On any given night in January of 2024, more than 770,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States, according to new data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That value marks an 18% increase from 2023 and a new record high since HUD began reporting on homelessness in 2007.
The Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, released last Friday, uses the nationwide annual Point-in-Time (PIT) counts in the final 10 days of January to produce a snapshot of the nation's growing homelessness crisis. The 2024 report found homelessness reached record levels for almost every population included in the survey. Veterans were the only population to see a decline in homelessness, continuing a year-over-year trend.
But advocates and policy experts say that the annual point-in-time count ultimately fails to capture a holistic picture of homelessness in the U.S. With groups of people excluded from the count and the data released almost a year to the date of collection, the count and report don't set localities up to address the problem and serve unhoused Americans, argued Adam Ruege, the director of strategy and evaluation for Community Solutions, a national nonprofit working to end homelessness.
"What's required is the ability to understand at any given time how many people are experiencing homelessness, why they're coming into homelessness, and why they're they're exiting homelessness so that communities can actually get a handle around this issue," said Ruege, who previously served as the deputy director of clinical operations for the National Veteran Affairs Homeless Programs Office.
Breaking down the 18% increase captured in the report paints a bleak picture. The number of families experiencing homelessness increased by 39%, a figure that HUD said is largely driven by a 43% increase in the sheltered population between 2023 and 2024. One in five people experiencing homelessness on a single night last year were 55 or older, and nearly half of those adults were unsheltered in "places not meant for human habitation."
The number of unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness also rose slightly by 10% between 2023 and 2024, while the number of children experiencing homelessness on any given night last year surged by 33%, making them the age group to see the largest increase in homelessness.
HUD pointed to several factors that led to the historic rise, chief among them the "worsening national affordable housing crisis, rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism." Other factors like public health crises, natural disasters that displaced people from their homes, a rise in immigration and the end of COVID-era homelessness prevention programs also contributed to the strain on the nation's homelessness service systems in 2024, the report noted.
The data points to a need for these factors to be addressed from a federal level, said Ann Oliva, the CEO of the nonpartisan National Alliance to End Homelessness.
"What we're seeing here in this set of data is homelessness overall being up for the eighth year in a row, but specific populations, like older adults and families being particularly hard hit by the housing crisis," she said.
"What's the point in counting people if we're not going to ensure that next year there are fewer people experiencing homelessness?"
Notably, the number of veterans experiencing homelessness decreased by 8% overall between 2023 and 2024, with the share of unsheltered veterans seeing a slightly larger decline of 11%. These drops are the results of targeted efforts and sustained funding to reduce veteran homelessness, according to the report.
Oliva said that the factors behind the decline in veterans experiencing homelessness, like the HUD's Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, offer a roadmap for extending those gains to other populations.
"For veterans, what we see is bipartisan leadership and support. We see resources that are much closer to the scale of need, and we see really smart policy and program design coming out of the federal government that focuses on housing and services," she told Salon in a phone interview.
She added that the decline in veterans experiencing homelessness is an example of a policy success both federal and local governments can facilitate.
Even with record highs, the PIT surveys are widely understood to be an undercount of those experiencing homelessness. The AHAR notes that the PIT count does not include five categories of people experiencing homelessness, including Americans who reside in housing not listed on the housing inventory count and those who are temporarily staying with family or friends. Ruege added that the survey being conducted in the winter — when fewer people are without shelter — also skews the count.
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HUD also noted that the 2024 data is likely out-of-date as the conditions, policies and circumstances around U.S. homelessness changed under the Biden administration over the course of the year.
While the PIT count allows policymakers and advocates to identify broad trends in homelessness over time, Ruege argued that local homeless service providers can bridge the gaps between reports using by-name data, a comprehensive, opt-in list of everyone experiencing homelessness in a locality that is updated regularly.
Building such data sets off of HUD's Homeless Management Information System, where providers collect client-level data on housing and services provided to individuals and families at risk of and experiencing homelessness, allow communities to report the changes in their local populations experiencing homelessness and better react to the problem "so they can be more proactive in solving it," he said.
"We know Point-in-Time counts are mandated, required congressionally, they're useful as a snapshot," he said. "But what we believe is that a video is required here, more real-time video, instead of a snapshot."
Oliva also emphasized the importance of looking to other data sources, like part two of the AHAR and HUD's system performance measures to paint a more holistic picture of the nation's homelessness crisis. The former offers insight into the needs of Americans experiencing homelessness and what happens to them as they move through the homeless services system, while the latter provides a better understanding of who is becoming homeless and how many people are experiencing it for the first time.
"The Point-in-Time Count is really important, but it's not the only part of the story that you need to look at in order to get sort of a comprehensive view of homelessness nationwide," she said.
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But Jesse Rabinowitz, the campaign and communication director of the National Homelessness Law Center, argued that the issue isn't a lack of holistic portraits of the reality of homelessness — the problem is that the data should be much more of a call-to-action to federal lawmakers than it is.
"Every year we have seen homelessness go up, but the federal government and city and state governments have not responded with an increase in funding for housing that matches the need," he said. "My question is, what's the point in counting people if we're not going to ensure that next year there are fewer people experiencing homelessness?"
In addition to funding housing at scale to the affordable housing crisis, elected officials must work to not make homelessness worse, which is a goal Rabinowitz said is more challenging given the Supreme Court's Grants Pass v. Johnson decision
That case, decided last summer, saw the Supreme Court effectively give localities license to criminally punish unsheltered Americans for erecting encampments on public property. The justices decided 6-3 that cities enforcing anti-camping laws and doling out penalties for violations did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.
Alongside the impact of the ruling, the nation's homelessness crisis is also poised to worsen under the incoming Trump administration, Rabinowitz said. In his campaign platform, Agenda 47, now-President-elect Donald Trump outlined a drastic plan to address what he called the "scourge of homelessness," focusing on making cities "clean, safe, and beautiful."
Those proposed policies included encouraging states to ban camping and force individuals to receive treatment or face arrest; buying land and relocating unsheltered people to tent cities to access social workers, mental health professionals and drug rehabilitation specialists; and reimplementing mental institutions to house and rehabilitate unhoused Americans with a goal of later reintegrating them back into society.
While it is unclear whether Trump will carry out his proposed plan and, if so, to what extent, Trump's stated plans to curb immigration, cut "vital social safety net programs" and implement tariffs will only push more people into homelessness, Rabinowitz said.
"We've tried, as a country, the housing last approach. We've tried forcing people into treatment. We've tried forcing people into camps. It doesn't work," he said. "The only thing that has been proven to work time and time again, is getting folks housing that they can afford and pairing that housing with services that folks want and need."
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