Lisa Desjardins:
Welcome to the “News Hour.”
Homelessness in America reached record high numbers earlier this year. A government report out today reveals that, last January, the number of people experiencing homelessness shot up by 18 percent to roughly 770,000, as counted on a single night.
The annual survey published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development pointed to a list of intensifying economic problems, rising housing costs and the migrant influx in some cities among them.
To understand more about what’s behind this rise, I’m joined by Shaun Donovan, CEO and president of Enterprise Community Partners and former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Shaun, this is an eye-popping report in many ways. It’s about where things stood earlier this year. And I want to start with one particular dynamic, the role of the migrant crisis. How and where did that affect homelessness in this country?
Shaun Donovan, Former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary: Well, Lisa, first of all, thank you for having me on.
And it is tragic news, the largest increase we have ever seen in homelessness since we started recording these numbers. And specifically to your question, there’s certainly no question that the rise in the number of migrant families in the U.S. did contribute to this, particularly in some of the places where we saw the biggest increases, places like New York City or Massachusetts, Chicago, Denver.
But I think what’s really stunning about these numbers is how broad the challenge is. We saw 18 states reach record levels, including places like Kansas, Alaska, Utah, places — Idaho is another one — places where there isn’t a significant influx of migrants.
And so there’s a much bigger story here about record levels of housing costs, both for owning and renting, higher than — somebody like me, who has been doing this for a long time for 30 years, I have never seen the affordable housing crisis this bad.