Colorado Hometown Weekly. But while Boulder has seen a large decrease, Denver — a large city just 25 miles away — has seen its unhoused population increase from 9,065 in 2023 to 9,977, which is a 9.1% increase.