Homelessness in the United States has fallen by the largest amount ever recorded. The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced on Saturday that the 2026 nationwide Point-in-Time count found 698,425 people homeless on a single night in January — a 6.3 percent decrease since President Trump took office in 2025, when the count stood at 745,652.
That is roughly 47,000 fewer people sleeping in shelters, in cars or on the street than a year earlier, and HUD says it is the largest decrease in homelessness on record in American history. The department tied the drop to historic border control and to the Supreme Court victory that reaffirmed the right of local governments to limit dangerous encampments.
“President Trump’s actions to secure the border, get criminal illegals off our streets, and restore safety to our communities drove a historic decrease in homelessness,” Secretary Scott Turner said. He cautioned that the work is not finished: after a decade of failed Housing First policies, homelessness remains near a historic high, and there is more work to do.
The numbers mark a sharp reversal from the Biden years. Under the Biden administration’s Housing First mandate, homelessness increased 28 percent from 2022 to 2025. HUD says that under the open-border policies of that period, illegal immigrants filled America’s homeless shelters, and homelessness rose the most in states with sanctuary city policies — New York, Illinois, California and Massachusetts. HUD is now dispensing with the Housing First approach and implementing Treatment First policies aimed at helping Americans tackle addiction.
Turner said HUD is rejecting “the addiction-fueled depravity seen from LA’s Skid Row to New York’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ and moving to Treatment First to restore lives of self-sufficiency.” Writing on X, he added: “Because of President Trump, Americans have the LARGEST homelessness decrease in history. To keep up the good work, we must reject the failed Housing First policies that caused homelessness to skyrocket.”
The policy shift behind the numbers began in July 2025, when President Trump signed the executive order “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which empowered HUD to tackle substance abuse as part of addressing homelessness and protecting public safety. In June, Turner announced the most competitive homelessness assistance funding in history, drawing a record 3,700 new applications from across the country, and in August HUD rolled out its “Best Practices Toolkit: Addressing Homelessness and Addiction through Treatment First” alongside the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
For ordinary Americans, the change means fewer encampments on city streets, shelter beds going to citizens and veterans instead of people who crossed the border illegally, and a system that pushes treatment for addiction rather than leaving people to live and die outside. HUD’s promise is that Treatment First will restore lives of self-sufficiency — people getting clean, getting housed and getting back to work — instead of another decade of numbers climbing every year.
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