Homelessness Count Fell in 2025—but Are the Numbers Reliable?

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) finally released its Annual Homelessness Assessment Report for 2025, and some people are already popping the champagne. The report shows that national homelessness decreased by 3.3 percent, or nearly 26,000 people, reversing a decade-long trend.

According to the National Homelessness Law Center, “Homelessness is down because President Biden funded things that we know work, like housing and support.” Yet Biden’s programs—known as Housing First—have been federal policy since 2013. After 10 years of growth, it hardly seems plausible to credit those policies for a sudden single-year dip. A deeper look at the 2025 numbers, unfortunately, reveals that the vaunted drop likely occurred more on paper than on the ground.

Hawaii’s impressive 41-percent reduction in homelessness—amounting to almost 5,000 persons—follows a staggering 89 percent increase in 2024, when the state temporarily sheltered wildfire victims. HUD rules dictate that emergency shelter populations be counted as homeless, leading to wild swings in Hawaii’s numbers. State reports, which exclude wildfire victims, show modest increases in homelessness for 2024 and 2025.

Other factors, such as immigration policy, have nationwide effects on homelessness. The Biden administration’s decision to tighten security at the southern border during the 2024 election may have produced a decline in foreigners seeking shelter. Chicago’s 2025 homelessness report explicitly attributes the city’s 60-percent reduction to this policy. However, the report adds that unhoused immigrants may have been undercounted “due to concerns of ICE raids around the time of the count,” which occurred shortly after President Trump’s inauguration.

New York’s Coalition for the Homeless similarly notes that the immigrant population in homeless shelters “declined precipitously following the January 2025 inauguration.” Pointing to the roughly 185,000 people who exited the shelter system “with no programmatic relocation support of any kind,” the report suggests that many simply went into hiding. New York and Illinois, incidentally, reported the two largest single-year drops in homelessness, totaling more than 23,000 persons—nearly the entirety of the national reduction.

Unsheltered counts also faced new challenges after the Supreme Court’s mid-2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson to allow local governments to remove homeless encampments. Repeated encampment sweeps drive homeless people into hiding to avoid having their meager belongings confiscated by the city. After Trump waged war on encampments in Washington, D.C., advocacy workers began advising the homeless to “try to be less visible.”

California, where two-thirds of the homeless population are unsheltered, is celebrating a 2.8–percent drop in homelessness (around 5,000 people) and a 9-percent drop in unsheltered homelessness. But the state’s encampment crackdown, combined with its shortage of shelters, after the Grants Pass decision draws these numbers into question. The unsheltered have since been taking refuge in less-visible places, such as abandoned buildings, where they are more difficult to count. In cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, both of which recorded lower homelessness, sweeps likely pushed more people into underground vaults and tunnels beyond the reach of outreach workers.

Los Angeles further reveals how political pressure can lead to significant undercounts. A former employee of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) testified last year that the organization’s data were “smoke and mirrors” and that her supervisor told her the authority’s job was “to do whatever we can to make the mayor look good.” An independent audit of LA County’s homelessness numbers by the RAND Corporation revealed a homeless population that was 50 percent larger than LAHSA had reported.

After a decade of consistent growth in homelessness, we all long for the day when the trend reverses. For now, however, it is too early to celebrate. Until we see a sustained, multiyear reduction, we should treat the 2025 homeless numbers with a healthy degree of skepticism.