Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a 6.3 percent annual decrease in homelessness in the United States, the largest decline on record.
HUD said that on a single night in January 2026, 698,425 individuals were homeless, 6.3 percent fewer than January 2025, when President Donald Trump took office. The decline follows "historic border control and a Supreme Court victory reaffirming the right of local governments to limit dangerous encampments," the department said.
In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that a municipality enforcing camping bans on public property against homeless people did not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment.
The department criticized the Biden administration's "housing first" mandate, which prioritized placing people in permanent housing without necessary participation in health, legal, employment, and other support services.
The Biden administration launched the House America initiative in 2021 to tackle homelessness through a housing first approach.
"This model works because it treats people with dignity, personalizes their care, and recognizes that - without housing - every other aspect of a person's life suffers," the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness said in a December 2022 statement.
Under the House America initiative, the administration helped 105 communities "move more than 100,000 households of people out of shelters, off the streets, and into permanent housing," the council said in a January 2023 statement.
Homelessness rose 28 percent between 2022 and 2025 under the mandate, HUD said, adding that this led it to shift away from this approach and implement Treatment First policies, which prioritize treatment and care for homeless people.
Around 75 percent of homeless Americans are addicted to drugs while 78 percent have mental illnesses, HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in an Aug. 12 post on X. The data is based on a sample of 64,000 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness who self-reported those issues.
A treatment first approach is expected to help Americans tackle addiction, HUD said.
HUD said the Biden administration's open border policies had led to illegal immigrants filling homeless shelters across the United States, raising homelessness in states with sanctuary policies, such as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York.
The number of people living in homeless shelters jumped 43 percent between 2022 and 2024, reversing the slow decline seen over the previous 16 years, according to an April 2025 paper from the University of Chicago on asylum seekers in the United States.
Three-quarters of the increase was concentrated in just three cities and one state - New York, Chicago, Denver, and Massachusetts. In these locations, the paper said, newly-arrived illegal immigrants were kept in emergency shelters.
"President Trump's actions to secure the border, get criminal illegals off our streets, and restore safety to our communities drove a historic decrease in homelessness," Turner said in the statement.
"However, after a decade of failed Housing First policies, homelessness remains near a historic high. Clearly, there is more work to do," Turner added.
Turner announced a homelessness assistance funding initiative in June, which has received a record 3,700 new applications to date, HUD said.
The $4.04 billion funding opportunity aims to support organizations that enable drug treatment and recovery programs, HUD said in a June 1 statement.
The funding will be made available to states and local governments, as well as nonprofits, to house homeless people and individuals facing other difficulties such as domestic violence and sexual assault.
"The 'housing first' experiment failed Americans by warehousing the vulnerable without results. This ideology promised to end homelessness. Instead, billions of taxpayer dollars were spent while homelessness increased to record levels. Housing alone will not solve a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness," Turner said in the statement.