Homelessness Hits New Record, Grows 18% in 2024

Opinion | Yong-in Park

The number of people experiencing homelessness in the United States has hit a new record, jumping more than 18% since last year.

According to an annual, single-night survey by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 771,480 people were recorded living in shelters, temporary housing, or outside. It is the largest number since HUD began these reports in 2007.

This tally is an undercount of the actual homeless population, since it does not record those living with family or friends.

It is also prone, as a single-night count, to recording short-term fluctuations. A historic uptick in border migration at the end of 2023 helps to explain the gargantuan spike in homelessness recorded in certain urban areas. Homelessness in New York City increased by 53%, while the state of Massachusetts had a 74% increase in family homelessness.

So what’s driving more and more people onto the streets? HUD attributes it to “our worsening national affordable housing crisis, rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism.”

Here, “systemic racism”—the intense stratification of the working class as a legacy of slavery and genocide inflicted against Black and Indigenous people—deflects the question of homelessness away from class, away from the stockpiling of capital by the ultra-wealthy and the inevitable concentration of poverty on the other end of society.

It bears repeating that homelessness is not simply the product of culture, “laziness”, or drug addiction. It is instead a material inevitability of capitalism’s inherent, multiplying crises. As housing and rental prices surge, as eviction moratoriums end, and global imperialist crisis drives people from the Third World to immigrate here, homelessness is an inevitable result.

Friedrich Engels writes in The Housing Question:

“[The housing shortage] is a necessary product of the bourgeois social order… in which finally the house owner in his capacity as capitalist has not only the right, but, in view of the competition, to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can.

“In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and it can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned.”

Although the ruling class tries to reassure us that American capitalism is stronger than ever—with the stock market seemingly hitting a new record every week! —figures around homelessness, among others, lay bare the truth of the matter.

Photo: Homeless encampment in Oakland, CA. Retrieved from Grendelkhan via Wikipedia.

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