Tompkins County reports modest declines in homelessness but length of stay and youth needs remain pressing

Lydia Barger, director of housing initiatives at Human Services Coalition, told the Tompkins County Community Services Board on Jan. 8 that local reporting shows modest improvements in some homelessness measures even as significant challenges remain. Barger said the Continuum of Care’s stated mission is to “make homelessness rare, brief, and 1 time in Tompkins County,” and that the county uses HMIS and HUD system performance measures to track progress.

Barger said the county’s point‑in‑time count has dropped notably between 2023 and 2025, an improvement she attributed in part to moves into newly available housing in 2024. She reported the community achieved a 16% decrease in the average number of days people experienced homelessness compared with a previous high point and said the system’s aspirational target is that people spend no more than 40 days experiencing homelessness. “The ultimate goal in our system is that people are only experiencing homelessness for a maximum of 40 days,” Barger said.

The presentation drew specific intake counts from shelter data covering Oct. 1, 2024, through Sept. 30, 2025. Barger said 531 people entering emergency shelter that year reported at least one disability, and that 28.4% of people in emergency shelter reported a history of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking or human trafficking; she noted some people report multiple disability types. She also said 466 adults and 55 children in families used emergency shelter during the period, and 38 unaccompanied youth aged 18–25 entered shelter.

Board members pressed Barger on how origin and disability data are collected. She said HMIS intake is self‑reported for disability and that county‑of‑origin questions were added to intake roughly three years ago but remain incomplete; based on periodic checks she said roughly 75% of people in HMIS appear to be local to Tompkins County and about 25% come from neighboring counties or have local ties.

Barger flagged youth homelessness as especially undercounted in HMIS because many young people couch‑surf rather than enter shelter. She said school systems’ McKinney‑Vento data are often better for estimating youth homelessness and suggested the true number of youth needing services may be several times higher than shelter intake figures indicate.

Members asked what is working. Barger credited periods of interagency cooperation and targeted programs that reserve permanent supportive units; she cited a local set‑aside program—referred to during the meeting as Asteri—that housed about 40 people and reduced counts of chronically homeless people in shelter data. She also warned that fragmented funding and eligibility rules across state agencies limit systems‑level responses and that messaging about local progress will be important to maintain community support.

The Community Services Board asked for Barger’s slides and the underlying datasets; she said she would share them. No formal votes or new county policy actions were recorded during the segment of the meeting provided.