The U.S. Just Recorded A Record Drop In Homelessness. The Government Is Claiming Credit.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced on Friday the largest annual drop in homelessness figures since HUD began point-in-time (PIT) counts around two decades ago.
These counts consist of annual, single-night estimates of the number of people experiencing homelessness on a particular day at the end of January. According to HUD, the 2026 PIT count showed that “698,425 individuals were homeless on a single night in January, a 6.3% decrease since President Trump took office in 2025.”
“President Trump’s actions to secure the border, get criminal illegals off our streets, and restore safety to our communities drove a historic decrease in homelessness,” U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner claimed.
The figure also represents a significant drop from the record levels of 2024, when 771,480 people were found to be experiencing homelessness on a single January night. Between 2022 and 2024, there was a 43% increase in the number of people staying in homeless shelters, a change that was indeed linked to “large inflows of new immigrants seeking asylum” in places like New York City, Chicago, Massachusetts, and Denver.
Decreasing homelessness in those localities, according to the New York Times, accounted for nearly half of the drop in last year’s homelessness levels.
Non-governmental organizations dedicated to ending homelessness also conducted their own investigations into the figures, which showed similarly positive results.
The homelessness-focused non-profit Community Solutions calculated in their own analysis of PIT data that a significant decrease in homelessness (approximately 6%) had occurred during in the 2025-2026 period.
Adam Ruege, the writer of the Community Solutions report, stressed that reduced homelessness was not confined to these formerly asylum-seeker-heavy cities, but was rather a broader national trend. He also speculated that various factors contributed to getting people off the streets, such as increased civic cooperation in certain areas and a potential cooling housing market in others.
Analysis commissioned by the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), another nonprofit dedicated to combatting homelessness, estimated a 6.7% decrease in homelessness between 2025 and 2026, reporting that the number of homeless individuals had decreased by nearly 50,000 to a figure of about 693,000 nationwide.
However, NAEH warned that “chronic homelessness”, which describes the “people who experience homelessness for the longest, and who have the greatest vulnerabilities,” had increased by 1% between 2025 and 2026. Such an increase demonstrates “the urgent need for investment in Permanent Supportive Housing,” the NGO argued.
Permanent Supportive Housing is a program which gives those experiencing chronic homelessness a permanent place to live without requiring them to first comply with certain conditions, such as mandatory sobriety, a promise to take necessary medications, or proof of employment, to qualify for housing.
The program also makes housing affordable by limiting the cost of rent and basic utilities to a percentage – typically 30% – of a tenant’s income.
“The program is vastly underfunded, and the Trump Administration has repeatedly attempted to defund it. This is a reckless approach that would surely erase these declines if it moves forward. No community can afford that,” CEO of the NAEH Ann Oliva claimed.
