New weather report shows homelessness down in California – CalMatters

from Marissa KendallCalMatters

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The number of people without a place to call home fell both in California and nationwide last year, according to a long-awaited federal report.

The data showing the first decrease in homelessness over the years has provided fuel for activists challenging the Trump administration’s narrative that current homelessness policies are failing and need to be overhauled.

Last year, 181,934 homeless Californians were counted — a 2.8 percent decrease from 2024, according to new federal report. Nationwide, homelessness fell by 3.3%, marking the first decrease since 2016. Nationwide, about 745,652 people are homeless.

Those numbers come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which released its annual homelessness report to Congress on Friday after an unexplained five month delay. As the country’s primary barometer of how efforts to combat homelessness are working, the report plays an important role in allocating funding and shaping policy – ​​and is a key policy tool.

The Trump administration has used the report to promote its policies, including a crackdown on immigration and efforts to steer funding away from permanent housing. Meanwhile, the National Homelessness Law Center was quick to point out that the reduction in homelessness happened while former President Joe Biden was still in office.

“Homelessness is down because President Biden is funding things we know work, like housing and supports,” Law Center spokesman Jesse Rabinowitz said in a news release. “Unfortunately, the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to roll back this progress.”

The federal government downplayed the small one-year reduction in homelessness, focusing instead on the fact that homelessness has increased by 27% across the country since 2013. The country then began following a practice called “housing first,” which moves people into housing right away instead of requiring them to get sober or meet other conditions first.

“The data is clear that the ‘housing first’ status quo has failed to significantly reduce homelessness, leading to crisis levels of people living on the streets,” said HUD Secretary Scott Turner. “HUD is rebuilding its programs to accelerate recovery and self-sufficiency and ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.”

The Trump administration wants to end housing first and instead prioritize housing that requires people to stay sober. The administration also tried to divert funds for homeless people away from permanent housing and into temporary shelters. California is one of the 19 states judicial the Trump administration on this change.

The federal administration tied the decline in homelessness in 2025 to immigration, saying in a news release that this was “due to a reduction in sanctuary cities.” The full report never mentioned sanctuary cities, but said some communities in New York and Illinois attributed the decline in homelessness “in part” to changes in federal immigration policy.

Where homelessness has decreased

California was among the five states that saw the largest declines in homelessness last year, although there were larger declines in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%) and New York (8%).

In California, 17 communities reported a decrease in the number of people who are “chronically homeless,” meaning they have a disability and have been homeless for a year or more. Los Angeles County reported 2,394 fewer such people. Community officials who have seen those declines attribute the trend to new housing openings, getting people into housing more quickly, using a coordinated system to match people with available units and increasing street coverage, according to the report.

The data comes from the federally mandated Homeless counting the moment in timewhich counts people sleeping in shelters and outside on a given day in January. Volunteers count the people they see sleeping on the street, in cars or other uninhabitable places. The effort is generally seen as insufficient, as it is easy for volunteers to miss people holed up in hard-to-reach areas.

The federal government requires every community to count people sleeping rough every two years. The census is conducted by “continuums of care” that include a county (or multiple counties), cities, and local service providers. In California, 14 of the state’s 44 continuing care facilities were unaccounted for last year. HUD uses 2024 data for communities where 2025 data is not available.

Each community is required to submit its census data at some point to HUD, which reviews, verifies and analyzes the data before publishing a report. This report is usually released in December of the census year.

How Trump Changed the Account of the Moment

When the federal report finally came out on Friday, the Trump administration put its stamp on it in several ways, including by deleting all references to gender. The previous report from 2024 broke down homelessness by gender (39% of people counted were female and 60% were male) and included categories such as transgender, gender issues and non-binary. The 2025 data does not include such a breakdown.

And while the previous report referred to “people experiencing homelessness,” the new report instead referred to “homeless people.”

While last year’s decline in homelessness across the country is a “relief,” trouble is on the horizon, according to Anne Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 census (now) is due to targeting housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to resettle people,” she said in a news release, “including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher Program and new funds to address rural homelessness and homelessness. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has largely disturbed these tools and works to dismantle the very systems that led to these reductions.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.