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Housing advocates are braving the winter weather to count the homeless population across Connecticut, and they expect the numbers to increase. They are hoping the updated numbers will help them stave off budget cuts. 

For the third year in a row, volunteers will fan out into shelters and streets to get a daily snapshot of the state's homeless population.

Natalie Matthews is with the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness. She says the expected increase is due to the bad economy, coupled with the lack of affordable housing.

"We know that one out of every three adults that answers the survey last year, they were working at the time of their homelessness. It was not as if they'd lost a job, they were working at the time of their homelessness."

Last year's homeless count was up just three percent from the year before, and a greater percentage were in shelters than not. 

But the current demand has emergency shelters increasingly turning people away.   

"We had people sleeping in our lobby both downstairs in our men's shelter and upstairs in our family shelter."

Brian Baker is the associate director of Hartford's South Park Inn.

"Even in good times we were underfunded. Now in bad times, we wonder, if we do get cut, where do we go from here?"

A final report on this year's homeless count will come out in April or May, just as lawmakers are wrestling with the next biennial budget. Homeless advocates want to preserve funding for both emergency shelters and longer term solutions, like supportive housing units, which offer permanent housing and services to chronically homeless residents. 

That could be a tough sell. In November, Governor Rell cancelled funding for 150 new supportive housing units. A spokesman says she could not justify spending an additional 6 million dollars a year to expand that program while other good programs are getting cut.