In the last week of January, when cities around the nation took a ballpark tally of their street populations, they counted a total of 549,928 people living in some form of homelessness. And while that’s hardly good news, it represents a 3 percent drop from the previous January. However, 15 states and the District of Columbia saw increases in the number of people lacking permanent shelter.
The new figures, released Thursday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in its annual report to Congress, mark the seventh consecutive year that homelessness has declined nationally. Sixty-eight percent of the affected people were staying in transitional housing and emergency shelters. The number experiencing chronic homelessness, defined as people with a disability who have been consistently homeless for at least a year, dropped 7 percent from 2015 to 2016—and 35 percent since 2007.