Homelessness got worse in 2024. This is not a surprise to anyone who reads a newspaper or watches TV news.
With eight million illegal aliens pouring into the United States — many of whom were illiterate with no marketable job skills — the states and cities that were forced to deal with the crisis eventually had to start kicking people out of shelters. An enraged public forced the political decision to do so on local politicians as residents saw money going to newcomers while their neighborhoods were rotting away.
Homelessness rose as much in 2023-24 as it did for the entire two decades previously. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released its annual Point-in-Time (PIT) count of the homeless in America. The PIT is released each January by local homeless service providers.
According to the HUD survey, 771,480 people were homeless in January 2024. Of those, 497,256 were "sheltered" homeless, meaning they were sleeping in an emergency shelter or transitional housing. Another 274,224 people were "unsheltered" homeless who slept outside, in vehicles, abandoned buildings, or other areas not fit for human habitation.
The top-line figure represents a remarkable 18 percent increase in the country's homeless population. That increase is even more shocking when one considers that the country's homeless population grew by 19 percent between 2007 and 2024. Near two decades' worth of growth in the homeless population occurred between 2023 and 2024.
Startling topline figure from this year's homelessness census. Almost the entire increase in homelessness over the past 17 years occurred between 2023 and 2024. Obviously, that masks a lot of annual ups and downs, but still pic.twitter.com/W9MZJXKf20
— Christian Britschgi (@christianbrits)A year-over-year comparison pic.twitter.com/eKA2YrkFlV
— Christian Britschgi (@christianbrits) December 30, 2024
The cost of housing is beyond ridiculous, made so by hundreds of regulations governing how homes are built, heated, cooled, and sold, among other minutiae demanded by state and federal regulators. The blizzard of regulations adds tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of homes, pricing them out of reach of most ordinary people.
In 2021, the National Association of Home Builders estimated that regulations added more than $98,000 to the cost of a new home. Building codes alone add more than $15,000 to the cost of a new house.
Regulations account for 40% of apartment complex development costs. Is it any wonder that aside from luxury homes and apartments, very little affordable housing is being constructed?
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why.
The PIT survey found a record 39% annual increase in homeless families with children. The population of homeless individuals grew by only 9.6%, while the veteran homelessness number was the only figure to show a decline. It dropped to 7.6%.
Most of the families who are homeless live in shelters or transitional housing. But there are a significant number of migrant families who remain "unhoused."
"You combine the increase in family homelessness and the increase in sheltered homelessness, it looks like this is overwhelmingly driven by the migrant surge," says Judge Glock, director of research for the Manhattan Institute.
That surge of migrants was uneven throughout the United States. Up to "75 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness over the past two years can be attributed to rising shelter populations in Massachusetts, metro Denver, New York City, and Chicago," reports Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute. It's no coincidence that those cities all have liberal "right to shelter" laws.
The Times reported earlier this summer on a rise in tent encampments in the city, populated by migrants who'd been evicted from the city's shelter system after staying the new maximum of 30 days.
Judge Glock, director of research for the Manhattan Institute, says right-to-shelter policies also pull people into the shelter system and into free temporary housing where they're counted as homeless. Places without right-to-shelter policies have lower overall rates of homelessness, suggesting migrants exiting shelters will find housing on their own.
Homelessness is not the fault of capitalism. If the supply and demand for single-family and multi-family dwellings were left to the market, homelessness would still be a problem but not nearly as serious as the current crisis.
Nor can the left blame Republicans. Joe Biden, a Democrat, had been in office for four years, during which time the homelessness problem exploded. Big-city mayors are almost all Democrats. Biden left the doors to the Southern border wide open, and 8 million illegal aliens walked through. States like California continue to pile regulation upon regulation, making housing construction a nightmare.
If America is going to get serious about the shortage of affordable housing, someone is going to have to take a meat ax to federal, state, and local regulations that make it impossible to supply residents with enough housing.
Are you listening, Elon? Are you listening, Vivek?
