After hitting a record high in 2024, overall homelessness in the U.S. declined by 3% in 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed in its annual homelessness assessment report May 29.
An increasingly prevalent — but less visible — form of homelessness is absent from the latest findings, researchers say, because HUD does not count it.
“Doubled-up” homelessness refers to people who are “staying with family, friends, acquaintances because of economic hardship or housing loss,” Molly Richard, assistant professor of public health for the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences, told Smart Cities Dive.
“People will double up to avoid having to go to a shelter,” said Richard, who studies the homelessness crisis and the phenomenon of doubling up.
Richard’s research contributed to a National Alliance to End Homelessness report last year that estimated there are as many as 3.2 million people in the U.S. who are doubling up — or 94 people out of every 10,000.
“We’ve seen the numbers growing among school-age students,” Richard said.
Doubling-up situations are often a pipeline to more visible forms of homelessness, Richard said. A 2023 study by the University of California, San Francisco, found that nearly 50% of those experiencing homelessness in California came directly from a doubled-up housing situation.
“People aren’t always going straight from eviction court to a shelter,” Richard said. “They're trying to bridge and figure out where to stay.”
Doubling up is most prevalent in areas already experiencing high rates of homelessness and low rates of shelters, according to Richard.
Cities can be more proactive in finding ways to curb street homelessness by more closely monitoring rates of doubling up, Richard said. “It’s something cities and states should be on the lookout for,” she said.
Because HUD does not include doubling up in its definition of homelessness, federal funding for people in doubled-up situations can be hard to come by. Some cities, including Chicago, have experimented with including doubling up in their definitions of homelessness, according to Richard.
By doing so, cities and states can open up rental assistance opportunities that could keep people from being forced to live outside, she said.
Richard also stressed the need for more affordable housing options in cities as a solution — as well as more middle-scale housing designs.
“So much of what’s available for people is a studio apartment or one-bedroom,” which can lead to overcrowding and difficult living situations if someone is not on the lease, she said. “If we can have better planning in regard to multigenerational households, we can live in a positive way.”
