It’s natural that everyone would be trying to tell the incoming Trump administration what to do. As advocates for homelessness prevention, we’re not short of ideas, either, and here’s one.
Let’s keep people housed.
That’s not meant to be glib. Rather, it’s the foundation of a more humane and cost-effective approach to the nation’s homelessness crisis, which is now at record levels. And from a policy standpoint, we should all be able to agree that increasing the Child Tax Credit can make a positive impact.
One of the only things that President Donald Trump and former vice president Kamala Harris agreed on during the recent presidential campaign was the need to increase the federal Child Tax Credit. While their specific proposals differed, they both agreed that protecting the most vulnerable in society—women and children—starts with keeping them housed.
Now, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, has put a stake in the ground with a bill to increase the Child Tax Credit from a maximum of $2,000 to $5,000 per child. While the 10-year price tag for this could run between $2 trillion and $3 trillion, it could well prove cheaper from a financial and a social standpoint to keep families housed together.
Consider these facts.
The just-released U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual count of people experiencing homelessness on a single night eclipsed 770,000 in 2024, an increase of 18 percent from the prior year and the highest since the report began in 2007. Homelessness increased among nearly every demographic of people in the survey, but it was especially steep among children and people in families.
Research by the National Alliance to End Homelessness reveals that it costs taxpayers an average of $35,578 per year to support a person who is chronically homeless, including costs for emergency shelters, health care, and law enforcement.
By contrast, preventing homelessness through early intervention costs, on average, $2,000 per household.
Meanwhile, a recent report by the National Women’s Law Center highlighted the direct effect that the fluctuating Child Tax Credit has on poverty. Between 2020 and 2021, the poverty rate fell in the U.S. because Congress expanded the credit and took other steps to protect the poor and the middle class during the coronavirus pandemic.
As that assistance expired however, and the amount of the Child Tax Credit was rolled back, poverty rates, as measured by the supplemental poverty measure, jumped by the largest recorded single-year increase in more than 50 years. The toll this took was hardest on women and children, with the supplemental poverty rate for women increasing from 8.7 percent in 2021 to 13.3 percent in 2023.
Breaking it down even further, reports show that children under 5 are the age group most likely to encounter poverty and eviction, with more than one in six young people under 18 living below the federal poverty line. Furthermore, one in five Latino children and one in four Black and Indigenous children live in poverty. And as we all know, the basic costs of raising children—food, child care, housing, and the like—are only increasing.
At the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, we prefer to focus on our mission of accompanying those suffering the effects of poverty and advocating for homelessness prevention. This takes many forms—from thrift stores to shelters to food pantries to charitable pharmacies. But the core of our mission is to spend time visiting people in their homes to get to the causes of their financial distress, and find ways to alleviate it so they remain in stable housing and don’t become another homelessness statistic.
In many of those visits, children are joyfully running around, oblivious to the pains and struggles of their parents as they struggle to make ends meet. That’s as it should be, of course. Let’s keep it that way by supporting an increase in the Child Tax Credit.
John Berry is the National President of the National Council of the United States, Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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