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Monroe County Homelessness: By the Numbers
Monroe County's homeless population is small by national standards, in the low hundreds. Nobody has a clean official count showing whether that number itself is rising, but demand for help clearly is: the county's main outreach center has already served more than double last year's total.
Here's what the numbers, the meeting minutes, and your neighbors are actually saying, plus two rural counties, one of them right here in Pennsylvania, that found solutions worth considering.
By the Numbers
106: people counted living unsheltered in the last one-night count
275+: people served by Street2Feet so far this year
2x: Street2Feet's demand vs. all of last year
The most recent county-wide count found 106 people living unsheltered in Monroe County. That's a single-night snapshot from HUD's federally required Point-in-Time count, taken every January, and it's widely understood to undercount anyone doubled up with family, sleeping in a car, or just hard to find on one specific night. Local outreach workers also do informal counts more often to keep the number current for grant applications.
The clearer number comes from Street2Feet, the county's only daytime shelter and outreach center for homeless adults: it has served more than 275 people so far this year, more than double last year's total, with one or two new faces walking in the door daily. Director Leslie Perryman says the surge is happening “amid inflation and the housing market,” not any single crisis. Translation: rent went up, wages didn't, and the gap between the two is where people fall through.
Rent went up, wages didn't, and the gap between the two is where people fall through.
Zoom out and Monroe isn't an outlier. Pennsylvania counts more than 12,000 homeless residents statewide on any given day, a problem the state's own housing agency says shows up not just in cities but in “even the most rural” counties too.
Where They Are
Locations of homeless encampments, by their nature, are transitory and can move from wooded areas, under bridges, alongside railroad tracks, or, in the latest case, even next to a cemetery.
The county set aside a wooded lot it owns behind Glen Park in Stroudsburg as an official encampment in late 2024, worked out with Street2Feet and the borough. If you haven't been there, the park is a wooded area alongside the creek with its main entrance in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Stroudsburg Borough Manager Larry Kopp was blunt at the time about what it was and wasn't: “The long-term solution obviously is to try to find some kind of housing... what we're trying to do is keep all the homeless people in one area and try to get services to them.” It was triage, not a fix, and officials said so on the record.
That triage didn't hold. By March 2025, BRC News 13's Nicole Walters was reporting the site had become “a bone of contention,” with residents complaining for “the past year” about “the large number of people living at Glen Park,” and that it was being cleaned up. It was cleared not long after, and there's no active encampment visible at the site today.
The latest unsanctioned version showed up this month near a Stroudsburg cemetery, on PennDOT land that belongs to neither the county nor the borough, a small lesson in how homelessness policy dies in jurisdictional cracks. It drew enough attention that the office of State Rep. Tarah Probst and Stroudsburg Borough both got tagged into the conversation online.
Point-in-Time volunteers say they check the whole county, soup kitchens and parking lots included, so the visible camps are probably the smaller part of the picture.
