“It’s the first thing you notice about the United States,” said Bernhard Froebe, a German tourist visiting Los Angeles in the summer of 2024. “There are so many people living in the streets, on the sides of the road, in whole encampments,” said Froebe, who hails from the Saxon city of Zwickau. “It’s shocking.”
Froebe’s remarks come as no surprise to Americans, who have seen homelessness rise 40% since 2018 and rent and home sale prices soar upward of 155% over the last five years.
According to the 2024 “America’s Rental Housing” report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 22.4 million renter households spent more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities in 2022 — a record high. Together, the numbers speak to an impending sense of crisis and pessimism about the U.S. housing market.
And according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night — 771,480 people — was the highest ever recorded. Accounting for around 2 of every 1,000 people in the country, people in families with children, individuals, unaccompanied youth, veterans and others found themselves in emergency shelters, safe havens, transitional housing or unsheltered and out on the streets.
Like the stats themselves, the factors are many: a worsening housing crisis, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, systemic racism, public health crises, disasters and displacement, inflation.
But how are faith communities responding?
In early 2025, numerous nonprofits and federal agencies were dealt a series of blows, as President Donald Trump signed several executive orders halting aid and slashing budgets, including that of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which was formed in 1987 to coordinate the federal response. The cuts, experts fear, will exacerbate the problems they already were struggling to address.
Religious communities across the spectrum have responded in various ways, providing direct support to those in need. For example, Latino Muslims in Chicago have developed a program called “Neighborly Deeds,” distributing warm meals, blankets, clothes and hygiene products to those experiencing homelessness. And on the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles, the Friars and Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ — a Catholic religious order founded in Brazil — have been ministering to recently arrived immigrants living in temporary housing or in tents along the road.
Individually, many who are unhoused turn to religious and spiritual practices, including Christian prayer, Buddhist meditationor Native-specific independent spiritual practices, as a means of protection or coping with the stress and related problems of homelessness.
Long a partner, or primary provider, to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, faith and values groups have also started to respond in more creative ways to the current crisis, looking to address more than immediate needs.
Shifting away from traditional shelters or safe havens, faith communities have started offering affordable housing: erecting microhomes on church properties, converting residences — from parsonages to convents — into units or repurposing vacant schools and parking lots. Many of the churches converting their underused land into affordable flats riff off the anti-development slogan “Not in my backyard” (NIMBY), instead advocating with the motto “Yes in God’s backyard” (YIGBY).
Meanwhile, the nonreligious organization SecularHelp runs its “Helping the Homeless” program, which it says provides direct, practical support to individuals experiencing homelessness without “relying on supernatural or faith-based approaches.”
But critics such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State lament that for many experiencing homelessness, “the only organized form of temporary shelter comes from a faith-based organization or church.” Though they can provide essential resources, Americans United wrote, churches can also use “this resource gap as an opportunity to proselytize a vulnerable population.” This issue recently came to the fore in the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, questioned the religious rules around providing shelter to the unhoused.
In another case, a church providing temporary shelter around the clock in Bryan, Ohio, was found guilty of violating zoning and fire codes in local criminal court. That decision, along with a civil case against the church, is being appealed.
At the very least, the above shows the numerous religion, ethics and values angles to be explored when it comes to the United States’ rapidly growing housing crisis.
