A new study examining changes in homelessness across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., finds that eviction moratoria and climate disasters explain why homelessness surged in some states but not others during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and UCLA analyzed five years of data (2019–2024) to understand why homelessness rose sharply overall nationwide but unevenly among states. Overall, homelessness nationwide rose by 33% between January 2020 and January 2024, reaching the equivalent of one in 435 Americans.
The study found that eviction moratoria substantially blunted increases in homelessness during and after the pandemic, while displacement due to property damage and loss from disasters such as floods, fires, and storms accelerated them. The researchers estimate that without eviction moratoria, the average 11% increase in homelessness per state between 2020 and 2022 would have reached nearly 20%. Without disaster-related housing destruction, it would have been closer to 8%.
The findings were published online April 6 in JAMA Network Open.
The study tracked year-over-year changes in homelessness counts rather than overall prevalence, allowing investigators to isolate short-term shocks affecting homelessness. These acute events were not experienced evenly across states.
"Discussions about homelessness often focus on economic factors like rents and unemployment," says the study's senior author Craig Pollack , MD, MSc, MHS, professor in the Bloomberg School's Department of Health Policy and Management and director of the Hopkins Housing & Health Collaborative at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. "Those factors matter for overall levels of homelessness, but our results show that sudden increases in homelessness are much more strongly tied to acute events, especially evictions and climate-related housing loss."
Eviction protections were enacted across the U.S. during the pandemic, but the length of the moratoria varied. For their analysis, the researchers estimated what percentage of a state's population was covered by non-federal moratoria enacted at the city, county, or state level. The study found that longer eviction protections were strongly associated with smaller increases in homelessness. In contrast, climate-related displacement had the opposite effect, with each home-equivalent lost per 10,000 residents linked to a 1.00 percentage-point increase in homelessness.
Notably, several commonly cited explanations, including average rents, unemployment, immigration, overdose deaths—a proxy in this analysis for substance-use severity—and the distribution of Emergency Rental Assistance, were not significantly associated with year-to-year changes in homelessness.
Homelessness is closely linked to infectious disease risk, chronic illness, adverse birth outcomes, poor mental health, and higher mortality. It is also associated with increased emergency department use and health care costs.
"Eviction prevention is one of the most powerful tools available to avert surges in homelessness," Pollack says. "As we experience more climate-related disasters, we also need to make our housing supply more resilient and include housing stabilization, not just short-term shelter, in disaster response plans."
The authors suggest policies such as tenant right-to-counsel programs, eviction diversion initiatives, and disaster recovery housing supports could meaningfully reduce future increases in homelessness. They also note that building and retrofitting housing for greater climate resilience, as well as addressing climate change, may avert displacement and homelessness.
The study used U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Point-in-Time counts of sheltered and unsheltered homelessness and linked them with state-level data on housing policy, economic indicators, overdose mortality, immigration, and climate-related property damage.
This study involves several limitations, including potential Point-in-Time undercounts of individuals experiencing homelessness and imperfect data on other explanations for increases in homelessness. As jurisdictions use the same methodologies to collect data year-to-year and measurement issues apply equally across states, this should not bias results.
Support for this study was provided by the the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (1K01HL179242) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (R01NR020854).
" Factors Associated with Rising Homelessness Within U.S. States, 2019 to 2024 " was co-authored by Kathryn M. Leifheit, Leah Robinson, Margaret Nkansah, Peter Szilagyi, and Craig Pollack.
