Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
10 facts about homelessness in America
10 facts about homelessness in America
Jul 1, 2025 2:48 PM

The homeless represent the most vulnerable portion of Americans living in poverty. The latest U.S. government report on homelessness shows that a culture ofsecularism and statism isdepriving Americans of church philanthropy, curbing the free market’s ability to provide,and leaving the most vulnerablereliant on the government – or the mercy of the streets.

The Council of Economic Advisers detailed their conditions in itsreporton “The State of Homelessness in America,” released last week. It found that “rent controls” may have priced homeless Americans out of an affordable home, permissive policies may increase homelessness, and those with no connection to a church or munity are 60 percent more likely to end up homeless.

Here are the facts you need to know:

1.Half a million Americans are homeless. Someone is counted homeless if he or she “lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). “In January 2018, 552,830 people were counted as homeless in the United States. Of those, 194,467 (35 percent) were unsheltered” – or living on the streets – “and 358,363 (65 percent) were sheltered” in temporary housing. “The overall homeless population on a single night represents 0.2 percent of the U.S. population, or 17 people per 10,000 in the population,” the report says.

2.Nearly half of all Americans sleeping on the streets live in California. “Almost half (47 percent) of all unsheltered homeless people in the United States are found in California, about four times as high as their share of the overall United States population. Among the five cities with the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness, four are in California (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Rosa, and San Jose), and the other is Seattle.”

3.But East Coast cities have the highest rate of homelessness – and Washington, D.C. ranks worst. “Compared to a national rate of 17 homeless people per 10,000, the cities … with the highest rates of overall homelessness are Washington, DC (103 per 10,000), Boston, MA (102 per 10,000), and New York, NY (101 per 10,000).” More than 20 percent of all homeless people live in New York City. “These cities each have homelessness rates that are over 6 times as high as the overall U.S rate,” and the level of sheltered homelessness is eight-times the national average (11 per 10,000).

4.The homeless have high rates of mental illness, substance abuse, and previous incarceration. According to HUD’s 2018 annual homelessness count, “111,122 homeless people (20 percent) had a severe mental illness and 86,647 homeless people (16 percent) suffered from chronic substance abuse. Among all adults who used shelter at some point in 2017, 44 percent had a disability.” The department also found that nine percent of U.S. homeless had spent time in a jail or correctional facility. However, HUD may have undercounted this population, as other surveys found up to four-in-10 homeless are alcoholics and an equal number have mental health issues.

5.Lack of connection to a church or munities increases homelessness. The report states that individuals with “weak social ties are more likely to e homeless.” It cites a study that found “the lifetime incidence of homelessness is reduced by 60 percent for individuals with strong ties to family, munities, and friends.”

6.Accounting tricks make it hard to know if U.S. homelessness has increased or decreased since 2007. The federal government has shifted from promoting transitional housing (offering homeless a room in a temporary housing facility) to rapid re-housing (offering assistance to defray the cost of moving into and renting a private home). The government does not count those in rapid re-housing as homeless. “The approximately 110,000 bed reduction in transitional housing between 2007 and 2018 has been almost fully offset by an approximately 109,000 bed increase in rapid rehousing,” the report states. “[I]t is not clear that people living in one type of program are more ‘homeless’ than people living in the other type.”

7. California’s homeless crisis is due to more than the weather. While California’s mild temperatures may facilitate unsheltered homelessness, they cannot account for its disproportionate share of the homeless problem. “Florida and Arizona have unsheltered homeless populations lower than what would be expected given the temperatures, home prices and poverty rates in munities. Meanwhile, the unsheltered homeless population is over twice as large as expected—given the temperatures, home prices and poverty rates in munities—in [s]tates including Hawaii, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington [s]tate.” The report said government policies, including “the extent of policing of street activities may play a role in these differences.”

8.Government policies to reduce homelessness may have made the situation worse.“Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. are each subject to right-to-shelter laws that guarantee shelter availability of a given quality. These places each have rates of sheltered homelessness at least 2.7 times as high as the rate in every other city, and this difference cannot be explained by their weather, home prices, and poverty rates. Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. also have substantially higher rates of overall homelessness than almost every other city, suggesting that most people being sheltered would not otherwise sleep on the street.”

9. Government housing regulations made the problem worse. The report states that the cost of median rent and homelessness rise in lockstep, finding a virtually one-to-one ratio. “A central driver of higher home prices in munities is the heavy regulation of housing markets by localities,” the report says. This includes “overly restrictive zoning and growth management controls; rent controls; cumbersome building and rehabilitation codes; excessive energy and water efficiency mandates; unreasonable maximum-density allowances; historic preservation requirements; overly burdensome wetland or environmental regulations; outdated manufactured-housing regulations and restrictions; undue parking requirements; cumbersome and time-consuming permitting and review procedures; tax policies that discourage investment or reinvestment; plex labor requirements; and inordinate impact or developer fees.”

10. Housing deregulation could wipe out the majority of homelessness in San Francisco.“We find that for the 11 metropolitan areas with housing regulations that drive home prices significantly above home production costs (which contain 42 percent of the United States homeless population), deregulation would reduce homelessness by an average of 31 percent. Homelessness would fall by 54 percent in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 23 percent in New York City. Overall homelessness in the United States would fall by just under 72,000 people, or 13 percent.”

The Acton Institute exists to connect good intentions with sound economics. “Affordable housing policies” like rent control may have decreased housing supply, pricing the poorest Americans out of the market – and leaving them on the streets. bined with a permissive policy of turning a blind eye to non-violent street crime, may have increased the number of homeless and/or prolonged their stay on the streets.Finally, this report shows another danger of America’s secularized, atomized culture: Church membership significantly decreases the likelihood of homelessness. Christians seeking to reduce homelessnessshould support a greater role for churches and private philanthropies, and less government interference in the housing market.

This photo has been cropped.CC BY-SA 2.0.)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
9 Things You Should Know About Pope Francis
Early today, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina was elected as the 266th pope of the Catholic Church. Here are nine things you should know about Pope Francis. 1. Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires in 1936. His father was an Italian immigrant. 2. He’s the first pope from South America. The only remaining continents that have never had a e from their lands are Australia, Antarctica, and North America. 3. He’s the first Jesuit pope. 4. He...
The Utopian-Progressive Worldview: Feel Good First, Ask Questions Later
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) recently appeared on the MSNBC round-table discussion show Morning Joe and was asked by Senior Political Analyst Mark Halperin to give his personal take on the reality of a world where Obamacare is the law of the land. Here’s what transpired: JOHNSON: Well, it’s obviously the law of the land right now. Obviously, I’m concerned about it. I think that the cost estimate of Obamacare is grossly understated. I think far more Americans are going to...
5 TV Shows That Demonstrate the Importance of Ordinary Work
Television is often lamented for its propensity to exaggerate the mundane and the ordinary. Yet when es to something as routinely downplayed and unfairly pooh-poohed as our daily work—the “rat race,” the “grindstone,” yadda-yadda—I wonder if television’s over-the-top tendencies might be just what we need to reorient our thinking about the broader significance of our work. As I’ve argued previously, we face a constant temptation to limit our economic endeavors to the temporal and the material, focusing only on “putting...
What is Fair?
In their book, American Society: How It Really Works, authors Erik Wright and Joel Rogers make the case that when we talk about social injustice most Americans think in terms of some sort of material inequality that might be considered unfair and possibly remedied if our social institutions were different. There are multiple problems with this reduction but it is fair to say that this is a dominant conceptual framework in our culture today. As a result, one of the...
Acton Institute’s Rev. Robert A. Sirico Comments on the Election of Pope Francis
With the election of Pope Francis, the Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Rev. Robert A. Sirico released the following statement. “Pope Francis is a man of great spirituality who is known for mitment to doctrinal orthodoxy as well as for his simplicity of life,” Rev. Sirico said. “Like Benedict XVI, bines concern for the poor with an insistence that it’s not the Church’s responsibility to be a political actor or to prescribe precise solutions to economic...
Commentary: A Passion for Government Leads to Neglect of Our Neighbor
When government provision is expected in all areas of life we begin to neglect our personal obligations to our families and neighbors, says Dylan Pahman, assistant editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. “For the ancient Jews, intergenerational relations were a religious matter,” says Pahman. mand ‘honor your father and mother’ (cf. Exodus 20:12) served as a bridge between duties to God and duties to neighbors. Our situation today may be quite different than that faced by Jews in...
The Duck Commander’s Business as Mission
Taking a look at these videos will give you a pretty good idea of what the Duck Commander’s mission is. You’ll see how the popular A&E series Duck Dynasty, focusing on the lives of the Duck Commander products, embodies a vision of business as mission on a variety of levels. As Phil puts it, “we all are preachers.” Here’s Phil Robertson, the Duck Commander, describing his journey to faith in Jesus Christ: Here’s the Duck Commander on the origins of...
Rev. Sirico: Don’t Underestimate Benedict’s Silent Influence
New Delhi TV recently published a Agence Franch-Presse report describing the former pope’s “invisible presence at conclave:” Retired pope Benedict XVI is gone but far from forgotten as cardinals begin voting for candidates to replace him, with his personal secretary Georg Gaenswein one of the last to leave the Sistine Chapel before the start of the conclave. Rev. Robert Sirico addresses Benedict’s influence on the conclave: Benedict has “been very careful not to insert himself into the proceedings” for his...
Charlie Self on Spiritual Empowerment in Work and Economics
AEI’s Values & Capitalism recently posted an interview with Dr. Charlie Self, professor at Assemblies of God Theological Seminary and senior advisor for the Acton Institute. In the last few weeks, I’ve posted several excerpts from Self’s new book, Flourishing Churches and Communities: A Pentecostal Primer on Faith, Work, and Economics for Spirit-Empowered Discipleship,which he discusses at length in the interview. When asked what a Pentecostal worldview adds to the “larger Christian conversation about faith, work and economics,” Self responded...
Women of Liberty: Abigail Adams
(March is Women’s History Month. Acton will be highlighting a number of women who have contributed significantly to the issue of liberty during this month.) In today’s era of texting, Facebooking and emails, one wonders fortable our nation’s second First Lady would have felt about these forms munication. Abigail Smith Adams, while not a “woman of letters” (she had little formal education), left behind letters that tell us much about her, her marriage and her desire to be part of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved