Homelessness rates jumped by double-digits in 2024 as Americans battled to afford housing

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: USA Today

Published 11:30 a.m. ET Dec. 27, 2024


More Americans were homeless this year compared to 2023, as families continued struggling to afford rent and other basic necessities, federal officials announced Friday. Across the U.S., more than 771,800 people lived without housing in 2024, according to a count conducted annually taken on a single night in January.

The number for January 2024 is 18.1% higher than in 2023, when officials counted about 650,000 people living in homeless shelters or in parks and on streets. In 2022, the population of people experiencing homelessness was around 580,000. "The numbers are just mind-boggling to me," Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told USA TODAY.

Many cities have struggled to build more affordable housing in recent years, while some communities have pushed for harsher laws banning tents and sleeping in public spaces. More local leaders across the U.S. need to invest in strategies to keep people in their homes when money is tight, experts told USA TODAY, otherwise the unhoused population will continue to grow.

"The underlying conditions driving homelessness are not going the right direction," National Housing Law Project Executive Director Shamus Roller told USA TODAY. "Housing affordability is worse, it's affecting more people across the country, and so you can't be surprised that people are essentially falling off the back of the wagon." Senior administration officials told reporters on Friday that the increase was due to a combination of housing costs, an influx of migrants in shelters and natural disasters such as the Maui wildfires that left people in emergency shelters.

Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/27/how-many-people-are-homeless-us-2024/77020773007/

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Link to HUD PRESS RELEASE - HUD Releases January 2024 Point-In-Time Count Report

Link to HUD AHAR REPORTS page - The Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR)

Link to HUD PRESS RELEASE - Federal Government Announces Significant Efforts to Reduce Homelessness

[Midnight Writer]

1. Trump will fix it! Simply stop counting the homeless and. like a miracle, the problem will go away.

[AZLD4Candidate]

5. The Xi Jinping method for measuring youth unemployment, homelessness, covid victims, and bank failures

The VAT solution to social problems, since my wife is convinced that China has no sales tax because sales tax is included in the price, unlike here where it's added at the end.

[Ziggysmom]

17. Reminds me of Scrooge!

?si=n_bYTej_NRxERa4U

[CrispyQ]

2. "...people are essentially falling off the back of the wagon."

A sad but apt description.

[KT2000]

3. The free market leaves it to

the government to fix it and then screams about taxes. This place is the real nut barn.

[Boomerproud]

4. State leges and 99% of congresscritters are clueless on this important subject.

They don't care and just want it to vanish.

[C Moon]

6. I'm sure the new admin, congress and senate will jump on fixing this. :/

[nmmi]

7. A 33% increase in last 2 years: Jan 2022: 580k, Jan 2023: 650k, Jan 2024: 771.8k

(771.8/580 - 1) * 100% = 33.1%.
So for every 3 in Jan. 2022, there were 4 in Jan. 2024

[LisaM]

8. We need to regulate short term rentals.

They are both cutting into the long term housing inventory and driving up rents.

But municipalities have little to no appetite to regulate them. People like staying in them, and I guess that outweighs all the harm they cause. I have begged people not to use them for years, to no avail.

[nmmi]

9. Reuters - Some more reasons from the report. Also, Black homelessness rate: 2.7 times the rate of all demographics

Last edited Fri Dec 27, 2024, 09:23 PM - Edit history (1)

combined.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-homelessness-rose-record-18-182345246.html

Black people, who made up 12% of the total U.S. population and 21% of the U.S. population living in poverty, represented 32% of all people experiencing homelessness, the data showed.

KEY QUOTES

"Our worsening national affordable housing crisis, rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism have stretched homelessness services systems to their limits," the Department of Housing and Urban Development said.

It also noted "additional public health crises, natural disasters that displaced people from their homes, rising numbers of people immigrating to the U.S., and the end to homelessness prevention programs put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic."

Edited to add Somebody brought up population growth as a factor. According to Macrotrends, the U.S. population increased 0.50% from 2022 to 2023, and 0.53% from 2023 to 2024. So we're not talking about anything comparable to homelessness's increases, which rose 18% in one year and 33% in 2 years.[/edit]

[Mysterian]

10. I'm sure population growth has nothing to do with this

Nobody ever seems to want to talk about that.

[BumRushDaShow]

11. But you also have an entire home building industry

that claims it's "not cost-effective" to build anything smaller than a "McMansion". Until we can get rid of the narrative of people not being able to live in something "under 2000 sqft", then this will go on forever.

[OldBaldy1701E]

12. How completely unAmerican!

To suggest that anyone live in something that is not worthy of envy is to say that we are not America! We have to d**kwave! We have to have a house bigger than the last one! Onward and Upward! Screw anything that does not say, "MY C**K IS THE BIGGEST!!"

This should not be necessary, but...

[BumRushDaShow]

14. LOL

(and there is a sequel out now )

[HereForTheParty]

13. Increasing shelter capacities should be step one

About 40% of the unhoused live outdoors or in other unlivable places.

[nmmi]

15. NBC News - Some excerpts with info I haven't seen in the other sources

NBC News, 12/27/24
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/u-s-homelessness-rises-18-amid-affordable-housing-shortage/ar-AA1wARDs

Notably, the annual count was conducted months before a U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowed cities to ban sleeping and camping on public streets. Since the June decision, cities and states, especially in the Western U.S., have passed new policies that allow encampments to be removed, which could impact the annual count moving forward.

. . . HUD pointed out the data was collected before the Biden administration began restricting illegal border crossings, which have dropped by more than 60% since January.

As a result, migrant arrivals have dropped significantly in Chicago, for example, where the migrant shelter census is down more than 60%, and in Denver, where the shelter census is down nearly 100%. Both cities ended their migrant shelter systems earlier this year.

[oldmanlynn]

16. Didn't help the election outcome

[NNguyenMD]

18. If we want to be serious about increasing housing supply then...

Stop using your house or any other house you own as a means to build generational wealth. And stop try to get rich off of your house. Your house is for living in. You house should be like your car, you use it, it depreciates and you sell it and find another one that you like better.

But that’s the ugly fact no one in high cost housing cities and states wants to touch. You remove the incentive to get rich off buying a house, and it will become an more affordable purchase, like a car or an appliance.