Delaware revives group to address homelessness

Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer last week issued an executive order establishing the Delaware Interagency Collaborative to End Homelessness, emphasizing a data-driven approach to tackling homelessness in the state.

The advisory group, comprised of Cabinet secretaries, county and city leaders and nonprofits, aims to coordinate state efforts to reduce homelessness by 50% and end youth homelessness within five years.​ The new statewide collaborative resurrects and expands upon the mission of the former Delaware Interagency Council on Homelessness, which dissolved in 2018.

Matthew Heckles, director of the Delaware State Housing Authority, who will chair the group, acknowledged that it is an ambitious goal.

“It’s a really difficult goal because we’re swimming upstream. There are a lot of forces that are resulting in more people becoming homeless, that’s been the trend, so we have to reverse that trend and make progress,” Heckles said. “But in a place like Delaware, the numbers are relatively manageable, so I’m optimistic that we’re going to make some good progress.”

Meyer’s executive order comes after Delaware’s five public housing authorities reopened their waitlists for Housing Choice Voucher programs and low-income public housing last February. The statewide initiative introduced a more streamlined system allowing applicants to manage updates, submit changes and review their statuses using a single platform.

After just two months, the consolidated public housing waiting list has nearly 50,000 applicants, which, Heckles said, is a huge number.

“We don’t have the resources to serve those people, but at least it tells us what the actual need is,” he said. “And so it doesn’t change how many people we can house, but it does give us a lot of information. We can also look through those applications and and try to understand what’s happening in our communities a lot better.”

Heckles said the new group hasn’t met yet, but it plans to first analyze data from the Homeless Management Information System, such as point-in-time count data, an annual snapshot of the number of homeless people across the United States on a single night in January, including those in shelters, transitional housing and safe havens managed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In 2025, the point-in-time count recorded 1,585 people in Delaware, a 16% rise from 2024. Children under 18 made up 27.3% of the state’s unhoused population. Eighty percent of those counted in Delaware were homeless for the first time, and 22% of those who found permanent housing returned to homelessness within two years.​

Heckles, who served as the mid-Atlantic regional administrator for HUD, attributes the double-digit increase in statewide homeless to a few factors, including an end to some social safety net programs.

“Homelessness has changed a lot since the pandemic, partly because the cost of housing has just gotten too expensive, too fast. We’re used to rent increasing three to five percent per year, and generally, people can can keep up with that,” Heckles explained. “But when the pandemic hit and we have sort of a crunch in housing supply that has put this downward pressure on the housing market overall. The people at the bottom are the ones that are getting squeezed out, and some of them are finding themselves homeless.”

Heckles said the new group will also to conduct a statewide review of homelessness programs and resources to identify barriers to effective service delivery, including legal and regulatory challenges. It will also seek to optimize programs to prevent and address homelessness and potentially create new systems similar to the public housing waiting list.

Though Heckles was optimistic, he also expressed concern about the potential loss of federal funding for state government programs, such as the New Castle County Hope Center, which provides flexible shelter and low-barrier service.

“I’m really concerned that we might lose that money, which would be dramatic. We haven’t seen the reduction in Continuum of Care funds yet, but we have seen the [Trump] administration walk away from the policy and the best practices,” he said.