The United States recorded its first national decline in homelessness in nearly a decade, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. On a single night in January 2025, there were 745,652 homeless people in the country — a 3% decrease from 2024, HUD reported. The decline was the first since 2016.
California recorded an almost 3% decrease, bringing its total unhoused population to 181,934 in 2025. The state remained one of the two largest in raw numbers of unsheltered people, alongside New York, but its decline ranked among the five biggest state-level drops nationally. Illinois reported a 44% decrease, Hawaii reported a 41% decrease, Florida reported an 11% decrease, and New York reported an 8% decrease, according to the HUD data.
The California numbers marked at least some return on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s intensifying push on homelessness. In May 2025, Newsom announced a model ordinance for cities and counties to address persistent encampments, along with $3.3 billion in voter-approved funding to expand housing construction and drug treatment programs. Homelessness has been a central issue in this year’s gubernatorial race and in the Los Angeles mayoral race.
The Trump administration sought to frame the decline in terms favorable to its own policy agenda while simultaneously downplaying the improvement. HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the data demonstrated a failure of the prevailing approach to homelessness. “The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” Turner said in a press release. “HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.”
The administration also highlighted the fact that homelessness has risen 27% since 2013, a longer-term trend that dwarfs the single-year improvement. It attributed the 2025 decrease to its own immigration enforcement, stating the drop was “attributable to decreases in Sanctuary Cities.”
Anti-homelessness advocates pushed back on both framings. Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the progress reflected targeted housing and service resources deployed in 2024, not the administration’s current policies. “So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 PIT Count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people, including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness,” Oliva said in a statement.
Oliva warned that the administration’s policy trajectory could erase the gains documented in the new data. She pointed to proposed cuts to permanent housing programs that the organization found would “force at least 170,000 formerly homeless people back on the streets.” The administration has also mandated treatment for recipients of federal housing vouchers, penalized jurisdictions that employed harm-reduction strategies such as safe consumption sites, and in April 2026 proposed a rule requiring federally funded shelters to house prospective tenants based on their birth sex alone.
The data comes from HUD’s federally mandated point-in-time count, which tallies people sleeping in shelters and outside on a given night. The count, conducted in January each year, is the primary national measure of homelessness, though advocates have long noted it likely undercounts people living in cars, on couches, or in other situations not visible on a single night.