photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Members of the point-in-time count team that the Journal-World accompanied enter a campsite in the wooded area near the intersection of Eighth and Delaware streets in East Lawrence on Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024.

The 2024 point-in-time homeless count for Lawrence and Douglas County, which was completed earlier this year, is up 18% from last year, according to results that were shared with the Journal-World on Wednesday.

The point-in-time count is conducted each year by state agencies as mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and it’s intended to give a picture of how many sheltered and unsheltered homeless individuals are in a community on a single night in January. The results of the count showed that 414 people were counted this year in Douglas County on the night of Jan. 24 and morning of Jan. 25.

Last year, the point-in-time count in Douglas County found 351 people who were homeless on the night it was conducted.

Although the data provides a snapshot of one night, experts say the count does not provide a complete picture, in part because the survey often asks personal questions and people can simply choose not to participate.

Only two counties in the state counted larger numbers of homeless individuals than Lawrence in the 2024 count: Sedgwick County, where Wichita is located, had 691 people, and Shawnee County, home to Topeka, had 537 people.

Despite having a population nearly a half-million people larger than Lawrence and Douglas County, Johnson County counted a significantly smaller homeless population. Its count found 250 homeless individuals, or about 164 fewer than in Lawrence. Johnson County’s homeless number increased by just 6% from last year’s count.

Across the state, a total of 2,815 people were counted as experiencing homelessness that night. That would mean about 14.7% of that total population was in Douglas County.

The count this year, which was facilitated by the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition in 101 of the 105 counties, also asked people how long they had been in the county they were in. Of the people experiencing homelessness in Douglas County, 289 said they had been there for over 12 months, which is about 70% of the respondents. 212 of the respondents said ​​they had been homeless for more than one year.

The count also found that 137 of the respondents (33%) were in transitional housing and 136 were staying in emergency shelter (32.8%), meaning under two-thirds of the homeless population that night were in shelter. 142 people, or 34%, were unsheltered.

In Shawnee County, 62% of the homeless population had shelter for the night, while in Sedgwick County, 73% of the homeless population had shelter that night.