The Count That Misses Most Homeless Children

HUD requires every Continuum of Care to run a point-in-time count, and it sets the rules for who gets counted. A Continuum of Care is the group of local agencies and providers that plans and coordinates a region's homeless services. Buncombe County's is the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care.

Four places count. An emergency shelter. Transitional housing. Somewhere not meant for sleeping, which covers outside, a car, a tent, or an abandoned building. And a hotel or motel room, only if a government program or a charity is paying for it.

One place does not count, and it is the most common one for children. A family staying on a relative's floor or in a friend's spare room is not in the count. The rule applies no matter how long they have been there and no matter what caused it.

A child in a shelter counts. A child sleeping in a car counts. A child whose family is staying on a cousin's floor does not.

HUD has published an age breakdown for Buncombe County's count every year since 2013. Over those years the number of children under 18 has run between 24 and 62, with one exception.

The exception is January 2025. Buncombe's Continuum of Care announced 755 people that night, and said in the same release that the final number sent to HUD would be larger, because federal rules require counting people in hotel rooms an agency is paying for. That added 1,548 people in FEMA's Transitional Sheltering Assistance program after Helene. HUD's published figure for the same night is 2,303 people and 296 children. The two are a preliminary local total and the completed federal one, not a disagreement. We have written about what that did to the all-ages figure in what the local count actually shows.

Leaving 2025 aside, the 67 children found in 2026 is the highest figure published for Buncombe County. The previous high was 62, in 2013. Through 2025, almost every child this count found was in a shelter bed or in transitional housing.

Across thirteen years, the most children ever recorded outside on the night of the count is five. That was 2017. Five of those years came back at zero.

That changes what the child figure can tell you. The number moves with shelter beds more than with anything else. If Buncombe adds beds for families, the figure goes up, with no additional family having lost housing. If those beds close, the figure goes down. The children are still homeless. They are just no longer countable under HUD's rules.

The 2026 count found 824 people in all, and 67 of them were children. Both figures are accurate answers to a specific question, which is how many people were in those four places on that one night. They are NOT an estimate of how many people in the county had nowhere stable to sleep that winter. That number is likely much higher, since one day out of a year is just what the name implies, a point in time.

Schools run a second count under a different law, and it uses a wider definition on purpose. The McKinney-Vento Act's own term for these children is homeless. Its test is whether a child has a fixed, regular and adequate place to sleep at night. It includes families doubled up with other people because they lost housing or cannot afford a place of their own. It includes families living in a motel when there is nowhere adequate to go.

The reason is part of the definition. A child living with grandparents because that is how the family lives is not covered. A child living with grandparents because the family lost its apartment is. Districts make that call one case at a time. The school count also runs across the whole school year, so a child who is housed in January and homeless in April is still counted in that year's total.

Schools identify these children because identification carries rights at school. A district has to keep the child in the school they attended before losing housing, when that is in the child's best interest. It has to enroll the child straight away, even without school records or proof of an address. It has to provide transportation to that school when a parent asks for it.

In the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year published district by district, Buncombe County Schools and Asheville City Schools together identified 817 students as homeless. Of those, 587 were doubled up with other people, and the one-night count does not include a single one of them.

The one-night count taken during that same school year found 49 children in the whole county. The ratio is about seventeen to one. Most of the gap is the definition. The rest is the calendar, because a count that runs all year reaches families a single night cannot.

North Carolina as a whole showed the same pattern that year. Its schools identified 34,950 students while the January count found 2,070 children, also about seventeen to one. Buncombe's numbers are in line with the rest of the state.

The 2023-24 school year ended in June 2024. Helene arrived in September. No district-level school figures have been released for any year since the storm.

North Carolina's own statewide count does run later. It gives 39,248 students for 2024-25, the highest figure the state has published. There is nothing underneath it for the western districts.

The numbers exist. Every district has to identify these children, and the state has to report the counts to the federal Department of Education. As of August 2026 nothing district by district has been released for any year after 2023-24. In late July 2026 we asked the North Carolina Homeless Education Program for the western districts' counts, and we followed up in August. The program runs out of UNC Greensboro for the state education department. We do not have them yet. If we get them, we will publish them here.