Homelessness on the Rise
by Katharina Buchholz,
Oct 7, 2024
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's latest report on homelessness in the United States, 653,104 Americans were homeless in 2023. Last year, levels of homelessness climbed for the sixth year. While in 2017 and 2018, growth was slow, homelessness increased more in 2019 and 2020 and finally skyrocketed in 2023 by growing 12 percent compared to the year prior and even climbing 10 percent above the 2007-2022 average.
As Covid-era protection programs expired and the cost-of-living crisis hit the country, homelessness numbers rose. At the same time, Covid restrictions on shelter capacity ended, leading to more homeless individuals living in shelters once again. During Covid-19, most of the increase in homeless populations had come from unhoused individuals. In 2023, sheltered populations rose by almost 14 percent, while unhoused populations rose by less than 10 percent. However, the share of the sheltered homeless population held steady at around 60-61 percent since the pandemic started.
Despite previous increases, the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January when the count is carried out had always stayed below Great Recession levels, which had been highest in 2007 when the data was first reported. The 2023 number now retired that record, surpassing it by 1 percent.
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Katharina Buchholz,
Oct 7, 2024
More than 650,000 Americans were homeless in 2023, the latest number available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. After a period of progress and decline, the U.S. homeless population increased slightly in 2019, 2020 and 2022 before taking a major step up in 2023, according to the report. It now stands at 653,104 individuals with 60 percent living in shelters. The total number is a 12 percent increase from 2022 and a 10 percent increase from the 15-year average between 2007 and 2022, marking a major shift in U.S. homeless populations. The count takes places in the first month(s) of every year, but is only published around a year later. While the number of sheltered individuals took a dip in 2021 due to Covid-19 precautions, U.S. shelters housed almost 400,000 in 2023. This marks an increase of almost 14 percent to the previous year, while the unsheltered homeless population rose by almost 10 percent in the same time period.
Around half of all unsheltered homeless people in the U.S. are located in California. This is despite the fact that some areas in the state have recently stopped counting unhoused homeless populations, as has Seattle. The rates of unsheltered homeless populations are also high in other states on the West Coast. Tent cities are common occurrences in these states as a result of the growing unsheltered homeless populations. This very visible symptom of homelessness has proven divisive, and while some cities have embraced designated areas for camping as a solution for unsheltered people, others have cracked down on encampments, for example Sacramento, San Jose and Oakland.
More than half of the U.S. homeless population is scattered across the country's 50 biggest cities and their surrounding areas. 24 percent of them live in just two cities - New York and Los Angeles. Despite its considerable homeless population, New York has a very low rate of unsheltered individuals: only 4.6 percent lived on the streets in early 2023, which is in part due to the two cities opposing climates. In Los Angeles, 73.3 percent of homeless people were listed as unsheltered at the same time.
The CoCs for New York and Los Angeles - so-called Continuums of Care or local planning bodies coordinating the response to homelessness - saw around 88,000 and 71,000 homeless people in the early 2023 count. Seattle/King County registered around 14,000 homeless people when just counting the sheltered homeless population - rank 3 nevertheless. Other CoCs in the U.S. experiencing a high level of homelessness are San Diego, Denver, San Jose and Santa Clara in California with around 10,000 homeless people counted each. Out of the 10 CoCs with the biggest homeless populations registered in 2023, five were located in California.
You will find more infographics at Statistaby Katharina Buchholz,
Oct 7, 2024
According to a survey of industrialized nations by the OECD, low-income people in the U.S. are among those struggling the most with housing costs. Almost half of all low-income U.S. residents spend more than 40 percent of their income on housing. This puts the country towards the top of the list of the least affordable housing markets in the OECD, only topped by Latin American countries Chile and Colombia. 30 percent or one third of income after tax spent on housing is generally considered the maximum amount any person should pay.
The data refers to private renters (and mortgage holders) as those on the subsidized market are expected not to have their resources overstretched by rent. While the OECD has no comparable figure of how many U.S. residents pay subsidized rent, Department of Housing and Urban Development data suggests that close to 3 percent of Americans benefit from the department’s housing assistance.
The data also shows the inability of low-income Americans to buy their own home instead of paying high rents. While this seems counter-intuitive, buying instead of renting is, or at least was, a way out from under the rent burden for low-income people in several OECD countries. In many places with high housing costs, burdensome mortgages are actually less common than burdensome rents – but this could also be due to the fact that fixed mortgage payments keep running for years at the same rates, while rent increases would display in the data more immediately. In the U.S., low-income mortgage holders were still overburdened by their payments in 43 percent of cases, only topped by Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica (44-58 percent) as well as pricey Luxembourg (52 percent). The U.S. number was matched by New Zealand's (43 percent).
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