The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago
When three homeless people died of cold in the ice-gripped US Midwest during last month’s freeze, it captured headlines — in a few local news outlets. But for most Americans, most of the time, the spectacular social failure that is US homelessness remains well below the radar. Even the news that it hit a record high last year was released quietly between Christmas and new year. In a US news cycle dominated by proposals to take over Gaza and annex Canada, this issue can’t compete.
But the news is shocking. According to a recent report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), homelessness rose 18 per cent in 2024 over the previous year, at 771,480. Nearly 150,000 children under 18 experienced homelessness, up 33 per cent from 2023. Among families with children it rose 39 per cent.
HUD, which takes a “snapshot” of homelessness on a single night every year, admits it’s an undercount. It only includes people living in shelters, cars, public parks, abandoned buildings or campgrounds — not the many thousands who are “couch surfing”.
Many families with school-aged children fall into the latter category, says Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, an expert on youth homelessness. Even in the affluent suburbs of Chicago where I live — and where a lakeside mansion recently found a buyer at the asking price of $35mn — local schools have many kids without homes.
In my upscale local school district, 5.3 per cent of kids in pre-school through eighth grade were homeless in 2022-23. In 2023-24, Chicago public schools identified 26,800 homeless students, or 8.29 per cent.
“But they fly under the radar,” says Duffield. “We don’t see them in the way that we see adults who are homeless.” Children tend to hide their status, ashamed to disclose it to adults, or afraid of being taken into care. This invisibility is a problem, says Duffield. “We know homelessness as a child is a strong predictor of homelessness as an adult.”
HUD says America’s critical shortage of affordable housing — worsened by the end of pandemic housing relief — is a major force driving the rising figures. Robin Stuht, homeless liaison for the Beloit school district in southern Wisconsin, told me this is the “new face of homelessness: dual-income families, both working full-time jobs, whose rent has doubled or tripled, sleeping in cars, tents on people’s properties or in garages”.
Just over 10 per cent of her district’s students are without homes, she tells me: she counts 43 homeless teen mothers and 12 families with children living in cars. Her district provides washers and dryers in schools, so pupils can have clean clothes, and a “care closet” with toiletries and undergarments.
She put me in touch with a local teen mother and her sister, who have been homeless for much of their lives. (Their names are withheld to protect them.) When the baby was born, they were living in a motel room with their mother and her boyfriend. They recall years of shuttling from sister to aunt to cousin: “People didn’t know we were homeless, we kept it to ourselves. But it was very stressful having to find somewhere new to go every day, having to beg people to let us stay.”
Betty Bogg, veteran chief executive of the not-for-profit Connections for the Homeless, which works in my town, sees reason for hope. “The conversation has shifted” from what she calls the “puritanical view that people just ought to [pull] themselves up by their bootstraps”, to one about “system failure” in the US housing market.
But from what he has said recently, it looks as if Donald Trump still blames the people, not the system. Scott Turner, new HUD secretary, made clear he thinks lack of funding isn’t the problem. HUD is “failing at its most basic mission”, he said “There’s record funding from HUD . . . and we’re still not meeting the need”.
Elon Musk, who heads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, refers to a “homeless industrial complex” that profits from not solving the problem. Trump may be too busy figuring out how to take over Greenland to bother much about homelessness. I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad news. But what we are doing now doesn’t seem to be working.