Counting Boston’s homeless: Volunteers blanket city to help those sleeping in cold

Just after midnight on Thursday, while hundreds of thousands of Bostonians slept in warm homes with solid roofs, a collection of city employees, social workers and other caring souls searched for those who were not.

In the doorway of a Downtown Crossing building outside Macy’s, they found one man huddled on the cold concrete.

He was tucked under a scratchy gray blanket — the kind people use to cover wooden furniture when they move houses — to escape the gusts of bitter, 23-degree air, doing his best to sleep.

Jim Greene, 61, took a step toward him as a small crowd of other volunteers from the city gathered a few paces away. The man poked out his face when Greene softly called to ask what he needed.

But the man didn’t request another blanket, hand warmers or a ride to a nearby homeless shelter.

He simply asked for a chocolate bar.

“I’ll be haunted by the folks we maybe didn’t get to... it’s a very painful privilege,” Green would later say in the night.

“It’s heavy, and it’s hopeful,” he said

As Assistant Director for Street Homelessness Initiatives within the Mayor’s Office of Housing, this marked Greene’s 38th time participating in Boston’s annual homeless census, now in its 45th year.

Usually conducted at the end of January, the “point-in-time” count involved over 250 volunteers canvassing the city to determine the number of homeless people on the street.

Data from the survey will be available in the coming months after it’s analyzed and cross-checked with shelter data, and will be used to inform city policies and where funds for resources to help the homeless will be allocated.

The census

Wednesday night, the census effort covered 45 areas, including all neighborhoods, Logan Airport, and transit systems. Teams began at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday and finished just before 2 a.m. Thursday.

While on the streets, the volunteers and officials conducted surveys and identified people as they gave out cold weather safety information and items like hand warmers, gloves, snacks and other necessities.

One of the first questions always asked, in some variation, was, “Do you want to get out of the cold [and] go to a shelter?”

Of the 20 or so people seen downtown by MassLive reporters, none took the offer.

“Sometimes, the structure in the shelter setting is just too much for people,” said Beckie Tachick, a registered nurse and the Street Team director at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

Tachick explained that some people who are homeless and were once in prison have described the shelter system as “like being incarcerated again.”

Additionally, some of the other “million reasons” a homeless person would voluntarily sleep in the cold include substance abuse, mental illness, the worry of theft or they do not wish to be in a “combined space with a whole bunch of other people who are suffering,” Tachick said.

For those who declined, the census group still tried to help in whatever way possible.

Mental and physical health were checked on and questioned, and bags of supplies were given out. The volunteers didn’t have a chocolate bar for the man outside the Macy’s, but he accepted the Nutrigrain bar they had instead.

Tachick even took a look at the injured hand of a man named Danny they found in a wheelchair inside the Orange Line T stop.

She also asked if he and the other man he was with, Patrick, needed an ambulance, as they appeared to be under the influence. An MBTA transit officer also stopped to see what was going on, and like the volunteers, he seemed to know Danny and Patrick.

While many of the homeless people found Wednesday were already known to the census group, Greene said the amount of new faces he saw was “striking.”

“There are new people all the time, who come from a lot of different places with a lot of different needs,” Greene said.

One older woman named Stacy, known to the city official group, took joking offense when a volunteer asked if she could be pregnant.

“Hell no! Hell to the (expletive) no,” Stacy laughed as she shuffled away in her wheelchair and camouflage-colored jacket. This incited more laughter from the volunteers, who replied, “OK, Stacy — we have to ask, you never know."

But others weren’t so jovial. One man who slept surrounded by makeshift walls of cardboard boxes to shelter him from the wind refused any help, and some others would not come out from underneath their blankets at all.

Still, “the right people are out there helping,” Greene said.

“And it’s not just what we did tonight, it’s, ‘What are we going to do the next 364 days?’ Everybody who volunteered tonight helps us fight that good fight,” Greene said.

A report on last year’s data

“The data from the census is crucial for the City as we act with urgency and care to make Boston a city for everyone,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement on this year’s annual census.

From Jan. 2023 to Jan. 2024, the rate of homelessness in Greater Boston jumped by an estimated 67%, according to a new report released by Boston Indicators on Wednesday.

According to the Mayor’s Office of Housing, the number of homeless people in Boston grew by 10.6%, from 5,202 in 2023 to 5,756 in 2024. However, the increase is 11.6% lower than the 2015 peak of 6,492 people.

The rise mirrors national trends, the Office of Housing said, with over 770,000 homeless people nationwide in December 2024 — an 18% increase from 2023.

However, last year’s findings ranked Boston with the second-highest homelessness rate out of all major U.S. cities behind only New York City, with 801 homeless residents per 100,000 residents, the Indicators report showed.

That spike is largely attributed to the influx of migrant families into shelters early in 2024, the Indicators report showed. It was further compounded by high housing costs and policy barriers that prevent low-income families from securing homes.

But while overall homelessness rose, the majority were able to find shelter thanks to the state’s shelter capacity measures.

According to the Indicators report, Boston had one of the lowest rates of unsheltered homelessness at 4%, compared to the national average of 35%. This was largely attributed to Massachusetts’ right-to-shelter law — the only such state-wide law in the country, which also combats chronic homelessness.

Geographically speaking, much of last year’s increase occurred outside of Boston proper, where additional shelters were set up outside of the city to manage overflow, like hotel rooms, Indicators said.

Despite this, the report highlighted that homelessness rates were disproportionately high for certain groups.

Black people in Boston are 17 times more likely to be homeless than white people, and Latino people are five times more likely, Indicators said, which it theorized could have in part been driven by the migrants' demographics.

Children under 18, in particular, also saw the highest increase in homelessness, rising by 72% last year — a “concerning development,” the Indicators report said.

However, the timing of the data — collected in January 2024 — was emphasized. This was shortly after Massachusetts hit its shelter capacity limit in October 2023 and before new restrictions took effect in 2024, like time limits on shelter stays. It was also when migrant families were being sheltered at Logan Airport.

Last year’s data did not capture any increases in unsheltered homelessness that might have occurred later in 2024, Indicators said, nor the effects of new state measures. The full impact may become clearer when the 2025 census data is released.

Greene called it “fortunate” that Boston has sustained a 45-year effort to reach out, engage with, house and care for homeless people. The city also regularly applies for federal funding to support housing and services, he said, and is committed to both the “safety net of shelter and the solution of housing.”

But far beyond the necessary work of outreach volunteers and employees, the report called for more than just an expansion of shelters — to address homelessness, it needs to be easier to build affordable housing and there needs to be “significant investments” into the infrastructure by the state, Indicators said.

Greene agreed.

“Housing, with a lot of support services and ways to address the life struggles that are playing up for them on the street, in a dignified and safe environment is, I think, the most important thing [people need],” Greene said.

“To get that, part of the solution is the affordable housing that we create and develop and rely on our state and federal partners to have. Another part of it is community,” Greene said.

This means help like the “supportive housing” system Boston has adopted, he said — but it also means the public calling 911 if you see someone sleeping in the freezing cold, and supporting initiatives from the city that help people get off the street.

“I’m going home tonight to my warm bed, and I’m worried about a guy who got on the subway who wasn’t warmly dressed and under the influence... I still want him to be safe and warm tonight,” Greene said.