(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) It was recently reported that right now there are well over half a million Americans who are homeless due to surging rent prices.
The report that was released on Jan. 25, 2024, by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies revealed that about 653,000 people reported being homeless in January 2023.
The report added that this is up about 12% from the same time in 2022, which was the largest single-year increase ever recorded. It was also revealed that about 71,000 more people were homeless in 2023 than the year before.
The 2023 number was about 48% higher than the homeless population in 2015.
The reason why that happened was because of incredibly high rent prices, inflation and the end of COVID-19 pandemic relief like eviction protections.
Rent.com also said that the median rent in the U.S. was $1,964 in December of last year, 23% higher since the pandemic.
The Daily Wire reported that, even though the rental market is cooling, rent prices are still much higher than they were before 2020 and wage growth has not kept up.
Government figures showed that median weekly wages grew only 1.7% between 2019 and 2023.
The report also noted that people who are earning between $45,000 and just under $75,000 a year saw the biggest increase in newly “cost-burdened” renters. About 41% of those renters were spending between 30% and 50% of their monthly pay on housing back in 2022, which is a 5.4% increase over how many spent this much before the pandemic, and nearly double how many people did back in 2001.
At the same time, low-cost rental units are disappearing, with more than half a million apartments with rents under $600 disappearing between 2019 and 2022.
Due to spiking housing costs, the states of Arizona, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas were some of the places that saw the biggest rise in homelessness.
In the states of California and Washington, both of which became infamous for their chronic homelessness problem and overburdened shelters, the issue became only worse.
In 2023, homelessness increased 9% in Los Angeles County, totaling an estimated 75,000 people. In the Bay Area, there are about 38,000 people who are homeless, which is 35% up since 2019. In San Francisco itself, there are more than 7,000 people who are homeless.
The number of homeless people in the state of Washington rose 11% to 28,036 in 2023, which is probably an undercount, the state data said.
