SocietyPoint-in-Time CountNovember 2026
Homelessness in America Fell by the Largest Amount on Record. Nobody Agrees Why.
The January count found 698,425 people without housing on a single night — 47,227 fewer than a year earlier. The White House credits border enforcement. Housing groups credit the programs the White House wants to remake.
Tents along a sidewalk in Skid Row, Los Angeles, July 8, 2018. Russ Allison Loar · CC BY-SA 4.0
01The number
The largest drop ever counted
On November 6, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced the largest one-year decrease in homelessness on record. The 2026 Point-in-Time count found 698,425 people without housing on a single night in January — 6.3 percent fewer than the 745,652 counted a year earlier, or 47,227 fewer people. It was the second consecutive annual decline, after a drop of about 3 percent the year before, and the first time the count has fallen two years in a row since 2016.
The headline is good news, and nobody in the debate disputes the direction. What they dispute is the reason — and what should happen next. The Trump administration credits border enforcement, a crackdown on encampments and a shift from Housing First to what it calls Treatment First. Housing advocates credit the very programs the administration is trying to remake, along with softer rents in some cities. The count itself cannot settle the argument. It can only say how many people were found, on one night, and where the trend is pointing.
02The count
One night, counted by hand
The Point-in-Time count is the federal government’s main yardstick for homelessness. On a single night each January, local Continuums of Care — the regional bodies that run federally funded homelessness programs — count the people they can find in emergency shelters and transitional housing, and send volunteers and outreach workers out to count people sleeping outside, in cars and in places not meant for living. HUD adds the local counts into a national total and publishes it in the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress.
That method makes the count a snapshot, not a census. It misses people sleeping on a friend’s couch or in a motel room they paid for themselves, and it depends on how many volunteers turn out on a cold night and how thoroughly they search. HUD had not posted the detailed report behind the November 6 headline when it announced the total, so the state-by-state breakdowns — which cities fell, which groups fell, how many were unsheltered — are still to come. The figures in this article are the topline numbers HUD announced, checked against the independent analysis commissioned by the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
03The arc
A decade of climbing, two years of falling
The longer arc is what makes the drop matter. Homelessness climbed almost without interruption from 2016, when the count hit its lowest point, 549,928, to a record 771,480 in January 2024 — an 18 percent jump in a single year. The 2025 count, published in May 2026 after months of delay, fell about 3 percent to 745,652, the first year-over-year decline since 2016. The latest count extends that turn: two straight declines, totalling about 73,000 fewer people than the 2024 peak.
Even so, the total is still far above where it stood before the pandemic. On the January 2019 count, 567,715 people were homeless; the latest figure is about 23 percent higher. HUD’s own statement concedes the point: Secretary Scott Turner said homelessness “remains near a historic high” and that “there is more work to do.” The 2022-to-2025 rise the department cites — 28 percent — is also real: the count went from 582,462 in 2022 to 745,652 in 2025. The argument is not about the numbers. It is about which policies deserve the credit for turning them around.
| January count | People counted | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 549,928 | Lowest on record |
| 2019 | 567,715 | Before the pandemic |
| 2024 | 771,480 | Record high; up 18% |
| 2025 | 745,652 | Down about 3% |
| 2026 | 698,425 | Down 6.3%; largest drop on record |
04Two explanations
The White House case: the border
HUD’s explanation starts at the border. “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,” Turner said in the November 6 announcement. The department argues that during the previous administration, asylum seekers filled shelters in New York, Chicago, Boston and Denver, and that the fall in new arrivals pulled the shelter count down with it. Devon Kurtz of the Cicero Institute, an administration ally on homelessness policy, told NPR that those four cities drove about half of the recent drop.
The independent analysis commissioned by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, written by Jared Schachner of the University of Southern California, found a decline of similar size — 6.7 percent, against HUD’s 6.3 percent — but a different story underneath it. “It’s good news that more people are getting housed, and that the programs that are funded by Congress are working,” the alliance’s chief executive, Ann Oliva, told NPR. She credited housing programs that move people indoors without preconditions, especially for veterans, and pointed to softer rental markets in some places: rents are still high, but down from pandemic peaks, which can slow the flow of people losing homes in the first place.
A separate analysis by Community Solutions, based on local counts from 182 Continuums of Care, found the same broad pattern: 57 percent of those communities recorded a decline. Both nonprofit analyses put the sheltered population down more than 7 percent and the unsheltered population down about 5 percent — the alliance’s figures are 7.9 percent and 4.9 percent. The decline, in other words, was not confined to four cities or to shelters. It was broad, and it was driven by people actually getting housed, not only by people leaving the count.
05Veterans
Veterans: the clearest success, claimed by both sides
Veterans are the clearest success story in the data, and both sides claim it. Homelessness among veterans fell more than 7 percent in the latest count, according to NPR, and the alliance’s analysis puts the fall at 7.8 percent. The longer trend is striking: on a single night in January 2025, 32,495 veterans were homeless, a record low since measurement began in 2009 and a 56.1 percent reduction since 2010, when the count found 74,087. Much of that progress came through HUD-VASH, the joint HUD and Department of Veterans Affairs program that pairs rental vouchers with VA case management — a Housing First program Congress funds at far higher levels than other homelessness programs.
That history is why advocates bristle at the administration’s account. Oliva told NPR that investments in programs like HUD-VASH “are much closer to the scale of need for veterans than for any other population experiencing homelessness.” The administration, by contrast, argues that the old model warehoused people without results and wants future funding tied to treatment and self-sufficiency. Veterans will be the test case for that argument: if the model that cut their numbers by more than half is dismantled, the next count will show it first.
06The exception
The one group that moved the wrong way
One group moved the wrong way. Chronic homelessness — long-term homelessness, usually tied to disability, mental illness or addiction — edged up about 1 percent in the latest count, according to the alliance’s analysis, even as the total fell. It is the hardest part of the problem to solve, and the part where the two approaches genuinely differ: Housing First offers a home first and treatment as a voluntary extra; Treatment First makes treatment and recovery services a condition of help, betting that sobriety and stability must come before a permanent home. Critics of the second approach say it sends people back to the street when they relapse, which is common; its supporters say a home without treatment leaves the underlying crisis untouched.
07Encampments
The encampment crackdown
The encampment crackdown is the second pillar of the administration’s case. In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities may enforce bans on sleeping and camping on public property without violating the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In July 2025, President Trump signed an executive order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” directing federal agencies to push cities toward clearing encampments and to steer funding toward treatment. HUD’s November statement cited both the court victory and the order as drivers of the decline.
The evidence for that claim is thinner than the headline suggests. The alliance’s analysis found that cities with encampment bans “actually did worse than the national average,” Oliva told NPR — a direct challenge to the idea that clearing camps reduces homelessness rather than moving it out of sight. What the bans clearly do is change where people are counted: a person moved from a visible tent to a doorway, a car or another city may disappear from one count and reappear in another. Until HUD publishes the detailed report, nobody can say how much of the 6.3 percent is people housed and how much is people hidden.
08The money
The funding fight behind the numbers
The money is where the argument turns into policy. In June 2026, HUD opened a $4.04 billion Continuum of Care competition — the largest federal homelessness grant — with $1.3 billion set aside for new transitional housing and services-only projects and scoring points for requiring participation in treatment. It was, the department said, the most competitive homelessness funding round in history: a record 3,700 applications arrived. But the competition has been fought in court all year. A district court vacated the fiscal 2026 notice in August; on September 16, the First Circuit stayed that ruling pending appeal, and HUD reopened the competition with a September 30 deadline. Awards are due by December 1.
The administration’s budget request for the next fiscal year would go further and eliminate the Continuum of Care program altogether. Supporters of the change say the old system spent billions while homelessness rose to record levels, and that funding should reward recovery and self-sufficiency instead of renewing permanent housing subsidies. Opponents — including the two nonprofit groups that tallied the latest decline before HUD announced it — say the decline itself is evidence that the current system works, and that cutting it now would reverse the first real progress in a decade. The December 1 awards will show which argument won the funding round. The January 2027 count will show what it cost.
09Blind spots
What the count misses
The count also has blind spots that no press release mentions. It does not count the doubled-up: families sharing a relative’s living room, people in motels, or anyone who found a couch for the night. It counts people in taxpayer-funded housing for the homeless separately, so a person who moved from a shelter bed into a subsidised flat vanishes from the headline even though they are still in the system. And a single January night is hostage to the weather: a count taken during a cold snap finds more people in shelters and fewer outside, and a count taken during a storm finds fewer volunteers. None of that makes the 6.3 percent meaningless. It makes it a floor, not a ceiling — the number of people the country could find, on the worst night to be outside.
10The calendar
Hunger, homelessness and the week ahead
The calendar gives the story its next dates. November is National Homelessness Awareness Month, and National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week runs November 15 to 21, 2026 — the week when food banks and shelters that spent the autumn feeding people who lost benefits will be most visible. HUD still owes the detailed report behind its headline, and the Continuum of Care awards are due December 1. Then, in January, volunteers will go out again on another cold night, clipboards in hand, and count. The question they will answer is whether 698,425 was a turning point — or a pause.
11Method
How this was reported
This article is desk research based on public sources checked against each other: HUD’s November 6 announcement, NPR’s November 7 reporting, the National Alliance to End Homelessness analysis, Community Solutions, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and HUD’s 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. Where the sources disagree, this article says so: the decline is 6.3 percent by HUD’s count and 6.7 percent by the alliance’s estimate; the number of people fewer is 47,227 by the official totals and “roughly 49,000” by NPR’s rounding.
Two figures in this article are calculated from official totals rather than quoted: 47,227 is 745,652 minus 698,425, and about 73,000 is 771,480 minus 698,425. The 28 percent rise from 2022 to 2025 is HUD’s own figure, and it matches the official totals. All figures are as announced or published on November 6 to 9, 2026. The detailed 2026 report had not been published when this article was written; state-level figures will be added when HUD releases them.
Sources
- HUD, “Largest Decrease in Homelessness,” Nov. 6, 2026: hud.gov
- NPR, “Homelessness in the U.S. saw its largest drop in more than a decade,” Nov. 7, 2026: kansaspublicradio.org
- National Alliance to End Homelessness, “2026 National Homelessness Estimate,” Nov. 2026: endhomelessness.org
- Bipartisan Policy Center, “What Does HUD’s 2025 Point-in-Time Count Tell Us?”: bipartisanpolicy.org
- Congressional Research Service, “Homelessness” (2025 PIT data): everycrsreport.com
- Community Solutions, “2025 Homelessness Estimates”: community.solutions
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “Veteran homelessness continues downward trend: 56% since 2010,” June 25, 2026: news.va.gov
- Library of Congress, Constitution Annotated, “City of Grants Pass v. Johnson”: constitution.congress.gov
- Newsmax, “Scott Turner to Newsmax: Housing First Failed,” Oct. 21, 2026: newsmax.com
- Cicero Institute, “California’s Exposure Under the FY2026 Homelessness Assistance Continuum of Care NOFO”: ciceroinstitute.org
- Homelessness policy tracker, 2024–2026 (CoC litigation timeline): contentlora.com
- Pitt County, N.C., proclamation, National Homelessness Awareness Month and Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, Nov. 2, 2026: einnews.com
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