The number of people without housing on the Peninsula is projected to rise 5% each year through 2028.
That’s one result of a study by Viam Advising intended to identify conditions leading people to lose housing and look ahead at future housing needs for Hampton, Newport News, Poquoson, Williamsburg, James City County and York County.
But the report, commissioned by Newport News city leaders, also highlighted a gap in the data about the number of transgender and gender-nonconforming people without housing on the Peninsula.
LGBT Life Center Housing Director Julie Snell said it’s a symptom of a broader issue of access and engagement among the Peninsula’s various organizations and resources that help people facing housing insecurity.
“It comes down to resources,” Snell said. “It comes down to cultural competency, training service providers to actually know how to talk to folks, know how to collect data, know how to respect them and engage.”
“Hard for anyone living on the Virginia Peninsula to keep up"
Viam’s report relied on multiple datasets assessing the number of people without housing on the Peninsula and the services available to them.
“We want to make sure that folks are informed and aware of … the reality and what are the best practices that they could choose from to address the homeless crisis,” said Jonathan Danforth, one of the report’s authors, after a November presentation in Williamsburg.
Researchers pointed to affordability as one clear cause for people to lose housing. Average rent increased by double digits in each of the six localities on the Peninsula since 2019, ranging between 39% in northern Newport News and 61% in Hampton.
“It is to a point where it is hard for, really, likely anyone living on the Virginia Peninsula to keep up with what’s happening,” said Shawn Griffith, another of the report’s authors.
The rising rents contribute to significant numbers of households being cost burdened, defined by the federal government as spending more than 30% of income on rent. Griffith said there are “areas where greater than 60%” of households are cost burdened across the Peninsula.
“It’s not just Newport News or Hampton,” he said. “It’s seen in York County, it’s seen in James City County, it’s seen in Williamsburg.”
Since the end of 2022, the growth in homelessness on the Peninsula began outpacing the national rate of growth.
Danforth added that the Peninsula’s network of service providers and resources for people without housing, or its “homeless response system … has less capacity to rehouse people than it did six years ago.”
Not every demographic is impacted equally by housing challenges. The number of people with disabilities without permanent housing is increasing. Black people on the Peninsula make up the largest segment of the population without housing in the annual point-in-time count, which counts the number of people experiencing homelessness in the last 10 days of January every year to estimate a full count.
“Where the Black community is 31.3% of the census population for the Greater Virginia Peninsula, it is 75.4% of the folks who are surveyed in the (point-in-time count),” Danforth said.
Indigenous people are also overrepresented in the population without housing on the Peninsula. The number of Latin American people increased in the point-in-time count from 2022 to 2023, while the number of white people counted decreased.
The point-in-time count, though, is an admittedly imperfect metric. It’s conducted on a single day every year across the U.S. to roughly approximate the number of people without permanent housing in each community, often relying on volunteer assistance.
“It’s a single snapshot, it is a slice,” said Griffith. “It doesn’t really have the capability of identifying everyone that’s experiencing homelessness in a given community.”
That is laid bare when considering the gender demographics reported in the most recent point-in-time count for the Peninsula. It showed the number of men and women without housing both increased, with men making up the larger segment.
“When we look at the transgender population, or gender-nonconforming population, we’re seeing that not present in the data,” Danforth said. “That typically signifies a question around data entry.”
“It just raises the question of if that data is not being captured, are those people being served appropriately in a way that’s meeting their needs?”
"Kind of a discrepancy"
Going back to 2014, the point-in-time count for the Peninsula says there was only one transgender or gender-nonconforming person without housing in 2017, 2019 and 2021 – with none in any other year.
Julie Snell, director of housing at the LGBT Life Center, said that’s just not true.
“In the last fiscal year, we served nearly 200 trans and nonbinary folks in our programs” from both the Peninsula and the Southside, she said. That covered all the Life Center’s programming, including housing services.
“That number is already saying there’s kind of a discrepancy,” she said referring to the Peninsula’s data.
The LGBT Life Center’s housing program serves about 400 households per year across Hampton Roads, according to Snell. It offers permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing services and homelessness prevention services for LGBTQ people and people living with HIV.
Snell said the LGBT Life Center and Regional Housing Crisis Hotline collectively received around 2,900 calls from transgender and gender-nonconforming people with housing instability across Hampton Roads.
“That number isn’t de-duplicated,” Snell said. “Folks do call multiple times and seek assistance, but still that’s a lot of calls for service needs.”
Transgender and gender-nonconforming people nationally lose housing or have unstable housing at rates higher than the general public.
“Transgender and nonbinary folks experience the … highest rates of intimate partner violence, which leads to housing instability,” Snell said. “If you’re saying zero or one trans or nonbinary folks in this region are experiencing homelessness and housing instability, that would make me pause.”
Snell said part of the problem comes from a lack of understanding of transgender and gender-nonconforming people by some providers. If someone seeking support is being misgendered or stereotyped without apology, or is otherwise made to feel unwelcome, many choose to walk away.
“Something I’ve noticed from providers a lot, particularly people that have been in this field for a really long time, is that they struggle with these things even though they shouldn’t,” she said.
Those who do not walk away can also be misrepresented in the data if they aren’t given an option to identify as anything other than male or female.
“And that system now has the wrong information because you didn’t give them that option,” Snell said. “This has been a huge issue with large datasets.”
Snell said it’s a problem of engagement with organizations serving the LGBTQ community, and investment into the community by Peninsula localities. That’s shown in part by the decreasing capacity to rehouse people on the Peninsula, she said.
Snell pointed to the removal of public housing units by Newport News without fully replacing them: Marshall Ridley Place in 2020 and Dickerson Court and Harbor Homes in the early 2000s, as examples. She said that “creates a housing crisis in itself.”
“There (were) many folks that lived in that affordable housing, and now where did they go?” Snell asked. “Not all of them got Section 8 vouchers.”
Viam Advising’s report said increasing the stock and density of affordable housing was a possible way to address the growing number of people without housing on the Peninsula, noting that zoning and other policy barriers to development would need to be tackled.
“The answer, in a lot of ways, to homelessness at its core is housing,” said Griffith. “If there’s not a unit that I have the ability to place someone in and help them remain stably housed, I cannot resolve that individual’s experience of homelessness until that time.”
Snell, though, said additional housing can only be helpful if it's accessible.
“A grip of my job is arguing with landlords and property managers because they are violating Fair Housing and they’re discriminating against people based off of how they identify,” she said.
“Unless you have policies and practices in place at that higher level to protect those populations and to punish people who violate those laws and policies, you are still going to see so much discrimination.”
