The homeless population is increasing. Will Trump's second term make it worse?
When Rosie Garrison evacuated from the Sunswept fire in Studio City, California, earlier this month she left behind a plastic toy cottage she used for shelter along the banks of the Los Angeles River.
Her cottage survived but Garrison remains part of Los Angeles' homeless population, which numbers around 75,000. The depth of the wildfire destruction is likely to increase that number.
"A week ago we had more housing than we've ever had in Los Angeles and we were still outside," Garrison said in a phone interview, coughing through a sore throat caused by breathing dust and ash. "If we rebuild, how are we not going to be outside still?"
Unhoused residents like Garrison across the U.S. and local leaders who serve them are asking the same question this month as Donald Trump reenters the White House: How will more people get housed over the next four years?
As Inauguration Day approached, housing experts are holding their breath, waiting to see if Trump will roll back federal strategies that get people from the streets into homes, said Philip Mangano, the former executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness under President George W. Bush. Any loss of progress at the federal level would make it harder for city councils and local nonprofits to stem the tide of homelessness.
“The fear, of course, is that there will be an undoing of what works," Mangano told Paste BN.
When Trump was first inaugurated in January 2017, there were about 550,000 homeless people nationwide, according to an annual count from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This past year, the same count found 770,000 people living unhoused, according to HUD, representing a 40% increase in homelessness since 2017.
Why do people become homeless?
The top driver of homelessness is high rents that keep low-income people locked out of housing, said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
"We know more Americans than ever are paying more than 50% of their income toward rent," Oliva told Paste BN. "When a neighborhood, on average, spends more than 30% of their income on rent, homeless goes up exponentially."
The best way government officials can reduce homelessness is by supporting efforts to build low-income housing, said Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project. But Trump hasn't said he'll push for new affordable, below-market rate construction in cities with housing shortages during his second term, Roller said.
"He's talked mostly about housing deregulation, and I think we're unlikely to see efforts at the federal government to get cities to entirely rethink the way they build housing," Roller said.
During the presidential campaign, Trump proposed housing homeless people on federal lands. While a potentially creative solution, the plan would also remove people from their support systems and communities in the places they currently live, Roller said.
In California, Garrison has lived outdoors since 2017 when a bounced paycheck from her job setting up stages for concerts and festivals "basically pushed me over the edge," she said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Garrison fought hard to use an Emergency Housing Voucher to get an apartment, but it never worked out. While living outside in Los Angeles, not much help from the federal government has trickled down to her, and that likely won't change during Trump's second term, she said.
California's newly passed Proposition 1, giving the state more power to place homeless people with mental illnesses into treatment facilities, worries her most, and she said she's afraid her boyfriend could get stuck in the system.
The last time she felt she got help was when the COVID-19 stimulus checks hit her bank account, Garrison, 34, said. In 2020, two COVID-19 stimulus checks were issued by the federal government while a third was issued in spring of 2021.
"This is going to sound really messed up, and I don't want to sound like a Trump supporter, but honestly that stuff helped me," she said.
Homelessness looks different across communities
Local leaders told Paste BN they will keep using the tools they have to fight for struggling populations, including unhoused people who need mental health services and people who get groceries from food pantries to make ends meet.
The small mountain city of Grants Pass, Oregon, which last year brought the legal fight over public sleeping bans to the Supreme Court, has strengthened its homeless resources over the past seven years, said Josh Balloch, who runs a health organization there. Towns across the U.S. will tackle the crisis in creative ways under Trump, Balloch said, like how he helps homeless people in southern Oregon access Medicaid to pay for rent. However, Balloch added, Trump could hamper local efforts by making homelessness into a political issue and taking away federal social safety net funding.
"I'm worried that if the pendulum swings so far back, we end up not building on the good work that we've done," said Balloch, vice president of health policy at AllCare Health. "If you start to cut those programs, and you go in with a sledgehammer and break the program, you make it exponentially harder for communities to administer services."
While high rents pushed people from all backgrounds into homelessness, migrant refugees bused from the southern border also swelled homeless shelter populations in cities by tens of thousands in 2023 and 2024.
Many migrants, refugees and other new arrivals still live in so-called sanctuary cities like New York, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The number of migrants bused to those cities dropped off throughout 2024, and since then "a lot of localities are not seeing that kind of inflow of new arrivals that they were then," Oliva said.
Meanwhile, Trump said he will take a tougher approach to illegal immigration and has threatened deportation, but migrants coming into the country legally will still need affordable housing, Oliva said. During Trump's second term, decreases in homeless migrant populations could come as cities continue to close their migrant shelters, she said, like New York City which shuttered a sprawling emergency tent camp for migrants this month.
In Brooklyn, the nonprofit Community Help in Park Slope has for years helped migrants from a nearby shelter get hot meals and groceries. Things could get harder for those communities under Trump, said Executive Director Peter Endriss.
“Our biggest concerns right now are what happens if deportation actually becomes a reality because a lot of the people we serve could be undocumented immigrants, we’re concerned with their welfare," Endriss said.
Trump could threaten Housing First, experts warn
Homeless people across the U.S. need low-barrier, easy access to housing, Mangano said.
For decades, policy experts on both sides of the aisle have agreed that providing homes for people, commonly called the Housing First model, is the best solution to end homelessness, said Mangano, president and CEO of the American Round Table to Abolish Homelessness in Boston.
When homeless people aren't given options to get off the street and into permanent housing, they cycle through shelters, the emergency room and jail, costing taxpayers more money, Mangano said.
“You don’t need to be Warren Buffet to figure out what is the better approach," Mangano said.
But Housing First is the top policy model experts worry Trump could try to end, Mangano said, because it's been the easiest so-called liberal approach to homelessness for critics to attack.
"Housing First has taken the rap for increased homelessness when in fact it doesn’t bear that responsibility," Mangano said. "Removing Housing First policies would be a terrible undoing."
Democrats and Republicans, especially in California and other states in the western U.S., have most recently advocated for sleep bans like the one in Grants Pass, which experts warn only exacerbate the homeless crisis. The Supreme Court found the ban constitutional and also instructed Grants Pass to build more shelters.
"It's possibly going to be worse this time," Oliva said, referring to the anti-tent bans across cities and states. "There are more players that are really pushing bad policies."
Scott Turner, the incoming HUD secretary, did not immediately respond to requests for comments. Turner sat through his confirmation hearing this week.
HUD and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs put out data each year showing the federal government has had the greatest success reducing homelessness among veterans because federal agencies work together to provide former service members housing and health services, Mangano said.
This fall, HUD announced veteran homelessness was at its lowest level since tracking began in 2009.
If Trump's administration wants to make progress in reducing overall homelessness, they should continue with programs that work for veterans and apply those approaches elsewhere, Mangano said.
“The first thing they need to do is finish the job on homeless veterans, we can get that job done," Mangano said.