greatest homelessness crisis since the Great Depression

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New York is experiencing its greatest homelessness crisis since the Great Depression — we just can’t see it. This fact may elicit cognitive dissonance for New Yorkers who lived through the urban decay of the ’70s and ’80s. That’s largely because New York has a “right to shelter law” on the books. A survey on one night in January found 76,501 homeless, an increase of 4.1 percent from 2016, and a little less than the 1 percent of the city’s population. But only 3,936 were sleeping on the streets — 72,565 were in shelters.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) annual assessment report to Congress for 2017 found that total homelessness in the U.S. increased for the first time since 2010. The one-night survey, involving tens of thousands of volunteers in some 3,000 cities and counties, counted 553,742 homeless people, an increase of 0.7 percent since the 2016 count. Overall, 360,867 people were located in transitional housing and emergency shelters while 192,875 were in unsheltered locations.

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