The latest data on homelessness from the Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that the number of unhoused in the U.S. increased by 18% over just the past year, to at least 770,000.
Analysts correctly note that the end of Covid-era eviction protections plus a surge in immigrants to a few urban areas like New York, Colorado, Illinois and Massachusetts, are major factors driving the current increase. Many also note that zoning restrictions, permitting restrictions, high costs of construction, not-in-my-backyard (nimby) attitudes, and other factors also make it difficult to build housing, affordable or otherwise.
But to stop there leaves out the most obvious factor that keeps hundreds of thousands or more unhoused year after year, and tens of millions more struggling to pay astronomical rents and mortgages: the fact that housing is built and maintained not for human need, but for profit.
Throughout the United States, there is no shortage of development. In cities and large towns alike there are massive construction projects building housing. But as signs like “Coming Soon, Luxury Rentals” advertise, the housing isn’t for poor and working-class people. It’s for the wealthy, or at least an upper layer of the middle-class. Since developers make little to no profit building low-income housing, they build little to no affordable housing. On the other hand, since they make big profits building so-called luxury housing, they therefore build luxury housing.
In cities like Baltimore, Berkeley, Newark, Jersey City, and many other parts of the nation, luxury high rises are being built while only yards away, dozens of people live unhoused on the streets or in the cracks and crevices of public buildings. This occurs not because of zoning rules or even migrant surges, but because developers are driven by the pursuit of profit, rather than human need.
The problem of unhoused people in the United States and many other nations is not a glitch in the system, or an easily fixed problem. Homelessness is an inherent part of a capitalist economic system that puts profits for a few before the needs of the vast majority.
