Volunteer James Freeman leans over to survey a man in a downtown Albuquerque gas station parking for the annual point-in-time count. (Photo by Patrick Lohmann / Source NM)
By the time Ilse Biel began the second day of her 14th year counting members of Albuquerque’s growing unhoused population, word had already spread to folks on the street about the latest funding cut threat from President Donald Trump.
“People were petrified” early Tuesday afternoon, she said, about rumors that Trump would cut Medicaid. “They were totally freaked out.”
Biel and dozens of other volunteers fanned out through Albuquerque this week, the New Mexico city with the majority of the state’s unhoused population. A similar effort occurred elsewhere in the state.
Known as point-in-time counts, the brief surveys rely on an army of volunteers to fan out across cities to create a snapshot of homelessness trends and demographics, typically in the last week of January. In New Mexico, one count is conducted for Albuquerque and another for the “balance of the state,” which includes rural areas and cities like Santa Fe and Las Cruces.
Biel has conducted the annual point-in-time count in Albuquerque every year since at least 2011, shining a flashlight under bridges and down alleys to briefly survey people on the streets about their needs and circumstances.
She’s done these in-person surveys of thousands of unhoused people through three New Mexico governors, three Albuquerque mayors, three United States presidents, a pandemic, a recession, a housing bust and recent shortage that has since sent home prices and rents skyrocketing.
In 2011, the year she started volunteering for the count, 387 unsheltered people were counted in Albuquerque during the point-in-time count, according to federal data. Last year’s count was more than 1,200.
“I’m not so good at ratios,” Biel told Source New Mexico as she drove through Downtown Albuquerque on Tuesday evening. “I just know there’s a sh*t-load more people on the streets.”
Ilse Biel walks under the I-40 overpass at Sixth Street in Albuquerque for the annual point-in-time count. A volunteer during the count the last 14 years, she’s seen the number of unhoused people in the city at least quadruple. (Photo by Patrick Lohmann / Source NM)
The federal Housing and Urban Development department requires a point-in-time a for federal housing dollars, known as Continuum of Care funding . It’s been a necessary step to receive roughly $20 million in recent years, but the money is also on the chopping block, according to Monet Silva, director of the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, which coordinates the count.
“We know that if this executive order is upheld and these dollars are taken away from our state, the impact that we see across our state, of every county and every city, will be really catastrophic,” Monet said at a Tuesday news conference, one of multiple local leaders who joined members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation to denounce the threatened Trump cuts.
The point-in-time survey is also a vast undercount, as Biel said she knows all too well.
On Tuesday, a few hours after the news conference, Biel and a team of volunteers approached a woman sitting against a short wall in the parking lot of a grocery store downtown. They asked her, as is the HUD requirement, where she slept “last Wednesday.”
“The hospital,” she said, lifting up her shirt to show a long stab wound above her hip.
Having a roof over her head that night, even though it was a hospital’s and only for a night, meant she didn’t qualify as unhoused for the purposes of the count, Biel explained later. The volunteers gave her a care package and got back in their car to keep searching.
Also uncounted, Biel said, are people living in their cars. She’s been distressed to witness an increase of people, mostly older women, living in their cars in Albuquerque in recent years.
And increasingly, the scourge of fentanyl has left some people physically incapable to take the survey even if they initially agree, Biel said. The trend prompted the coalition to add “unable” alongside “refused” to survey forms, Biel said, for data-tracking purposes.
A small group of volunteers walks through alleys in Downtown Albuquerque in search of unhoused people to survey on Tuesday night. (Photo by Patrick Lohmann / Source NM)
Along with Biel, the volunteer crew included a medical student, an epidemiologist and a business owner who were assigned to Downtown Albuquerque that evening, as icy wind picked up, bringing with it a snow storm and below-freezing temperatures.
One man, Vincent, spoke to Source New Mexico after being surveyed in Robinson Park at Central Avenue and Eighth Street. Despite a monthly pension left to him by his late father a few years ago, food and clothing costs are too much for him to afford rent, he said.
Another woman, who declined to give her name, said she was a full-time student with a full-time job at the University of New Mexico until 2020, when she lost her job and then dropped out of school. “It happened so fast,” she said, of a descent from a stable life into addiction and homelessness.
She was standing near First Street and Prospect Ave, which was empty Tuesday night but is often the site of an encampment of unhoused people. The site is also where Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham held a news conference last summer, using the encampment as a backdrop to call on lawmakers to get tougher on crime. “We’ve cleaned this area up 50 times,” she said in mid-July.
In addition to the threatened federal funding cuts, the specter of city-ordered sweeps loomed large over this year’s point-in-time count. City officials reassured organizers that, except when encampments pose a threat to an unhoused person’s safety, they would hold off on clearing them for the purposes of the count.
After surveying a few folks at First and Prospect, the volunteers drove to a gas station parking lot, surveyed a man using a wheelchair, and then walked under the Interstate 40 overpass spanning Sixth Street. It appeared empty of people at first, but volunteer James Freeman shouted up toward the girders, ‘Do you have a moment for a brief survey?’
From the darkness, a cell phone light switched on, and Taylor Potter, a UNM medical student, sprinted up the abutment to speak with the man sleeping there. Another person counted.
It’s too soon to say what this year’s count is, whether the city officials kept their promise to hold off on sweeps, or whether Trump’s threatened cuts will come to pass.
Until Tuesday, Biel said she was resolved to ignore the second Trump term as much as possible. “I thought, OK, the only way that I can survive and carry on with what I’m doing is to forget about Washington. Let Washington do whatever the hell it wants. I’m going to organize and make a difference, hyper locally.”
She fears the community she cares so deeply about will give up on even trying to find a home.
“They are just so downtrodden right now. They don’t have energy for anything,” she said. “I mean, that’s the federal government. And then what the city is doing is not as dramatic, but it is as bad, because with all these displacements, people have become completely disassociated.”
But even if the point-in-time count becomes moot, part of a requirement for funding that Trump successfully guts, Biel said she will keep counting, by herself or with as many volunteers she can recruit.
“It just corroborates what we feel on the street with the understanding that it’s a gross, completely evil undercount,” she said. “The other thing is, if housed people can have a census, why can’t people who live on the street? The street is their homes, is their houses.”
Getting a number, any number, Biel said, makes visible an invisible and growing population here and across the country. It’s a vital validation she and other advocates can carry to a City Council meeting, send to HUD or wave in front of Trump himself.
And, most of all, it’s important to the people being counted, she said.
“It validates them. It makes them seen, even if we don’t get to see everyone,” she said. “And some people realize this, they acknowledge this: We are trying our best to see them.”
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