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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Here's a story from over the holidays that I don't want to get lost in all the other big national and local news that's been taking place. A report released in December from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development showed that the number of people experiencing homeless in the US topped 770,000 last year. I believe that's for the first time. Our guests will clarify whether that's the case. It was a measure of homelessness in January of last year, though it just got released near the end of the year. The national count is conducted in January each year. Homelessness at the beginning of 2024 rose by a third compared to two years earlier. What an increase. Just at the time that you think the economy and everything else is recovering from the pandemic. Another way to look at it, it was an increase of more than 18% in the number of Americans who are homeless from just the previous year. We have two guests to break down what's in the report, what the Biden administration as it leaves office thinks is the root of the problem, what the Trump administration, as it comes in, plans to do about it, if anything, and to talk about what else might be done. Jennifer Ludden, you know the name probably, NPR national correspondent who covers economic inequality, systemic disparities in housing and more, and Peter Hepburn, associate director of the Eviction Lab. That's in the context of his sociology professor status at Rutgers Newark. Jennifer and Peter, welcome to WNYC.

Jennifer Ludden: Hi there. Thank you.

Peter Hepburn: Thanks for having us.

Brian: Jennifer, this count done by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, just to be abundantly clear, came out at the end of December, but it was a snapshot of January 2024, right?

Jennifer: Correct. It takes them a while to collate everything nationally. Some cities, like New York, come out with their local numbers earlier, but you are absolutely right. This is the highest number on record since HUD has kept these records since 2007. It was the largest one year spike in homelessness. I just want to note also that three quarters of a million people, 274,000 of them unsheltered, living outside, in tents, in their cars. Those are just numbers we haven't seen before. I want to note that it is largely considered an undercount. Again, it's like a snapshot. People go out one night in every community, but it doesn't include, for example, people who may be bunking in with friends or relatives because they just can no longer afford the rent and may very well be at high risk of losing housing totally.

Brian: You report, Jennifer, and Peter will bring you in here in a second, that HUD officials point above all to the skyrocketing rents that we've been seeing in the past few years nationally as well as locally for people who just think this is a New York thing. They also cite a few other issues which we'll get into in a second. Can you paint a national picture for us of rent increases?

Jennifer: It's expensive in places that never used to be considered expensive, for sure. Obviously New York City's had a high rent issue for quite a while, East Coast, West Coast cities. The cost of living, especially housing, has really grown across the country to different degrees. Advocates for homelessness and housing will say that this is driven in large part by a massive shortage of housing generally and especially shortage of affordable housing. When you have a lack of supply and growing demand, that's what pushes prices up and up.

Brian: Peter, you study evictions in particular, and I'll cite a Vox article from 2023 which cites that somewhere around 5 million Americans lose their home through evictions or foreclosure each year. I gather there are no official government numbers on that, though you have advocated, I believe, that the US Government should keep that data. They don't keep data on foreclosures and evictions.

Peter: There are data on foreclosures, but for evictions, there really is next to no federal data collection. We just don't know how many people are losing their homes to eviction every year. That's been part of the work of the Eviction Lab is to try to provide those numbers.

Brian: What can you say in general terms about the trend in evictions? Let's say from before the pandemic through the beginning of the pandemic, when a lot of places had eviction moratoriums, but now those have expired, so up until now.

Peter: In the early months of the pandemic, we saw eviction filing numbers drop to historic lows, numbers that we'd never seen before. Through a combination of eviction moratoria and emergency rental assistance, those numbers stayed low in 2020 through 2021 to the end of 2022. By the end of 2022, as we started 2023, we were back to where we were before the pandemic, which is 3.6 million eviction cases filed every year across the US.

Brian: To either of you, Jennifer, maybe you first, how granular does the data get? Are there certain areas of the US more impacted than others by homelessness or certain groups of people demographically?

Jennifer: Certainly. We talk a lot about California for a reason. It's probably got, I want to say a third. The numbers have changed now, but a very large share of the homeless population, and particularly the unsheltered population does live in California. New York State saw a large bump in its overall homelessness population. Not as much New York City, I think, if I recall. Again, you see numbers going up in what would seem to be unexpected places because of the overall high cost of living, high cost of housing landscape.

It was exacerbated, I think during the pandemic, we saw unsheltered homelessness in a lot of communities for the first time because of the way it played out with concern about the virus. We then had this massive inflation spike in 2022. As Peter said, there was a lot of aid for people to keep people housed during that time. As that aid and those protections from eviction and so forth ran out, people still have high prices to cope with housing, food and other items. I think that the homelessness issue just got exacerbated, like so many people who are feeling their pocketbooks being pinched. That's part of the story here for sure, along with some other issues that the HUD report does lay out.

Brian: That we will get to. Peter, go ahead.

Peter: To Jennifer's point, there's been a 20% increase in rents over the course of the last four years. While wages have increased, they have not kept pace with those sorts of increases in rent. There's just less money to keep rent paid.

Brian: Listeners, I wonder if we have any stories that you want to share of yourself or someone you know becoming homeless in the last few years. 212-433-WNYC, especially if it's not about somebody who's been in and out of homelessness for a long time, but somebody for whom some of these more recent pressures of the last few years may have tipped the scales from barely housed to unhoused in the context of these numbers from the federal government, which show that homelessness increased by 18% as of the beginning of last year compared to just the year before and by about a third compared to two years earlier. That's such a spike in homelessness, we don't want it to go ignored. Even While people talk a lot today about January 6th or one thing or another, that's hot button. We are talking about this for part of the show today. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. If you have a story or if you have a question for our guests, Jennifer Ludden from NPR and Peter Hepburn from Rutgers Newark and the Eviction Lab, 212-433-9692. Go ahead, Peter. You want to say something.

Peter: To your earlier question about the granularity of the data, I think one of the things that's important about these pit counts is that they do tell us something about who it is that's experiencing homelessness too. You just said it's an 18% increase year over year in the number of people experiencing homelessness. When you look at families and when you look at kids, those numbers are higher. This was a 33% increase in the number of kids who are experiencing homelessness. It's 150,000 kids out there who are homeless.

Brian: I see the number of older adults, senior citizens, rose as well. I'm seeing a 6% growth rate in homelessness among 65 or older, Peter.

Peter: In fact, the only group that didn't see an increase was veterans, which is part of a long-term trend that we've seen since 2007. Veteran homelessness has been cut by nearly in half or more than half at this point relative to what we were seeing 15 years ago.

Brian: Is that a result of policy with veterans specifically in mind?

Peter: Absolutely. No, there's been a concerted effort that started under the Bush administration to encourage collaboration between HUD and between the Department of Veterans Affairs to try to make outreach to veterans experiencing homelessness and to get them rehoused and to give them the services they need. It's been extraordinarily successful. That's a blueprint showing that we could do this if there was political will there.

Brian: Jennifer, as you mentioned, there are more factors in the HUD report, federal Department of Housing and Urban Development Report. One is the recent increase in migrants. Certainly people in New York have seen that expressed in terms of, there are only x number of shelter beds and they try to increase the number of shelter beds with so many recent arrivals needing shelter beds, using hotels and things like that. Yet it definitely put pressure on the existing supply of beds for people who are otherwise unhoused.

Jennifer: Absolutely. Not only in New York, families with children, homelessness among families with children actually saw the highest boost from last year, 39% higher. The HUD report said there were 13 communities around the country, including New York, who cited migration as a core issue with their shelter resources. In those communities, family homelessness doubled. This is a major reason that HUD says we have this unprecedented boost in homelessness.

They also pointed this among a few other things to suggest that it's likely these numbers have since come down since a year ago. We'll see because people will be going out this month again in communities around the country to count. They say, look, last June, the Biden administration used executive action to try and stem cap illegal border crossings to limit asylum claims and that therefore places like New York, Denver, Chicago specifically say that they have now seen fewer asylum seekers in their shelters since then.

They're suggesting this number may have been coming down through the course of 2024 before this count came out. Again, we'll see. In many immigrant raves, you had people coming for jobs, people coming individually to certain areas they knew they could get work. There's a lot of families fleeing persecution and violence and so forth and coming without jobs lined up, without housing. That HUD is suggesting is a really big part of this and what New York has seen. New York last spring did start to shut down some of its many shelters that were open to accommodate these communities.

Brian: The one other factor that I want to make sure to give you a chance to mention, because it was in your reporting for NPR, is weather events as impacting displacement.

Jennifer: Climate driven extreme weather disasters displace people all over and they have an impact. This report specifically cited Maui, where there was that terrible fire last year and that was in August, I believe August or September. Then by the time of the January count, there were still 5,200 people in homeless shelter beds still without housing.

Brian: As we continue for another few minutes to talk about the spike in homelessness nationally in the United States that's been measured by the Department of Housing and Urban Development with Jennifer Ludden, NPR National Correspondent, who covers economic inequality, systemic disparities in housing and more, and Peter Hepburn, associate director of the Eviction Lab, which obviously studies eviction, and he's a sociology professor at Rutgers University, specifically the Rutgers Newark campus. Sharon in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sharon.

Sharon: Hi. Good morning. My daughter is a principal and she has noticed so many families, both migrant and non-migrant, needing housing, being pushed around from shelter to shelter with not stable environment for schooling. It's a big problem. Also as a senior I talk to many women my age, 70, and we see that once you outlive your husband, and that income is not there, a lot of women are falling in to homelessness. You can see that with the lady that was set a fire on the train. She lost her stability in terms of her marriage or you just lose an income and you're not able to afford to live in New York. It's a travesty.

Brian: Sharon, thank you for that call. Sad as it was. Eugenia in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Eugenia.

Eugenia: Hi, Brian. I always listen to your show. I love it. I have been homeless twice, once in 2008 and then in 2015. It's one of the most horrible experiences in my life. You have to push a suitcase from here to there and if you fall asleep, a security guard tells you, "Go away, sleep somewhere else." You are not treated like a human being. If it had not been for a stranger of the street, I cannot rely on my family. She gave me a part time job so I could get a room and then a small studio, I would still be on the street. There has to be an end to this because you have to be treated as a human being. The services are very hard to get and sometimes you have to wait a very long time.

Brian: What do you think, based on your personal experience, a policy response, an effective policy response would be if you've given that any thought, Eugenia, either at the city level or the national level.

Eugenia: I'm an American citizen. I went back to my home country, Argentina and I came back to the United States to get a real life back in 2008. Instead of getting real life, I got homelessness. I think people in the government have to maybe less rent, the rental price should be less and more jobs. I'm a translator and I could not get anything. If it hadn't been for this person who just found me on the street walking with my suitcase and my small cat, I'd be nowhere. Sometimes there are social workers that are nice, but sometimes they can't do anything or they can't do much. The shelters, at first she tried to get me into a shelter. They're horrible, they're gloomy and the people do drugs and sometimes they fight and you can get hurt.

Brian: Eugenia, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate you sharing your story again, as difficult as it probably is to do publicly and your thoughts about the situation. Jennifer, you report that there are places in the country that have fared better than others. Your reporting cites Phoenix and Los Angeles and Dallas as examples. Are there specific things at the policy level that they're doing right?

Jennifer: I'm going to punt a little bit because I have not looked into those. The former head of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness cited those for me from the recent report. I know Los Angeles saw its numbers come down slightly first time in a while. They have been working very hard to build up permanent housing, and also a system of motels to place people in. Certainly policymakers will say housing is key. Forgive me for not knowing the details of those places, but I think Texas generally has fewer restrictions. It's fewer regulations around housing, and they have seen more housing and less homelessness in general in some places because they've seen more supply come onto the market.

Brian: [inaudible 00:19:39] [crosstalk] restrictions on development. Peter, anything on that?

Peter: Actually I just wanted to touch on two of the points that the callers made there. First Sharon's point that kids are experiencing a lot of instability here. That's totally borne out by what we see in the data on evictions as well, where families with kids are at twice the risk of facing eviction as families without kids. It's a lot harder to find places to rent and to keep that housing stable. Then what Eugenia pointed to and the harms, the dangers of being homeless, I think that puts the lie to a talking point that's often made by politicians on the right that that people are choosing homelessness because the services are so generous and that there is a conscious decision here. This is not something that anybody who is homeless wants or is actively seeking out. I think that's a dangerous myth that should be dispelled.

Jennifer: Can I also just jump on a point there, Brian? Sorry. The other thing is, people may not realize we have a social safety net program in this country, but unlike, say, food help or health care, Medicaid and so forth, housing is not an entitlement program in this country. Even if you meet the qualification for public federal subsidies for housing, only one in four people who qualify actually get them. There's a severe shortage. The country has never fully funded subsidized housing to the demand that there is. It's just gotten worse in these past couple years with inflation and the pandemic supply chain and everything else. With prices so high, it's just harder and harder for people to hang on. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies has analyzed census data and said that there's a record level of unaffordability for renters across the country. About half of renters can't pay more than 30% of their income for housing, and about half of them pay more than half their income for housing. That's just not sustainable for many, many people.

Brian: Peter, a listener asked, I want to touch a couple of things before we run out of time. One is a few listeners are writing in to ask about, as one puts it, the amount of housing available versus the amount of housing owned by corporations. We definitely hear, and we've talked on this show before about corporations buying up a lot of rental housing. Do you see that as a contributing factor?

Peter: In certain parts of the country, it absolutely is. We definitely see this more in the Sun Belt. Down in Georgia, for instance, we're seeing larger shares of single family housing being bought up by corporate investors. I'm not sure how much that is happening here in New York, but it's certainly something we should keep an eye on and be concerned about.

Brian: These numbers, Peter, showing this big increase in housing in homelessness over the last two years came from the federal government. Yet I think people generally think of policy to address homelessness as being a city level or state level thing. Does the Biden administration have a record on trying to address it if these numbers come from HUD?

Peter: There are absolutely federal programs to address homelessness. The federal government controls the big purse strings. They have the ability to direct resources to try to deal with this. In a lot of cases, it's been help from HUD that has allowed local cities, governments, and continuums of care, which are the organizations that are tasked with dealing with homelessness, to really coordinate services and to deal with this situation better. I think Houston is the key case study for this, where HUD targeted them for intervention, worked with the local organizations down there to better coordinate outreach to homeless populations. They've seen a really sizable decrease in homelessness over the course of the last 10 years.

Brian: Jennifer, Biden, I don't know if this is in your beat exactly, but he was going to propose some version of national rent control just before he dropped out of the presidential race last summer. Harris didn't pick it up. I saw a story just the other day about President elect Trump planning to address homelessness by outlawing street camping, which puts it on the homeless people as if they're doing something wrong. Is there anything you can say about what we can expect from the Trump administration at the policy level, if anything, regarding homelessness?

Jennifer: On that Biden policy, that was really more limited. That was a more limited version. I wouldn't call it national rent control. It would have had some effect. Yes, President elect Trump has said he would like to work with states to have statewide bans on homeless camping and sees this, and many Republicans also see this as a way to push people into getting treatment for drug addiction or mental health issues. The Biden administration, and for two decades really, it's been a bipartisan issue to get people into housing first. The policy is called Housing First. Under the argument that once there, they are better able to deal with any addiction or mental health issues they may have.

There's a long proven track record showing that it can keep them off the streets long term. It doesn't work for everyone. There is also a shortage of treatment for people who need it. You're going to definitely see more emphasis among the Trump administration and allies on this. They may well try to shift billions of dollars and shift the priorities there for how that money gets spent by states and localities and [inaudible 00:26:03] [crosstalk]

Brian: Did the HUD report even name mental health? This is certainly what a lot of people in New York City, for example, would casually cite just based on their observation, people who are not unhoused as a reason for homelessness, rising rates of serious mental health problems. Did the HUD report cite that?

Jennifer: There are a large share of people who are without housing do suffer from these. It's not a majority. Most people with mental health problems are not homeless. Most people who are addicted with drugs are not homeless, as advocates will point out. Certainly the longer you are without housing, you see higher rates of drug addiction and mental health. It's a way to cope. One big study in California found it's more of a consequence than a cause. Certainly that's what people may see, it's disproportionately present, probably among the people living in parks and streets and so forth.

Brian: Jennifer Ludden covers inequality for NPR. Jennifer, thank you very much for joining us. I think this is a little bit of a treat, actually, for some of the listeners who hear your report as a correspondent but don't get to hear you in conversation very much like this. Thank you for coming on with us.

Jennifer: Appreciate your interest. Thank you, Brian.

Brian: Peter Hepburn, associate director of the Eviction Lab and assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University in Newark. Thank you, Peter.

Peter: Thanks for having me.

[00:27:48] [END OF AUDIO]

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