Noah Smith, Columnist

Homelessness Is a Tragedy the U.S. Can Afford to Fix

But it’s a job for the feds, not state and local government.

May 21, 2018 at 11:00 AM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

It doesn’t have to be this way.
Photographer: Christian Science Monitor/Christian Science Monitor

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First the good news: Homelessness in the U.S. is down. In the mid-2000s, President George W. Bush’s “housing first” program made substantial inroads against the problem. President Barack Obama continued the campaign with the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program in 2009 and a follow-up program in 2010. As a result of these efforts, the nationwide homeless population has continued to fall:

That happy trend shouldn’t be minimized. But it masks substantial regional inequality in access to housing. In some states, homelessness has dropped a lot, but in other states it has gone up: