Another Year Closer to Ending Homelessness: Reflecting on World Homeless Day 2025

What makes a home? Is it the food we cook and share at its table? Is it the cheerful shrieks and incessant bickering of siblings at play and war? Or is it the reassuring familiarity which greets us as we step through the door; the patient hum of a box fan in the window, singing in tune with the rhythm of cars passing by outside? 

A home without these human elements is a hollow shell. Step into any vacant home, furnished or not, and you wade through a veil of expectancy that hangs in the air. Perhaps that melancholy feeling in your heart as your eyes pass over bare walls and dusty corners caught in sunlight is just the tendency we have to project human qualities onto otherwise inanimate things-- and yet, it is unshakeable.

A home without people suffers a phantom pain. It lacks. It yearns for the warmth, dirt, and bustle people bring. In their absence, it languishes, devoid of purpose and remiss in function.

It’s unsurprising, then, that we characterize such unoccupied homes as 'abandoned', 'condemned', even 'haunted'. To us, a home without people seems unnatural. Why, then, have we accepted people without homes as natural?

The Numbers

A home is meant to be lived in. People are meant to live in homes. But not all of us are so lucky. The causes of homelessness vary and intertwine. Poverty, low wages, lack of affordable housing, domestic violence, health challenges, limited healthcare, inaccessible education, systemic discrimination, and inadequate support systems– these factors all compound to keep people down. 

Helping an empty home is simple, by comparison. Just fill it with people. But at Family Promise of Spokane, we believe the inverse to be true as well. Helping a homeless person is simple: get them into a home.

Let’s not shy away from the facts. According to the United States Census Bureau, there are currently around 8.1 billion people on Earth. Of those 8.1 billion, between 1.6 to 3 billion are in inadequate housing, according to 2024 data from United Nations Human Settlements Programme.

Here at home in the U.S.? “The number of Americans exposed to homelessness on a single night in 2024 was the highest ever recorded.” The data shows that nearly 800,000 people in the U.S. are homeless, living in emergency shelters, in transitional housing programs, or in unsheltered areas entirely. Home is a luxury that many of us do not have, but it shouldn’t be.

And the children? The National Alliance to End Homelessness found in 2024 that more children live in homelessness nationwide than live in most U.S. states:

“The number of children experiencing homelessness during the 2021-2022 school year nationwide was greater than the total number of children in 28 states. Nearly 1.2 million children were either literally homeless (living in a shelter, or in unsheltered locations such as a car or tent) or doubled-up (sharing housing with friends or family beyond a unit’s designated capacity).”

Though these numbers were recorded in the year following the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S., which undoubtedly exacerbated the homelessness crisis, rates of homelessness have only increased every year since: up to nearly 800,000 in 2024 compared to around 600,000 in 2022. It’s unlikely that child homelessness numbers have fallen despite the waning of COVID-19.

The People

To be clear: homelessness is an issue for more than this one day of the year. It is a challenge that we would like to address 366 days of the year. At Family Promise, we strive to evolve our response to homelessness to be more effective, more efficient, and more trauma-informed. Although the problem of homelessness seems overwhelming, it’s still just a problem that can be solved like any other.

Though numbers inform much of our work, we must be careful to view our fellow people as more than these. People aren’t numbers, but the problems we solve for often are. Yet we’re not trying to solve people. Rather, we’re trying to give them the foundational stability in housing which frees them to grow and thrive enough to solve their own problems. When we resort to viewing people as numbers, particularly these big ones like 800,000 or 3 billion, our emotional understanding of the vicious cycle of homelessness fades. We are desensitized to the scale of suffering and need, and abstract a very real problem into something less uncomfortable. 

The widely cited 1992 study Measuring Nonuse Damages Using Contingent Valuation: An Experimental Evaluation of Accuracy demonstrated the severity of this 'extension neglect bias' in how we perceive social impact and issues. Put simply, humans struggle to conceptualize the true scale of larger numbers, which biases our decision-making and judgment. This is readily apparent in common attitudes towards homelessness where it is viewed as a personal failing, limited to a select few people. But the reality of homelessness is systemic, widespread, and endemic. Homelessness captures entire families, hurts communities, and continues in generational cycles: people who experienced homelessness as a child have 40% higher odds of becoming homeless as an adult, even if their childhood experience was brief.

The Day

These numbers are not indicative of a personal failing, but rather a societal one. Homelessness is not natural. Every child deserves a home. This World Homeless Day, we encourage you to fight homelessness alongside us. Every number we’ve cited in this piece today is a person, a child, a daughter or father. Even one left behind is unacceptable. 

We live in the most technologically advanced and materially rich era of human history yet. We have the means, the numbers, and the knowledge to end homelessness. Now, we need to find the heart.

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Samuel McLaughlin is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Family Promise of Spokane.