Mother of exiles

In late December, a sleeping homeless woman traveling on New York City’s F train was allegedly set ablaze and killed by a homeless immigrant, highlighting, apparently, how the city has struggled to cope with an influx of homeless immigrants, who often use the subway system for refuge. Over the last two years, New York City has spent more than US$6 billion on shelters.

Last year, meanwhile, homelessness in America rose by 18 percent, the largest increase since data collection began in 2007. And that came on the back of the previous record increase of 12 percent in 2023. Now, some 770,000 people are homeless in America, per the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual point-in-time count, which took place on a single night in January 2024.

What makes the spike especially jarring is the fact that it follows years of declining levels of homelessness. In 2012, 622,000 people were homeless in America; by 2016, 550,000. More jarringly still, child homelessness has risen by 33 percent since 2023, with some 150,000 children experiencing homelessness. Nearly 260,000 people in families with children are now homeless, also the largest number on record. What’s going on? 

Dennis Culhane is a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Culhane says that while the previous year’s increase was driven by a set of factors—a combination of rising levels of immigration and longer-standing failures of government policy—last year’s is driven almost exclusively by a surge in immigration that American cities and states have been poorly equipped to handle—leaving hundreds of thousands now cold on the streets. And yet those same states and cities have begun responding—in some ways they’ve already had successes with and in some that are experimental …

Gustav Jönsson: What’s behind this new spike?