Volunteers, behavioral health workers, homelessness service professionals, and others fanned out across St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas before dawn Friday and started asking questions. They began with: where did you sleep last night?
“Street or sidewalk.”
“Park.”
“Abandoned building.”
The responses came during this year’s Point-in-Time count, a tally and survey of unhoused people, their circumstances, and the resources available to them. The count is done in communities across the United States and its territories over a 24-hour period. To receive federal homelessness assistance aid, the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department requires each community to have a local Continuum of Care, or CoC, to administer the count and to promote “a community-wide commitment to the goal of ending homelessness,” according to HUD’s website.
Dan Derima, chair of the V.I. Continuum of Care Council on Homelessness and executive director of the nonprofit Meeting the Needs of Our Community, explained during a September Senate Housing, Transportation and Telecommunications Committee meeting that a CoC should be a coalition of experts including: homeless care, social and victim service providers; faith-based organizations; health, housing and education agencies; law enforcement; and people who have lived experience with homelessness.
Grant funds are allocated to Continuums of Care every year, and organizations can then apply for funding to support permanent housing, rapid rehousing, transitional housing, supportive services, a Homeless Management Information System, and homelessness prevention projects, according to Derima’s September testimony. But before any of that can happen, communities need an accurate head count.“The HUD definition of homelessness is anyone staying in a place not fit for human habitation,” Derima told the Source Friday. That includes people living in structures but who lack electricity, running water, windows, or doors.
Participants covering St. Croix’s west end had little trouble finding them. Edwin Nieves, assistant director of the Frederiksted Health Care Social and Community Programs Division, explained that most of the area’s homeless people are DSCP clients — people whose names, demographics, and personal histories they know well. Throughout the morning, they often breezed through several pages of survey questions to which they already knew the answer before handing out care packages filled with essentials and snack bags.
Nieves said the DSCP offers the island’s unhoused people a place to have their basic health care needs met, use a portable shower and toilets, and receive regular meals and donated clothing. DSCP case managers also connect their clients with services provided by other organizations under the Continuum of Care umbrella and have even helped some of the people they work with find housing. In some cases, that meant reconnecting them with family members living on the mainland.
Aisha-Jamila Mussington, the division’s director, said the most important part of the homeless health program is Samaritan Saturdays, a monthly “round robin of services where we provide medical screenings.”
“Ideally, we would want to provide housing,” she said. “But we don’t have a key . . . we don’t have real estate, and what we can do is that we can provide medical care as well as case management services and essential support services.”
Mussington said she hoped people would be able to see that there are entities in the Virgin Islands “who do the work.”
“It’s not just lip service,” she said, calling on people to partner with or sponsor the program’s efforts. One service she hopes to implement, she said, is vending machines for people to use when the clinic is closed — one for medications and tests and another for food.
The Frederiksted Health Care staff take seriously the trust they’ve earned with their unhoused neighbors. After team members spoke with two women living in a derelict building next door to the medical center, Nieves said the structure had recently sold. Later, Mussington said about 10 people shelter inside.
“It’s a community — it doesn’t have any water, doesn’t have electricity,” she said. When the building was sold, Mussington said officials came and asked for their help getting their clients to move out. “And I’m like, ‘no.’ That’s the wrong approach. I get that you sold it, and the business owners want to do something with the building — great.”
But, Mussington said, it’s on the government to figure out what to do.
“We’ve already built a relationship with them, provided them essential support services. To now tell these people you’re going to move [them] without a plan of where to put them — I don’t mind being in the conversation if it’s easier for you, but you gotta come with a plan where they feel safe and secured, because this is their livelihood.”
The U.S. Virgin Islands doesn’t have a shortage of abandoned buildings, but it does have a shortage of shelter beds. Where some of the territory’s unhoused people have turned to derelict homes, hotels, and schools for shelter, others have made space for themselves on beaches. The latter group has also drawn the ire of officials in recent months.
Planning and Natural Resources Coastal Zone Management Director Marlon Hibbert said during a November meeting of the Senate Homeland Security, Justice and Public Safety Committee that the V.I. Open Shorelines Act is frequently misinterpreted.
“Contrary to public belief, [the Act] does not convey all beach areas to the government of the Virgin Islands, nor does it state that all beaches are public,” he said at the time. “In the St. Croix district, the misinterpretation of the law has caused people to trespass on private land, erect structures in the name of camping and, when approached, tell our enforcement teams that all beaches are public, and they are free to camp on them.”
DPNR posted notices on encampments, private property owners filed trespassing reports and government agencies removed some of the structures, only to see them rebuilt weeks later, Hibbert said. Frustrated, the department turned to the V.I. Justice Department to determine whether the structures could be removed through court order and whether people who violate such an order can be arrested.
“It’s unfortunate that we must resort to these measures,” Hibbert said in November. “However, we no longer have any choice but to exercise our powers to the full extent of the law. A DPNR spokesperson told the Source Friday that the department had not yet received a response from Justice and noted that enforcement would fall under the purview of the V.I. Police Department.
In one out-of-the-way corner of a St. Croix beach Friday, Sam Dubuisson warmly invited Point-in-Time participants into his camp, where he displayed some of his artwork. One painting depicted a woman picking up sea glass on the beach.
“All my habits are things that you can do alone in a place like this,” he said, like painting. “You need peacefulness, music.”
If the territory does amp up efforts to remove people from beaches, it’s not clear where they’re supposed to go.
Derima told lawmakers in September that the last Point-in-Time count, in 2023, identified 252 unsheltered people and only 92 beds. That figure included 16 emergency shelter beds, 53 transitional housing beds, and 23 permanent supportive housing beds. By Friday night, participants using the CoC’s Cloud-based digital survey had recorded 244 unsheltered people, but that figure did not include people who filled out paper questionnaires.
Derima said the territory’s numbers had more or less held steady, and he noted the correlation between homelessness and mental illness.
“A couple of ways that we can assist in lowering that number is to build,” he said. “We need more facilities, more rooms . . . that can accommodate those persons with those challenges. Without building more and providing services attached to those units, then we’ll continue to be in dire straits in terms of persons with mental illness and homelessness.”
