While the raw number of homeless people living in Macon may have dropped, the city doesn’t have the empty slots in the most successful service to help the people still living on the streets of the city.
That’s the picture that becomes clear in a GPB analysis of the data from the 2026 Point in Time count of the unsheltered.
WHAT IS THE POINT IN TIME COUNT?
In the world of homeless services, it is often called the PIT count.
Last week, residents of Macon-Bibb County got their first look at this year’s PIT count data, collected during a week in January. The data is required by the federal government for the release of federal spending on homeless services.
So far, the contractor paid by the county to conduct the PIT count has shared very little.
One detail shared by the contractor Root Analytics and reported by the Macon Telegraph and WMAZ is this: a 34% drop in the number of unsheltered homeless people who were interviewed during that one week in January compared to the last time the count was done.
That information was shared with downtown merchants who continue to voice frustration with what they see as a growing issue.
What has not been shared yet are more details about who the unhoused are, why they say they are homeless and what services they use most. That information is in the raw data of the PIT count which GPB has gotten access to via an open record request to the state agency responsible for collecting the PIT data for most of Georgia.
The rest of this story will explore some of the findings.
You can find the spreadsheet with the data here.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘UNSHELTERED HOMELESS?’
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development collects the nation’s PIT data. For its purposes, an unsheltered homeless person is anyone (or any family) sleeping in a place not intended for that purpose. That includes abandoned buildings, parks, campgrounds and sidewalks.
But services for the unsheltered homeless are broken out into different types, depending on whether it’s a homeless family seeking aid or an individual.
For the purposes of this story, we will focus on individuals.
WHO ARE MACON’S UNSHELTERED?
About two thirds — some 70% — of the people whose interviews are recorded in Macon’s 2026 PIT data told interviewers they are not new to town, saying they have lived in the city for at least three years.
Over half of Macon’s unsheltered said they have been homeless for at least two years. By the same token, most respondents said their current bout of homelessness is the first they have experienced in their lives.
This contrasts with a point often made by Macon leaders who say local services for people experiencing homelessness are what draw people who need help to the city.
WHERE DO THEY LIVE?
As has been reported, most of the unsheltered homeless in Macon live downtown. Dig a little deeper and you see that’s confined even more narrowly: 82% of the unsheltered live in the single ZIP code of 31201.
That’s the smallest ZIP code in Macon by area, taking in the core of downtown to the Ocmulgee River.
Only three of the 20 federally funded homeless service providers in Macon are in the same ZIP code. Those are the Crisis Line and Safe House, which supports victims of domestic violence; the Macon-Bibb Economic Opportunity Council, whose specialty is providing rent assistance to housing insecure families; and the Depaul USA’s Daybreak homeless day shelter.
Though each organization plays a crucial role in the larger picture of helping the housing insecure, only Crisis Line and Safe House offers what you likely think of as a “homeless shelter.” That’s typically for women and children.
Meanwhile, most unsheltered homeless individuals in the 2026 Macon PIT data are men. Most are middle aged, with an average age of 51.
WHERE ARE THE SHELTERS FOR MEN?
There are two emergency shelters in Macon accepting men.
At the time of the 2026 PIT Count, the Brookdale Resource Center had 78 emergency shelter beds available to individuals. That’s the most in the city. It’s also about 3 miles (or an hour’s walk) away from ZIP code 31201. In PIT data from this year, only about a third of Brookdale’s emergency shelter space was being utilized.
While the Salvation Army shelter is much closer to downtown, it only has six emergency shelter beds for individuals. Only one was used during this year’s PIT Count.
In the aggregate, only about a third of shelter beds available to men were being used during the 2026 PIT Count.
But even if every one of the 166 unsheltered people documented in this year’s count had sought out an emergency shelter bed, there would have only been enough on hand for about half of them.
WHY AREN’T SHELTER BEDS USED MORE?
There’s a question asked in the long battery of survey questions asked during the week of the PIT Count.
Perhaps confusingly, it is asked like this: ”What are the top three reasons you are not in shelter or housing?”
Viewed as a question about homeless shelter use, most commonly people said they flat out do not like congregate shelters. Others said they do not feel the shelters near them are safe or that the shelters nearest them were full.
But most people appear to have viewed the question to be about why they did not have more stable housing of their own.
In that light, the vast majority said they just didn’t have enough money and that rents are too high. That was true of the handful of people who said they had jobs and true of the larger group who said they were looking for work. Others said housing, when available, was of “poor” quality.
Some noted their struggles with mental health or substance abuse as reasons for why they had no shelter, whether that was emergency shelter or an apartment of their own.
One likely reason people stay away from emergency shelters is that they have strict rules against substance use. A few people balked at the idea of leaving their pets behind on the street, too.
WHAT SERVICES DO THE HOMELESS USE?
Emergency shelter is just one service to the homeless. River Edge Mental Health and others offer another service called permanent supportive housing. That’s when providers offer the unhoused an apartment or home regardless of the state of their mental health or substance use. Once housed, residents then receive help for those issues.
There are nearly three times as many permanent supportive housing slots in Macon as emergency shelter beds. And while emergency shelter is typically underused in Macon, permanent supportive housing is generally overfull. That was true in the 2026 PIT Count when the two largest River Edge programs, housing hundreds of people, served many more people than they were originally designed to help.
Permanent supportive housing is also sometimes described as the “housing first” model of homeless services. It has recently come under fire from President Donald Trump.
Each person in the PIT Count is represented by their survey data. That’s spread across lots and lots of columns in a spreadsheet. Not every entry in every column is filled out, which means not every survey is complete.
There’s a column in the data that addresses why that is so. The people who conducted the January survey used that column to explain why surveys were not complete. Out of 228 entries in the data, only 26 had such an explanation.
A few people were described as incoherent. More apparently passed on the opportunity.
Only four times did a survey collector posit “safety concerns” as a reason for the incompleteness of a survey.
