Columbia, South Carolina – Harold Simmons sees the same blue tarp most mornings before he sees the State House dome. He drives into downtown Columbia before 7 a.m., cutting through streets that are still half-empty, past office buildings, bus stops, church steps and the places where people slept because there was nowhere better to go. Sometimes the tarp is folded. Sometimes a shopping cart sits beside it.
Sometimes a man Harold recognizes but does not know is sitting up, rubbing his hands together in the cold or fanning himself in the heat. Harold owns a small cleaning business and has lived in Richland County for nearly 40 years. He is not angry at the people outside. He is not comfortable ignoring them either.
“I don’t want the city to treat people like trash,” Harold said. “But I also don’t want sidewalks, parks and storefronts to become waiting rooms for a system that has no room.”
That is the difficult place Columbia and the Midlands now occupy. Visible homelessness has become one of the region’s most emotional civic problems, touching public safety, downtown business, compassion, mental health, addiction, housing costs and the limits of local government.
The numbers show why the issue feels larger than one block. The City of Columbia reported that the 2025 Point-in-Time Count found 1,334 people experiencing homelessness across the 13 Midlands counties served by the Midlands Area Consortium for the Homeless. Of those counted, 63% lived in Richland County, 24% were chronically homeless and 51% reported at least one disabling condition. That means about 840 people counted were in Richland County on a single winter count, and many were facing needs beyond rent alone.
The count is only a snapshot
The Point-in-Time Count is useful. It is also limited. It captures one period in January, not every person who moves between couches, motels, cars, shelters, hospitals, jail, woods and sidewalks over a year.
United Way of the Midlands says the PIT count is required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and is conducted over 10 days in January to measure the size and characteristics of homelessness. The organization also manages the regional Homeless Management Information System, which helps providers coordinate shelter and services.
For Harold, the official count explains only part of what he sees.
“Maybe the number is right for that night,” he said. “But the street changes every day.”
That is the frustration for residents and providers alike. Homelessness is both visible and hard to measure. People move. Encampments appear, shrink and reappear. Some people avoid services. Some are not eligible for certain programs. Some need mental health care before they can manage housing. Some need housing before they can manage treatment.
Rapid Shelter has shown progress, but not enough capacity
Columbia has tried to answer the most visible part of the crisis through Rapid Shelter Columbia, the city’s transitional shelter site on Calhoun Street.
The city describes Rapid Shelter as the first project of its kind in the Southeast, built around roughly 50 individual pallet-style sleeping cabins, private space, personal storage, case management, food service, security and wraparound help. The goal is to serve chronically unsheltered adults and move them toward permanent housing.
The program has real outcomes. As of Aug. 22, 2025, the city reported 431 admissions, 74 residents employed, 73 enrolled in insurance, 128,235 meals served, 1,034 community referrals and 101 residents permanently housed.
Those numbers matter. So does another number: 50. A 50-unit program can change individual lives. It cannot, by itself, solve a regional count of 1,334 people, including hundreds in Richland County and many with disabling conditions.
Rapid Shelter residents also arrive with complex needs. The city reported that 44% had a diagnosed mental health issue, 34% had a diagnosed substance use disorder, 28% lived with a physical disability and 29% had a chronic health condition.
That is not a simple shelter problem. It is a housing, health care and treatment problem sharing one sidewalk.
Read also: Fentanyl deaths fall, but South Carolina families still count the empty chairs
Visible homelessness changes public spaces
Columbia’s homelessness debate is often most intense where private hardship becomes public. A person sleeping under an awning may be in crisis. The business owner opening that door may also be worried about customers, safety and cleanup. A resident may want compassion and still feel uncomfortable walking past an encampment. A police officer may respond to repeated calls while knowing jail will not solve homelessness. An outreach worker may spend weeks building trust with someone who still refuses shelter.
Harold has cleaned storefronts where needles were found nearby. He has also watched church volunteers hand out food at dawn. Both memories shape his view.
“People want one clean answer,” he said. “There isn’t one. You can care about the person sleeping there and still think the city has to keep public places usable.”
That tension has reached state politics, too. A 2026 South Carolina bill defined public camping as sleeping or using public property as a substitute for regular shelter, and defined unsheltered homelessness as sleeping in places not meant for human habitation, including tents, cars, parks, rights-of-way, campsites and abandoned buildings. Whether or not such proposals become law, they show how homelessness has moved from social-service offices into public-order debates.
Read also: One ditch tells a larger story about South Carolina flood future
The causes are not one thing
The visible crisis is often reduced to mental illness or drugs. Those are real issues. Rapid Shelter’s data shows many residents need behavioral health or substance use support.
But homelessness also grows from low wages, eviction, domestic violence, medical debt, family breakdown, disability, incarceration, housing shortages and rent increases. A person may start homeless because of money and become sicker outside. Another may begin with untreated mental illness and lose housing after a crisis. A third may leave jail, a hospital or a relative’s home with nowhere to go.
South Carolina’s homelessness rate remains lower than many states, at 9 people per 10,000, according to Columbia’s summary of federal data. But low relative rates can hide local pressure when services, affordable housing and treatment beds do not match need. In the Midlands, the question is not only how many people are homeless. It is how many paths out exist.
Read also: Horry County residents feel the cost of rapid growth and development on roads, schools and drainage
Compassion needs infrastructure
Columbia’s challenge is to avoid two failures at once. The first failure is pretending visible homelessness can be solved by moving people from one block to another. The second is pretending public concern is always cruel. Residents have legitimate worries about parks, sidewalks, sanitation, fires, drug use and safety. People experiencing homelessness have legitimate needs for shelter, treatment, privacy, dignity and permanent housing.
A serious response has to hold both truths. That means more shelter capacity, but also more exits from shelter. It means treatment access, but also housing affordable enough for people to stay inside. It means outreach workers, but also places to take people when outreach succeeds. It means cleaning public spaces without treating human beings as debris.
Harold still drives past the blue tarp. Some mornings it is gone. Some mornings it is back. He has stopped seeing it as proof that nothing works. He sees it as proof that the region’s response is still too small for the need.
“One person housed is a miracle to that person,” he said. “But if the next person is still sleeping outside, the city’s work is not done.”
In Columbia, visible homelessness is not only about what residents see. It is about what the Midlands is willing to build behind the scenes, so fewer people have to live their crisis in public.
