By Taylor M. Coffman
Herald Correspondent
In Jan. 2025, Central Florida’s Homeless Services Network published their annual Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, and the results paint a troubling picture: homelessness is on the rise in Seminole County.
Conducted every year at the direction of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the PIT Count has over 300 volunteers going out into the community to conduct surveys and count the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. This year, Seminole County’s total reached 436, which is a 4% increase from last year’s numbers and a continuation of the concerning upward trend that volunteers have been
seeing in recent years.
Chris Ham, the Executive Director of the homeless shelter Rescue Outreach Mission, reports that the increase in homelessness rates is a multifaceted issue, but the “number one driver” behind the rise is a lack of affordable housing.
Last year, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seminole County ranged between $1500 and nearly $1900. When you add in the fact that prices for essential items like food, water and clothing have also gone up without seeing a matching rise in wages across the county, it begins to make more sense as to why Seminole County is seeing more and more people sleeping on the streets, in their cars, or in emergency homeless shelters like Rescue
Outreach Mission.
The cost-of-living increase is particularly hard on senior citizens living on a fixed income, according to the PIT Count, which showed that 46% of people over the age of 64 were homeless. Other high-risk groups include single-parent families, which rely on one, often hourly income to feed and house multiple people. While there’s an enduring assumption that most homeless people must be addicts or people with mental illness, Ham argues that that’s “the furthest from the truth” and only 8% of Rescue Outreach Mission’s clients had “serious mental health issues” last year Rescue Outreach Mission, being Seminole County’s only emergency homeless shelter, has also been feeling the strain of rising costs over the last few years, according to Ham.
“When I started [at Rescue Outreach Mission] in January of 2022, our average was around seventy guests a night. We’re averaging over 110 now,” he recalled. “We have to account for insurance, utilities, food and water…Everything is rising all around us, and with more guests staying here, that means more water usage, more electricity. Everything is going up.”
While the shelter does everything it can to help its guests, including partnering with anti-addiction services and having case managers on hand to help with budgeting, obtainingIDs, finding jobs, and navigating Social Security or Veterans Affairs, Ham maintained that the only long-term solution to the rising homelessness rates was to create affordable housing.
“We need to get creative with it,” he said, mentioning solutions like mother-in-law suites, tiny homes, and rooms-for-rent.
“People deserve a safe place to call home. I find it unconscionable that people are sleeping in tents or in their cars when they live in the greatest county, the greatest state and in the greatest country in the world.”
For those who want to donate to Rescue Outreach Mission, they accept toiletries and essentials, but financial donations are reportedly, “the best thing to do” if you want to help the shelter continue their mission.
Anyone interested in donating or contributing to the shelter’s Amazon wish list can do so at https://romcfl.org/donate/.
