Homelessness soared to the highest level on record this year, driven by forces that included high rents, stagnant wages and a surge in migrants seeking asylum. The number of people experiencing homelessness topped 770,000, an increase of 18 percent in a year and the largest annual jump since the count began in 2007. A report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development showed that homelessness rose by a third in the past two years, after declining modestly over the previous decade, the New York Times reports.
Biden administration officials emphasized the role of asylum-seeking migrants who overwhelmed the shelter systems where much of the increase occurred. The officials argued that because the annual count occurred in January, the migrant crisis had begun to abate.
“This data is nearly a year old and no longer reflects the situation we are seeing,” said Adrianne Todman, the acting housing secretary, The government does not track the migration status of homeless people, so it is hard to disentangle the twin crises of domestic poverty and foreigners fleeing troubled lands. The record-breaking rise in unhoused people is likely to widen the growing partisan divide over homelessness policy.
Democrats typically blame housing costs, flagging wages and scarce rental subsidies, while supporting Housing First policies, which house the chronically homeless without requiring treatment for mental illness or substance abuse. Republicans seek cuts in housing aid and other social services and blame what they call liberal permissiveness. They want to require unhoused people to seek psychiatric or substance abuse help as a condition of support. President-elect Trump has called for clearing cities of encampments and for placing unhoused people into camps. "Thiis is just a horrible increase, and it shatters any myth that Housing First is working,” said Robert Marbut, who served as the federal homelessness coordinator during Trump’s first term. He dismissed the idea that migration was the primary reason homelessness rose. Prof. Dennis Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania said that about three-quarters of the increase in homelessness occurred in the four states hit hardest by asylum seekers — New York, Illinois, Colorado and Massachusetts — along with Hawaii, where wildfires in Maui fueled mass displacement.
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