Immigration contributes substantially to boost in homeless numbers
Dorothea Lange, photographer. Migrant Mother, 1935.
The influx of migrants to states like CA played a big role in rising homelessness count nationwide, reports the LA Times.
Because the local agencies taking the count across the country do not ask for immigration status, homeless numbers ballooned in a handful of states that took in tens of thousands of immigrants, and those states, in turn, pushed the national number to an unprecedented high of nearly 772,000.
In releasing the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report in the last few days of 2024, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cited immigration, along with the shortage of affordable housing and natural disasters, as a cause of the 18.2% increase nationally. But it did not provide an estimate of how much of the increase was from immigration.
In fact, more than three-fourths of the increase occurred in five states, among them California, that were prominent recipients of immigrants.
Though immigrants stressed homeless systems, forcing cities such as New York and Chicago to spend millions of dollars to create new shelters, they were more likely than domestic homeless people to quickly find housing on their own.
The annual assessment, called the point-in-time count, is used to apportion federal dollars and provides a long-term measure of the state of homelessness in America.
But it’s an imperfect and chronically out-of-date process that takes almost a year to gather data collected across the country by local administrative agencies called Continuums of Care that each develops its own methodology. After making the counts in January, the agencies publish results through the year. For last year, HUD released the compiled numbers Dec. 27.
Among the count’s faults, its results are subject to statistical error and it doesn’t account well for people who live in and out of other people’s homes.
“As bad as the point-in-time count is, all the faults in it, what has been remarkable is how consistent it has been. It usually varies only by [1%] or 2% going up or down.”
To estimate the influence of immigration, Culhane devised a crude methodology using the outsize increases in states known to have received large numbers of immigrants and the unusually large increases in Latino and family homelessness.
Latinos accounted for more than 60% of the increases in the five states and were as high as 70% in New York.
Just less than half the national increase occurred in New York City, which was deluged with immigrants in 2024, largely shipped there by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Combined with New York state, counts in Illinois, Massachusetts, Colorado and California recorded increases totaling slightly fewer than 90,000, or 76% of the increase nationally. Adding on more than 5,000 people rendered homeless by the wildfire on Maui, Hawaii, would account for 80% of the entire increase.
Read the whole thing here.
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