This holiday season, America’s financial oligarchy is celebrating as the Dow Jones Industrial average breaks record after record. But this winter, more homeless Americans than ever will spend the holidays on the streets, in homeless shelters, in parked cars and RVs, in abandoned buildings and under highway overpasses.
The number of homeless people in the United States has hit a record 653,000, a 12 percent increase over the prior year and an all-time record. This year, the number of homeless people in America was greater than the entire population of Vermont or Wyoming.
Tents line an overpass on North Hill Street above Cesar Chavez Avenue near U.S. 101 in Los Angeles, Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023.
These figures come from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) annual “point-in-time survey” released earlier this month.
But even this enormous figure is likely an underestimation. A 2017 report from the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty noted that a previous study using “administrative data collected from homeless services” estimated that the annual number of homeless people in the US is “2.5 to 10.2 times greater than can be obtained using a point in time count.”
Notable findings from the latest HUD survey include:
- Homelessness among families with children increased by 15.5 percent.
- California, home to the most billionaires in the US at 186, also has the highest homeless population at 181,399.
- Nearly one in six homeless people, or more than 98,000, were between 55 and 64, while another 39,700 were over the age of 64.
- Among homeless adults over 55, 46 percent were living in unsheltered areas “not meant for human habitation.”