Nearly 200 Pittsfield People Were Unsheltered During 2026 PIT Count
PITTSFIELD. Mass. — There were nearly 200 people experiencing homelessness on the night of the 2026 Point in Time count.
Last Wednesday, the Homelessness Advisory Committee reviewed this year's PIT count, which was conducted on Jan. 25. The Three County Continuum of Care gathers this data to best determine how many people are without adequate shelter on a single night.
In Pittsfield, there were 192 people experiencing homelessness on that night, including 38 people in families with at least one child and 23 children under 18. This count also included 154 individual, adult-only households, and 14 unsheltered individuals.
In January 2025, there were 215 Pittsfield people in shelter, and 12 people unsheltered.
Data was collected from the Onota Family Shelter, Pearl Street Shelter, Pittsfield winter shelter, Berkshire winter emergency hotel/motel stays, the Elizabeth Freeman Center, and Friends of the Homeless Berkshire House, a Safe Haven facility.
"Unsheltered" means the person spent the night outside, in a place not meant for habitation, and in a vehicle or RV. This year, 178 people were counted in shelters.
The CoC's data and evaluations manager, Michele LaFleur, reported that there were no unsheltered families in the count this year.
"There was a peak in 2023 with a lot of people in shelter. It went down in 2024 and has kind of been going back up. That kind of falls in line with what I understand from some of the shelter capacity in terms of the family shelters opening and then closing, and that's where I kind of see those biggest changes happening," LaFleur said.
"There were slightly more people identified unsheltered in 2026 compared to 2025, but it's still a bit lower than it has been in the preceding years."
The number of children in the count has decreased from 51 in 2024 to 47, and now 23. Youth and young adults 18 to 24 experiencing homelessness have increased in 2026; there were 16 youth and young adults identified.
There was an increase in chronic homelessness in Pittsfield, or when a person has been unsheltered for at least one year, or has several experiences that add up to one year over the past three years, and has a disabling condition.
In 2025, 30 people reported experiencing chronic homelessness, and this year, 50 people reported experiencing chronic homelessness.
In the 2026 count, 48 adults identified having a serious mental illness, up from 28 people in 2025, and 41 people identified as having a substance use disorder, up from 34 people in 2025.
ServiceNet's Director of Shelter and Housing Erin Forbush thinks the organization's family shelter has not been utilized as well as it could be for a good part of this past year.
"But that basically goes back to the state's eligibility process, and we have always had a challenging time in the Point in Time count, even when we know there are families out there, for families to, on that one night, really be able to fit the definition of what we're doing in the point in time, and in the middle of January, and we had a pretty cold January; people typically would find a space to be inside during those times," she said.
"Families are very cautious about identifying any time of year, but you know specifically in the winter."
LaFleur added that on Jan. 25, there was a bad winter storm.
In other news, the warming center at the First United Methodist Church is planned to open on Nov. 16 if all goes well. Forbush reported that ServiceNet has applied for state funding and should hear how much has been funded this week.
It opens at 10 p.m. and closes at 8 a.m. the next morning and will run until the end of April. This year, the warming center will open at 5 p.m. on Sundays; The First continues to operate seven days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
"When we opened last winter, the first people would go from the warming center and right over to The First in the morning, so they had some sense of a warm place that they could choose to go to," Forbush explained.
"This will happen on Sundays. It will be a really full day that people will have a place to be on a Sunday, and we serve a meal on Sundays. We'll serve dinner just as we're serving it to the shelter. We'll just kind of combine that and do the same thing."
Tags: homeless,
