On one winter night at the beginning of 2025, more than 1,900 people in West Virginia were staying the night in shelters or on the streets.
That number comes from the federally mandated Point in Time count, an annual census conducted near the beginning of the year by volunteers. It does not include unhoused people who are “couch surfing” or living with friends or family.
And some of the people affected by homelessness are kids. More than 15,000 students in the state experienced homelessness at some point during the 2024-2025 school year according to the state’s Department of Education.
Confronted with unsheltered people, some of the state’s municipalities, including Morgantown, Clarksburg, Parkersburg and Wheeling, have implemented bans on camping in public places. And though critics have roundly condemned those policies, arguing that they criminalize homelessness, legislators have introduced state-wide bans in the last two legislative sessions.
Mental illness and substance abuse are among the key causes of homelessness according to a study of the state’s homeless population completed by the Department of Health Services in 2024. But other challenges that people face include the lack of affordable housing and employment.
Homeless advocates and some who have experienced homelessness themselves say those with few housing options need more shelter, more information about resources and expanded public health strategies that reduce the harm of addiction.
Spending time with people
Niamh Coomey, 26, was a journalist-turned-bartender from the Twin Cities area in Minnesota when her cousin offered her a vacant bedroom in her new Wheeling apartment.
She took the opportunity, and began working again as a reporter at The Wheeling Intelligencer, where she was later assigned to cover the city’s camping ban. Writing about unhoused peoples’ displacement made her realize how much she cared about it.
As Coomey began volunteering with the unhoused population, she realized she wanted to do more for the disenfranchised people in her community. So she switched jobs and became the editor-in-chief of the Mustard Seed Mountain Street Paper.
The street paper is based in The Mother Jones Center for Resilient Community, or the “MoJo House” in Wheeling and describes itself as “biased for the poor, working, and misunderstood.”
Some of its recent stories include first person accounts from victims of the Triadelphia flood in 2025, convicted felons, and people who have achieved sobriety. The goal of the paper is to create understanding for the underprivileged, and help unhoused people find work and dignity while they’re at it.
The paper works with a system of unhoused vendors who buy each paper for a quarter and sell them for a dollar or more, keeping the profits to support themselves.
One of the vendors is a woman who has struggled with mental illness and is writing her autobiography. Coomey said the paper is a “little spot of hope” for her.
Coomey herself sometimes struggles with making ends meet.
“Rent is expensive. Groceries are expensive. Having a car is expensive. I don’t have a car right now. I can’t afford a car,” she said.
She has taken financial assistance from Ohio Valley Mutual Aid, a nonprofit. But she considers herself privileged because she can rely on her family for help, unlike many of the vendors and people she works with for the paper.
Living in Wheeling for only two years, Coomey does not want to speak for the community, but she considers the treatment of homeless people by the city, and how they’re perceived by the public, to be dehumanizing.
On a snowy December morning last year, she was helping campers pack up their belongings as the last safe camping spot for homeless people closed. She said the experience was traumatizing for the campers, and there weren’t really places for them to go.
Coomey believes there should be more.
“They can’t get into public housing. A lot of times they can’t get into shelters. At that point, there’s really no option for them,” she said.
Coomey said spending time with the people themselves makes a difference. She said the comments she has heard from city officials demonstrate a real lack of understanding of the causes of the problem and how the community got here.
“I don’t think a lot of them are actually trying to have conversations with these people that they want to discuss so much and talk so poorly of,” she said.
Someone in their corner
When Skylar Sams was in seventh grade, life with her parents became chaotic. Eviction notices came in the mail, the bills weren’t being paid and she was only eating when she went to school. So she took it upon herself to move in with her grandma.
Things started to go well after that — she graduated from high school and started college at West Virginia University’s Parkersburg campus studying elementary education.
But Sams lost the Pell Grant and her financial aid when she didn’t perform well her first semester. She dropped out of college and got jobs working in restaurants, but things went downhill again when her grandma passed away.
Without housing, Sams was living in her boyfriend’s car. A friend named Jack Comeau, known locally by the stage name Moon King, was involved in many nonprofit programs in the Parkersburg area. He told her about a transitional living program with the Children’s Home Society of West Virginia.
Sams got involved with the program immediately, and three weeks later, she had an apartment.
“When I was stressing out about if I was either gonna have to crash at my mom’s house or live in my boyfriend’s car with him, I felt like I had nobody,” Sams said. “It was nice knowing that I had a group of people, who I had only met once, willing to help me find an apartment — help me get set up, so that I’m not a young adult just being thrown into the waters and being told ‘swim.’”
Now 22, Sams said making ends meet is still a struggle. She has a fulltime job at a local daycare and a paid weekend job taking care of her mom. Her boyfriend works 40 hours a week, but they both still rely on food stamps, medicaid, and the ongoing assistance given to them by the transitional living program to make it.
“I have to sit there, budget my paychecks and be like, ‘okay, well, this one can go towards rent. This one can go towards the electric bill. Oh — phone bill’s due — gotta pay that.’ After everything’s paid, I got like 20 bucks for food,” Sams said.
Coming from a family that lived paycheck to paycheck, Sams thinks that it is very difficult to be a successful young adult without coming from a middle or upper class family.
Sams had friends in high school who were homeless but didn’t know about the youth programs that could have helped them. Many of them feared talking to school officials because they could be put back into foster care or their bad home lives. The resources need to be more advertised, to struggling youth in particular she said.
“(They need) someone to just be in their corner. To have a support system and know that they can go to someone. And feeling like they aren’t throwaways — basically knowing that they are wanted,” she said.
‘You deserve so much more than this’
Now in her fourth year as a medical student, Abby Mitchell, 29, has been volunteering in street medicine, taking basic medical care and consultation to shelters and people living on the street, since her second year.
First, she worked with the student organization, MUSHROOM, the Multidisciplinary UnSheltered Homeless Relief Outreach Of Morgantown.
Now on the WVU School of Medicine’s Charleston Campus, she volunteers for CHASM, the Charleston Homelessness and Street Medicine Mission.
Alongside her medical school rotations, it adds up to a lot of time with people down on their luck.
“They have people who love them. They have family members. They have dreams,” Mitchell said. “These folk are just so overly appreciative of the smallest things. And sometimes that’s heartbreaking because I’m like, ‘you deserve so much more than this.’”
The student organizations she has worked with have had varying abilities to provide care that reduces the harm of drug addiction, and it frustrates Mitchell.
She would like to provide more consistent harm reduction care, such as handing out testing strips for fentanyl and xylazine, exchanging needles, and providing doses of naloxone.
Photo by Eva Altizer / Mountain State Spotlight
“There’s a lot of conversation about not understanding why we do harm reduction. But a lot of times when you treat people who are facing substance abuse disorders with kindness and nonjudgment, that helps them have self-motivation and also helps them build trust with the medical community,” she said.
She said that can eventually lead to less drug use and sobriety.
“The issue is systemic and the root is that these people need resources and support,” Mitchell said.
Once, while doing a street round in Morgantown, Mitchell and other student volunteers had to perform wound care in the dark, pouring rain, with their headlights on, to treat a man with xylazine burns.
The patient clearly felt shame about his situation — at first, he told the volunteers that he had been pushed into a fire. Mitchell wants street medicine to break down the barriers to care and reduce shame.
“This patient was in excruciating amounts of pain,” she said. “And I think that was a really visceral moment where I’m like, this community is really sick and they need a lot of help, and there’s no access to it.”
