Homelessness in Washington is growing, but at a slower rate. Why?

SEATTLE — The number of people who are sleeping outside or in emergency shelters in Washington increased about 2.2% from January 2024 to January 2025, according to the state.

The Department of Commerce's “Snapshot” report said 158,791 people were living in emergency shelters or unhoused in January 2025. While homeless populations are uniquely hard to fully count, the state's Snapshot report combines data on housing status from three state agencies to be one of the most comprehensive numbers available in Washington.

The population of people living outside or in emergency shelter throughout Washington has been marching steadily upward for years. State officials are claiming some victory in seeing the increase slow after the end of pandemic-era renter relief programs caused a more than 9% spike in homelessness in 2022.

But looming budget cuts for homeless services at state and federal levels and a tightening housing market could choke out the fledgling success.

And King County saw a bigger increase in homelessness than the state: Here, it grew by 6.13%, according to the same data from the Department of Commerce.

Pandemic cutoffs

Statewide, homelessness increased by nearly 2.3% in 2021 before jumping by 9.5% in 2022. Joe Nguyễn, director of the state Department of Commerce, attributed that increase to the end of stimulus checks, eviction moratoriums and housing services that were lifelines during the pandemic and kept people on the margins from falling over the edge.

Once those programs ended, evictions began to climb back up. One in 50 Washington renters faced eviction in 2023.

Postpandemic, the state invested significant sums: In the last two-year budget, the state directed $1.8 billion toward housing and homelessness.

More money has gone into services like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which provides time-limited monthly cash to eligible families; Commerce’s Housing Trust Fund, which provides capital funding for housing projects; and the Connecting Housing to Infrastructure program, which funds utility connections for affordable housing.

Jurisdictions across the state that once did little to address homelessness are also making a “concerted effort,” Nguyễn said.

“We are trying to Band-Aid the solution,” Nguyễn said.

Now, he and others are worried more sharp spikes in homelessness are on the way, as funding is threatened.

The state is tightening its purse strings while reeling from an approximate $12.6 billion budget shortfall. Lawmakers reduced funding for the Encampment Resolution Program in the most recent budget. The program has been the most successful in the state at moving people out of encampments and into shelter and housing. Now, it will likely only be able to maintain its current levels but not expand its reach.

Cuts loom on the federal level, as well, as President Donald Trump’s administration takes aim at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The administration has proposed slashing the department’s funding by nearly 44% while simultaneously axing rental assistance for people with low incomes by 43%. Trump’s administration has also proposed cutting half of the agency's workers, threatening to stall the department’s work.

Housing challenges

Efforts across the state to address homelessness are an important first step, said Gregg Colburn, a researcher and associate professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington, but they are “not at the scope and scale in which we need it to happen.

"Once we reach stabilization, then we need sustained and scaled efforts to continue to push levels of homelessness down," Colburn said.

Part of that is housing available to people at low incomes.

Seattle began building housing at a rate that was starting to return some affordability to some renters in the last couple of years before it began to slow.

Softening rental markets in the city created a little bit of slack and more vacancies may have provided more opportunities for people to get housed, Colburn said. Postpandemic, there were a lot of multifamily housing units and small units opening up, contributing to a flattening and even decline in rents.

Then, interest rates, material costs and labor prices went up while the housing supply went down. Permit applications for new units in Seattle slowed to a near halt. The first quarter of this year saw just 379 applications compared with a peak of 7,000 in 2021. Housing prices have continued to climb.

“It's certainly not the only thing, but having adequate production of housing is really important to slow rental price growth,” Colburn said.

Colburn worries vacancies are beginning to dry up and fewer housing units are coming online over the next couple of years, returning low-income renters to a “pretty high-rental-growth, low-vacancy environment.”

In King County, people living outside are telling the Evergreen Treatment Services’ outreach team “all the time” that they are facing homelessness for the first time because of the prohibitive cost of living, director of outreach Karen Salinas said.

Salinas said she knows numbers are increasing in South King County, where her organization does outreach work. But it's been harder to get a grasp on whether the same pattern is happening within Seattle city limits, since her organization's work there is more limited.

High rents make matters worse for people who might be sick and don’t have health care or might not be able to work enough to be financially independent, Evergreen clients have told her. Minimum wage and social safety nets haven’t been able to keep up ever since pandemic-era federal funding expired.

Salinas fears Commerce’s data undercounts the number of people living outside. A quarter of the people her organization works with have never been connected with services before, like the ones Commerce pulls its data from.

Pierce County is also seeing people enter homelessness who cite a lack of affordable housing and employment opportunities among other factors, all while pandemic-era funding dries up, said community services program manager John Barbee. Federal dollars had helped the county expand shelter offerings with temporary hotel and motel rooms.

Homelessness rose 2.4% in Pierce County last year after decreasing 2.3% the year before, closely in line with statewide trends.

In part, the increased tally of homeless people might be attributable to more successful outreach, Barbee said. Pierce County has increased programming to connect people with resources, which does more to identify and contact people living outside.

But it’s still hard to get out of homelessness, Barbee said. People in Pierce County face long waitlists to get into permanent supportive housing, on top of a lack of services that can help people transition off the streets.

“We're continuing to see people enter our homeless system faster than they're exiting,” Barbee said. “ The need still outweighs the dollars that we have.