Biden unveils plan to reduce homelessness 25% by 2025

The Biden administration on Monday released a plan that seeks to eventually eradicate homelessness in the United States, starting with a 25% reduction in the number of people suffering from a lack of reliable access to safe housing over the next two years.

“My plan offers a roadmap for not only getting people into housing but also ensuring that they have access to the support, services, and income that allow them to thrive,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “It is a plan that we have grounded in the best evidence and aims to improve equity and strengthen collaboration at all levels.”

All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness is based on input from thousands of service providers, elected officials, housing advocates, and others—including more than 500 people who have been unhoused—across nearly 650 communities, tribes, and territories.

According to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), which held dozens of listening sessions to gather feedback while developing its 104-page blueprint, the new multiyear plan “will do more than any previous federal effort to systemically prevent homelessness and combat the systemic racism that has created racial and ethnic disparities in homelessness.”

After steadily declining from 2010 to 2016, homelessness around the U.S. has been climbing in recent years. More than one million people experienced “sheltered homelessness” at some point in 2022. Meanwhile, more than 582,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2022, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development conducted its annual “point-in-time count”—a method some advocates say underrepresents the severity of the crisis.

Unhoused individuals have faced wrongful blame for their predicament, says the White House, which attributes the deadly public health crisis to structural failures, including decades of worsening economic inequality and skyrocketing housing costs. The convergence of stagnating pay and a shortage of affordable housing has led to a situation where “in no state can a person working full-time at the federal minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent,” the plan points out.

The plan is critical of the “criminalization” of homelessness, which has led to the arrests of unhoused people or the destruction of encampments. Last month, for instance, Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams instructed local law enforcement and emergency medical workers to respond to unhoused mentally ill people with involuntary hospitalizations.

As NPR noted: “The new plan includes a range of ways to boost the supply of affordable housing, as well as increase the number of emergency shelters and support programs. But its biggest change is a call for the ‘systematic prevention of homelessness,’ focusing on those who are struggling to keep them from losing their housing.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org.