Homelessness appears to have fallen in the last year of the Biden administration, according to local counts reported to the federal government but not yet released under President Trump, an analysis of the local data shows.
A large sample of the counts, taken in January 2025 and compiled by The New York Times, suggests the homeless population shrank by tens of thousands of people nationwide from the record level set the previous year, though the number remained high by historical norms.
The tally includes jurisdictions that typically contain about two-thirds of homeless people, making it a meaningful if inexact preview of the national count, which the government has normally published by now.
“A sample of this size shows there’s been a decline in homelessness across the country,” said Dennis P. Culhane, an expert on homelessness data at the University of Pennsylvania who reviewed the figures at The Times’s request. For nearly two decades, Mr. Culhane helped lead the research team that compiled the nationwide count.
A national drop in homelessness would be the first in eight years.
While the count is usually announced in December, a spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development wrote in an emailed statement that “there is no standard timeline” for its release and declined to say when it would be made public. “HUD is on pace to produce a thorough and comprehensive” report, he added.
Mr. Trump has cited record levels of homelessness in calling for tough new policies. An executive order issued in July cited the number of people living outdoors down to the digit in calling for camping bans, forced treatment for addiction and mental health, and an end to Housing First programs, which provide long-term housing with no preconditions. Evidence that homelessness fell before Mr. Trump took office may complicate the rancorous debate.
Though the measure covers the last year of the Biden administration, some conservatives say it vindicates Mr. Trump’s get-tough call for camping bans, which many jurisdictions had already adopted. Critics of Mr. Trump’s plans note homelessness fell fastest in cities hit by an earlier surge of asylum seekers, suggesting the record spike was anomalous and temporary.
After a decade of modest declines, homelessness began a slow rise in 2017, then soared by a third from 2022 to 2024. By January 2024, 771,000 people were homeless, according to the government’s count, and more than a third lived outdoors, as opposed to in shelters.
The spike accelerated conservatives’ attacks on what they called permissive policies, like tolerance of encampments, while progressives cited the asylum crisis; rising rents, which increased during the coronavirus pandemic; and the expiration of pandemic-era aid.
The data collected by The Times suggests that the asylum crisis did increase homelessness and that the migrants’ impact is waning. Homelessness fell 60 percent in Chicago, 25 percent in Denver and 9 percent in Washington. All are Democratic-led cities where homelessness soared after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, sent tens of thousands of migrants to protest President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s border policy.
New York City, where Mr. Abbott bused the most migrants, would not disclose its 2025 homelessness count. But Mr. Culhane, compiling public data from shelters and other sources, estimated homelessness in the city fell 10 percent or more, a drop of roughly 14,000 people. “Critics blamed homelessness policy for what was mostly a migration issue,” he said.
Homelessness also fell in places less affected by asylum seekers, suggesting other forces are in play. It dropped about 9 percent in Minnesota and Florida and nearly 11 percent in Maine.
Nearly 400 local groups, called continuums of care, conduct the “Point in Time” counts in January and submit the numbers to HUD. A private research group, Abt Global, checks the data and drafts a report, which HUD typically reviews and publishes by the end of the year.
To assess the national trend, The Times collected a large sample of 2025 data by contacting the local groups, compiling figures posted on their websites, and confirming notable changes with public officials and others who monitor local trends. Not all local groups release the data.
With figures from areas that usually hold about two-thirds of the unhoused population, the sample found homelessness falling 7 percent. Mr. Culhane, noting The Times’s sample overweighted big cities with steep declines, projected a nationwide decline of 3 to 5 percent.
“That is still the first drop in many years and one of the most significant on record,” he said.
Even so, the numbers are all but certain to remain well above pre-Covid levels and much higher even than in 2023.
The annual count is an imperfect measure that combines data from shelters with a one-night effort, aided by volunteers, to tally people sleeping outdoors. It can be affected by bad weather or inflated by victims of natural disasters, and most experts argue it undercounts homeless people. But it is the main national measure, and as a consistent yardstick it reflects trends.
The unusual timing of the 2025 report has stirred suspicion among Mr. Trump’s critics, who argue the administration suppresses data it dislikes. After the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported slow job growth last summer, Mr. Trump fired its commissioner. After enacting deep nutrition cuts, the administration ended its annual report on food insecurity.
Outside of two pandemic years, the release of the homelessness report, which Congress requires, will come later than any since at least 2012.
According to the local counts, homelessness appears to have stabilized or dropped in California, the state with the largest unhoused population and one that has had especially vivid struggles with encampments. A full state count is not yet available, but data from 30 of the 44 continuums of care collected by Joe Colletti of the Hub for Urban Initiatives, a research group, found a decline of more than 4 percent. The numbers include Los Angeles, where the homeless population, by far the state’s largest, fell nearly 5 percent.
“That is promising because, often, where California goes, so goes the nation,” said Ann Oliva, the chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an advocacy group.
In Denver, where the number of homeless people fell by 3,500 in a year, Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, said the city had faced intertwined crises of migration and homegrown need. It sheltered migrants as they searched for work or housing, often in other states, while closing encampments and using pandemic aid to build 1,200 units of hotel-style housing.
“Contrary to popular belief, this is a solvable problem,” Mr. Johnston said of the homelessness crisis.
Nationally the decline seems about as large among people sleeping outdoors as it is among those in shelters, if not more so. That is significant because the unsheltered homeless population has a high death rate and because the surge of people living on the streets, many with addiction or mental health problems, raises concerns about public safety.
In a recent State of the State address, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, celebrated the drop of people living on the streets. “The number of unsheltered homeless people in California dropped 9 percent,” he said, citing a figure from the Urban Initiatives group’s partial tally. “We have not seen a drop like this in a decade and a half,” he said.
Unsheltered homelessness fell 10 percent in Los Angeles, 19 percent in Florida, and 26 percent in Denver, according to the local counts.
Policy lessons remain open to debate.
“If the trend is in the right direction, it could reasonably be argued that enforcement is working,” said Stephen Eide of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group. Camping bans grew at the end of the Biden administration, he noted, because the Supreme Court ruled they were legal.
While homeless people are often described as having no place to go, he said, encampment closures push them to pursue work or treatment or stay with family or friends. “People do have options,” he said.
But others say closures work only when coupled with services and adequate housing, in shelters or long-term dwellings. California has spent $900 million on “encampment resolution” grants that can be used for outreach and housing subsidies.
“L.A. has made progress not through criminalization but by getting people into interim housing,” often in motels, said Benjamin Henwood, who runs the Homelessness Policy Research Institute at the University of Southern California. “The question is whether that’s financially sustainable.”
Even as homelessness fell nationwide, progress was highly uneven. The diverse locations where local counts show homelessness grew include Philadelphia (6 percent), San Antonio (7 percent), the D.C. suburbs (9 percent) and Kentucky (11 percent).
In Utah, where homelessness rose 18 percent, Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, is planning what he calls a homeless services campus and critics call a detention camp. A 16-acre site on the edge of Salt Lake City would hold up to 1,300 people, some involuntarily.
The release of the full 2025 count may draw heightened attention because it follows record growth and because of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overhaul policy. His effort to shift billions in aid from unconditional Housing First programs to those with treatment mandates was recently blocked in federal court.
But Ms. Oliva, who oversaw the HUD office that compiles the Point in Time count, warned against excessive focus on one year’s count. While the first drop in many years is welcome, she said, it is not a trend, and progress will be hard to sustain without more affordable housing.
“Housing markets are still incredibly tight,” she said.
Jason DeParle is a Times reporter who covers poverty in the United States.
The post Homelessness Appears to Decline, Reversing a Yearslong Trend appeared first on New York Times.
