BUFFALO, N.Y. \u2014\u00a0When we think about homelessness, we often picture someone sleeping on a sidewalk or under a bridge. But homelessness can look very different in rural communities, and getting help can be much harder when services are spread miles apart.<\/p>\n
University at Buffalo faculty expert on homelessness Elizabeth Bowen said homelessness doesn’t always look like how people imagine it.<\/p>\n
“Certainly also includes not just people in cities, but people in suburbs, people in rural areas as well,” said Bowen. “Homelessness is not contained only to cities or only to any one type of community.”<\/p>\n
Rural Outreach Center Executive Director Lynda Battaglia said homelessness can be even harder to see in rural communities.<\/p>\n
“It is a camper that is potentially deplorable and falling apart and utilization of tarps to keep it somewhat dry,” said Battaglia. “You might drive past that and think that camper’s completely abandoned. When in reality, people are living there.”<\/p>\n
Rural Outreach Center Executive Director Emeritus Frank Cerny said he’s seen situations like that firsthand.<\/p>\n
“I drove a back road into a place where a family with two children had put together field stones to build a structure, and they used newspaper to plug the holes,” said Cerny. “Right here in Western New York.”<\/p>\n
The difference isn’t just visibility; it’s also access. In an urban area, shelters and food can be concentrated. But according to Homeless Alliance of Western New York Community Impact Director Tracy Schmidt, those same resources may be miles apart in rural communities.<\/p>\n
“Here in Buffalo, you have the city proper, so you can find a soup kitchen, your emergency shelter. In Wyoming County or Orleans or even Genesee County, there’s no emergency shelter,”\u00a0said Schmidt.<\/p>\n
And Federal Programming Director Ashley Matrassi said getting from one resource to another can become an obstacle of its own.<\/p>\n
“The long bus rides also, which can compound an experience that should take someone maybe 10 minutes by car, that could take almost an hour and a half in the rural communities,”\u00a0said Matrassi.<\/p>\n
And even when someone finds a path toward housing, there may not be an affordable home waiting at the end. Housing Navigator Rob Williams said the problem isn’t solved simply by finding someone a place to live.<\/p>\n
“We can help people get into stable housing, we can get them as stable as possible. But once we leave, if they can’t afford it, we’re just right back into that situation,”\u00a0said Williams.<\/p>\n
As winter approaches, the stakes become even higher, especially for people whose homelessness may never be visible from a city street.<\/p>\n
“I’m concerned about the immediacy of needing to be able to take shelter and find a warm place to stay when our winters get really cold and a big storm is coming in,”\u00a0said Battaglia.<\/p>\n
And then there’s the question of treatment. A new federal “Treatment First” toolkit puts addiction treatment at the center of its approach to homelessness. But local providers said housing and treatment shouldn’t necessarily be separated.<\/p>\n
“Homelessness and addiction can certainly be co-occurring issues,” said Bowen.<\/p>\n
“What we really encourage is a holistic approach. It’s not one or the other. It’s everything,” said Schmidt.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of them working in parallel, like treatment and then housing, I think they really need to work in tandem,” said Battaglia.<\/p>\n
Because whether someone lives in a city or on a rural road miles from the nearest service, anyone can be affected by homelessness.<\/p>\n
In the latest report from the Homeless Alliance of WNY, 77% of people who experienced homelessness in the five-county region in 2025 were experiencing it for the first time. Advocates also stressed that homelessness can happen to people who are working, families with children and older adults, not just people we see sleeping outside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BUFFALO, N.Y. \u2014\u00a0When we think about homelessness, we often picture someone sleeping on a sidewalk or under a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[113,2000,117343,9,11,10,49,51,50,12,6317,200],"class_list":["post-352706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-buffalo","tag-homelessness","tag-hunter-caparelli","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-news","tag-swarm","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}