After years of increasing to record-high levels, the homeless population in the U.S. dropped more than 6% in 2025. That amounts to roughly 49,000 fewer people without housing. It’s the second year in a row that homelessness has declined, with a smaller drop in 2024.

“President Trump’s actions to secure the border, get criminal illegals off our streets, and restore safety to our communities drove a historic decrease in homelessness,” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner said in a press release announcing the results of an annual count in communities around the country. The agency had not yet posted a detailed report.

A second independent analysis based on the same count, but commissioned by the advocacy group National Alliance to End Homelessness, found a similar decline but credited different reasons for it.

“It’s good news that more people are getting housed, and that the programs that are funded by Congress are working,” said CEO Ann Oliva.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    This is horseshit and everyone involved knows it.

    The methodologies for measuring this are a clusterfuck mess, housing is more expensive, decent paying jobs are below keeping up with working age population growth, thats the main driver of homelessness, not being able to afford to live somewhere legally (duh?!), so obviously homelessness is up massively.

    Source is me, I used to do analytics and basically half the computer backend shit for a large homeless-serving nonprofit.

    The closest you can get to reasonable estimates are proxying unique indvidual/family ‘demand’ for some kind of help, vs how many you can serve.

    The problem is that there are 10k tiny organizations that serve the homeless, and they all have entirely different standards for tracking that kind of shit across the US (often that standard is ‘we dont really do that at all’), its not possible to merge all the data in an accurate and meaningful way.

    Beyond that, tons of people are homeless, and don’t seek help, because they (often correctly) see it as a waste of time. Or, they seek help, and just waste a month or three, failing to fully qualify and then getting handed to some other org who doesnt have an opening or oops they missed a deadline for some paperwork or they couldnt return a call because their phone was dead, etc etc.

    How do you count homeless people that live in their car?

    That live on the streets and are constantly moving?

    That live on the streets and are staying in one place, after the Grants Pass decision made that a crime?

    That are squatting illegally and secretly in a derelict building?

    The current Point In Time count, last time I worked the data for it… when I proxied it by our unserved ‘demand’ vs what qualified for the PIT, I came away with something like ‘multiply our PIT # by at least 3, possibly 4 or even 5, for an actual realistic count’.

    That was 2022.

    I’d love to be able to prove this outright, but in 2023 a series of calamities happened to me and I then became homeless, so I kinda lost all my stuff.

    But yeah, this is horseshit, the PIT counts are a joke.