Housing and housing shortages are recurring topics among the NKY region’s leadership, and homelessness – even when it’s not broached directly in conversations about housing – inevitably contributes to the scope of the problem. The end of the year offers a chance to assess homelessness both in Kentucky and nationwide.
One way to do this is by consulting the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which recently released the 2024 State of Homelessness Report. The report analyzed data from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, as well as state-level continua of care networks. It paints a picture of trends in homelessness. The report’s most recent data measures differences between 2022 and 2023, the most recent data that’s available.
Before one considers the data, however, there are some things to keep in mind about how it’s collected and analyzed. At the national level, housing data of all kinds is collected through the census every 10 years. The U.S. Census Bureau makes estimates between census collection years through the American Community Survey, which offers projections based on census trends. Additionally, federal definitions for homelessness are more specific than simply someone who doesn’t have an established address (you can read HUD’s four definitions of homelessness here).
At the state level, state continua of care measures homelessness levels through annual point-in-time counts, which measure the number of people using homeless shelters on one night in January. The counts can shed light on homelessness levels at a particular moment in time, but there are many factors that can influence a year’s figures. Absent any centralized alternative, however, point-in-time counts are the go-to method for tracking trends, even if they’re admittedly imperfect as a measure.
Kentucky’s continua of care are split into three sections. The areas in and around Lexington and Louisville each have their own continuum of care, but the rest of the state, including Northern Kentucky, is lumped into the third continuum of care, which was largely designed with rural communities in mind. As such, it’s not always easy to isolate data for the Northern Kentucky region.
Although it’s not mentioned in the report, it’s also impossible to talk about homelessness in Kentucky without mentioning the so-called “Safer Kentucky Act,” or House Bill 5, which went into effect in July. The bill increased penalties for living outside, and critics of the bill worried it would make outreach to people experiencing homelessness more difficult as it might shunt them away from service providers and into jail and the courts. In one recent headline-grabbing story, a police officer in Louisville cited a pregnant woman with an unlawful camping citation as she was going into labor.
With these caveats in mind, we can begin to assess the admittedly mixed picture the alliance’s report paints.
Let’s start with the bad news: overall rates of homelessness both nationwide and in Kentucky increased from 2022 to 2023. 4,766 people experienced homelessness in Kentucky on a given night in 2023, and the rate of homelessness among the state’s general population was 11 out of every 10,000 people.
The good news is that homelessness response systems throughout the nation have been expanding. More people were served in shelters in 2023 than in 2022, and nationwide, the supply of permanent housing options during that same time grew by 36,737. There was also an increase in people moving into permanent housing and a decrease in the number of people returning to homelessness.
Chronic homelessness, although on the rise in Kentucky, is actually a comparatively small portion, only about 10%, said Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky Executive Director Kim Webb, of the overall homeless population, even if the image of the chronically homeless panhandler on the side of the freeway exit is one that sticks out in the popular imagination.
“The rest of folk, like our data supports, is folks that come in and just need a short-term place to kind of put their life back together and go back to family,” Webb said. “All of a sudden, they’ve gotten sober or they’ve gone to therapy or they have gotten a different job, saved some money, and then all of a sudden family’s willing to take them back.”
Unfortunately, these positive trends were coupled with the fact that demand for services consistently outpaced supply. In Kentucky, for instance, there was a shortage of nearly 1,390 shelter beds for individuals in 2023.
Likewise, unsheltered homelessness is continuing to rise. Nationwide there was a 9.7% increase in unsheltered homelessness, an increase of about 23,000 people, from 2022 to 2023.
The report points to a general shortage of affordable housing, a phenomenon that has been a repeated point of focus in Northern Kentucky. Renters are especially susceptible to the downwind effects of this.
“Rental burdens in 2023 were extremely high,” the report states. “This is not a new problem, but the result of decades of inadequate investments in housing that caused rent burdens to steadily increase since the 1970s. To reverse this long-term trend and end homelessness, policymakers must make significant investments to ensure that all people have deeply affordable and safe housing. Some people also need additional income, health care and social supports that are too expensive or inaccessible on the private market.”
A study of housing in Northern Kentucky has revealed troubling trends for housing in the region, with the largest need being for “workforce housing” for households earning between $15 and $25 per hour, with monthly housing costs between $500 and $1,500. The region needs about 3,000 more housing units to provide for people within that income range, according to the study. The demand for one- to two-bedroom rentals and owned properties consistently exceeds their supply, while supply for three and four-bedroom properties consistently exceeds demand. The study suggests that the region needs to build 6,650 housing units to support economic development in the next five years, which equates to 1,330 units per year. Read more here.
Understanding NKY’s housing shortage
About 38% of renters in Boone County, about 40% of renters in Kenton County and about 45% of renters in Campbell County are rent-burdened, according to the American Community Survey. A household is rent-burdened when it spends 30% or more of its income on rent.
Broken down by demographics, people of color experience higher rates of homelessness than white people, although the percentage of the white homeless population that’s unsheltered in Kentucky is larger than other demographics at 37%.
Most of the people experiencing homelessness are men, but more women are beginning to experience homelessness, as well. Rates of homelessness among transgender and other gender non-conforming people is also on the rise: “since 2015, transgender homelessness increased 217% (compared to 14.5% for cisgender people),” according to the report.
The report also indicates nationwide increases among people with disabilities, the elderly and people with chronic health conditions. In Kentucky, 7 out of every 10,000 adults aged 55 or older experienced homelessness in 2023, which is actually low compared to some other states.
Webb said the high rates of homelessness among men and increased rates among the elderly track with her organization’s experience. Attitudes around masculine self-reliance can often increase the stigma for homeless men, but people aged 55 and older also have their own challenges.
“47% of our [847] guests self-reported as homeless for the first time last [fiscal] year,” Webb said. “47% said they’d never been homeless before, and of that, 12% were over the age of 55.”
“We’re seeing more and more elderly show up that have never been homeless before that have increasing medical needs that we don’t even probably focus on the housing system as a whole to solve this for them,” Webb also said.
The number of families experiencing homelessness in Kentucky decreased from 2022 to 2023, a deviation from national trends. The overall number of people aged 25 and younger, however, increased.
In spite of the more dour observations in the report, the National Alliance to End Homelessness concludes by saying “homelessness is not an intractable problem. While much of the data in this report depicts rising trends in homelessness, local progress and coordinated federal efforts demonstrate that there are solutions.”
It gives the following recommendations to address the problem:
- Expand housing production that very low-income households can afford
- Increase access to emergency housing and increase funding for homelessness assistance grants
- Reform existing mental health, substance abuse and general healthcare systems to make them more affordable for everyone
- Expand income-support programs, such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, and the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act, or WIOA.
Locally, Webb recommended increased cross-jurisdictional efforts at centralized data collection, such as having dedicated, county-level specialists to collect and analyze data between service providers in order to provide interventions informed by localized trends, rather than broader state-level trends. Next, she advocated amending the Kentucky Constitution to mandate county-funded emergency shelters throughout the commonwealth, similar to how counties are required to fund and maintain animal shelters.
Lastly, she recommended a general increase in the number of emergency shelters throughout the region.
“Homelessness is a year-round issue,” Webb said.
Read the alliance’s full report with data visualizations at the link below:
National Alliance to End Homelessness State of Homelessness: 2024 Edition
Learn how to volunteer, donate or otherwise contribute to the region’s homeless service providers at the links below: