You Can’t Afford to Live Here Anymore — Welcome to the future

 If you’ve walked through any city recently not just L.A. or San Francisco, but places like Denver, Austin, or even small towns in Ohio  you’ve probably seen it. Rows of tents, people wrapped in blankets on park benches, and cars crammed with people trying to sleep through the night. This isn’t a blip. This is America now.

Homelessness in the U.S. jumped 18% in 2024, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s equivalates to over 800,000 people without a roof over their heads. That is more than the population that lives in Seattle  literally just out here, surviving.

          ,                                                    Families living out of cars

This used to be an “urban issue" but now we are seeing families being heavily affected. Families are being evicted from homes they’ve lived in for years. Full-time workers are crashing in parking lots. Shelters are packed beyond capacity from coast to coast. The system wasn’t built to handle a wave this big — and now it’s breaking.

And here’s the gut punch: family homelessness is up 40%. Child homelessness is up 33%. That’s nearly 150,000 kids  doing homework in shelters or not going to school at all. What happened? Simple: the few supports we had — eviction moratoriums, emergency rental aid — are gone. The rent kept going up. Wages didn’t. And people fell.

“This is what it looks like when you tear away every last safety net,” says Samira Rodriguez, a caseworker in Phoenix. “People aren’t failing, they’re being left behind.”

Republicans point fingers at immigrants. Democrats throw a little money at the issue and call it a day. Meanwhile, cities pass camping bans and sweep people out like trash. And the tents just move a few blocks over.

Tonya, 52, used to be a school custodian in Nevada. Now she sleeps in a tent off a highway. “I’m not lazy,” she says. “I worked hard my whole life. Then rent jumped, my car broke down, and I was out. No one helped.” And Tonya is not alone, 53% of people living in a homeless shelter had careers before they went homeless. This is a very common problem because the median income in the U.S is just above 59,000 and the cost to own a home has calculated to about making at least 47,000 a year. 

 

The racial gap here is massive too. Black Americans are 13% of the U.S. population but 36% of the homeless. This isn’t random — it’s the fallout from redlining, wage gaps, underfunded schools, and generational poverty. Darnell, 30, who’s been living on the streets in Chicago since last fall, puts it bluntly: “I was born poor and Black. That’s two strikes already.”

And then there are the seniors. Imagine working your whole life and spending retirement sleeping in a bus station. Almost half of unhoused people over 55 are unsheltered. That’s not a statistic — it’s a national shame.

There’s still this idea floating around that if homeless folks just worked harder, they’d be fine. But here’s the thing, many already have jobs. They're waiters, delivery drivers, warehouse workers. The American economy runs on them, but still doesn’t make room for them. And pretending everyone on the street is there because of laziness or addiction is just a lazy excuse to do nothing.

Helping one family can literally change the course of generations. But most of the time, people look away.

This crisis isn’t impossible to solve. We just act like it is because it’s easier than trying.

We need housing real, affordable housing. We need to stop making it take years and a maze of permits to build an apartment building. We need cities to stop prioritizing luxury condos over actual homes for the people in the city to live in and clean off the streets. These affordable homes would also help kickstart a new life for most young people giving them a place to stay until they are stable on their feet.

Mental health and addiction services are in ruins. Sidewalks aren’t psych wards. Jail cells aren’t detox centers. We’ve got to rebuild real support systems — not throw people in jail for sleeping outside.

And we’ve got to stop these useless, expensive police sweeps that only make things worse. Moving people from one block to the next doesn’t solve homelessness. It just hides it for the public and the media so the problem can be pushed behind a curtain and not solved year after year.

Americans donate about $1.4 billion to homelessness charities every year. Sounds like a lot, right? Until you find out the Girl Scouts pull in $600 million just by selling cookies. People care — but the system doesn’t.

And schools? They’ll teach your kid to raise money for cancer research (which is great), but when’s the last time anyone learned about the kid in their class who’s living in a shelter? By raising money kids learn the reality of life and how important it is to be financially educated to help prevent tragedies like homeless happen.

This is what collapse looks like. It’s not dramatic. It’s not a movie. It’s just people slowly disappearing from the system while the rest of us keep moving, looking the other way.

We can keep pretending this isn’t our problem until your neighbor gets evicted. Until your rent spikes. Until your city turns into a tent city. Until your world becomes there world.

Or we can actually do something about it.

Because if we don’t? The tents won’t stop growing. The streets won’t stop filling up. And one day, it might be you.