Rising rents, not mental-health issues or addiction, are driving homelessness, advocates say

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That is happening despite successful efforts to move people into housing, said Steve Berg, chief policy adviser at the NAEH, because the “number of people who lose their housing and become homeless is [going] up faster than the number of people who are homeless and move back into housing.”

Rent is the No. 1 issue, he said: “For 75 years, the long-term trend has been that the cost of modest rental housing has been going up faster than modest income.”

Berg and other experts spoke to reporters at a briefing Monday focused on the state of homelessness in the U.S. and hosted by NAEH, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Despite the prevalent view that mental-health conditions or addiction are the main factors behind homelessness, the speakers said, homelessness actually can be attributed to the discrepancy between how fast rents and incomes are rising.

“Housing instability is primarily an income problem,” said Peggy Bailey, vice president for housing and income security at the CBPP. “Obviously there are people who might have a mental-health condition or disability. But that isn’t the primary cause of homelessness. It just exacerbates the odds that they might experience homelessness.”

She noted that median U.S. rents went up by 18% between 2001 and 2021, and just in the two pandemic years between 2019 and 2021, they went up by 13%. Those increases, she said, “were not met with corresponding increases in income.”

Affordable housing can’t be left to the private market, said Diane Yentel, the president of the NLIHC, because the amount of rent that people with the lowest incomes can afford to pay does not cover the cost of operating and maintaining a building.

“This is a basic market failure that requires government intervention, in this case in the form of subsidies,” she said.

Housing-first initiatives like rental-assistance programs are the most effective way to address homelessness, the CBPP’s Bailey said. Because of those programs, she said, “between 2009 and 2022 we’ve been able to reduce veteran homelessness by more than half.”

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Housing-first approaches provide people with a place to live with no preconditions and then offer social services like counseling or treatment for addiction. Such policies were first adopted on the federal level by the administration of President George W. Bush.

In 2020, the Trump administration proposed a plan to end housing-first initiatives and instead called for providing housing vouchers to people only after they complete drug and mental-health treatment and job-training programs.

“For too long we’ve seen housing as a reward and something that generates wealth for families,” Bailey said. “And this is the excuse that we’ve used to not build enough apartment buildings or to discriminate against people of color, people with low incomes, people with disabilities, and to restrict their housing access to certain neighborhoods or communities.”

She added: “Why are so many people unhoused in the richest country in the world? And what can we do to end homelessness and evictions? The answer to all that is to invest in rental assistance and affordable housing.”