On a roll in terms of exposure, as after the op-ed and research letters came out on the 25th and the 26th, respectively, on Friday (the 27th) I got a request from Fox LiveNOW for an on-air interview to talk about the nationwide homeless population numbers that were released by HUD in its Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR). I had never heard of LiveNOW, apparently it’s streaming 24-7 breaking news, the kind you hear on background in airports.

Interesting process. A couple of emails back and forth with an intern and then I joined a zoom linkup at 7:20 pm, briefly chatted with a reporter, Andrew Craft, and then immediately went on the air. Basically, Craft threw me softballs, I answered them, and I was done and back to my Friday evening routine by 7:30. I think I answered the questions okay, though it seemed somewhat uninspired; anyone interested can check out the interview, and some reporting on the topic, here.

I expect the commentary is already buried and forgotten. But it did force me to quickly read through the 2024 AHAR and think up some semi-intelligent hot takes. I’ll write up a few thoughts here from having read the report.

Given that HUD released this report on the Friday between Christmas and New Years, the news couldn’t be good, and indeed it wasn’t. The point-in-time (PIT) number was 770,000 people estimated as being homeless nationwide on a night last January (yes, almost a year ago), an 18% increase from last year and by far the highest number ever since these counts began in 2007.

One of the reasons the number was so high was that it included a large number of mostly families who had temporary visas after coming into the US and were staying in shelters. This included folks who were bused north from border states to cities like NYC, whose already tight homeless systems further got stretched. The PIT count, like the shelter systems impacted, were not set up to handle this novel and suddenly significant subgroup of the homeless population. I suspect that this group will be better documented in the 2025 count (coming up in late January). Until then, one more dimension of the stigma/homelessness intersection.

Data also show pretty clearly that, even if you take every non-US citizen out of the homeless population, the PIT count still would have increased from last year and thus still would have hit an alltime (albeit lower) high. Nearly every category into which homelessness is sliced and diced went up.

This portends that homelessness is, on a nationwide level, as bad as its ever been. But this also reflects results from January 2024. The local jurisdiction counts, the building blocks of the nationwide count, have been available for quite awhile. There is large variation among local homeless counts, so the increases in places like Delaware or Philadelphia contrast with decreases in places like LA or Houston. So in some respects the US count acts as a reference point for the local counts. To paraphrase Tolstoy, each jurisdiction has homelessness in its own way. And the 2024 results come at a time when jurisdictions are preparing for the 2025 count, which is a month away.

These results are sure to further politicize homelessness. Immigrants, who have already had the finger pointed at them for the housing crisis, now will surely get the blame in some quarters for the homelessness crisis. Some will trumpet that this is further proof that housing first doesn’t work. Others (including me) will point to the lack of resources for not only housing but also related services, and how these increases come at the heels of the rollback of COVID era assistance programs. As a rule, when homelessness increases the rhetoric gets sharper, emotions get more intense, and middle ground shrinks which makes responses, even temporary accommodating responses, harder to implement. And toning down polemic is not really in the playbook of the incoming administration.

Homelessness increased again, pretty substantially, in the over-age 55 population. This something I’ve been researching for awhile, and is one more sign that this population continues to age (see here). With this trend will come more tragic stories and avoidable deaths.

One of the few bright spots, heralded by HUD, that counters the overall trends has been the continued reduction in the number of homeless veterans. I was part of the VA’s efforts to end homelessness among veterans back when this became a priority in the Obama Administration, and its rewarding to see that these efforts have continued to bear fruit. For me, the lesson we learn here is that when there is a bipartisan effort and adequate resources devoted to homelessness, as there has been with veterans, then reductions follow. If we treated each homeless individual as we treat homeless veterans, there’d be much less homelessness out there.