Homelessness Statistics: How Many People Are Homeless in America in 2024?

1. Sheltered (60%)—people are staying in shelters or transitional housing. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

2. Unsheltered (40%)—people are sleeping on the street, in their cars, or in abandoned buildings. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• On a given night, 354,000 Americans sleep in temporary shelters. (NAEH, 2022)

• Most people without homes are single adults over 25. (NAEH, 2022)

• Families with children comprise 28% of people who experience homelessness in America. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• The most common homeless family consists of a single mother under 27 and two young children. (SAMHSA, 2022)

• 13,000 homeless Americans die of violence every year. (NLCHP, 2019)

• In some cities, like Seattle, a third of all homicide victims are homeless. (NLCHP, 2019)

• There are roughly 150 million homeless people in the world. (UN Habitat, 2019)

• Veterans account for around 6% of homeless people in America. (NAEH, 2022)

• Veterans who served in Vietnam are at the greatest risk of becoming homeless. (NAEH, 2022)

• The number of homeless veterans fell by 11% between 2020 and 2022 and by 55% since 2009. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• People are chronically homeless if they are disabled and meet one of the following conditions:

1. They’ve been homeless continuously for at least a year.

2. They’ve been homeless four times (or more) for a combined period of at least 12 months in the past three years. (NAEH, 2022)

• Chronically homeless people make up 19% of the homeless population. (NAEH, 2022)

• They are the largest unsheltered group with 66.4%. (NAEH, 2022)

• Older homeless population (aged 55+) has been growing rapidly and is expected to triple by 2030. (UPenn, 2019)

• More than half of unhoused veterans and a third of chronically homeless people are older adults. (NAEH, 2022)

• Men are 1.5 times more likely to experience homelessness than women. (NAEH, 2022)

• The transgender homeless are less likely to sleep in a shelter—63% are unsheltered. Among other gender non-conforming people that number is even higher at 80%. (Security.org, 2021; NAEH 2020)

• 17% of unhoused transgender people report being sexually assaulted in homeless shelters. (NCTE, 2017)

• Even though white people are the largest group of homeless individuals numerically, people of color are far more likely to experience homelessness. (NAEH, 2022)

• Black Americans make up only 12% of the population, but they constitute 37% of all people without housing, and 50% of homeless families with kids. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

Homelessness rate in the US by ethnic groups:

(NAEH, 2022)

Contributing factors for people of color who experience homelessness:

• Higher unemployment rate

• Lower income

• Limited access to healthcare

• Higher incarceration rate

• Racial discrimination (NAEH, 2022)

• More than a million public school students in the US are homeless—that’s 2.2% of all students. (NCHE, 2022)

• The number of homeless students has gone up by 63% in the past 15 years. (NCHE, 2022)

• Homeless students are 87% more likely to drop out. (FFCFC, 2021)

• The gap between income and housing costs is by far the main cause of homelessness in the United States. (NLCHP, 2019)

• Ronald Reagan’s cuts the funding for affordable housing in the 1980s is how homelessness got out of hand in the US. (In the Midst of Plenty, 2020)

• Since the mid-1980s, subsidized housing has been disappearing at a rate of 10,000 units per year. (NLCHP, 2019)

• There’s at least a 7 million shortage of homes for low-income renters. (NLIHC, 2022)

• Only 10 out of 100 homes are affordable and available to low-income renters in some cities—Las Vegas being one of them. (NLCHP, 2019)

• If rent went up by just 10% in New York City, over 6,000 people would end up homeless. (NLCHP, 2019)

• Evictions cause anywhere between 14 and 66 percent of new homelessness cases. (NHLC, 2018)

• 63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. (LendingClub, 2022)

• 40% of homeless shelter residents in NYC have a job, but earn too low an income to afford housing. (NLCHP, 2019)

• There are no states where minimum wage workers can afford a one-bedroom apartment. (NIHC, 2021)

• An average minimum wage worker would need to work 97 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom rental. (NIHC, 2021)

• Median wages only grew by 8.8% since 1979. (NIHC, 2021)

• Employment’s been down 28% for low-wage workers in the pandemic. (NIHC, 2021)

• 38% of all survivors of domestic violence will experience homelessness in their lifetime. (NNEDV, 2018)

• Up to 57% of homeless women say domestic violence was the main cause of their homelessness. (NNEDV, 2018)

• Four out of ten American cities name domestic violence as the primary reason behind homelessness there. (NNEDV, 2018)

• People who’ve been to prison are ten times more likely to experience homelessness. (PPI, 2018)

• The risk is 13 times higher for people who have been imprisoned more than once. (PPI, 2018)

• More than 50,000 people enter shelters straight out of prison or jail every year. (HUD, 2018)

• Jail to homelessness pipeline goes both ways—people without homes are 11 times more likely to get arrested. (NLCHP, 2019)

Homelessness is often associated with mental health issues and addiction—both are factors that put people at risk of losing housing.

• Over half of all homeless people experience symptoms of mental illness, and at least 30% suffer from severe mental disorders. (UCLA Law Review, 2020)

  • For comparison, about 18.5% of the general US population have some mental illness, and only 4.5%—severe forms. (UCLA Law Review, 2020)

  • Up to 75% of women who don’t have housing experience symptoms of mental illness. (HomelessHub, 2021)

• People who experience homelessness are at a greater risk of opioid addiction—they are 750% more likely to end up in hospital for opioid-related reasons. (PubMed, 2019)

• In Boston, MA, opioid overdose is the leading cause of death among homeless people (causing 91% of all deaths). (JAMA Network, 2022)

• Homeless adults between 25 and 44 are nine times more likely to die from a drug overdose than adults who have housing. (JAMA Network, 2022)

• More than half of all homeless people in the US live in just four states:

1. California—30%

2. New York—13%

3. Florida—5%

4. Washington—4% (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• During the pandemic, the number of people who experience homelessness rose in more states than it fell. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• New York’s the state where the number of unhoused people went down the most during the pandemic—by 17,000 people. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• States where most homeless population is unsheltered and living on the streets:

• California—67%

• Mississippi—64%

• Hawaii—63%

• Oregon—62%

• Arizona—59%

• Tennessee—58%

• Arkansas—53%

• Georgia—52% (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• In contrast, these states house the overwhelming majority of their homeless population:

• Vermont—98%

• Maine—96%

• New York—95% (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

Among all fifty states, there’s one notorious for homelessness—

• California has the highest rate of homelessness in the country—44 out of 10,000 people. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• More than half (around 115,500) of all unsheltered homeless people live in California—that’s nine times the number of unsheltered people in the second-place state, Washington. (NAEH, 2022; AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• California also accounts for the absolute majority of chronically homeless people. The same’s true for every group of homeless people, except for families with kids, most of which live in New York. (NAEH, 2022)

• Even when homelessness was falling nationwide a decade ago, it rose in California by 42%. (Stanford, 2022)

• The number of beds in emergency shelters rose by 56% between 2007 and 2022. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• Permanent supportive housing more than doubled in the years 2007–2022. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• The only type of assistance that shrunk in the past 15 years is transitional housing. (AHAR to Congress, 2022)

• Public libraries provide support to unhoused people during the day—and up to 40% of library patrons in big cities experience homelessness. (ALA, 2021)

• Homeless people who receive permanent housing make 81% fewer visits to the ER, 61% fewer hospital visits—and the psychiatric care costs fall by 79%. (NLCHP, 2019)

• In December 2022, the Biden-Harris administration introduced a strategic plan to reduce homelessness by 25% until January 2025. (USICH, 2022)

• The new strategy entails:

1. Housing supply action plan—create new affordable housing.

2. National mental health strategy—boost system capacity to help people with mental health conditions.

3. National drug control strategy—provide trauma-informed support and income to people who suffer from addiction. Continue to fight the drug overdose epidemic. (USICH, 2022)