The Department of Housing and Urban Development quietly released its annual homelessness report on Friday afternoon, 16 months after volunteers around the country carried out the 2025 homeless count. The news wasn’t all bad, in fact the data showed a small improvement overall. But these marginal gains elicited an odd response from the Trump administration, which opted to use the report as a vehicle to attack programs and policies that help both poor and unhoused Americans.
Overall, homelessness dropped 3 percent to 745,652 people, according to the 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. It’s the first decrease in national homelessness in years, following the 12 percent and 18 percent spikes that were reported in the 2023 and 2024 counts, respectively. The report, compiled from homeless counts done by local authorities around the nation in January 2025, reflects changes from the previous year. That means that this year’s report largely examines the changes that occurred during the final year of the Biden administration, not the first under Donald Trump. However, in its press release accompanying the 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, HUD Secretary Scott Turner decided to talk about a different issue.
“The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” Turner said. “HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.” The HUD announcement also took the time to note that homelessness is up 27 percent since January 2013 and that any decreases in the 2025 report were “attributable to decreases in Sanctuary Cities.”
The words “sanctuary,” “sanctuary cities,” or “housing first” do not appear in the report.
The May 29 release of the report was a prelude to more attacks on housing-first policies—which, as the name suggests, prioritizes putting people into housing with low barriers, be it by building new units or funding rapid rehousing programs—as well as an increased focus on addiction and mental health issues, even though most Americans experiencing homelessness don’t deal with those conditions. On Monday, HUD released a revised plan for homelessness, pushing money to deal with drugs and mental health, which it calls the “root causes of homelessness.” In a statement, Turner again attacked housing-first policies, saying, “Housing alone will not solve a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness.” It’s a drastic shift that moves money away from federally backed housing programs to a dubious new approach to the crisis that’s not supported by the data.
All the same, it’s not a surprising move. Trump, JD Vance, and their allies have opposed housing first and other forms of assistance to people living on the streets or on the brink of homelessness for quite some time. Throughout the 2024 election and since taking power, the administration has repeated claims that homelessness is driven by addiction or mental health issues, linking homelessness to criminal activity and, by extension, a punitive policy approach. Other Republican politicians have taken up the rhetoric for their own purposes—Spencer Pratt, the reality-television heel currently running to be mayor of Los Angeles, has, in somewhat ham-handed fashion, deployed these talking points on the campaign trail.
This is all despite the fact that the report found some slight improvement in the overall homelessness picture. “So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 PIT Count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people, including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness,” Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a separate statement. “Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.”
The count itself is what is known as a “point-in-time” count. It does not reflect thousands of Americans who fell into homelessness over those 12 months for short periods of time due to disasters, financial strain, or other hardships but were able to get rehoused. Still, it is a window into just who is homeless in the United States: 266,320 were unsheltered. Approximately 155,750 of the total unhoused population is chronically unhoused. Veteran homelessness, which has been cut by more than half since a record high of more than 74,000 in 2010, dropped 1 percent in the 2025 count. That is a victory, but also a notable flatlining compared to the 8 percent drop in the 2024 count.
Even in the Democrat-led cities the administration has gone after—and repeatedly accused of being overrun by crime and homelessness—the number of unhoused Americans went down. The 2025 count noted that Los Angeles’s continuum of care, in particular, saw the largest decline in chronic or long-term homelessness, down 2,394 over the previous year. The report specifically noted continuums of care, attributing declines to “additional projects opening, use of coordinated entry to move unsheltered individuals into affordable housing units, quicker placements into housing, increased outreach to transition chronically homeless individuals into permanent housing,” among other reasons. These are the same mitigation approaches the administration is now disclaiming as ineffective.
The economy of Biden’s final year in office wasn’t particularly rosy. A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that nearly half of the country’s households didn’t make enough to make ends meet. Homelessness is a case of precarity and scarcity, and thousands of Americans remain on the brink of, or are even briefly experiencing, being unhoused.
The release of the report was several months delayed. The fall government shutdown likely played a role, although a HUD spokesperson told NBC News earlier this year there was no set release date. But the 16-month wait leaves local authorities waiting for information that normally helps set policy. The extremely quiet release of the data is telling: The annual count is an important tool used to help guide housing efforts and funding programs—the longer it is delayed, the harder it is for communities to plan for their response to affordability and housing crises.
The delay also means that the most “current” data is already out of date, in many ways. Because the count covers the last year of an administration that is no longer governing, it can’t account for any trajectory-altering effects of any of the new policies the Trump administration has pushed on housing or homelessness, nor does it show how tariffs and the government’s cuts to SNAP are hurting families and individuals relying on those programs to stay afloat.
Even the 2026 count, whose final numbers are still months from being released, won’t reflect the ongoing economic strain of the energy shock and geopolitical disruptions of the war with Iran. It’s highly likely that the millions of Americans struggling to get by are dealing with worse conditions than any of our available data can reflect. But the administration is barreling forward with a plan of its own: Denigrate if not scuttle the programs designed to help people get back into housing quickly, while leaning back into depicting spurious and stereotypical symptoms of homelessness as the root causes. There is no telling when we might have a timely and accurate depiction of the homeless population again, but everything the administration is doing suggests that there will not be gains, marginal or otherwise, to celebrate.
