Yesterday I interviewed Amber Urish of the Blair County Community Action Program. On January 25 they participated in a census of the Homeless in Blair and Cambria Counties. She said that it is difficult to conduct a census of the homeless. This is doubly true in the winter. She said it was harder to conduct the census in Cambria County than in Blair. This is because there are many abandoned houses that are too dilapidated for census taker to enter.
I presented to her statistics from County Health Rankings on child poverty in the area. The image above shows the trend in overall poverty in Blair and Cambria Counties. (I was unable to show this graph in the interview but the trend was similar.) There was a 3% decrease in 2020 due to the stimulus packages that were passed and other measures taken during the COVID pandemic. In 2021 there was a slight rebound in both counties with a higher rate in Cambria. Urish expressed concern of a rebound in poverty once pandemic era measures have expired.
I later asked Urish about the demographics from the census of the homeless in Blair and Cambria Counties. She said that most of the ones that they found were 25-50 year old adults. She did day that human trafficking was an issue in Blair County because of its proximity to Interstate Highways. The census was part of a nationally mandated census.