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Every year, typically at the end of January, teams of canvassers conduct a vital survey to count the number of people experiencing homelessness in America.

This survey informs the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s to Congress. It includes Point-in-Time (PIT) estimates of the number of people who, on a single night, are staying in emergency shelters, transitional housing, , or unsheltered locations across the country.

were the highest ever recorded, with a total of 771,840 people across the U.S. experiencing homelessness—including nearly 150,000 children.

The numbers are daunting, but experts believe it is possible to end this situation in the U.S.—and a growing body of research shows what it would take to do it.

How We Got Here

Well before the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in , which allows cities to punish unhoused people for sleeping in public even if they have nowhere else to go, the general public was noticing an uptick in homelessness.

“People’s intuition is right: More people are experiencing homelessness, and more people are in need of services than ever before,” says MPH student and Bloomberg Fellow , a research analyst at the .

The main reason? Housing costs have increased while .

While many people believe that substance use, mental illness, or other individual factors are the main drivers of homelessness, extensive research shows that rising housing costs drive more people into homelessness than any other cause. For example, of housing costs and homelessness noted that “housing costs explain far more of the difference in rates of homelessness than variables such as substance use disorder, mental health, weather, the strength of the social safety net, poverty, or economic conditions.”

Ashley Meehan, MPH, a PhD candidate in Health, Behavior and Society, points to that shows the hourly wage required to afford a two-bedroom apartment in each state. There is no state in the country where a person working full-time at the federal minimum wage can afford such a unit. In South Dakota, which has the country’s lowest housing costs, a person would need to work 66 hours per week at minimum wage to afford to rent a modest apartment.

“There are 17 states where you need to make at least $30 an hour or more just to afford an average two-bedroom rental unit,” Meehan says. “There’s this increasing gap between what things cost and what people are making.”

“We know that homelessness is a housing problem,” Soucy says. “The Government Accountability Office has shown that when median rents increase in a community, homelessness also increases in that community.”

Housing First

It sounds almost too obvious: To end homelessness, house people. is one approach to this, and .

Housing First solves the immediate and foundational need of giving people a safe, permanent place to live with no preconditions. Once that basic need is met, people can opt to use supportive services that meet other needs, such as access to health care, employment assistance, or programs to treat substance use disorders.

The idea of Housing First originated in the U.S. in the 1990s and was adopted as federal policy in the 2000s during the George W. Bush administration. Though the policy was never scaled up sufficiently, it was the basis of a successful partnership between HUD and Veterans Affairs that dramatically reduced homelessness among U.S. veterans.

From 2000 to 2017, the U.S. doubled federal funding to programs targeting homelessness among veterans, including voucher programs and others designed specifically to provide housing. In that same period, .

“I think about that all the time,” says Meehan. “Anytime anyone says, [ending homelessness] can’t be done, I’m like, well, it’s already working for some people, if you’re committed to actually doing it, and doing it right, and sustaining that response. … I think if we’re willing to scale that up, that could happen for so many more people.”

Housing First is both effective and cost-effective.

“When someone experiences homelessness, they cost a lot more to emergency systems, criminal legal systems, shelter, etc., than someone who is housed,” Soucy explains. “Additionally, they are so focused on staying alive they can’t fully contribute to local economies.”

Meehan cites . In the year before they died in the hospital, the people experiencing homelessness incurred, in medical costs alone, expenses totaling 81% of what it would have cost to provide them Permanent Supportive Housing. “We’re paying way more in all of these other places than what it would cost just to provide housing,” Meehan says.

that it would cost $9.6 billion—nearly triple what the U.S. spends now on programs to end homelessness—to provide permanent housing for every household who stayed in an emergency shelter in 2022.

And where will that affordable housing come from? suggests options ranging from policies that incentivize producing high-quality one-room units for people with very low incomes, to increasing housing stock “that sits outside the private market.” This might come from increased investments in public housing, “the acquisition of housing by public housing authorities or other non-profit entities,” or other models.

Preventing Homelessness

An even more cost-effective approach to homelessness is to prevent it from happening.

“I see housing as a spectrum of stably housed at one end to experiencing homelessness at the other end,” Meehan says. “And in between there, there's this ambiguous, amorphous category of housing unstable or housing insecure.” Addressing any transition along that spectrum is “homelessness prevention,” she says. “To prevent homelessness is to stop the housing loss as early as you can.”

Housing supports can correspond to people’s needs across that spectrum. Many people need only immediate, temporary support, such as help paying for utilities, , or having a case manager for finding employment and a unit on the private market.

“Intervening before somebody experiences homelessness by paying for their rent or covering whatever cost they need to stay housed or connecting them with some sort of health care service, if that’s what they need, is cheaper than it is to address homelessness once it occurs,” Soucy says. “It's also just a lot easier if you know where someone’s living to provide them with services and stay in contact with them. So that is always the ideal scenario—that we're going to do what we need to do to keep people housed.” 

Providing support at critical junctures—such as discharge from foster care, mental health or substance use programs, or the criminal justice system—could also go a long way toward preventing homelessness. In 2022, people leaving those settings made up who were not already homeless.

What Doesn’t Work

that one increasingly common response is not just ineffective but actively harmful: criminalizing homelessness. 

“Ticketing, fining, and putting people in jail, even for short periods of time” only worsens the situation for people experiencing homelessness, Soucy says. “They lose their belongings. They might lose their ID. I talked to physicians who administer medicine to people experiencing homelessness, and they say, ‘I have to write a new prescription every single time that somebody gets pushed off the street or gets their tent taken away.’”

Criminalizing homelessness can also perpetuate the problem. “If you have a criminal record, that precludes you from a lot of housing options,” Meehan says. “It also makes it harder to get a job. It exacerbates the problem.”

She notes that several cities across the country have implemented alternatives to policing that use community response teams to connect people to services. 

“The one I’m most familiar with is PAD [] in Atlanta. It’s embedded into the city's 311 hotline, so you can call 311 and say, ‘I see someone in this location, and it seems like they're having a crisis right now,’ and they’ll send folks out there who can help engage with that person in a trauma-informed way to help get them engaged with the services that they might want or need,” Meehan says.

The community can see that there is a response; the person in crisis gets connected with supports and kept out of the criminal justice system; and police can respond to more appropriate calls. “I think that’s a win for lots of different people who have a stake in the community,” she says.

When it comes to closing encampments, of how planned, coordinated, and humane initiatives can help people without criminalizing them. Atlanta’s —a partnership of nonprofit, government, and other community organizations dedicated to ending homelessness—housed 1,850 households through strategic efforts that provided access to housing and services for residents of two encampments.

Moving Forward

For Soucy and the homeless service providers they regularly connect with, ending homelessness is not just a vision but an achievable goal.

“People who work in those roles [in homelessness response and services] feel the challenges every single day. They’re often not paid enough, they’re often overworked and often burdened with trauma. But in speaking to them, they never doubt that we can end homelessness,” Soucy says. “It's extremely clear to me and to everybody who does this work that we know how to end homelessness. That gives me a lot of hope and gives me a lot of things to look forward to in the future, even if right now it feels quite difficult.”

Meehan, too, knows it’s possible to end homelessness, especially if we approach the issue with humanity.

“I would love for everyone to see their unhoused neighbors truly as their neighbors. … Seeing each other as one collective community would be huge. I think that that would change the way people voted and the types of policies that get put forward. And I think that that would change how people interact with one another, and the decisions of like, do I call 911, or do I call 311? Do I want to help this person or just get them taken away?”