On the longest night of the year, over 60 people marched through D.C.’s streets. They followed a group of six pallbearers carrying a bare, wooden coffin. The coffin itself was empty, but it represented the very real deaths of dozens of D.C. residents experiencing homelessness.
At least 120 people died while experiencing homelessness in D.C. over the last year. More than 100 were matched to a housing resource but were still sleeping outside or in shelters when they died, stuck in the city’s long voucher and subsidy process.
In late December, the People for Fairness Coalition (PFFC), a group of formerly unhoused people who advocate for and provide outreach to homeless community members, hosted the 12th annual memorial and vigil for people who died while experiencing homelessness. For over a decade, PFFC has gathered advocates for ending homelessness in the District to remember those who’ve lost their lives in what many consider preventable deaths.
This year, the two-day event began on Dec. 20 with a service at Luther Place Memorial Church service and a procession to Freedom Plaza. A few dozen people spent the night in the plaza as an homage to those who sleep outside every night, and who passed without the dignity of a home. The vigil ended on Dec. 21 with a memorial service at the Church of the Epiphany and a reading of the names of those who died.
Between 2023 and 2024, the District saw rates of homelessness rise for the second year in a row, with older residents representing the fastest-growing group of unhoused people, according to this year’s Point-In-Time (PIT) Count results. Deaths for the unhoused are often due to a lack of access to health care, and with rising rates of people over 55 experiencing homelessness, those medical issues become more dire.
Homelessness increases the risk of experiencing violence, trauma, health and medical problems, mental health issues, and substance use disorders. People experiencing homelessness have a mortality rate 3.5 times higher than those who are housed, according to a study from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics.
In 2022, 104 people died while experiencing homelessness in D.C., according to data from the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). In 2023, 101 people died. The vigils in 2022 and 2023 were held in remembrance of 77 and 90 people, respectively — the list for the vigil is assembled by the community, but the actual death toll reported by the medical examiner is often much higher. This year trend flipped, with the community reporting more deaths than the OCME.
OCME has confirmed only 43 deaths of individuals experiencing homelessness during 2024. Most of the deaths were ruled as accidents, though at least three people were the victims of homicide.
Of the 120 people who died this year, 104 were matched with a nonprofit agency to help them through the process of obtaining housing through a voucher that would have allowed them to move into housing, according to PFFC.
The Community Partnership TCP, the non-profit corporation that coordinates the D.C’s Continuum of Care and collects the data for the vigil, didn’t respond to requests for comment on the discrepancy between TCP’s count and OCME’s death toll.
While PFFC members read the full names of the 120 people remembered, the names are not public, as not all of their families have been notified.
At the memorial, the community added the name of Redbook Mango, a Street Sense vendor and artist, to the list, after her body was found last week. Her poems talked of her hopes, her faith, and her regrets.
“Realization is missing you all the time,” she wrote.
Earlier this year, community members also came together to remember Tad Holt, who died earlier this year and had lived at many encampments across the District.
“You were the sweetest individual ever,” Cyria Knight, a case manager at Miriam’s Kitchen, recalled for his obituary. “If I was looking for a client, you knew exactly where they were. Any client or person that disrespected me, you always put them in your place.”
Every year, the mood at the vigil is somber, but 2024 was especially difficult, as many of the advocates who spoke, such as Robert Warren, co-director of PFFC, and Lara Pukatch, chief advocacy officer for Miriam Kitchen, laid out the stakes of the fight to advocate for an equitable budget for the unhoused in 2025. 2024 saw an uptick in housing instability due to the mass exit of 2,200 families from D.C.’s Rapid Rehousing (RRH) program, an administrative error causing hundreds of vouchers funded in the budget for 2025 to be unavailable, and limited availability of rental assistance. Nationally, the Supreme Court upheld cities’ ability to arrest people for sleeping outside by ruling in favor of the town of Grants Pass, Oregon.
“This year’s numbers are very saddening, much like all numbers have been in this public health crisis we’re going through,” Warren said in his speech on Dec. 20 at Luther Place Memorial Church.
Laura Zeilinger, the outgoing director of D.C.’s Department of Human Services, spoke on Dec. 20 as well, leaving advocates and supporters with some lessons from her almost decade-long tenure with city government, which ends this year.
“The progress that we’re making, we need to talk about that too, as loudly as we talk the shame of having lost lives on the street,” Zeilinger said. “Because it is in what is possible that drives people to continue to invest, to support, to back us to do what we do what we must, which is to welcome our neighbors.”
As they do each year, vigil organizers called for the D.C. government to improve its homeless services system and prevent the deaths of people without homes. But this year, advocates worried the upcoming budget battles would be more ferocious than ever under a new presidential administration looking to cut back on federal spending and a D.C. mayoral administration that seems to be deprioritizing funding for homeless services. Members of PFFC spent the day before the vigil lobbying D.C. Council members to put resources towards ending homelessness.
Longtime housing advocate Dana Woolfolk said he hopes every year will be the last he needs to speak at the vigil. But this year, during the memorial service at the Church of Epiphany, he said he decided to stop “embracing the delusion.”
“Most likely, we’ll be here again next year,” Woolfolk said. “But what I would hope is that each one of us can rededicate ourselves to trying to help just one person end their homelessness. And therefore, we can decrease the numbers so that we won’t have 120 names to read.”
