Special Series
This story is the first in a week-long series by Spotlight Delaware examining homelessness and its impacts across the First State. If you or someone you how are experiencing homelessness, available resources can be found here.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The state of homelessness in Delaware has been a major topic of discussion across all three counties this year. While the number of homeless people is growing, existing resources struggle to meet the demand for help, and federal funding cuts make the pinch on resources even tighter.
Since the spring, a task force appointed by Wilmington Mayor John Carney has intensely deliberated ways to address the city’s growing homeless population, considering options as wide ranging as creating a sanctioned tent village to using old city buses as storage for people’s belongings.
Fifty miles south in the state’s capital city, debate over an anti-panhandling ordinance has broken Dover City Council and community advocates into factions since the fall. Proponents of the regulation say it is a necessary way to control traffic flow and pedestrian safety, while critics have labeled it as a cruel way to criminalize homelessness.
Another 40 miles south of Dover, the town of Georgetown has seen a hyper-active local Facebook group pop up over the past few months focused on the town’s growing homeless population. Hours of public comment at recent town council meetings have been spent attacking the existing support services for homeless people in the area.
From Delaware’s northern urban core to its sprawling southern farmlands, unrest over homelessness has touched every corner of the state this year.
This year’s homelessness point-in-time count – which, while flawed, is considered to be the foremost method used to track homeless populations across the country – showed Delaware’s homeless population rising by 16% from 2024. The count acts as a snapshot of the state of homelessness in Delaware on one night of the year.
Additional counts of the homeless population in Sussex County over the past six months conducted by a street outreach group indicated that the homeless population in Georgetown alone has ballooned to nearly 2% of the town’s total population or 242 of about 7,450 total residents.
Housing costs in Delaware are on the rise, which experts say puts more people at risk of becoming homeless. And there are not enough shelter beds in the state for those already living on the streets.
Meanwhile, changes in the way the federal government addresses homelessness could take away funding currently being used to bolster support services in Delaware.
In a five-part series this week, Spotlight Delaware will examine how these various facets impact homelessness in the First State.
From walking through the experiences of homeless people across Delaware, to examining the existing support services and gaps in available resources, and dissecting the complicated process of navigating affordable housing, Spotlight Delaware aims to paint a broader picture of the growing crisis – and the various approaches to address it.
Shifts in the national approach
Court rulings, federal funding changes, and the Trump administration’s language in talking about homelessness have all impacted the way homelessness looks and is addressed around the country.
In June 2024, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowed local governments to implement anti-camping ordinances, even in jurisdictions where there are not enough shelter beds for people living in public spaces.
Stephen Metraux, a University of Delaware professor who studies homelessness, said the decision was symbolic because it “emboldened a lot of cities or local jurisdictions to take a much more criminal justice-based approach to homelessness.”
More recently, President Donald Trump signed an executive order in July that shifted U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding from “housing first” programs to drug treatment services instead.
The housing first model calls for providing permanent housing to homeless people without requiring sobriety or mental health treatment. Director of Delaware’s State Housing Authority, Matthew Heckles, said there is ample evidence that the housing first model is the most effective method to address homelessness.
But Trump and his allies often describe the homelessness crisis as being caused by individuals’ drug use, rather than a lack of affordable housing – an idea that many homelessness experts dispute.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development also made changes last month to how states may use grants awarded through the federal “Continuum of Care” program.
A coalition of more than 20 Democratic states, including Delaware, sued the Trump administration over changes that would include a major reduction in the percentage of federal dollars that states can use to fund permanent housing programs, which are meant to help people find housing stability, from nearly 90% down to 30%.
Delaware received $11.9 million in continuum of care grants last year to fund housing assistance and rapid re-housing programs. Nationwide, the program awarded $3.6 billion to states in 2024.
Heckles said that funding helped people find stable homes in an increasingly expensive housing market, driven by a severe lack of affordable housing in the state.
At least 500 Delawareans would lose their homes if the funding changes are upheld, Heckles said.
Alongside the national changes in addressing homelessness, there has been intense scrutiny from Delawareans in parts of Kent and Sussex counties toward local officials and their attempts to address the crisis.
Resident backlash in Delaware
People who are homeless in cities like Dover, Seaford, and Milford told Spotlight Delaware they have to be careful to stay out of public view, or move their tents to other locations in order to avoid getting arrested.
“We’ve had instances where cops are pulling homeless [people] out of their encampments and then arresting them,” said Michael Starr, who has been homeless in the Seaford area for more than five years.
And while homeless people face scrutiny around where they can and cannot reside, residents have pushed back against housing efforts seeking to help mitigate homelessness.
Earlier this month, the Georgetown Town Council approved a cottage housing ordinance, allowing 12 tiny homes to be built on a single acre of land. But that decision came after an hour and a half of impassioned public comment – largely against the proposal – and another half hour of discussion among council members.
In voicing their frustrations about the tiny homes proposal and homelessness in town in general, some residents pointed to a large, growing tent encampment in the woods behind Douglas Street, saying that bringing more affordable housing and homelessness services to town would simply attract more homeless people to the area.
Residents have long complained about the encampment as a source of substantial trash in town from free meals that people in the encampment receive, as well as drug needles they say come from the encampment being strewn across the nearby train tracks.
The residents say that allowing tiny homes in Georgetown will only lead to another area of blight within the Sussex County seat.
Members of the ever-growing Facebook group Make Georgetown Great Again, many of whom were the same vocal critics of the cottage housing ordinance, wrote online that “May is on the way,” a reference to the next town election – and that council members will pay the price for passing the ordinance at the ballot box.
Coming from away?
Some Delaware elected officials have also referenced nearby cities as the reason for the state’s growing homeless population.
Wilmington Mayor John Carney has blamed Philadelphia for giving bus tickets to homeless people and sending them to Delaware.
Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies homelessness, said that in reality, Philadelphia has reestablished a long-standing “traveler’s aid program,” which is for homeless people who are stranded in one city, but are from somewhere else, and can get assistance in moving back to the location where they are from.
“Every city I’ve ever talked to thinks that their homeless programs are great, and people will migrate great distances to be in those programs, but we never see evidence of this,” Culhane said.
Data collected by Street Outreach Services in Sussex County indicated that of the roughly 170 homeless people the group spoke with in Georgetown, only about 10 came to the town from another county in Delaware or from a different state.
Spotlight Delaware also spoke with homeless people living in Wilmington’s Christina Park about where they previously lived.
Ron “Philly” Simmons, who has been periodically living in the park for two years, is originally from Philadelphia, but moved to and owned a home in Dover before becoming homeless.
Another man living in Christina Park, Al, is a Howard High School graduate who grew up in Wilmington’s Eastside.
Looking across Delaware’s counties
Because of varying population densities and levels of connectivity by bus routes and highways, homelessness can look quite different across the state.
While New Castle County has multiple homeless shelters in addition to its centralized Hope Center, there are fewer resources across Kent County.
Instead, there is a smattering of shelters mainly concentrated in the Dover area.
Those working in Kent’s existing shelters, like Shepherd Place Executive Director Tasha Scott, also have noticed that there are generally fewer housing and job opportunities for the homeless population in the state’s central county.
Georgetown has also become regarded as the hub for homelessness in the state’s southernmost county.
The landscape of resources in rural Delaware, however, could soon change.
In November, Gov. Matt Meyer announced that Delaware would apply for up to $1 billion from the federal government to invest in health infrastructure in Kent and Sussex counties, which would include new homeless service shelters in the lower counties, as part of a new nationwide program meant to bolster rural health care.
Still, local officials often say their hands are tied when it comes to providing homeless services. Some have claimed it is up to the state and federal governments to bring those resources to the local level.
In Georgetown, State Sen. Brian Pettyjohn (R-Georgetown) and State Rep. Valerie Jones-Giltner (R-Georgetown) established a task force to examine the way homeless services are being delivered in the town, and how state agencies can better serve the unhoused population.
Although local officials have made efforts at the state and local level, Culhane said there is no requirement for the government to address homelessness, so it often gets left up to voluntary charitable organizations or a third-class social welfare system.
“Talk about falling through the cracks, the system is basically one giant crack,” Culhane said.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.