Each year, the Kentucky Housing Corporation conducts a K-Count to best monitor the homeless situation in Kentucky, and each county turns its local numbers into the state. This annual count takes place at the end of January and largely determines how much federal funding is received to combat homelessness.
The count must be taken within 24 hours, normally at night. This year’s count took place on Jan. 29.
Owensboro Times reached out to a variety of agencies and nonprofits, such as Aid the Homeless, Daviess County Fiscal Court and Audobon Area Community Services, to uncover details about this year’s local K-Count, but each organization said their staff had no involvement in the event.
In recent years, the local K-Count has been conducted through the Homeless Council of the Ohio Valley, where volunteers with the nonprofit went shelter-to-shelter to count the number of sheltered homeless individuals.
The Homeless Council of the Ohio Valley did not participate in the most recent count, but Dan Eaton, Chair of the 2020 committee, believes that’s because a more technological approach was taken this year.
“Places that participate in software information management services, like St. Benedict’s and the Pitino Shelter, participate through software,” he said. “The software prompts several questions about numbers.”
But not every homeless shelter in the County has that software, and they don’t all partner with the Kentucky Housing Corporation, explained St. Benedict’s Executive Director Harry Pedigo, making it very difficult to get an accurate K-Count across the board.
“You have to have a statistical, numerical value to show a need for homeless resources in your area, but it’s extremely difficult to get an accurate number,” Pedigo said.
In 2017, the K-Count revealed 235 homeless individuals living in Daviess County. That number decreased to 204 in 2019, and Eaton expects the number to sit around 250 after this year’s K-Count. Those numbers make little sense, seeing as how St. Benedict’s alone housed between 400 and 500 men over the course of one year, Pedigo said.
And aside from the sheltered homeless population, there’s also an unsheltered group that often gets left out of the K-count, as well as a group defined as “precariously homeless.”
“The majority of homeless kids in the school systems — their families don’t own a home, or they live in a single home dwelling with multiple families who are sharing a space because another loved one allowed them to stay there,” said Brandon Harley, former member of the Homeless Council of the Ohio Valley. “They’d qualify as precariously homeless. It’s not just folks without a roof over their heads.”
While the school systems do their own count of homeless students, they follow the McKinney Vento Act to determine what constitutes as homeless, and Harley says he isn’t sure those numbers, which are turned into the Kentucky Department of Education, filter into the annual K-Count sent to the state.
Harley worries that if a K-Count wasn’t facilitated by Audubon Area Community Services — his place of work — then it’s possible that an official K-Count wasn’t conducted at all this year.
That would mean that any local statistics sent into the state were only done by the homeless shelters with the capability to do so. The number of unsheltered and precariously homeless individuals were likely not counted at all.
“Local folks who serve the homeless estimate as many as 100 people are homeless who aren’t included in the count because they are staying somewhere that makes them not want to participate, such as outdoors, in abandoned property or on someone’s land,” Eaton said.
According to Harley, other counties across Kentucky have established better-organized methods in conducting the annual K-Count.
“There are counties that do a much better job, like Fayette County,” he said. “It has to be planned, coordinated and organized to make it work.”
Harley said Daviess County’s 2019 K-Count of 204 — around .2 percent of the population — was “highly inaccurate.”
“Some people view homelessness in the traditional paradigm, but there’s no mold for homelessness,” he said. “Housing is a significant issue in Daviess County. Housing needs are always our highest or second-highest need on Audubon Area’s needs assessment.”
Housing issues at the local level won’t be easily resolved, Harley said, without an accurate K-Count. While affordable housing projects have been started in downtown Owensboro, Harley questions whether those housing options would be truly affordable for those on the brink of homelessness.
