"The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets," Turner said.
In announcing the report, awaited since December, HUD emphasized a 27 percent increase in the unhoused population between 2013 and 2025. It used this baseline, it said, because that marked the beginning of HUD's focus on housing-first policy implementation and grant making.
Not every housing-first program is the same, but they share the viewpoint that housing stability is key to the success of any social or behavioral intervention. The first priority is to get a homeless individual off the street, ideally into permanent housing (or at least moving toward it). Other approaches focus on getting an individual services — for example, job counseling or addiction treatment — before they qualify for housing.
Critics of housing first, including the Trump administration, argue that the approach has caused unhoused populations to balloon.
Housing-first approaches to homelessness began with President George W. Bush, who made it part of his homelessness policy in 2004. President Obama's 2009 strategic plan to end homelessness also included it. In 2013, HUD made it a policy and grant-making priority.
The HUD data has limitations. It’s a picture of who is sleeping on the street on a single night in January. Normally, a report comes out the following December. At best, the data is a year old. This time it’s five months older.
The numbers reported since the first count in 2007 trended downward between 2007 and 2019, though not dramatically. The first time the number was higher than in 2007 was 2023 (total U.S. population increased about 12 percent over that period). The 2021 count is uncertain; due to COVID-19 concerns, 40 percent of communities, including many with high unhoused populations, did not undertake counts.
Groups advocating for the homeless see factors including an influx of immigrants, rising housing costs, housing shortages, inflation and the end of pandemic-era programs as the main causes of increase. Researchers point to rising housing costs as the single most important factor, finding homeless rates are highest where affordable housing is most scarce.
Conservative policymakers argue that because housing-first programs do not make recovery from behavioral problems and drug problems a precondition of housing, the emphasis became "housing only," not rehabilitation. (Defenders of the approach assert that "housing only" was never the goal.) President Donald Trump signaled his administration's take in a July 2025 executive order, calling for persons with serious behavioral or substance use disorders to be moved into treatment centers or "civil commitment."
“It’s important and relevant to finally be able to see the report,” says Marcy Thompson, vice president of programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH). “At this point, communities have already submitted their 2026 data to HUD — based on what we’re seeing, the downward trend could be continuing into this year.”
NAEH sees the recent decreases as outcomes from investments including an emergency housing voucher program and funds to relieve rural and unsheltered homelessness. State investments can also have significant impact, Thomspon says. California and New York, states with large unhoused populations that make such investments, saw significant decreases.
A range of factors can affect numbers. North Carolina saw a significant increase in 2025, a year after Hurricane Helene displaced thousands of households. In addition, the state’s reputation for affordable housing has eroded in recent years. Its loss of low-rent units since 2012 is the third-highest in any state.
HUD attributes the 2025 decreases to lower populations in “sanctuary cities.” Illinois did see one of the biggest downtrends in 2025. Thompson acknowledges that reduced migration to Chicago could have contributed to this, but underscores the impact of strategies implemented there to move people off the street and into housing.
Overall, more states (29) saw numbers go up than not, though the increase varies greatly (see map). The biggest increase, more than 4,000, was in Oregon.
At present, Thompson says, more than 17,000 people become newly homeless each week. They don’t all stay homeless, but it's not always the case that the same people are unhoused year to year.
