How serious is the homeless situation in America? Nearly everything about homelessness is complicated, beginning with the question of just how many Americans experience homelessness each year. The most commonly used metric comes from what are referred to as “point-in-time” counts: annual headcounts conducted by regional agencies across the country known as continuums of care. These pointin-time counts are so named because they only count the number of people who are homeless in a given jurisdiction on a particular night of the year; for that reason and a few others—including the natural difficulty associated with counting people who, by definition, have no fixed address—they tend to drastically underestimate the size of the homeless population.
That doesn’t make them useless, however. While citing a point-in-time count in isolation is usually a mistake, looking at successive counts longitudinally can provide at least an indicator of whether homelessness is rising or falling. Based on that metric, the federal government’s analysis of all the most recent counts tells us that nationwide homelessness, which had been climbing steadily since 2016, appeared to plateau between 2020 and 2022.1 The point-in-time counts registered only a 0.3 percent increase in homelessness over that period.