Housing precarity increasingly prevalent, persistently difficult to quantify

Security and stability of one’s shelter is a fluid situation, as so many Midwest residents were reminded this spring. But three months before the 2025 ice storm, in late January, nonprofit workers and volunteers in the Midwest and across the nation made efforts to contact and count people living without stable and secure housing.

Known as the Point-in-Time (PIT) Count and coordinated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the goal is “a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January.”

“It’s basically like the homeless census,” said Chad Lytle, Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency (NEMCSA) Street Outreach Director. Lytle coordinates homeless prevention in Crawford, Iosco, Ogemaw, Oscoda and Roscommon counties.

“During that time, we're counting those who are literally homeless,” he said. “Literally homeless has a little tighter definition than people might think.”

The federal government’s definition is simple enough on first look.

Homeless means: an individual or family who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence or who will imminently lose their primary nighttime residence.

Source: Federal Register, Vol. 76, No. 233, Monday, Dec. 5, 2011

It is complicated, though, by 24 pages of preamble and supporting definitions, over 500 words explaining precise and extenuating circumstances to include at-risk youth and victims of domestic violence, and an additional section that requires recordkeeping.

“(The count) includes people in homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, emergency motel placements, and those sleeping outside,” said Eva Rohlman, Mid Michigan Community Action Agency Outreach and Opportunities Director. “In 2024, we count over 1,000 households experiencing homelessness across 61 rural counties in Michigan.”

MMCAA coordinated PIT activities in Arenac, Bay, Clare, Gladwin, Mecosta and Osceola counties on Jan. 21.

“We had about six partner agencies participate in PIT this year, including The Well, McKinney-Vento and MDHHS,” said MMCAA Homeless Program Manager Jennifer Rodgers.

I was unable to establish contact with someone who gathered data on the ground in Arenac County.

“Because of funding restrictions, we don’t have the ability to have somebody on the ground going site-to-site,” said Heather Bauman, director at The Well in Standish.

Bauman said for Arenac County, MMCAA and partner agencies collaborate with schools, clinics, food pantries and social service case workers to report numbers for the count.

“It’s really difficult to—on one of the coldest days of the year at the end of January—to do a Point-in-Time Count in a very rural community where we have no shelter. A lot of people are doubled up in our community, which does not meet the definition of homeless in the eyes of that count,” she said. “It almost makes the numbers feel inaccurate to what’s really happening in this community.”

A NEMCSA staff member took myself and another volunteer along to find and contact as many people as possible who might have qualified as homeless in Ogemaw and Oscoda counties on Jan. 29.

Homeless where you hang your hat

Late January marked Madison Shamel’s first anniversary as a Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency Resource Coordinator.

“Last year when I did this it was like my first week,” she said.

Shamel, 23, graduated from Ferris State with a bachelor’s in Forensic Psychology and then worked at a children's advocacy center for two years.

“That kind of helped me get my toes in the water with helping families out with resources,” she said. “Then I found NEMCSA.”

Joined by local freelance journalist Mike Busch at the West Branch District Library, the three of us got into Shamel’s car to begin canvassing for homeless people. Shamel, from Houghton Lake, navigated using a list of possible locations from NEMCSA and by asking us for suggestions and directions.

After checking in at a few thrift shops and food pantries, we arrived at St. Vincent de Paul in West Branch. Staff and volunteers there assist people with utilities and emergency motel placements, among other things. We conferred briefly with a staff member and set off with several locations around West Branch to investigate.

Madison Shamel, right, speaks with a St. Vincent de Paul staff member.

Counting homeless people in Northern Michigan presents an interesting challenge. Asking everyone one encounters whether they are homeless seems impractical.

At 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, as our search got properly underway, a person without or imminently without “a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence” might have been at work or in some public place keeping warm. We were looking for homeless people in situ.

At the end of a dead-end street, in a big rig cab that appeared not to have moved in some years, a man answered the door and shouted down as freezing wind stole hot air from the cabin. He said a NEMSCA program that had been helping him had been “killed.”

“I'm good,” he said. “I'm warm. I've got food. I've got water. I'm good.”

He accepted giveaway bags containing supplies (tooth brushes and paste, laundry detergent pods, etc.) and hastily shut the door. He had a neighbor in a weathered camper who responded similarly when asked about his status. Both men appeared to be in their 50s.

A local motel manager said 15 of 20 units were occupied by people sheltering through emergency placement arrangements. People came out of desperation, when temperatures dropped well below freezing in late January.

“We've got kids with no electricity in homes,” the manager said. “People are very leery—and I am as well—when they come in, on giving names or anything, because they'll go take their kids.”

Parents who apply for homeless assistance can suffer consequences with respect to custody.

“It's a very fine line of helping and getting more put on them,” the manager said.

Shamel took notes for NEMCSA to follow up but did not interview or count anyone at the motel.

Eking through winter

“What have you been doing for your pain?” asked a doctor on speakerphone.

“Sleep. Don't walk on it. And I'm getting tired of sleeping,” said the man, who was in his late 50s. “You can only sleep so much. But if I walk on it then it irritates it more.”

He was sitting on a couch in an old camper in Oscoda County, reviewing his medication regimen while Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency (NEMCSA) Resource Coordinator Madison Shamel waited outside. Water leaked through the ceiling, dripping into a plastic food container at the far end of the camper, in the kitchenette.

“Have you been taking your [pain medication]?" asked the doctor.

“Yeah, it don't touch it. It helps my back. It doesn't touch that sciatic at all. It feels like I'm constantly getting a shot in my butt, in the right cheek,” he said. “Then if I stand up or bend over the fire goes all the way down to my calf. And I haven't done nothing to cause it. And I've never had that before. It's not like I used to have it, come and go. I've never had it.”

“I have a suspicion it could be your bed,” said the doctor.

“I sleep on a couch and a bed. I was thinking that too but the heat's out in the front room and it's easier to close the doors and keep the heat out here. It's cheaper. To try to heat the whole trailer—it's a 28-foot—it's draining me,” he said. “The heat just goes out the windows.”

After he concluded his tele-health call, I fetched Shamel.

“Nice and warm in here,” she said.

The man explained how he came to live in the camper along with two cats.

“People at the other trailer park...I moved there, lived in a tent, met a guy. He sold me this (camper). The guy had a stroke. So he got evicted, and then I moved here and everybody else had left their animals,” he said.

Shamel asked when he became homeless.

“Right after my girlfriend went to jail for a domestic against me,” he said.

“That's actually another question,” said Shamel. “So, yes for survivor.”

“I've talked to NEMCSA a million times,” he said.

“This is kind of different. It's not through NEMCSA—NEMCSA just helps out with it, so it's a national program where specifically today volunteers like us go out and take this information and get as much as they can. So this is specifically for that,” said Shamel. “Just one more: total months homeless in the last three years?”

The man guessed 5 to 6 months.

“Any long-term disability?” asked Shamel.

“I'm on disability. I get one check a month,” he said. “That covers my rent, my propane—leaves me nothing.”

“Are you a veteran?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Do you mind if I get your date of birth?”

He gave it.

“That’s all the information I needed.”

Before we left, the man told us about a family of three living in a neighboring camper, and several more people making do in a nearby tent.

“They moved in here without telling anybody and a week later the owner came and said, ‘what are you doing on my property?’ They must have told him a sad story,” he said.

Madison Shamel approaches recreational vehicles during the 2025 Point-in-Time Count.

Conservative numbers

Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency Resource Coordinator Madison Shamel reported contacting six families and around 10 individuals experiencing homelessness in Ogemaw and Oscoda counties on Jan. 29.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “Point-in-Time Count Methodology Guide” (2014) devotes 20 pages to actually counting homeless people. Additional pages cover planning and data analysis.

To count a homeless population in a rural area such as Northern Michigan, the guide recommends something called a service-based method.

“Many suburban and rural communities do not have extensive homeless services. In such places, the count is usually focused on mainstream human service agencies that are used by homeless and non-homeless people,” the guide says. “This method focuses on conducting interviews with users of non-shelter services and locations frequented by people who are homeless.”

The other method is known as night of the count (or “street count”) and depends on mobilizing a large number of volunteers to conduct data collection overnight.

“Often, suburban and rural (counts) focus on a limited number of known locations where homeless people are believed to congregate and might conduct a random sample count of high and low concentration areas.”

The HUD 2024 report on homelessness in Michigan shows 9,739 total homeless persons counted.

Data from the January 2025 count is expected to be released in December.

See all HUD's homelessness reports at hudexchange.info/programs/coc/coc-homeless-populations-and-subpopulations-reports/