The 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is more bad news for President Joe Biden’s legacy but also demonstrates the administration’s fundamental misunderstanding of what is driving the spike. The report from HUD claims that the massive increase is due to a lack of affordable housing, inflation, natural disasters, the spike in illegal immigration, and even systemic racism, but ignores drug addiction and mental health issues.
Ironically, most of the problems cited in the report are due to the Democrats’ failed policies.
The report completely ignores the drug crisis, despite record overdoses and crime fueled by people trying to support their addiction. The US has been flooded with Fentanyl by China and Mexico through the wide-open southern border.
One need only spend a day on the streets of Seattle to see these statistics in real life, as Washington was found in the report to have the third-highest rate of homelessness in the country, despite record spending on “affordable housing” and “harm reduction.” The Evergreen State also had the country’s largest percentage increase of the chronically homeless (55.8 percent) over 2023.
Aside from the denial of the factors causing the spike in homelessness, the numbers are based on an annual Point-in-Time (PIT) count where volunteers attempt to count the number of people they see on the streets that they believe to be homeless. Experts in the field have said that the PIT count is likely a massive undercount.
According to the report, the increase is due to the country’s “worsening national affordable housing crisis, rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism,” adding that illegal immigration and natural disasters made the problem worse.
The Biden administration supports the failed “Housing First” model, where addicts and people in mental health crisis are shoved into taxpayer-funded apartments or hotels but not expected to complete treatment. Worse yet, many of these facilities are “low barrier” to entry, meaning an addict can bring in their drugs or alcohol. Background checks are not performed and felons have taken advantage of the free housing to bring weapons into the facilities, which are notorious for violence. As a result, people are not transitioned out of housing and continue their death spiral from addiction and/ or violence.
Biden’s HUD seems content to blame homelessness on the “affordable housing crisis,” rather than acknowledging that the lack of affordable housing is due to onerous building regulations, increased taxes, hedge funds buying properties as a hedge against inflation and the government buying up whatever it can to enact their “housing first” model for addicts and the mentally ill.
The agency blamed natural disasters, because it fits the left’s climate change agenda, but failed to acknowledge that the federal government failed to help people in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton and even denied help to people with Trump signs and flags on their homes.
The Biden administration seems content to blame the homelessness crisis on illegal immigration but refused to acknowledge that it created the conditions that allowed over 11 million illegal immigrants to enter the country and allowed cartels to import drugs at record levels. Rather than addressing the drug crisis killing Americans in record numbers, Biden’s HUD chose to claim “systemic racism” was the explanation behind record numbers of people living on the streets, claiming “homelessness is an outcome of structural racism and racial inequities.”
Anecdotally, the majority of the people I see on the streets of Seattle in the throes of addiction and mental health issues are white. This is backed up by the data from a recent survey showing that over 51 percent of Seattle’s homeless are white, and only 19 percent of the homeless are black, while people who identify as American Indian, Alaskan Native, or Indigenous make up 7 percent of the county’s homeless population.
Democrats and progressive activists continue to advocate for “harm reduction” to address the drug crisis, which in Seattle means someone paid by the city will come up to you and ask if you want a condom, a box of needles, a clean crack pipe, or socks and not offer you treatment or shelter. This likely contributes to the record number of overdose deaths; 1,339 overdose deaths in 2023, a 214 percent increase since 2019.
Despite record spending of billions of dollars to solve the homelessness crisis, as much as $1,137,256 per person, King County, Washington reported an all-time high number of homeless, a 23 percent increase from 2022, following its 2024 Point-In-Time Count, the largest number of homeless ever reported in Seattle and King County. This despite King County in 2005 launching a 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness by 2015.
Dr. Robert Marbut, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institutes Center on Wealth and Poverty said, "Their argument was, well, we need more money. And yet in 12 years, the amount of money that the federal government has been spending toward homelessness has tripled and now they're saying we need more money and wouldn't explain where it's going."
Marbut added, "This year, they blamed it on immigration. The year before, they blamed it on housing prices. The year before that, they blamed it on COVID. And at no time have they taken responsibility that maybe their policy is bad. You know, sometimes policies are bad, and the more money you put into bad policy, often it makes things worse."
The report also showed that 63 percent of the people living on the streets had a substance use disorder, mental health issue, or both. King County’s numbers are similar to those in other cities with massive numbers of people living on the streets such as San Francisco and Los Angeles counties. An audit recently revealed that California was unable to account for $24 billion spent on the homeless crisis.
Seattle officials defunded actual solutions to the homeless problem following the George Floyd riots that rocked the Emerald City. Seattle had seen some success with its Navigation Team made up of police, social workers, and waste management employees that offered shelter and treatment. However, the team was dismantled to satisfy the radical left in 2020, and since then has seen a surge in overdose deaths as well as increased violence in homeless encampments.
Until government officials acknowledge the true causes of homelessness, namely substance abuse and mental health issues, and call for a full audit of where the billions of dollars have gone that were supposed to address the problem, the crisis will only get worse.
