Biden Administration Announces Plan to Cut Homelessness by 25% by 2025

President Joe Biden's administration announced Monday that it is ramping up efforts to help house people now sleeping on sidewalks and in tents and cars as a new federal report confirms what's obvious to people in many cities: Homelessness is persisting despite increased local efforts.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said that in federally required tallies taken across the country earlier this year, about 582,000 people were counted as unhoused — a number that misses some people and does not include those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own.

The figure was nearly the same as it was in a survey conducted in early 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic hit the nation hard. It was up by about 2,000 people — an increase of less than 1%.

The administration aims to lower that by 25% by 2025.

“My plan offers a roadmap for not only getting people into housing but also ensuring that they have access to the support, services, and income that allow them to thrive,” Biden said in a statement.

The 2022 All In strategy made public Monday follows a 2010 effort called Opening Doors, which was the nation’s first comprehensive strategy seeking to prevent and end homelessness.

Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness and a former HUD executive who worked on the first road map, said the federal government can influence local action with financial incentives, streamlined processes and strong policies.

Homelessness among veterans, for example, has plummeted as a result of federal leadership, and the country also has made inroads among youth, she said.

“What they’re trying to do here is to show, as a federal government, we are going to work across agencies, we’re going to break down silos, we’re going to lead with equity, we are going to talk about upstream prevention and work on those issues,” Oliva said.

The federal plan highlights racial and other disparities that have led to inequity in homelessness. It seeks to expand the supply of affordable housing and improve on ways to prevent people from experiencing homelessness in the first place. Potential steps include a campaign to encourage more landlords to accept government housing vouchers and encourage local governments to build more apartment complexes that are affordable for working families.

The administration also announced a program to have federal agencies work with local officials to reduce unsheltered homelessness in select cities that have not yet been named.

In the Bay Area, where already strikingly high rates of homelessness increased in every county except San Francisco since 2019, the initial response to the announcement from advocates who work with unhoused people was cautiously optimistic. Still, some noted the lack of detail about what types of federal funds would be distributed to local jurisdictions and agencies.

"We can't talk about policy goals without revenue goals," said Tomiquia Moss, founder and CEO of the Bay Area advocacy group All Home. "And I think that this was not explicit about where the money's going to come from."

Some advocates pointed to the impact of Project Roomkey, a 2020 initiative to temporarily lease thousands of California hotel rooms as emergency shelters, which was shown to be effective at getting people into permanent housing — but shuttered earlier this year when federal funding dried up.

"I'm hoping that this is signaling not only commitment," said Moss of Biden's new plan, "but [an understanding] that in order to espouse the comprehensive strategy, you have to pay for it ... One of the things that I think is going to be important for the feds to commit to is flexible resources, more abundant resources, that really allow this kind of audacious goal to be met. You can't just have policy direction and not invest in the solutions."

Homelessness has become a major political issue, especially in the nation's biggest cities and on the West Coast.

The new survey finds that Los Angeles has overtaken New York as the city with the largest unhoused population. In New York, where most people experiencing homelessness are in shelters, the total number declined to less than 62,000 this year from nearly 78,000 in 2020. Homelessness grew more slowly in Los Angeles, but still edged up to more than 65,000 from under 64,000 two years earlier.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass took office this month and promptly declared a state of emergency. New York Mayor Eric Adams last month announced a plan to treat mentally ill people and remove them from the streets and subways, even against their will. And in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom in September signed the controversial Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Act, which allows courts to order treatment plans of up to two years for unhoused people with severe mental health disorders.

This year's point-in-time survey reflected a balancing of opposing forces. The pandemic brought massive job losses, particularly for lower-income people, and higher rents. It also spurred an eviction moratorium and temporary federal aid, including tax credits for families that helped keep people housed.

The count found that homelessness declined among veterans, families, children and young adults. Most were staying in shelters, though the number of those sleeping in places not intended for habitation rose. More people had been unhoused for more than a year. Black people continued to be disproportionately likely to experience homelessness.

The new count was heavily anticipated because the 2021 survey was incomplete due to the pandemic. This year's survey wasn't a full return to normal, however. While the individual tallies normally take place in late January, many were pushed back to February or March because of the pandemic. The local reports compiled into the national data showed that the numbers rose in some places and fell in others.