Homelessness Expert Questions Stats Showing Record Drop In Americans Sleeping Rough: Exclusive

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently released a report showing that, according to a specific metric, U.S. homelessness levels had recorded their largest drop in about two decades.

The metric is the point-in-time (PIT) count, a federally-mandated count of both sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. Local planning groups known as Continuums of Care (CoCs) conduct the count, and individuals staying in emergency shelters, transitional housing or safe havens, as well as those on the streets, are included in the figure.

Although government representatives claimed that the 6.3% PIT decrease recorded between January 2025 and 2026 was a testament to "President [Donald] Trump's actions to secure the border, get criminal illegals off our streets, and restore safety to our communities," some U.S.-based experts on the issue of homelessness cast doubt on the PIT metric as a reliable indicator of homelessness levels, and questioned the administration taking credit in this manner.

One such expert is Barbara Duffield, the executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit organization that, in its own words, "works to overcome homelessness, from prenatal to postsecondary" by facilitating the access of people experiencing homelessness to education.

Duffield spoke to International Business Times about the limitations of the PIT count, especially as they relate to measuring homelessness levels amongst young people.

"So the housing agency uses a very limited definition [of homelessness]. It's just people who are in shelters and people who are visibly homeless outside. The other federal agencies who focus on children and youth, so for example, the Department of Education [DOE], Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS], use a broader definition of homelessness ... [which] includes children and youth who are staying temporarily with other people because they have nowhere else to go," Duffield said.

According to youth.GOV, DHHS defines "homeless youth" as "an individual [not more than 21 years of age] who cannot live safely with a parent, legal guardian, or relative, and who has no other safe alternative living arrangement," whereas DOE defines homeless youth as "individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence."

Under that umbrella definition, DOE lists children who are living in other people's homes or residing in non-sheltered accommodation (like motels, hotels and trailer parks) as homeless. The PIT measure does not include those people.

Residence in these non-permanent types of accommodation is, according to Duffield, "much more the nature of family and youth homelessness."

"So the one overarching critique of the point in time count [which I have] is that the situations that families and youth who are homeless are most likely to be in, aren't part of it at all," the homelessness expert told IBT.

DOE measures youth homelessness by school year and its 2023-2024 data showed 1,548,191 students (children and youth) experiencing homelessness in that window.

By contrast, PIT data from HUD estimated that on a single night in 2023, 108,190 children in families and 34,703 unaccompanied youth under the age of 25 were experiencing homelessness. HUD data from 2024 showed a similar result, with the department reporting that nearly 150,000 children experienced homelessness on a single night in 2024, alongside 38,170 unaccompanied youths.

The discrepancies between the DOE and HUD figures are stark and, according to Duffield, the former data set is "very telling."

The executive director was also critical of the Trump administration's correlation of the homelessness data with immigration policy.

"It [immigration] is not the prevailing cause of homelessness in the United States, absolutely not."

"I mean the only year where you could see it in the data was 2024, when the Southern governors essentially forced people to move to New York and Chicago ... and that's when both Chicago and New York set up special shelters for families who were displaced," Duffield argued.

Decreases in homelessness levels in Chicago and New York, along with Boston and Denver, accounted for nearly half of the drop in homelessness levels recorded in the 2026 PIT data.