Dear reader,
So far in Headway’s weekly conversation about the numbers that help us understand our world, we’ve been considering babies — how many are being born and how many are dying. This week, we’re looking at a different type of figure, the annual count of how many Americans are living either unsheltered or in temporary shelters.
Headway has spent more time considering homelessness than any other issue. The nation’s annual effort to quantify it is particularly fraught — most everyone agrees it significantly understates the actual degree of homelessness — and it has only grown more so in the past couple years, as changes in the legal landscape have led to crackdowns on encampments nationwide.
But despite the flaws in the official count, it’s also seen as a useful yardstick to understand the extent of homelessness in the U.S. And as our colleague Anna Diamond recounts below, the official count of homelessness in 2025 is unavailable. It’s one of several indicators that have gone missing as we’ve been planning this series. Read on for more from Anna about what we know about the spread of homelessness in the U.S.
— Matt Thompson
How is homelessness counted?
Every year, toward the end of January, thousands of social workers, public safety officers and volunteers spread throughout their communities to see how many people are experiencing homelessness, an exercise known as the point-in-time count. Typically, the Department of Housing and Urban Development compiles and sends the local counts to Congress before the year’s end.
Though the tally is seen as an imperfect undercount, it remains the country’s most authoritative measure of homelessness. It includes people who are sheltered (living in emergency shelters and transitional housing) and people who are unsheltered (sleeping outside or in places not meant for habitation, such as cars and transit stations). The last reported count, in 2024, showed a dramatic rise in homelessness, which the Trump administration has referenced as a reason for big changes to longstanding federal policy.
But we still don’t have official numbers for 2025, even with the count for 2026 underway. The administration has given no indication of when 2025’s numbers will be released.
Jason DeParle, who covers poverty and the count each year for The Times, compiled a sample of local data from the 2025 count, and his analysis suggests homelessness declined for the first time in eight years.
What does the count reveal?
In 2023 and 2024, the counts were especially big news: Homelessness hit record highs both years. An 18 percent jump in 2024 was the greatest year-over-year increase since data collection began, putting the total number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night at 771,480.
Double-digit jumps two years in a row most likely reflected a moment when two crises converged. Dennis Culhane, a leading expert on homelessness, attributes most of the spike to the increasing number of migrants who were seeking access to homeless services. He saw especially huge jumps in sanctuary cities, like Chicago, Denver and New York City, where Republican governors had bused migrants across state lines.
DeParle’s unofficial count supports this theory: In 2025, homelessness fell in these cities as migrants’ demand on resources subsided. Still, as DeParle noted in his analysis, homelessness remains high compared with historical standards. “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,” he wrote.
How are policies on homelessness changing?
For years, the U.S. was making slow but steady progress to lower the rate of homelessness. Between 2007 and 2017, it declined 15 percent. This is often attributed to Housing First, a philosophy that prioritizes stable, long-term housing for people in need that was adopted under the George W. Bush administration. For years it received bipartisan support.
Nationally, there was a 5 percent increase between 2018 and 2022, in large part because of rising housing costs that outpaced income. The growth was especially acute on the West Coast, which, according to Culhane, saw a 57 percent jump in unsheltered homelessness between 2015 and 2022.
As homelessness became more visible, Housing First drew more criticism from the right. Conservatives argued that permissive policies around encampments were worsening the crisis. In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled in June 2024 that local governments could ban public camping and sleeping, even if alternatives were not available to unsheltered people. By the end of the year, more than 100 cities had banned homeless camping.
After returning to office, President Trump issued an executive order that calls for unhoused people to be involuntarily institutionalized, and proposed budget cuts and changes to how funding is distributed, which targets Housing First. Those cuts have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
What can I read next?
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What does the count look like across the country? Times reporters joined counters in four communities in 2023 to better understand the survey.
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Sarah Maslin Nir offers a look at the hidden homeless in New York: people who are “doubled up” in overcrowded apartments, but are not included in the count.
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The significant decline in veteran homelessness has been used as evidence of Housing First’s promise, and was celebrated during Trump’s first term. But his new approach may endanger that success.
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Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle report from Utah on the development of a large-scale involuntary addiction and mental health treatment center, which follows Trump’s vision for addressing homelessness.
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What is homelessness really like? Headway interviewed 30 people about their experiences.
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Permanent supportive housing is one pathway out of homelessness and to stability. For Headway, Andy Newman reported from the Lenniger Residences, a permanent supportive housing complex in New York City, to show us what life looks like after homelessness.
— Anna Diamond
Your turn
Test your knowledge: More than 900,000 students were in the New York City public school system in the 2024-25 school year. How many were estimated to be experiencing homelessness, including by living doubled up?
Tell us your thoughts: What have you noticed about homelessness in your community? Does it seem more or less prevalent now than it has in years past? Please email your thoughts to [email protected].
What we heard: In last week’s letter on infant mortality in the U.S., one of the experts we quoted likened the statistic to a mirror of society. Those of you who wrote in expanded on that theme, pointing out that the uneven rates of Americans who die in infancy reflect the nation’s deep inequalities.
In sadly related news, the same day our newsletter went out, The Times covered the aftermath of a house fire in Queens, where a mother and her 17-day-old baby had died in an illegal basement apartment.
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 Why Don’t We Know How Many People Are Homeless? appeared first on New York Times.
