Indiana is a diverse state with highly urban areas and rural areas. Both areas are experiencing a rise in homelessness. Yet there is a very clear divide in access to services between these two areas across our state. La Porte County mirrors the state in our rural and urban divide. We have two urban hubs and many rural miles between and around them, and homelessness behaves differently on each side of that line. Today we are going to look at that divide, how the unhoused populations in each are impacted, and the challenges they face.
The Urban Picture
When most people picture homelessness, they picture an urban version of homelessness, and for understandable reasons. Cities historically tend to have more visible unhoused populations, shelters, and encampments.
Indianapolis, our state’s largest city, counted separately from the rest of the state, found 1,821 people experiencing homelessness in early 2026. Within the 91-county Balance of State region, the largest populations of unhoused individuals tend to cluster in and around our state’s counties with cities: St. Joseph, Vanderburgh, Monroe, Delaware. This is true here in our northwest corner of the state as well, with more urban areas in Lake, Porter, and La Porte Counties.
This urban setting tends to have more shelter beds, more case managers, more outreach workers, and public transportation that can get a person from a shelter to a job or a clinic. Homelessness in the city is a serious problem, but it is a problem the system is at least built to see and respond to. That is not the reality across the state.
The Rural Picture
Rural homelessness can be quieter, and that quiet is deceptive. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, rural areas account for only about 7% of the counted unhoused population. However, almost everyone who studies the issue and service providers alike agree that number is most likely an undercount. Rural homelessness often presents as the “hidden” kind: families doubled up in a relative’s home, people sleeping in cars, in campgrounds, in the woods, or in an unheated outbuilding on a back road. Jason Hayes, executive director of the men’s residence center at the Evansville Rescue Mission, said, “folks that are hidden in the woods or that pop in and out of friends’ houses, rarely the visible street homelessness a survey team can easily find,” in an article in the Indiana Capital Chronicle from earlier this year.
In rural areas, losing housing often looks less like a sudden crisis and more like a slow squeeze: utility debt, a rising property-tax bill, a rent increase in a place where affordable housing stock is extremely limited or not available at all. When someone does become unhoused, there are fewer places to turn in rural areas. Services that are available tend to be fewer and have historically operated at lower capacity than in cities. Another challenge for many experiencing rural homelessness is that services may be widespread, with little to no public transportation to get help.
In Indiana, rural homelessness is growing faster than urban homelessness. Between 2023 and 2025, homelessness rose 16.6% in rural areas versus 9.4% in urban areas. The gap between the visible problem and the hidden one is widening in exactly the places least equipped to support the needs of the unhoused population.
The “Real” Rural Number
Part of the reason rural homelessness stays hidden is how we count. The official tally is the Point-in-Time count, a single night, once a year in January, when volunteers try to find and survey everyone experiencing homelessness. This method works far better on a city block than across hundreds of square miles of farmland, small towns, and forest. Doubled-up families don’t meet the federal definition and often aren’t counted at all. We’ll spend some time next week talking about how counting the unhoused is so hard, how that number shapes funding, and how funding shapes who gets help.
La Porte County Reflects the State
La Porte County mirrors the same urban-rural split as the state. Our population and our services concentrate in two places: Michigan City, the county’s largest city, and La Porte, the county seat. That’s where our shelters are, where the food pantries, case managers, and support services are, and where fixed-route public transit runs. Ringing those cities is a large rural county: townships of farmland and small communities where a car is the only realistic way to reach any of it.
So, the divide becomes a matter of geography and transportation. A person experiencing homelessness in Michigan City can, at least in principle, walk or ride to a shelter bed. A family quietly losing their home twenty miles out has no such option; the resource exists, but not for them, not without a reliable vehicle and the gas to run it.
If the problem differs by geography, so can the solutions. Urban response leans on capacity: more beds, coordinated outreach, keeping people from cycling back to the street. Rural response leans on prevention, because in a place with few shelters, the most effective and affordable move is to stop someone from losing housing in the first place: targeted rental assistance, help with a past-due utility bill, and case management that meets people where they are.
An Issue that Is Isolated to One Area
Homelessness isn’t an issue in only urban or rural areas; this issue knows no geographic barriers. In the more urban areas, it tends to be concentrated and visible; in rural settings, people tend to be scattered and hidden; and in a county like ours, our communities are experiencing both at once. As a community and a county, a response designed only for the downtown version will keep missing the family on the county road parked at the truck stop.
Sources
National Alliance to End Homelessness — “Rural Homelessness” (share of homeless population, hidden homelessness, income and service-capacity gaps). https://endhomelessness.org/resources/policy-information/rural-homelessness/
Indiana Capital Chronicle — “Rural homelessness growing faster than cities” (rural +16.6% vs urban +9.4%, 2023–2025; hidden/doubled-up homelessness; IHCDA rural pilots in Starke and Jackson counties). https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2026/01/20/rural-homelessness-growing-faster-than-cities/
IHCDA — “2025 Indiana Balance of State State of Homelessness” (Region 1 unsheltered count; Lake County/Region 1a; highest-count counties; PIT methodology). https://www.in.gov/ihcda/indiana-balance-of-state-continuum-of-care/files/2025-IN-BoS-State-of-Homelessness-Slides.pdf
WFYI / Mirror Indy — Indianapolis (Marion County) 2026 Point-in-Time count: 1,821 people. https://mirrorindy.org/indianapolis-homeless-population-2026-pit-count-streets-home/
IHCDA — Indiana Balance of State Continuum of Care, Regional Structure (Region 1 counties). https://www.in.gov/ihcda/indiana-balance-of-state-continuum-of-care/regional-structure/
