When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass campaigned last year on reining in homelessness, she laid out bold proposals with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. In April, she told NPR she hoped for a “very significant reduction” this year, especially of people living on the street. But on Monday, Bass said it’s become clear that there’s simply no end in sight.

“We really need to normalize the fact, unfortunately, that we’re living in a crisis,” she said at a press conference announcing a renewal of her emergency declaration on homelessness.

The shift in tone comes after both LA and New York City recently declared a record level of homelessness, and other cities have also seen their numbers continue to climb despite considerable attention and spending to give people shelter. It’s part of a steady rise around the country since 2016, after years of successfully driving down the number of people without housing.

So what’s going on? Advocacy groups and researchers say a big driving force is the decline of affordable housing, a problem decades in the making but one that has grown significantly worse in the past few years. Here are a few ways it’s playing out.

Continue reading at NPR… 

 

Homelessness in America spiked last year, reaching a record high, according to an annual count that provides a snapshot of one night in January. The report, released today by the department of Housing and Urban development, found more than 650,000 people were living in shelters or outside in tents or cars. That’s up a whopping 12% from the year before.

To advocates, it hardly comes as a surprise.

“We simply don’t have enough homes that people can afford,” says Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. “When you combine rapidly rising rent, that it just costs more per month for people to get into a place and keep a place, you get this vicious game of musical chairs.”

Homelessness has been rising since 2017 in large part because of the country’s massive shortage of affordable housing. There was a pause during the pandemic, and Biden administration officials say that’s because of sweeping federal aid that kept people from getting evicted. But last year, in a triple whammy, that aid started running out. Inflation spiked to its highest level in a generation, and median rent hit a record high. Research has found that where rents rise, so does homelessness.

Continue reading at NPR…