Dear reader,
Over the past few years, we’ve found that one of the first answers city leaders give when asked how they’ll address rising homelessness is to build various forms of emergency shelter. But we’ve also seen why this has not proved to be a scalable solution to the long-term challenge of homelessness.
This week, in our exploration of numbers that help us understand our world, we’re taking a look at the conundrum of shelter beds. Our colleague Aidan Gardiner has reported a look at how these facilities fit among approaches to addressing housing insecurity, and how the Trump administration is changing the shelter system.
— Matt Thompson
How many beds are available at homeless shelters?
At the latest count, in 2024, there were 421,973 emergency shelter beds nationwide available to people experiencing homelessness — the most since the federal government started tracking them in 2007. The number of beds is tallied annually on a single night in January, when communities try to count the number of people living outside or in shelters, before sending their data to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
An emergency shelter can vary from a church basement with a few beds to a large dormitory with rows of bunks or a facility with private rooms for whole families. They are typically operated by governments or nonprofits with government funding.
Recently, Western states have added many beds. California’s supply tripled over the past decade to 61,387, according to the latest data from HUD. As homelessness in the region increased in recent years, local officials invested more in shelters, which had been more common in the Northeast and Midwest, said Dennis Culhane, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Both the federal and local governments have recognized the need to devote more resources to addressing homelessness, which seems to have dipped in 2025 after a record high. But shelters can’t keep up. Hundreds of thousands more people are in need of a bed than there are beds available, Culhane said. California’s additional beds aren’t enough for the state’s 187,000 homeless people.
The number of beds available is “woefully insufficient,” said Marcy Thompson, a vice president at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “There are simply not enough resources either to prevent homelessness or to respond to homelessness if it can’t be prevented,” she said.
What are shelters like in the U.S.?
Emergency shelters in the U.S. once required guests to follow fairly strict rules, like observing curfews and sleeping in gender-segregated quarters. To get access to so-called transitional housing programs that allowed for longer stays than shelters did, residents needed to follow yet more rules, like passing drug tests or undergoing mental health treatment. It was thought that these requirements would help people become more stable and eventually provide for their own housing needs.
But this approach proved expensive and counterproductive. Facilities ended up serving those who were easiest to help and evicting those who were the most challenging. Without access to transitional housing programs, many people remained in shelters or on the street, often becoming chronically homeless.
“You suddenly had people experiencing homelessness for longer and longer periods of time,” Thompson said.
The Bush and Obama administrations promoted a different approach to transitional housing, however, and funded so-called Housing First programs, which housed people for longer periods with fewer extra requirements. Most studies show that these programs significantly improved people’s housing stability, at least for a year or two.
Though emergency shelters are helpful for people hoping to immediately get off the streets, experts say they don’t help solve long-term homelessness, serving only as temporary solutions. They help during a narrow window of someone’s life, when they’re experiencing an acute crisis over a few days or weeks. But the longer someone stays in a shelter, experts say, the harder it becomes for them to find stability.
A few years ago, the Headway team spoke with dozens of people who had experienced homelessness, many of whom confirmed the limitations of shelters. Some said that shelters helped for a while, but they also reported dirty facilities, thefts, sleep disruptions, strict curfews and threats of violence. Among other things, these conditions could make it difficult for them to apply for and keep jobs.
How is the shelter system changing?
The Trump administration has signaled that it wants to do away with Housing First approaches, and fund only programs that require people to meet certain criteria to gain access to longer-term housing.
Local governments are already making changes in this direction. Utah is building a site with 1,300 beds, 800 of which will be set aside for involuntary treatment, which has raised serious concerns over civil liberties.
“It might mirror a detention camp sort of setting,” Thompson said. Utah’s site follows a broader pattern at the local and federal levels of criminalizing homelessness and forcing institutionalization. “That’s what we’re fearful of, and wanting to get ahead of,” Thompson said.
Elsewhere across the country, more effort is being put into preventing homelessness:
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Programs meant to limit evictions, as in Philadelphia, have spread throughout the country.
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Nonprofits in states like Michigan and Connecticut are helping people pursue more stable options than shelters.
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In Los Angeles, county health officials are using artificial intelligence to identify at-risk households, as state legislators try to develop a statewide prevention strategy.
But more than anything, many experts say, the country needs more homes. “If you only keep building more shelter and you don’t invest in affordable housing,” Thompson said, “you’re only going to always need more shelter.”
What can I check out next?
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The Department of Housing and Urban Development provides a detailed annual report about the state of homelessness. The National Alliance to End Homelessness provides more analysis of that data.
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In December, Jason DeParle of The Times examined studies of Housing First outcomes.
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To better understand shelters, Culhane stayed in facilities in Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C., then wrote a history of the shelter system.
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CalMatters rounded up the various ways that California is trying to prevent people from losing housing.
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In 2023, Headway published a wide-ranging series about homelessness in America. We interviewed over 30 people who told us about their lives, including their time in shelters.
— Aidan Gardiner
Your turn
Test your knowledge: New York’s right to shelter laws, requiring the city to house anyone who is homeless, posed a critical challenge in recent years with the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants. From May 2023 to June 2025, the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan served as a shelter for the new arrivals. What’s the minimum number of immigrants estimated to have passed through its doors during that time?
Tell us your thoughts: Have you experienced homelessness and spent time in an emergency shelter? What was your experience, and did it help you eventually secure more permanent housing? Are there programs other than emergency shelters in your community that help address homelessness? Email your thoughts to [email protected].
Aidan Gardiner contributed reporting.
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
The post There Are More Shelter Beds Than Ever. It’s Not Enough. appeared first on New York Times.
