The general impoverishment of the working class grows as homelessness quietly rises across the country. As the economic crisis deepens, the number of homeless population, which has risen since the COVID-19 pandemic, has reached a record high.
According to the latest national reports from 2024 (during the Biden administration), there was an estimated 32% surge in homeless population between 2022 and 2024 to over 771,000 people, since the enactment of the “Build Back Better” programs. A growth this rate has been unprecedented at least since the 1980s. Trump, however, merely continued this trend. While comprehensive statistics has yet to be produced by the Old State and bourgeois think tanks, new, worrying reports are already emerging from across the country. From Massachusetts, to Washington D.C., and to Florida, investigations revealed the continued rise in homelessness, with families with young children and seniors being the most at risk.
The continued rise of homelessness is a natural consequence of the current economic crisis that is developing by the day. In New York City, homelessness grew by 53.1% from January 2023 to January 2024, more than four times than the national average. While the nominal wage has risen from $15.00 (2019) to $17.00 (2026), it has struggled to keep pace with the high inflation. In terms of 2019 purchasing power, $17.00 today is roughly equivalent to $13.80–$14.10 back then, which has fallen greatly in comparison. at the same time, rent in the city has increased for generally 6% per year and gradually increasing. Available rental homes have likewise been decreasing. The lack of affordable housing is not unique to New York City. According to Florida representative Lindsay Cross, “People have seen [property insurance premium] rates double, triple, sometimes even more than that, and it’s causing our housing prices to be even more severe.” In the Metro Washington DC area, while statistics showed no meaningful change in the city proper in the last year, homelessness has increased in the surrounding suburban counties, where more and more workers, the majority of which being Black, have been pushed into throughout the previous years.
Like a Chinese proverb goes, “the wages go up like snails, and the prices go up like balloons.” The rising rent, alongside inflation, are all means by which the capitalist class plunder the working people. As inflation worsens, the money becomes less and less valuable, and the price of everything will go up. With the accelerated process of fascistization to resolve the economic crisis, the Old State continues to use inflation as an important weapon to attack the working people and further their general impoverishment. A July 24, 2025 executive order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” in full reactionary positivist fashion, revoked the failed housing-first policy pushed by Biden and instead adopted an “order and progress” approach to jail drug users and people with mental illness. This decision came at an ironic timing, as the overwhelming majority of shelter residents have been newly homeless. Instead of defeating poverty, the capitalist aim at defeating the poor.
In 2024, one-third of infants and toddlers were in struggling families, and more families have joined the ranks of homelessness as time goes on. In Central Florida, it was reported by a local non-profit organization that the number of seniors or teenagers in need of housing has multiplied more than threefold since 2021. In Los Angeles County, California, 1 in 3 students was identified as “experiencing homelessness” during the 2023-24 school year. Aid programs under the Biden administration did not and could not stop the rapid growth of poverty. Like the newly expanded “heavy-hand” programs attacking crime and drug use under Trump, both parties are interested in expanding the role of the executive branch of the State and accelerate the process of fascistization, in order to further exploit and oppress the working class. Under this bloodthirsty system, the youth and seniors, who are less efficient in producing profit for the capitalists, are the first ones to be thrown under the bus.
These attacks against the people are not new: consumer prices continued to grow in all but one economic crises since the Second World War. During the Great Recession of 2008, while cost to buy a house crashed (to plunder the wealth of the lower and middle petit-bourgeoisie), rent, education, and food cost continued to increase, much like the situation today. “No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.,” pointed out Karl Marx 179 years ago.
As US imperialism wrecks havoc across the world in its vain hope to resolve the ongoing crisis from Venezuela and Iran and now to Cuba, it only redoubled its attacks against “its own” working class.
Just like in the struggle against ICE, opportunist and reformist positions in the housing struggle are renewing the circus to trail behind the Democratic Party that has produced so much misery for the working people. In the final analysis, all calls for building “dual power” or “support networks” end up in begging the State for new aid packages and housing coupons. Not only do these measures deepen the illusion in the reactionary Old State and conceal the real nature of capitalist exploitation, they serve to facilitate the general attack against the working people as more and more fall into homelessness.
Facing these difficult situations, it is important for workers and oppressed people to wage militant struggle in the housing and neighborhood sectors. In the face of rising homelessness, it is important to form and strengthen solid, militant, and class-conscious organizations of the masses, wage militant struggles to lower rent and even to occupy properties – like what the Communist Party did in the “Hoovervilles” of the 1930s – in order to take back living space of the working people, conquering them from the hands of the capitalists and the State that safeguards their interest.
(Image: 20FootPalmTree, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
