In 2023, the United States saw its largest single-year increase in homelessness since tracking began. Over 650,000 people were counted as homeless on a single night — a number that experts agree dramatically undercounts the reality. Behind that statistic are hundreds of thousands of people who, six months earlier, had never been unhoused. They had jobs. They had leases. They had plans.
What happened? Washington happened. And not in the abstract.
The Legislative Pattern Nobody Is Talking About Loudly Enough
Over the past several years, a convergence of federal and state legislative decisions has systematically dismantled the financial floor beneath working-class Americans. The mechanisms are technical enough to obscure in press releases, but their effects are catastrophic in living rooms and parking lots across the country.
The expiration of pandemic-era protections — eviction moratoriums, enhanced SNAP benefits, expanded Medicaid, student loan forbearance — happened at different times and in different ways, creating a rolling series of financial shocks for households that had built fragile stability on top of those supports.
Medicaid unwinding alone removed coverage from over 10 million people in 2023-2024, many of whom were dropped due to procedural issues rather than ineligibility. When healthcare costs reappear without warning, families make impossible choices: pay for insulin or pay rent.
The death of expanded Child Tax Credit sent 3.7 million children back into poverty almost overnight when Congress failed to renew it in 2022. For single-parent households, the monthly payment wasn’t extra — it was the difference between making rent and not.
First-Time Homelessness Is Different
There is a distinction that gets lost in policy debates between chronic homelessness — people experiencing long-term housing instability — and situational homelessness, where people lose housing due to a specific crisis or economic shock. The current influx is overwhelmingly situational.
These are people who don’t know the shelter system. Who don’t know which organizations to call. Who are terrified, disoriented, and often employed but unable to cover first, last, and deposit simultaneously after an eviction. Their needs are different, their timeline to re-housing is shorter with the right intervention, and the window to help them closes fast.
What Responsive Policy Actually Looks Like
We don’t need to invent solutions. We need to fund and scale what works: emergency rental assistance that moves faster than eviction courts, right-to-counsel programs that give tenants legal representation, housing-first approaches that don’t require sobriety or employment as prerequisites for shelter, and bridge support that doesn’t create benefit cliffs discouraging income growth.
Hot’s N Cot’s is building community-level infrastructure to catch people before they fall — and to connect them to resources when they do. Our Corridor initiative links small businesses and nonprofits across communities. Our Hootenanny festivals bring economic access directly to the neighborhoods that need it most.
The influx isn’t accidental. And neither is the solution. Join us at hotsncots.org and help us build the systems that Washington isn’t building fast enough.