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The Fargo Moorhead Coalition to End Homelessness began its annual count of homeless people in the area Wednesday. The goal is to get an idea of how many people are living without a permanent residence in the area. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires the annual count be done over the last 10 days of January each year.

Similar counts began all across Minnesota on Wednesday, as planning organizations known as Continuums of Care (CoC), which are made up of nonprofits that provide support and services to people who are unhoused and local government officials, conduct these annual counts of unhoused individuals in each of ten CoC regions in the state. 

In the West Central region, The Fargo Moorhead Coalition to End Homelessness (FMCEH) will lead the annual count of unhoused individuals, collecting data about how many people are living in non-permanent housing like homeless shelters and transitional housing.

In the metro area of Minnesota, which is split into 3 different CoC regions, the count also began on Wednesday, although Hennepin County has postponed the unsheltered portion of their count due to the federal immigration enforcement operations.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) only requires a count of unhoused individuals living without shelter every two years. But this is the year for that count, so on Thursday morning, 15 different teams of people in the Fargo-Moorhead area will begin the unsheltered search. The volunteers will be looking for people who are living in cars, tents, and under bridges, as well as in sheds and fish houses.

They will be looking throughout the West Central region in Minnesota which includes 10 different counties, and across the Red River to Region 5 of North Dakota, which includes 6 additional counties.

“We often have a pretty good idea of where those folks might be, because we've been doing the count for many years,” says Chandler Esslinger, Executive Director of the Coalition.

The goal of the count is to track the number of people living without a permanent residence and to survey those that are unsheltered to learn more about their background. 

“It's one data point that we use that allows us to kind of track trends in increasing or decreasing homelessness over time,” says Esslinger.

Esslinger says that since 2016, rates of homelessness in the state and west central region have gone up.

In Fargo-Moorhead, the Coalition estimated 1,196 people were without permanent housing in 2025, and they expect a similar number this year. The area has seen a small but steady increase in unhoused people for the last 3 years.

She claims this is partially due to ineffective policies that don’t address the issue of homelessness directly.

“We're seeing an increase in the criminalization of homelessness, regulating a lot of behavior that's associated with homelessness without addressing the underlying root cause, which is not having a place to live,” Esslinger says.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires Continuums of Care to conduct the point in time (PIT) count annually. The Fargo Moorhead Coalition is partnered with two Continuums: the North Dakota Continuum of Care (Region 5) and the West Central Continuum of Care in Minnesota.

HUD uses data from the PIT count at a national and state level to determine funding levels and planning to prevent homelessness. In addition, Continuums of Care use the data they collect to make plans for addressing homelessness at a regional level.

The Fargo Moorhead Coalition to End Homelessness, which was founded in 1989, has over 70 different partners. They do not provide direct service to people experiencing homelessness. Instead, they work with various groups to make sure they are all working as efficiently and collaboratively as possible.

“You can kind of think of the coalition as our clients, being the organizations in our community who do that direct service work. So we kind of help to maximize the impact of their efforts by creating those efficiencies in the system,” says Esslinger.

An initiative started this year is focusing on securing housing for high-risk homeless people. This label includes people who have had frequent interactions with law enforcement and crisis teams. 

Esslinger says they have enough funding to help find housing for 20 people considered high risk, and more than half of them have been placed in housing so far.

“That's been really exciting, because it cuts through a lot of the red tape that sometimes kind of gets in the way of exiting homelessness quickly, especially for people who've been unhoused, unsheltered for many years,” says Esslinger. 

This initiative is a partnership with United Way of Cass-Clay.

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Noah Bloch

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Across Minnesota, nonprofits that provide support and services to people who are unhoused are teaming up with local governments to count the number of homeless people living in various regions of the state. In the Fargo-Moorhead area, teams led by the Fargo Moorhead Coalition to End Homelessness will be fanning out Thursday to look for people who are living in their cars, in tents, under bridges and in outbuildings such as sheds and fish houses. 

Alyssa Goelzer  | The Forum

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Annual count of homeless people in Fargo-Moorhead is underway, Wednesday and Thursday

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