Homelessness rises to a record level in America

EACH YEAR FOR a few frigid days in January volunteers fan out across cities, towns and rural areas to try to count every homeless person in America. The method is admittedly flawed: cities do their counting in different ways, and many homeless people are transient or hide away in subterranean tunnels and under highway overpasses. Researchers think the result is an undercount. But this “point in time” survey offers the most complete picture of homelessness that exists in America today. The results for January 2024, released on December 27th, offer bleak news: the number of homeless people in the country had risen to the highest level on record.Between 2023 and 2024 homelessness increased by 18%, to roughly 771,000 people. That is nearly as many people as live in North Dakota. The vast majority of the uptick comes from people living in shelters—picture hotel rooms or rows of cots—rather than sleeping rough, as is common on the West Coast and in some southern states. The report’s most shocking revelation is a 39% rise in family homelessness year-on-year—a reversal of a slow but steady decline in the years preceding the covid-19 pandemic. Three main factors contributed to the surge: a housing shortage that has driven up rents and home prices, an influx of asylum-seekers that overwhelmed some cities, and disasters that displaced people.Estimates vary, but Moody’s Analytics, a consultancy, reckons America is short about 2.9m affordable homes. It is no coincidence that many of the states with consistently high rates of homelessness (California and New York), or those that saw big increases this year (Hawaii and Massachusetts) boast some of the priciest housing in the country. A third of people counted were chronically homeless, and may suffer from drug addiction or struggle with , which make it harder for them to stay housed. But most people fall in and out of homelessness depending on their financial situation. When pandemic-era programmes that offered emergency rental assistance and expired, more people may have been pushed onto the streets.When migrants arrived by the thousands in cities far from the southern border (many on buses sent north by Texas’s governor, ) they stressed already crowded shelter systems. Three places absorbed the most migrants: Chicago, Denver and New York City. In Chicago migrants . Denver created a bussing scheme of its own, sending people on to their final destinations rather than allowing them to camp on the streets. The states those cities belong to—Illinois, Colorado and New York—each saw corresponding rises in homelessness. New York City attributes almost 88% of its increase in homelessness to asylum-seekers housed in the city’s shelters.For an example of the ways in which disasters can increase homelessness, look to Hawaii. In August 2023 a wildfire caused by broken power lines razed , killing at least 102 people. Houses were burned down to their foundations. Survivors lived out of shelters and hotel rooms across Maui for months, if not longer. The blaze worsened an already dire housing shortage on the islands, where the median listing price is nearly double the nation’s. What happened on Maui has become a cruel pattern: homelessness also spiked in Chico, California after a fire engulfed the nearby town of Paradise in 2018.There are two small reasons for hope. First, the count was carried out right after and cities were flailing. Since then newcomers have settled in. Denver has wound down its migrant shelter programme. That may mean homelessness could decline in 2025. Second, the only bright spot amid about 100 pages of grim tidings in the report showed that the number of homeless veterans has declined by more than half since 2009 thanks to better co-operation between cities and the federal Department of Veteran Affairs. In the hunt for solutions, it makes sense to start there.