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, parks, and 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.
How many people are homeless in California?
In January 2024, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that approximately 187,00 people were experiencing homelessness in California, a 6% increase from the previous year. California accounts for about 25% of the nation’s homeless population, and has the highest number of unhoused people in the nation,.
Los Angeles has the second-largest homeless population of any city in the nation and first in the state, with approximately 75,000 people. San Diego and San Jose, with a 10,000 homeless population each, come in second and third in the state, and Oakland, with 9,700, comes in fourth, while San Francisco has about 8,000 people homeless people, fifth in the state. San Jose has about 6,000 homeless people.
Related: California Gov. Gavin Newsom announces funding for anti-homelessness programs
Lack of affordable housing making homelessness problem worse
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.
Some of that has changed since January when the count was taken, officials said. In June, President Joe Biden took executive action to limit the number of illegal border crossings, which officials said had reduced the strain on shelters. Denver and Chicago recently announced an end to their migrant shelters.
Communities in Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chester County, Pennsylvania, notably saw a drop in their homelessness counts in 2024, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
‘Struggling with a high-cost rental market, Los Angeles increased the availability of housing for individuals and families experiencing homelessness, combining Federal, City, and County funds. This led to a decline in homelessness for the first time in 7 years. Unsheltered homelessness declined by 5% since 2023,” HUD wrote in a press release.
Two people experiencing homelessness, Tonya and Troy, vacate private property being used as a homeless encampment with the assistance of New Philadelphia Police officers on April 5, 2024, in New Philadelphia, Ohio. They had to turn around and use another, more stable egress route. The land is private property and prior notice to evict was given months before. Tonya has maintained that the property is hers.
Homeless population likely larger than counted
Every community across the U.S. receiving HUD funding is required to tally their homeless population, said Adam Ruege, a data analyst who works with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and tracks homeless populations in more than 100 communities across the country.
Related: Reaction to Newsom’s homelessness directive runs gamut from praise to criticism
But because the count is conducted each January, the number calculated for unsheltered homeless populations is “fundamentally an undercount,” Ruege said, because people try to seek any form of shelter they can during winter, including cars and other structures not meant for human habitation.
The annual nationwide count is also inherently flawed because it captures data from just a single moment out of the year, he said.
“It’s just one point in time, it’s a picture, a photograph, as opposed to a video” Ruege said.
Glen Garner, who is homeless, tries to cool off in the 99-degree heat in Edward Rendon Sr. Park at Festival Beach in Austin, Texas, on July 1, 2024. “It’s tough,” he said of trying to survive the extreme heat.
Veteran homelessness drops as crisis grows overall
The Biden administration made progress reducing homelessness among veterans: That population decreased nearly 12% during the president’s term. From 2023 to 2024, the number of homeless veterans decreased from 35,000 to 32,800, a drop of about 7.5%, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This fall, the department announced veteran homelessness is at its lowest level ever since tracking began in 2009.
But this year’s increase in the overall homeless population is a repeat of the increase from 2022 to 2023, and marks the end of a two-year timeline set by Biden, when in 2022 he declared a goal of decreasing the nation’s homeless population by the end of his first term.
The federal government was more successful reducing homelessness among veterans in part because housing and mental health services from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs were strategically paired with resources from HUD, experts told USA TODAY.
“When we have bipartisan leadership, when we have resources at the scale of need and we have smart program design and policy, we can actually drive down the numbers,” Oliva said.
Ruege also said government’s veteran-specific resources mean they have solutions on-hand when someone becomes at-risk of homelessness.
“The reality is when the federal government, Congress and the White House dedicate resources in a bipartisan way, you’re going to see results, and we see that with veterans because of the strong safety net veterans have,” Ruege said.
Wider safety net needed, policymakers say
Veteran homelessness has declined by over 55% since 2009, according to HUD, and similar progress can be made with the entire U.S. homeless population if resources are deployed similarly to tackle all homelessness, said Marion McFadden, HUD’s principal deputy assistant secretary for community planning and development.
“We need to assume that every single person is housing ready,” McFadden told USA TODAY. “You don’t have to pre-qualify by going through some kind of treatment or getting ready to be in a house.”
The drop in veteran homelessness came after housing officials waived up-front requirements and expanded income eligibility cut-offs for homeless veterans in Los Angeles, said Richard Monocchio, HUD’s principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Public and Indian Housing.
“Income verification takes time, and if you’ve been living on the street or in a van, or in a shelter, you might not have immediate access to these documents,” Monocchio told USA TODAY. “We said, ‘we are going to presume that these homeless people that don’t have housing are eligible.'”
In Los Angeles, which along with New York City has the nation’s largest homeless population, veteran homelessness declined by nearly a quarter between 2023 and 2024, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
It’s about giving people “breathing room,” McFadden said, and making it easier for them to access resources they’re entitled to.
“When someone’s life is consumed by their need for housing, they shouldn’t have to be experts in federal statutes and regulations,” she said.
Contributing: Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: How many people were homeless in the US in 2024? And in California?