WITH A FRESH HEAP of snow sticking to the ground, Christy O’Brien and a team of volunteers bundle up and head to Hope for Holyoke, a substance abuse recovery and support center in the heart of the city’s downtown. Here, they start the night by approaching a handful of unhoused people camped outside.

“We’re on a mission tonight,” O’Brien told CommonWealth Beacon in an interview.

That mission is to ensure that anyone experiencing homelessness in the city is counted.

As the temperature slowly drops to zero degrees, volunteers ask where the individuals will be sleeping tonight. Some say they don’t know, while others say they will be “walking” instead of sleeping – something many homeless people do during the brutal winter months when they can’t get warm enough to rest or fear they will be kicked out of an area in the middle of the night.

The volunteers hand out bags of food, toiletries, and other small necessities as those individuals set out to wander the streets for the rest of the night. Holyoke’s only homeless shelter – totaling 46 beds – has been full for months, and without funding for additional shelter beds this winter, there are few places for the unhoused to go. Even in nearby cities, beds aren’t available.

“Shelters have been full since the summer, which is pretty unprecedented for all of this area,” O’Brien, homelessness service line director for the Center for Human Development in Western Massachusetts, said. “We have way more referrals than we can ever manage. We are turning people away.”

On January 28, just days after a severe winter storm hit Massachusetts, local volunteers across the state set out to quantify homelessness in their communities. The Point-in-Time, or PIT, count is conducted across the country on a single night in January every year. This one-night snapshot – first held in 2005 – is the only federally required count of all people experiencing homelessness in the United States.

On the night of the count, homeless people are counted in two categories – sheltered and unsheltered.

Holyoke has one of the highest unsheltered counts in the state and had the highest unsheltered count in all of Hampden County this year, according to preliminary numbers. Last year, 82 unsheltered people were counted in Holyoke, the highest number ever recorded in the city at the time. This year, that number was 89.

Unsheltered homelessness in Hampden County had been rising since the pandemic, peaking at 211 individuals in 2025. This year, that total dipped to 157, mainly due to a sharp decrease in unsheltered homelessness in Springfield. (Although Springfield’s unsheltered count remains high compared to pre-pandemic levels.)

This year, more unsheltered residents were found in Holyoke than in Springfield, a neighboring Gateway City that is four times its size. (Springfield was able to fund more shelter beds this winter thanks to pandemic-era funding and an infusion of cash from Urban Impact Initiative, a poverty-fighting organization serving communities across the state. The city also helped to create 30 new units of permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless individuals, most of whom have been unsheltered.)

This year’s count comes at a critical time, as homelessness in Western Massachusetts has reached unprecedented levels in the aftermath of the pandemic, following national trends.

In recent months, the Trump administration has attempted to issue sweeping policy shifts to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s main program that supports local governments and non-profits with funding for homelessness response efforts. In response, activists have called for increased state funding for individuals experiencing homelessness, highlighting that those without children do not have the same emergency housing protections as families under Massachusetts’ unique Right to Shelter Law.

“We’re really hopeful to quantify it, because getting these numbers to HUD feels really important,” said O’Brien, who led the count in Holyoke. “It’s hard in this political climate to feel like what we’re doing is going to be utilized, but getting the numbers to prove the situation makes it indisputable.”

Volunteers conducting the count must follow strict guidelines set by HUD – the main federal agency that handles homelessness.

In 1994, HUD developed the Continuum of Care (CoC) grant program that later established local networks in each state consisting of government agencies, service providers, and nonprofits that document homelessness and administer housing and other resources. There are 11 CoCs in Massachusetts, and they each report their region’s PIT count totals to HUD.

According to annual PIT count data released by the Springfield-Hampden County CoC, the total homeless population in Hampden County jumped from 2,156 to 3,018 between 2022 and 2024. In 2025, that number dipped back down to 2,719.

At the start of 2025, amid rising safety concerns and costs that skyrocketed to more than $1 billion a year, Gov. Maura Healey proposed significant changes to the state’s decades-old Right to Shelter law. The move came after the state saw an influx of immigrant families from 2022 to 2024. That influx swelled the family shelter system and annual homeless count. The Legislature approved new statutory residency requirements for families, time limits on shelter stays, and criminal background checks. Hotels that had been used as shelters for homeless families were also shuttered.

Many of the families who were in the shelter system received housing vouchers and HomeBase assistance from the state, which helped them transition into housing over the last year.

According to this year’s unofficial draft count, 1,221 homeless people were found in Hampden County. It’s a sharp decrease from years prior, mainly due to the significant changes made to the family shelter system, which lowered the number of homeless families. The number of homeless individuals without children remains high.

It is impossible for a small group of volunteers to find and count every person experiencing homelessness on a single night. But while the count is not foolproof, homelessness in urban areas is often very visible, with most of the population living on the streets.

Because of this, O’Brien is confident that her team can capture most of the city’s homeless population in the count.

In Holyoke, most homeless individuals can be found outside of storefronts, wandering streets or alleyways, or set up in encampments. Many others can be found at Kate’s Kitchen, a local soup kitchen that provides meals twice a day and, occasionally, a pop-up shelter.

For the local volunteers – many of whom are housing, shelter, and mental health providers in Holyoke or the surrounding area – the count also serves as an opportunity for outreach, even if they don’t have available beds to offer.

“It is an opportunity for us to say, ‘Oh, we don’t know you. Here’s our card and our information for our drop-in center. You should come see us,’” O’Brien said.

In November, the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities announced $12 million that would be allocated to 26 programs across the state for additional winter shelter capacity, allowing local providers to open more beds. The grants were awarded to “cost-effective, coordinated proposals aligned with HLC’s goal of making homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring and priority was given to applicants serving regions with the highest need for shelter beds,” according to a press release.

O’Brien’s agency, the Center for Human Development (CHD), received the grant in previous years, but its 2025 application was not approved, meaning Holyoke did not receive additional beds, although the funding did expand winter bed capacity in Hampden County as a whole.

The state housing office “did not have enough funding to support every proposal for this competitive grant program and used the scoring criteria identified in the NOFA [Notice of Funding Availability] posting to determine which bids were ultimately funded,” a spokesperson for the office said in a statement. The Center for Human Development’s proposal “included a rate that was $100 higher per person per night than the next highest bidder,” the statement said.

The PIT count is conducted in January every year because frigid temperatures tend to drive more people into emergency homeless shelters, making sheltered individuals easier to count.

“The strategy of doing it on a cold January night should be striking, and it should be communicative of how important it is that people are outside on a night like tonight,” O’Brien said.

The volunteers ask each unhoused person a list of demographic and background questions when they enter them into their shared database, which helps CoC administrators like Geraldine McCafferty identify each person to ensure that someone is not counted more than once. But some people on the streets refuse to talk to the volunteers or answer questions.

The team of just under 10 volunteers in Holyoke has seven days following the official night of the count to go back out into the community and find people they missed who were unhoused on the night of January 28. Although the system isn’t perfect, volunteers like O’Brien are committed to conducting the most accurate count they possibly can.

“A margin of error is never worked into how HUD absorbs the numbers, so we have to get as many unduplicated people as possible,” O’Brien said.

For housing and shelter providers in Holyoke and beyond, the PIT count is an opportunity to demonstrate how severe the issue of homelessness has become. They can use the data to advocate for resources.

“We’re holding on to every dollar as tightly as we can … and continuing to advocate to every funder – or anyone who can impact funding or legislation – how important this work is, and the PIT goes right into that,” O’Brien said.

In November, HUD announced its plans to overhaul the CoC program, significantly cutting funding for permanent supportive housing and instead allocating the funds toward “transitional” or temporary housing assistance with participation requirements. The overhaul has been temporarily and partially blocked by a federal judge, but local housing providers and coordinators have been stuck in limbo awaiting federal funds.

The move draws on a provision of Project 2025 that refers to permanent housing, also known as “Housing First,” as a “far-left idea premised on the belief that homelessness is primarily circumstantial rather than behavioral.” The document, which has served as a blueprint for the second Trump administration, calls for HUD to end all permanent housing grants.

Permanent housing programs mainly target people who are chronically homeless. Those individuals must have a physical or mental disability. In an interview with CommonWealth Beacon, McCafferty warned that without the Housing First programs Hampden County has relied on for years, many chronically homeless individuals could wind up unsheltered again.

“If we lose two thirds of our funding that can go to permanent housing, those are people who will not get the rent paid and will be evicted, and because of their histories, are very likely to be back on the streets,” McCafferty said. “They’re very vulnerable people – a lot of mental illness, multiple illnesses, comorbidities – and those people are now at risk of there being no money to pay their rent.”

As federal and state policies continue to change, local providers remain constant in their efforts to provide shelter and assistance to some of the most vulnerable people in Massachusetts.

While driving through Holyoke’s streets, Lorie Pastrana-Heady, a shelter program manager at the Center for Human Development who volunteered on January 28, said when she is finally warm in her bed at home, she won’t stop thinking about the people she counted that night.

“You’ve got to love what you do,” Pastrana-Heady said. “People are built to do different things, and we were called to do this work.”