The federal government is hoping you, the public, won’t notice that homelessness in America reached an all-time high last year. That was the impression given by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) when it quietly released the 2024 annual homelessness report on the Friday between Christmas, Hannukah, and New Year’s. Nationwide, 771,480 people were experiencing homelessness in 2024, an 18 percent increase from the year before and the highest number on record.
The HUD administration attributes this record-setting number to a lack of affordable housing, systemic racism, and rising inflation. Impossible to hide, the report also highlights the strain caused by a surge in migrants and asylum seekers: “new arrivals” made up 13,600 of Chicago’s sheltered population and caused a 39 percent increase in families experiencing homelessness nationwide.
What isn’t mentioned may be just as telling. In all 117 pages of the report, the words “Fentanyl,” “addiction,” or “mental health” do not make a single appearance. For the 274,224 people living on the streets, in encampments, or in vehicles in 2024, we know from their own reporting that the majority face untreated addiction and mental illness and say it contributed to their homelessness. (READ MORE: Make America Mentally Healthy (Again))
Surely such a dramatic increase in subsidized housing would be accompanied by a decrease in homelessness.
Yet HUD, politicians, the media, and institutional experts espouse housing as a panacea for the nation’s homelessness crisis. Lack of affordable housing, we are told, is the single root cause of homelessness. The solution is fully subsidized housing with no strings attached, a policy formally adopted by the federal government in 2013 and known as “Housing First.” According to a graph in the HUD report, as permanent supportive housing units have more than doubled since 2007, unsheltered homelessness has increased 7.2 percent in the same time period.
If it were the solution, surely such a dramatic increase in subsidized housing would be accompanied by a decrease in homelessness. But the opposite is true, which is why Dr. Robert Marbut, former Director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, says, “The data proves ‘Housing First’ is not the solution, it is the problem.”
In Seattle, where the population experiencing homelessness is the third highest in the nation, two records were set last year that should draw further skepticism of a causal link between housing supply and the visible reality of unsheltered homelessness. The Seattle Times reported that a record-shattering 12,730 housing units were opened in 2024. This is good news, but the Seattle region also counted a staggering new high of 9,810 people living unsheltered last year.
Without a doubt, the nation needs more housing affordable to all income levels, but conflating housing demand with the rise in unsheltered homelessness is a fatal blow to the Americans overdosing alone in subsidized housing, losing limbs to xylazine-laced fentanyl, or selling their bodies in encampments to fund the next potentially lethal dose.
Progressive leadership has denied this reality lest it invoke some measure of collective moral courage to intervene and mandate individual accountability. Still, that courage and accountability have been provided by hundreds of private organizations this year that transform lives marred by the effects of homelessness, addiction, and broken relationships. Many of them, programs that require treatment, are prohibited from receiving HUD funding due to “Housing First.”
As the largest federal spender on homelessness, HUD doled out over $3.2 billion in 2024 and plans to spend $3.5 billion this year. If incoming leadership renews a commonsense focus on the whole person, not merely the four walls around them, America can hope for a 2025 homelessness report that the government has no reason to hide from the public.
READ MORE:
The Phantom National Homelessness Crisis
Seattle’s Policies Are Killing Drug Addicts
Make America Mentally Healthy (Again)
Caitlyn McKenney is a research fellow for Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. Her work has centered on government fiscal accountability, political rhetoric, and addiction with a focus on human dignity ethics. McKenney has written for the British Journal of Psychiatry and the Federalist and has made local and national media appearances.
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