Nov. 7
Trump Admin Claims Homelessness Is Down 47,000, Releases No Report, and Is in Court Over Its Plan to Defund the Homes of 97,000
HUD credits sweeps and border enforcement, a judge ruled in June it broke the law cutting housing grants, and the countries said to have solved homelessness count the people America leaves out.
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On Nov. 6, 2026 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, announced the largest one-year drop in homelessness it has ever recorded: 698,425 people homeless on a single January night, down 6.3% from 745,652 a year earlier. HUD Secretary Scott Turner credited President Trump’s border enforcement and “a Supreme Court victory reaffirming the right of local governments to limit dangerous encampments,” and said HUD is replacing Housing First with what it calls Treatment First. The number came in a press release with no report behind it.
The same agency is in federal court for trying to take the money out of housing resources. In December 2025 a federal judge blocked HUD’s overhaul of its $4 billion homelessness program and wrote that the agency had caused chaos for the people in it, and on June 29, 2026 the court ruled that HUD broke the law in issuing its 2025 grants. The nonpartisan National Alliance to End Homelessness counts at least 97,000 people now living in HUD-funded apartments who would lose them under HUD’s 2026 funding notice. A country reported its biggest drop in homelessness in the same year its housing agency went to court to pull the housing, and this article is about how that happens, here and in the seven countries we are told solved homelessness: a homelessness number is a decision about who gets counted, and the governments that count the most people report the most homelessness.
The United States counts its homeless two ways. HUD’s volunteers count shelters and streets on one night. Additionally, the Department of Education counts every enrolled child who lacks a “fixed, regular and adequate” place to sleep, which includes the kid whose family is doubled up in an aunt’s living room, and in the 2023-24 school year, the latest it has published, it found 1.54 million of them, the most it has ever recorded. One agency says homelessness just had its best year on record and the other says it has never been bigger, and both are genuine counts of different angles.
Florida shows how a state brings its official number down without housing anyone. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365 in March 2024, a law that bans sleeping or camping on public property anywhere in the state, and the penalties took effect on Jan. 1, 2025. Florida’s Council on Homelessness reported in June 2026 that the state’s counters found 10,180 people sleeping outside in January 2026, down from 13,647 a year earlier, a 25.4 percent drop, with 25,519 homeless people counted in all. Barbara Venditto, of the Mid Florida Homeless Coalition, said after the first count under the law that the camping ban was one reason her counters found fewer people, and Broward County’s homeless services director told her county commissioners that people had stopped talking to the counters at all. Jacksonville, where Mayor Donna Deegan added shelter beds and an outreach team in 2025, counted 31 percent more people sleeping outside in January 2026. Albuquerque’s own count report said the city’s encampment clearing before the 2024 count left surveyors arriving at zones mapped as heavily populated and finding nobody to survey, and the city agreed to pause the sweeps during the next count. When a state makes it a crime to be seen sleeping outside, its counters find fewer people sleeping outside, and the state gets to report a success it never earned.
When exploring public policy solutions, I frequently check to see which countries may be performing more or less adequately. Finland is one country that may come to mind more quickly as having more effective social programs, and in fact, it’s the only country in the European Union where homelessness fell for 11 straight years. In 2025 Finland recorded the largest rise in homelessness in its history, 4,579 people, up 20% in one year. So I pulled the latest count from each of the seven governments most often held up as the model, ranked them from the biggest rise to the biggest fall, and for each one wrote down what a person has to be doing on the night of the count to be in it.
1. Finland, up 20%. Finland counts anyone living without a lease of their own, so a man sleeping on his brother’s couch is in the number. On Nov. 15, 2025 the state housing agency, the Centre for State-Subsidised Housing Construction, counted 4,579 people, 773 more than the year before. Since 2008 the state and the nonprofit Y-Foundation, which now owns 18,518 apartments across Finland, have bought ordinary flats and rented them to people coming out of homelessness. Then Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s government cut housing allowance and income support in 2024 and 2025, and the cities told the agency that evictions and homelessness rose after the cuts. Housing First worked right up until the money under it was cut.
2. Scotland, up 10%. Scotland gave every household that becomes homeless through no fault of its own a legal right to settled housing back in 2012, and it counts only the households that apply to a council for help. On March 31, 2026 there were 19,004 households in temporary accommodation, up 10% in a year, and they had been waiting an average of 237 days. Councils broke their own law 21,800 times in the year by offering no temporary housing at all.
3. France, no official count since 2012. France has not officially counted since 2012, when the national statistics office INSEE found 143,000 homeless people that year. The housing charity Abbé Pierre founded, now called the Fondation pour le Logement des Défavorisés, did its own count and reported 350,000 in February 2025, a record, while the state opens 203,000 shelter places every night. INSEE’s next count is due this year, 14 years after the last one.
4. Austria, up 2.8%. Vienna owns 220,000 flats and subsidizes 200,000 more, and about half the city lives in one of them at rents that hold. Austria counts everyone registered with homeless services, including people in supported housing, and the national statistics agency Statistik Austria registered 21,073 homeless people in 2024, 11,512 of them in Vienna, the third straight annual rise. Vienna holds rent down for half the city, and the agency registered more homeless people outside that half for the third year running.
5. Denmark, up 0.7%. Denmark passed a Housing First reform in 2023 and counts one week every two years, and it counts people on sofas and in institutions. VIVE, the Danish National Research Centre for Welfare, registered 6,028 people in the first week of February 2026 against 5,989 in 2024; 482 of them were on the street and 1,375 were on friends’ sofas. Social Affairs Minister Monika Rubin called the result “incredibly discouraging.”
6. Japan, down 4.2%. Every January, Japanese ministry workers walk the parks, riverbanks, roadsides and station buildings with clipboards and count the people they can see. In January 2026 they counted 2,481 homeless people in a country of 124 million, down 4.2% from the year before and the lowest since the count began in 2003 with 25,296. A person sleeping in an internet café cubicle or in a car is in no count at all, and the ministry’s own 2007 survey found about 5,400 people living in the cafés, more than double the number it reported this year for the whole country.
7. Singapore, down 6.4%. Singapore’s Housing and Development Board built the flats that 77% of resident households live in. Its Ministry of Social and Family Development counts only people sleeping outdoors on one night, and on July 18, 2025 it counted 496 rough sleepers, down from 530 in 2022. Nearly half of the people its counters interviewed had a home they could have gone back to and were sleeping out over a family conflict.
Japan and Singapore, the only two on this list that reported fewer homeless people, count only people sleeping outside. Finland, with the sharpest rise, counts a man on his brother’s couch. HUD credits its record drop this year to a court ruling that lets cities clear the encampments its counters walk through, and Florida counted a quarter fewer people outside in the first full year sleeping outside was a crime.
The United States, counting only shelters and streets on one night, has 20.5 homeless people for every 10,000 residents. Finland, counting the man on his brother’s couch, has 8.1. Denmark, counting sofas and institutions, has 10.1. Count America the way Finland counts and the 1.54 million homeless schoolchildren alone are 45 for every 10,000 residents, five and a half times Finland’s entire homeless population per capita. So the countries we hold up as social democracies are struggling with this too, and they are struggling at a fraction of our level. Their models work. Finland cut homelessness for 11 straight years by buying apartments and handing people keys, and the year its government cut housing allowance and income support, the number went up 20 percent. Scotland wrote a right to housing into law and has 19,004 households waiting an average of 237 days because the homes were never built. Vienna owns or subsidizes 420,000 flats and still registered more homeless people for the third year in a row, and half the city pays a rent that holds because of those flats. Housing First works where it is funded, and the moment the money stops, the count climbs, which tells you the model was never the problem. It would be nice to tell you somebody figured this out. Nobody has a solution to poverty right now, and homelessness is poverty with the walls removed. What the seven countries show is that a government keeps people indoors by owning the homes and funding the model, and that Finland and Denmark have half our homelessness or less while counting more of it. Every government that reported a win this year got it by looking at fewer people. We keep going because the alternative is to stop looking, and the people on the couch and in the café cubicles are still there whether a government counts them or not.
CALL TO ACTION
Your state legislature can do two things this session without a dollar from HUD. The first is a law requiring the state to publish its HUD one-night count beside the Department of Education’s school count every year, by county, on one page, so no state can report fewer homeless people by counting fewer kinds of them. The second is a state Y-Foundation, a nonprofit chartered by the state and financed through the housing finance agency every state already has, that buys ordinary apartments and rents them to people leaving homelessness, the way Finland has since 2008. If you write your state representative and state senator in your own words, who you are, where you live, what you do and why you care, and link this article, either ask arrives with the numbers attached.
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