Homelessness hits record high. White House, media blame immigration
Polygraph | Newsletter n°285 | 1 Jan 2025
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Situation
Homelessness in the US hit a record high in 2024. According to a recent report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the number of people experiencing homelessness reached 771,480 this past year, an 18% increase over 2023. HUD’s count is a snapshot of the number of people experiencing homelessness at a single point in time, and data for these reports are collected during the last 10 days of January each year.
This strikes me as an undercount. Homeless is defined in the report as “lacking a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” — the first bit of a much longer definition set forth in federal regulation 24 CFR 578.3. I don’t get the impression that all the people who qualify as homeless based on that definition were included in HUD’s national estimate. Surely there are, for example, unhoused people couch surfing or staying in shelters not officially designated as homeless shelters. But on page 11 of the report, HUD says its count excludes people “temporarily staying with family or friends…even if their stay may be unstable,” or those staying in any housing “not dedicated for people experiencing homelessness.” Either way, it’s a lot. It’s a crisis.
Explanation
The report lists several factors contributing to record homelessness, including:
Lack of affordable housing
Rising everyday costs
Stagnating wages
Systemic racism
Public health crises
Natural disasters
Immigration
End of pandemic social programs
Based on the included testimony from several Continuums of Care (CoC) — local or regional planning bodies that coordinate services for people experiencing homelessness — the combination of ending pandemic assistance (which included an eviction moratorium, specific homeless prevention funding, and broader cash assistance and tax credit programs) and the lack of affordable housing was particularly devastating. For example, here’s a quote from a CoC in the northeast:
In response to COVID-19, our CoC saw an influx of rapid rehousing and prevention resources, as well as an effective statewide eviction moratorium. These efforts were effective in keeping households from entering into homelessness and moving households out of homelessness quickly. Since the sunsetting of these resources and the ending of the eviction moratorium, our COC has seen a large influx of new families and individuals seeking emergency shelter assistance.
Coverage
There’s considerable daylight between what’s in the report vs. what the Biden administration chose to include in the accompanying press release. The press release gives you the impression that rising homelessness is primarily due to rising migration, with natural disasters and rental costs as secondary factors. The devastating effects on homelessness from the (in many ways Biden-engineered) collapse of the pandemic welfare state that numerous local shelters talked about? No mention of that at all.
There’s no doubt immigration is part of the story — Hispanic homelessness grew faster than overall homelessness (31.6% and 18.1%, respectively) from 2023 to 2024, for example. But it’s not the story — record homelessness is. There were 118,376 more people who experienced homelessness in 2024, and most of them were non-Hispanic (61,747). Of the total 771,480 people who were homeless this year, 69% were non-Hispanic. There was an increase in homelessness across all subgroups HUD tracks, aside from veterans.
Unfortunately for us, establishment media outlets often base their coverage on the accompanying press release rather than the actual report. That tendency was at play here, too — the BBC, CNN, and Axios were particularly embarrassing in this regard. I suppose I should be thankful, because this lackluster reporting creates a greater need for publications like mine (here at Polygraph, we always crack open the full PDF). But I’m not thankful, I’m just annoyed.
Had the Biden administration not cast immigration as the main character in its narrative on record homelessness, perhaps we’d only see headlines like “Migrant Crisis Pushed US Homelessness to Record High in 2024” in edgy far-right publications and not in Bloomberg. Perhaps there’d be more discussion about the collapse of the pandemic assistance programs, and scrutiny over the administration’s decision in early 2022 to abandon the social welfare platform it ran and won on in 2020.
^Alt text for screen readers: U.S. homelessness has increased 33% since 2020. This orange line chart shows the number of people experiencing homelessness from 2010 to 2024. The line is relatively steady until it shoots upwards in 2022. In 2020, 580,466 people experienced homelessness. In 2024, 771,480 people did. Data comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Figures for 2021 are unavailable due to pandemic-related disruptions to counts.
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