Homelessness in the United States is now at a record high, according to a new report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The data show that 771,480 people were homeless in 2024 — 18 percent more than in 2023 and a staggering 33 percent jump since 2020. Even in a country that has normalized rampant homelessness, this isn’t normal.     HUD attributes this to many factors, including: a lack of affordable housing, inflation, stagnating wages, systemic racism, public health crises, natural disasters, immigration, and the end of pandemic welfare programs. But the report makes clear that ending pandemic welfare during an inflationary bout and affordable housing crisis was a particularly devastating combination.

Testimony from several Continuums of Care (CoC) — local or regional planning bodies that coordinate shelter and other services for people experiencing homelessness (example here) — suggests that this combination is primarily what launched homelessness into the stratosphere since 2022. Here are a few examples:

Northeast CoC: “In response to COVID-19, our CoC saw an influx of rapid rehousing and prevention resources, as well as an effective statewide eviction moratorium. These efforts were effective in keeping households from entering into homelessness and moving households out of homelessness quickly. Since the sunsetting of these resources and the ending of the eviction moratorium, our CoC has seen a large influx of new families and individuals seeking emergency shelter assistance.”

Midwest CoC: “Due to the economic impacts of inflation in combination with the lack of affordable housing, there has been an increase in folks experiencing homelessness, and that has resulted in seeing an increase in folks experiencing unsheltered homelessness as well.”

Southeast CoC: “The rise in unsheltered numbers can be attributed to several pivotal developments. The end of the eviction moratorium played a significant role, as many individuals who had been protected under pandemic-era policies suddenly faced eviction proceedings. With the legal system resuming operations, those who were delayed in court processes found themselves without housing. Economic pressures have also escalated the situation, particularly the unprecedented spikes in rental prices. . . . This surge in housing costs has pushed many out of affordability.”

Pandemic welfare included an eviction moratorium, rental assistance, broader cash assistance, and tax credit programs. Collectively, this blunted the impact of the spiraling cost-of-living crisis. Taking that assistance away evidently cost many people their homes.

And it wasn’t just housing security that went to hell after those social programs were taken away — as the graph below shows, food and financial security did, too. Joe Biden promised to make these temporary programs permanent through his flagship domestic plan, the Build Back Better Act, which included about $25 billion in rental assistance. But after he failed to get it passed in 2021, Biden abandoned his social welfare agenda altogether in March 2022. Deficit reduction and historic military budgets took its place atop his domestic priorities.Rather than own up to its own policy failures, the Biden administration decided to blame immigrants for homelessness shooting up by a third over the last four years. In the accompanying press release to HUD’s report, the administration not-so-subtly implies that rising migration is chiefly responsible for rising homelessness. Rental costs and natural disasters are eventually mentioned too, but with considerably less emphasis — each was devoted about two sentences in the press release, while immigration got two paragraphs. The content of that press release is all the Biden administration has had to say about record homelessness. And in that lone official narrative, it decided to be deliberately misleading.

The administration’s press release says that “migration had a particularly notable impact” on homelessness, implying that its crackdown on “irregular migration” will result in fewer unhoused people. Sure, immigration is part of the story. For example, from 2023 to 2024, Hispanic homelessness grew faster than overall homelessness (31.6 percent and 18.1 percent, respectively). But immigration isn’t the story — record homelessness is. And HUD logged an increase in homelessness across all subgroups (aside from veterans), not just among Hispanic people. In 2024, 118,376 more people experienced homelessness than in 2023, and most of them were non-Hispanic (61,747). Of the total 771,480 people who were homeless this past year, 69 percent were non-Hispanic.

As another example, the administration’s press release says, “Some communities reported data to HUD that indicated that the rise in overall homelessness was the result of [sheltering] a rising number of asylum seekers coming into their communities,” but completely omits what the bulk of local homeless shelters reported, which, as discussed above, attributed spiraling homelessness to the (in many ways Biden–engineered) end of pandemic assistance during a cost-of-living crisis.

The cases the Biden administration is talking about exist, but only in a limited number of cities in a limited number of states. For example, the Biden administration mentions Chicago, for which the local CoC reported a surge in homeless asylum seekers. But as HUD notes in its report, while “new arrivals accounted for most of Chicago’s increase in estimated homelessness, the same cannot be said for the 16 other CoCs in Illinois that experienced increases.” The primary factors driving homelessness in those locations included “a higher cost of living combined with a rollback of pandemic-related financial supports, and a lack of affordable housing.”

Same deal in New York: the New York City CoC (one of twenty-four across the state) attributed the increase to a “significant influx of asylum seekers in 2024.” But for the other New York CoCs mentioned in the report, the increase in homelessness wasn’t due to immigration, but to “increased evictions as cities worked through backlogs in evictions that built up during the eviction moratorium, lack of affordable housing, and increased rents . . . as well as loss of rapid re-housing supported by ESG-CV and other COVID-related funding.” (ESG-CV refers to Emergency Solutions Grant–COVID-19, a $4 billion homeless prevention and response program passed as part of the CARES Act of 2020.)

Nobody who actually reads HUD’s report in good faith would conclude that immigration was the primary driver of record homelessness, as the Biden administration implied. The problem is that many establishment media outlets appear to have based their coverage of record homelessness not on the actual report but on the accompanying press release. They didn’t bother fact-checking the administration’s narrative before syndicating it.

As a result, “Migrant Crisis Pushed US Homelessness to Record High in 2024” isn’t a headline I found in a fringe, far-right publication — it was in Bloomberg. The incoming Trump administration is likely thankful for Biden’s efforts in not only helping normalize record homelessness but also using immigrants as scapegoats.