Helen Zivar
In the richest country on earth, over 653,000 people were homeless in 2023, a 12% increase from 2022 and the highest recorded level since reporting began in 2007, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). At the same time, according to the Census Bureau, over 15 million homes were vacant in the same year.
The official homelessness count reported by HUD is a gross underestimate of the actual number. For example, while schools identified 1.28 million homeless students in 2019-2020, HUD reported about 106,000 children under 18 were homeless.
The fastest growing population among the homeless is the elderly. The current number of homeless people 50 years and older has not been seen since the Great Depression. This age group comprised 11% of homeless single adults in the 1990s but today represents half of this population. This is expected to get worse over the coming years. Further, the number of homeless families increased between 2022 and 2023 by an estimated 25,000, reversing a 10-year downward trend in family homelessness according to HUD.
Bourgeois experts have provided various reasons for this crisis. They point to the shortage of affordable housing, inflation and rising rents, drug use, chronic mental illness, and the expiration of pandemic-era eviction ban as the causes of rising homelessness. For example, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of over seven million units of affordable homes for low-income renters. At the same time, the number of evictions has sharply increased over the past two years, as Princeton University’s Eviction Lab reports: the number of evictions filed increased by 78.6% in 2022 (in a sample of states and cities that Eviction Lab tracks) compared to the prior year, and in 2023 this number reached 1.1 million.
While these factors exacerbate homelessness, they are not the root causes of it. Capitalism is driven by the singular goal of increasing profit through the exploitation of labor. This means that production, including that of affordable houses, is also dictated by this law. Capitalists increase their profits by decreasing relative wages, meaning workers are left with fewer resources to pay for rent and other necessities. This is brought about in part through the introduction of new technology that decreases the number of workers required for production. There is more competition among workers for the fewer jobs remaining, and those that remain are made to work harder and for less or else be replaced by someone more desperate. The rest are cast aside into the reserve army of labor—the unemployed, who the capitalists utilize not only to threaten its current workers but also to draw upon in times of economic boom when more production is needed.
As the reserve army grows, so do the jobless, destitute, and homeless. Just as unemployment is a necessary condition of capitalism, homelessness will remain a necessary symptom.
