Photograph by Kazim Yildirimli / iStock / Getty Images Plus
On a cold night in January, Diane Hughes, a volunteer with the Point-in-Time Count, approaches a young person in tight jeans, smoking a cigarette outside a midtown Publix. “Hi, there,” Hughes begins. “I’m helping conduct a survey about people experiencing homelessness in Atlanta. Do you have a few minutes to answer some questions?” They nod, cautiously.
After confirming that her interviewee is unsheltered, Hughes asks them a series of questions from a form she consults on her phone and enters the responses they provide. What is your gender? “Nonbinary.” How long have you been living on the streets or in emergency shelters? “About two years,” they begin, telling Hughes how they arrived in Atlanta from a state up north.
At the end of the interview, Hughes provides them with a $10 Kroger gift card as thanks for participating and bids them a warm goodbye. Then she joins the rest of her volunteer group to head to their next location. By the end of the night—well past two a.m.—she and hundreds of other volunteers will have canvassed nearly all of the city. They’ll have talked to people taking refuge under bridges and sleeping in tents behind gas stations, gathering a picture of who is living unsheltered in Atlanta at a single moment in time.
Hughes—who, like many of the night’s volunteers, works in homeless support services—is a multiyear veteran of the Point-in-Time Count. The survey, conducted at the end of January every year, is mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, better known as HUD. The government and local homeless service organizations use the data to understand how many people are living unsheltered, who they are, and what kind of resources they need. The data from the 2025 survey is set to be released in the coming weeks.
“The Point-in-Time Count gives us a big picture of how we’re doing as a nation on homelessness,” says Cathryn Vassell, CEO of Partners for Home, the HUD affiliate in Atlanta, which oversees the city’s count. “We use this data to inform decisions about the dollars we raise and where we invest them.”
As the name suggests, the survey is meant to measure how many people are homeless in Atlanta on a given night. The survey is conducted in January, Vassell explains, because those who remain outside despite cold temperatures generally lack other housing options. In the days following the nightlong canvass, more volunteers head to soup kitchens and other service spots to catch anyone the night count might have missed.
Data from the 2024 Point-in-Time Count found that Atlanta’s homeless population increased 7 percent from the year before. Vassell says housing affordability is a big contributor: “We’re facing evaporating affordable housing, coupled with rent spikes. This is all driving the prevalence of homelessness here.”
Understanding those shifts is key to addressing them. Many Point-in-Time volunteers will later use the survey data in their own work, to figure out how many flu vaccines to order for street medicine teams, for instance, or which neighborhoods need more shelter beds. It may be a single snapshot of an ever-changing landscape, but for those dedicated to serving Atlantans experiencing homelessness, it’s the most important picture of the year.
This article appears in our April 2025 issue.
