Boston has the nation’s second-highest rate of homelessness among major cities, according to a new report from Boston Indicators. But the report also found that the city has done an exemplary job of providing shelter.
“After a dip around the pandemic. [Homelessness] spiked again in 2023,” said Luc Schuster, the executive director of Boston Indicators. “And yet among comparable U.S. cities, we also have the eighth lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness.”
Schuster said Massachusetts’ right to shelter law and places like Pine Street Inn, which offer a range of services in addition to shelter, make the region stand out for its support of homeless people.
But he added that while those supports are valuable to families and individuals in the short term, they do not address the central cause of homelessness in Greater Boston: a lack of affordable housing.
”Especially in terms of housing policy, we’ve pulled up the bridge behind us,” Schuster said.
Boston Indicators senior research analyst Peter Ciurczak said the report shows how cities with extremely high rent — like Boston, San Francisco and New York — all have high per capita homelessness, whereas cities with lower rents have lower per capita homelessness.
“We’re not really producing enough of the extremely low-income, poor and near-poor housing necessary to keep families housed,” said Ciurczak. “So we’re really missing a lot of the mobile homes, the accessory dwelling units, or single-room occupancies for individuals that could help bring the cost of housing down.”
The report also found that, from 2014 to 2023, per capita rates of homelessness for Latino residents was several times higher than that of white residents. The rate for Black residents was even higher than both those groups throughout that period. In 2023, the homelessness rate for Black people was 11 times higher than the comparable white rate.
That disparity is “driven by a complex set of systemic social and economic factors,” Schuster said.
“Things like economic inequality … a long history of housing-based discrimination, racial disparities in the criminal justice system — these factors altogether have led Black residents to be much more likely to fall into homelessness than any other racial group in Greater Boston,” he said.
Other demographics demonstrated in the report were that most unhoused people are in family groups, accounting for almost two-thirds of Greater Boston’s homeless population, and that many of those experiencing homelessness are recent immigrants.
The report also found that youth under 18 have the highest homelessness rate of any age group, at more than one-and-a-half-times higher than the second highest group, those aged 25-34.
But older people are increasingly in danger in the region as well, said Karen LaFrazia, president of the St. Francis House shelter in Boston.
“There are elderly people that are losing their housing that have been renters their whole life, and now, the rent has gotten beyond their ability to pay, and they find themselves homeless.”
Franzia added, “if homelessness is ultimately a housing issue, and if we’re going to, as a city and as a state, make significant investments in the development of affordable housing, then I think we can abate the numbers growing — but that’s what it’s going to take.”
