The number of homeless Americans rose by 12 percent to a record level in 2023 as President Joe Biden invited several million legal and illegal migrants into homes and jobs.
“More than 650,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023, a 12% increase from 2022,” a Friday report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) said.
The data is 11 months old, suggesting that the current homeless number is far higher.
January’s count shows an increase of about 70,650 from January 2022.
The number is 70,000 above the 554,000 homeless in January 2020 under President Donald Trump’s lower-migration policies. It matches the 2005 homeless population under President George W. Bush’s pro-migration policies, when media coverage of the homeless issue was one-third greater.
This chart from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development graphs homelessness from 2007-2023 (HUD).
The 2023 number was boosted by a large number of Americans who could not afford housing in Biden’s high-migration economy. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported on Friday, December 15:
HUD data indicates that the rise in overall homelessness is largely due to a sharp rise in the number of people who became homeless for the first time. Between federal fiscal years 2021 and 2022, the number of people who became newly homeless increased by 25%.
“The most significant causes are … the high cost of housing that have left many Americans living paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness,” Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, told the Associated Press (AP).
The federal report did not mention the federal government’s immigration policy, which simultaneously reduces wages and increases housing costs.
Migrants outside of Sacred Heart Church in El Paso, Texas, US, on Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023. President Joe Biden was confronted at the airport in El Paso on Sunday by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who demanded in a hand-delivered letter that Biden act immediately to stop unauthorized immigration including by building more walls on the border (Paul Ratje/Bloomberg).
Even poor migrants drive up rents because they are more willing to share bedrooms and kitchens.
Homelessness is also rising in high-migration Canada:
Seventy percent of homeless people are Latino or black, even though they comprise 33 percent of the overall population. More than half of the homeless population is in Democrat-run California, New York, and Washington, or Republican-run Florida.
The New York Times reported in October:
After losing his job in January as a purchasing agent for a gardening company in Denver, Josh, 37, who asked that he be identified by his first name only because he had not told his family about his predicament, moved into his Toyota RAV 4.
Finding somewhere safe to park was a daily struggle: “I was bouncing around between gyms, hotel parking lots, light industrial areas and the side streets off of hotels or apartments,” he said …
He called the Colorado Safe Parking Initiative, one of the newest in the country which operates thirteen [homeless parking] lots in Denver, and begged the operator for a spot. Josh now lives in one of the lots and commutes to his chemotherapy appointments.
Biden’s increased tax spending for landlords has prevented even greater levels of homelessness. For example, HUD declared:
Since Day One, the Biden-Harris Administration has been tackling the nation’s homelessness crisis with the urgency it requires, prioritizing new resources and programs to help communities quickly reconnect people experiencing homelessness to housing.
Homelessness is driven by Biden’s “Bidenomics” policy. The policy uses mass migration to expand government spending, suppress wages, spike real estate values, boost consumer spending, and spur the stock market.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about “Bidenomics” in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 9, 2023 (Photo by Jim WATSON/AFP).
The policy is a reverse of the economic policy through the Cold War, when tight curbs on immigration allowed people to buy homes for growing families and pressured companies to grow productivity and develop new technologies:
Biden’s strategy has succeeded for investors.
For example, rents have sharply increased since early 2020, according to Nerdwallet.com: “Since the beginning of the pandemic, rents have increased 29.4% overall, according to the real estate website Zillow.”
Similarly, Americans’ wages have flatlined, helping the stock market climb by 21 percent since Biden’s inauguration: