On Wednesday, Maricopa County released the results of its Tuesday, January 28th, county-wide Point in Time (PIT) count. 9,734 people were counted that day as experiencing homelessness in Maricopa County. The main headline was that the number increased by 3% over 2024, but the deeper underlying area was that the unsheltered homeless population had risen a dramatic 28%.

On January 28, volunteers and city workers across Maricopa county municipalities fanned out across their respective communities to try and spot people who might be homeless in what is called the annual “Point in Time” Homelessness count. Once found, a person is asked where they slept that night and a series of other questions, including if there were others in their group at night. The surveys are required by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Typically the numbers become the official count of the number of people experiencing homelessness.

That figure is an undercount, probably a significant undercount. The National Law Center on Law and Poverty reported many of the systemic limitations of the Point in Time count in 2017 in their report, “Don’t Count on It.”  The U.S. Dept of Education collects data on students who experience homelessness during the school year and in 2021-2022, 18,000 Arizona school children are estimated to have experienced homelessness. Sixty percent of these students are chronically absent from school. Thus, homelessness and housing insecurity are much larger than the Point in Time Count suggests.

Read the full report here.

For more information, contact: Dave Wells, Research Director, Grand Canyon Institute, at DWells@azgci.org or at (602) 595-1025, Ext. 2. 

The Grand Canyon Institute (GCI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to informing and improving public policy in Arizona through evidence-based, independent, objective, nonpartisan research. GCI makes a good faith effort to ensure that findings are reliable, accurate, and based on reputable sources. While publications reflect the view of the Institute, they may not reflect the view of individual members of the Board.