The 2024 Pierce County Point-in-Time homelessness count, the federally mandated annual survey conducted each January, found a 23 percent increase in total persons experiencing homelessness compared to 2023, per HUD and Pierce County PIT records. Among the unsheltered population, people sleeping outside, in vehicles, or in places not meant for human habitation, the increase was 59.4 percent.
In one year.
Researchers treat PIT counts as floor estimates. The methodology captures people visible on a single night in late January. It misses people staying temporarily with family, people in rural areas difficult to survey, people who find short-term shelter specifically because they know the count is happening. The actual increase in housing instability is almost certainly larger than the headline number.
The Math Behind the Surge
Two forces are running in the same direction at the same time in Pierce County, and neither has reversed.
The first is rental costs. Median asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Tacoma reached approximately $1,400 to $1,650 per month in 2024 depending on source and season, a significant increase from 2019 levels. Median household income in Pierce County grew roughly 12 percent over the same period per ACS one-year estimates. The gap between rent inflation and income growth has pushed lower-income households to the edge of what's affordable, and over it.
The supply side runs in the same direction. HUD fair market rent for a three-bedroom unit in Pierce County is $2,882 per month (2025), per HUD fair-market-rent records. More than a third of Pierce County renters pay more than 30 percent of household income on housing, and tens of thousands face severe housing cost burden exceeding 50 percent of income. The county faces a significant affordable-unit deficit against documented demand, and HUD-VASH voucher availability for eligible veterans remains severely constrained.
The second force is the veteran pipeline. Pierce County has one of the highest veteran population concentrations in the country, approximately 73,000 veterans, roughly 10 percent of the adult population per ACS, driven by JBLM's status as one of the Army's largest installations. Veterans are overrepresented in Pierce County's identified homeless population relative to their population share.
JBLM is one of the region's largest transition points for service members leaving active duty. The Transition Assistance Program is mandatory, separating service members go through employment and benefits preparation. TAP is not a housing-placement guarantee. A service member can complete transition requirements without the federal system guaranteeing a lease or housing placement in one of Washington's tightest rental markets.
Some of them end up in the PIT count.
The Veteran Health System Runs Behind the Pipeline
The federal system that's supposed to catch separating service members on the way out is also under-resourced. VA Puget Sound Health Care System, the JBLM-adjacent facility, publishes access-to-care data showing primary care and mental health wait times that exceed the VA's own 20-day target. Tens of thousands of JBLM-adjacent veterans depend on that system. The same federal pipeline that releases thousands of service members into one of the tightest rental markets in Washington state is then asking the VA to catch them with a system that cannot meet its own access benchmarks.
Strickland sits on the House Armed Services Committee and the Military Personnel and Readiness subcommittee. That subcommittee has direct jurisdiction over TAP requirements, military separation standards, and VA coordination on transition. The public record reviewed for this release did not identify a Strickland-sponsored bill or amendment tying military transition, HUD-VASH capacity, and VA Puget Sound access targets to Pierce County's housing pressure.
The Shelter Math
Pierce County's emergency shelter network was not built for this scale of need. Year-round shelter capacity in the county's Continuum of Care system has not expanded proportionally with the unsheltered population. The result is that a growing share of people who need shelter cannot access it, not because they have not tried, but because the beds do not exist.
The federal Continuum of Care program is the primary mechanism for funding emergency shelter and transitional housing. CoC allocations are competitive and slow to respond to surge conditions. A county with JBLM's federal footprint, a severely constrained rental market, and a documented affordable-unit shortage faces a housing-pressure pattern that CoC was not designed to handle alone.
Congress has direct tools here. Congress has direct tools here: stronger transition housing planning, HUD-VASH capacity, CoC expansion grants, and VA staffing oversight. The publishable claim is not that any single federal change would solve the PIT increase; it is that the federal government has levers that match the federal footprint in Pierce County.
The 59 percent increase in one year is not a natural disaster, per Pierce County PIT records. It is the visible arithmetic of a housing market the federal government helped shape and a military pipeline the federal government operates. Pierce County cannot build its way out of a problem this size without federal partners who understand what their own policies are producing.