Why Should Delaware Care?
The growing homelessness crisis – and how best to address it – has spurred particularly heated debates across the state over the last year. But inconsistencies when completing this year’s annual homeless population point-in-time count have raised questions about the true size of Delaware’s homeless population. Those questions could lead to policy roadblocks for lawmakers seeking to address the growing crisis.
An inconsistency in the counting methods for this past winter’s annual homelessness survey leaves Delawareans without a conclusive way to compare the current number of unhoused people in the state to that of previous years.
The annual Point-In-Time (PIT) Count – an attempt to tally up all the homeless people in the state on one winter night – normally includes data for both people staying inside shelters and those sleeping outside. This year’s Delaware PIT count, however, only counted sheltered individuals.
The count also normally occurs in January, but a severe winter storm when the survey was originally scheduled forced organizers to push the date back to late February.
A representative from the Housing Alliance of Delaware, the organization coordinating the annual count, said she “can’t remember exactly” why the organization did not count people outside. There was a blizzard warning days before the rescheduled count, which made traveling around the state to deliver supplies and prepare for the survey much more difficult, the representative said.
“It was like, ‘Oh my god, this just isn’t meant to be this year, we just need to let it go,’” Rachel Stucker, director of the Housing Alliance of Delaware, said of rescheduling and weather-related obstacles.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires that each state complete a PIT count every January, but the count of individuals living outside only needs to be administered bi-annually. So Delaware is still in compliance with federal guidelines despite having missed the unsheltered count this year, Stucker said.
Despite the Housing Alliance’s data snafu, this year’s PIT count comes amid a period of amplified controversy over the state of homelessness in Delaware. Elected officials and residents alike, from Wilmington to Georgetown, have spent the past year debating the state’s homelessness crisis and the most effective ways to combat it.
Outdoor homeless encampments in Wilmington and Georgetown have drawn particular attention over the past year, but it is unclear whether the actual number of people in those encampments has increased.
And experts say the implications of this year’s missing numbers mean that specific trends about homelessness in 2026 remain hairy. Lawmakers also will be forced to make policy decisions based on outdated information.
Steve Metraux, a University of Delaware professor who studies homelessness, said he will not try to interpret the 2026 numbers, or use them to assess whether residents’ notion that homelessness is increasing in Delaware is true.
“You really can’t use it to say homelessness went up or homelessness went down, or different things like that,” Metraux told Spotlight Delaware.
The number of homeless people staying in shelters across the state recorded in the 2026 PIT count – 1,378 – decreased slightly from last year’s 1,418 counted shelter inhabitants. Notably, when the PIT was completed this year on Feb. 25 and 26, temperatures had begun to rise after a frigid January, reaching highs in the 50s, according to Accuweather.
While not counted this year, the number of unsheltered individuals has hovered between 150 to 250 people in recent years.
Last year’s PIT count was the highest on record since the survey began in 2008, excluding the COVID pandemic.
The count is often criticized as random and unrepresentative of the true number of homeless people, but is also considered the primary means of tracking homelessness across the country each year.
A closer look at the numbers
In addition to capturing the raw number of sheltered homeless individuals in Delaware, the PIT count collects demographic data about the individuals included in the survey.
These data points, such as age, gender, race and veteran status, remained fairly consistent from the 2025 count to this year.
Some of the more striking demographic takeaways from the 2026 count, Stucker said, include that 41% of adults surveyed reported having a disability and roughly half of respondents were either under 18 or over 55 years old, which is higher than previous years.
Black people tend to experience homelessness at disproportionately high rates in Delaware, according to the PIT count – they represented 65.5% of surveyed individuals, but just 24% of the state’s population.
Metraux, the UD professor, helps conduct the PIT count every year. But he also is open about some of the survey’s shortcomings and the difficulty in locating homeless people in wooded or remote areas. Metraux also said he does not draw specific conclusions about the demographic breakdowns from the PIT count because of the flaws in its methodology.
He will, however, compare “general trends” from the survey with other homelessness studies to assess their accuracy.
The distribution of the homeless population among Delaware’s three counties shifted slightly southward from New Castle County this year.
The percentage of homeless people counted in New Castle County decreased from 61% last year to 55% this year, while Kent and Sussex County saw slight increases from 17% to 20%, and 23% to 25%, respectively.
It is unclear how much of these percentage shifts can be attributed to the absence of the unsheltered count this year.
A look at the specific types of shelters shows there are far more year-round beds available in New Castle County, whereas most of the beds in Kent and Sussex counties are seasonal or overflow beds that are only an option during the cold weather.
Where are people from?
In response to claims from Wilmington Mayor John Carney that other cities – most commonly Philadelphia – are sending homeless people to Delaware, the PIT count organizers added a question this year about where unhoused individuals in Wilmington are from.
The results, Metraux said, “pretty much debunked” Carney’s assertion that Philadelphia is sending homeless people on buses to Wilmington.
Of the 182 people surveyed at the Sunday Breakfast Mission, an overnight shelter in downtown Wilmington near the Christina Park encampment, only four people said they were homeless in Philadelphia before coming to Wilmington.
Forty-five percent of the individuals said they grew up in Wilmington, and another 24% reported becoming homeless after moving to Wilmington.
About one-third of the people said they moved to Wilmington while already experiencing homelessness – among that group, the majority moved from somewhere else in New Castle County or the southern part of the state.
“Even with the limitations of the data, it was still pretty unequivocal – homelessness in Wilmington is a problem that originated in Wilmington,” Metraux said.
When asked about the PIT count indications that few homeless people are coming from Philadelphia, a spokesperson for Carney’s office defended his stance.
“This data only captures a portion of the unhoused community in Wilmington and is particularly likely to focus on a more localized population,” Caroline Klinger, the spokesperson, said.
Klinger added that people at a shelter, like the Sunday Breakfast Mission, are more likely to have been in Wilmington long enough to be connected to emergency housing as opposed to individuals who have just arrived in the city and may still be living unsheltered – and thus were not included in the count.
The PIT count this year only asked the question about where people are from in Wilmington, but organizers said they would like to extend it across the state next year.
A survey conducted last fall by Metraux and Judson Malone, the director of Springboard Delaware – a homelessness service provider in Georgetown – suggested similarly that the majority of unhoused people in the Sussex County seat were from Georgetown or another location in southern Delaware.
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/.
