Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.

This week's newsletter closes out the year by looking at the latest homelessness census released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which found a staggering increase in the number of people living on the streets or in shelters.

Number of People Without a Roof Over Their Head Goes Through the Roof

This past Friday, HUD released the results of its Point-in-Time (PIT) count—an annual census of the homeless population conducted each January by local homeless service providers.

The 2024 numbers are not pretty. According to the HUD survey, 771,480 people were homeless in January 2024. Of those, 497,256 were "sheltered" homeless, meaning they were sleeping in an emergency shelter or transitional housing. Another 274,224 people were "unsheltered" homeless who slept outside, in vehicles, abandoned buildings, or other areas not fit for human habitation.

The top-line figure represents a remarkable 18 percent increase in the country's homeless population. That increase is even more shocking when one considers that the country's homeless population grew by 19 percent between 2007 and 2024. Near two decades' worth of growth in the homeless population occurred between 2023 and 2024.

A year-over-year comparison pic.twitter.com/eKA2YrkFlV

— Christian Britschgi (@christianbrits) December 30, 2024

That top-line figure obviously masks a lot of yearly ups and downs. Nevertheless, the numbers are moving decidedly in the wrong direction, and fast.

Breaking Down the Numbers

The huge rise in the homeless population is attributable to related increases in the sheltered homeless population and the number of homeless families.

Of the 118,376 additional homeless people counted in 2024, 100,762 (or 85 percent of the total) were sheltered. This represents a 25 percent annual increase.

The 2024 PIT found that the unsheltered population grew by 17,614, which represents a 7 percent increase. That significant, albeit less severe, increase is effectively a continuation of the steady pre-pandemic rise in the unsheltered homeless population.

Conversely, the sheltered homeless population boom is both a huge increase and a reversal of the trend line. The sheltered homeless population had been on a steady decline in the years before the pandemic. Shelter populations plummeted even more during COVID-19 as shelters slashed capacity as a social distancing measure. This fall was significant enough to push down the overall homeless population, even as the unsheltered homeless population was rising.

Similarly, the 2024 PIT count found a record 39 percent annual increase in homeless families with children. The population of homeless individuals grew by a more modest 9.6 percent. The veteran homeless population was the only group to see a decline, dropping by 7.6 percent.

Migrant Surge, Homeless Surge

The HUD report notes that 13 Continuum of Care (COC) organizations (the local federally funded groups that provide homeless services and perform the PIT) saw a large influx of migrants into their shelter system.

HUD attributes the massive increase in homelessness to a range of factors, including rising housing costs, the belated expiration of some pandemic aid programs and eviction moratoriums, the end of the child tax credit, and "systemic racism." One reason stands out above the rest: the recent influx of migrants to major northern U.S. cities.

"You combine the increase in family homelessness and the increase in sheltered homelessness, it looks like this is overwhelmingly driven by the migrant surge," says Judge Glock, director of research for the Manhattan Institute.

This is most obviously the case in New York City, which has a longstanding, robust "right-to-shelter" policy, and has seen its emergency shelter population grow from 55,677 in 2022 to 81,108 in 2023 to 132,892 in 2024—during which time the city received some 225,000 new migrants and asylum seekers.

New York City's COC attributes 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness to asylum seekers. And the increase in New York City's homeless population accounts for roughly 40 percent of the national increase in the homeless population.

Cities like Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., which all have robust right-to-shelter policies and which have been primary destination cities for new migrants, also reported some of the largest jumps in their homeless populations, Glock notes.

Chicago's COC reported that most of the increase in its homeless population was a result of newly arriving migrants and asylum seekers.

Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute notes that 75 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness over the past two years can be attributed to rising shelter populations in Massachusetts, metro Denver, New York City, and Chicago.

One-Off Increases, Chronic Problems

The number of migrants in big-city shelter systems is already falling, thanks partly to smaller influxes of new migrants and cities' own curtailment of shelter benefits.

There were 69,000 migrants in New York's shelter system in January 2024 when this year's PIT was performed, The New York Times reported. That's since fallen to 55,000.

A lingering question is whether this will merely shuffle currently sheltered homeless migrants into unsheltered street homelessness.

The Times reported earlier this summer on a rise in tent encampments in the city, populated by migrants who'd been evicted from the city's shelter system after staying the new maximum of 30 days.

Glock says right-to-shelter policies also pull people into the shelter system and into free temporary housing where they're counted as homeless. Places without right-to-shelter policies have lower overall rates of homelessness, suggesting migrants exiting shelters will find housing on their own.

HUD says that the January PIT likely captured sheltered homeless populations near their peak and that those numbers are declining. We'll have to wait until December 2025 to know for sure if that's true.

The huge, likely migrant-driven increase in the sheltered homeless population obscures the more depressing, humdrum reality from the 2024 HUD homeless report: the number of people sleeping on the streets is at record levels and continues to rise.

Homelessness continues to increase in almost every state in the country. That includes West Coast states that have not experienced a New York City–like migrant surge and already have among the country's worst rates of homelessness.

This steady rise in homelessness has occurred even as federal funding for homeless programs has steadily increased under the Biden administration.

It's no coincidence that homelessness continues to rise as housing continues to get more expensive in the country. Lower housing costs correlate with lower rates of homelessness.

In the places where homelessness is worst, housing costs continue to rise. We can expect homeless problems to continue to rise with them in the new year.

Quick Links

• Earlier this month, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the city of North Las Vegas, Nevada, rejected the nonprofit Tunnels to Towers plan to build a privately funded 112-unit housing complex for low-income veterans on a vacant five-acre lot across the street from a Veterans Affairs hospital. The city argued that the location was a poor fit and thus declined to rezone the commercial property to allow the proposed housing.
• Housing inventory (the total number of homes available for sale) is at the highest it has been since November 2020, reports listing company RedFin.
• Last week, a judge ruled that the City of Los Angeles illegally tried to prevent a housing developer from using the city's streamlined development process known as ED1 to build a 220-unit project in a single-family neighborhood. LAist has the details.
• Mobile home prices are on the rise, reports Fortune. 
• California massively undershoots Gov. Gavin Newsom's campaign trail goal of building 3.5 million new homes by 2025.

The post Unprecedented Rise in Homelessness appeared first on Reason.com.

On a Monday in August 2020, Camryn Kuehl and her family embarked on a snorkeling trip in Jupiter, Florida, on a boat operated by a company that specializes in shark encounters. During the trip, the boat's crew, John R. Moore Jr. and Tanner Mansell, spotted what they described to the Kuehls as an "illegal longline fishing line" attached to a buoy. With the Kuehls' help, Moore and Mansell hauled in the line and freed the 19 sharks caught on it—a rescue operation they encouraged the Kuehls to document with their cellphones. Moore called Florida Fish and Wildlife Officer Barry Partelow to report the incident.

As Partelow ultimately discovered, Moore and Mansell had made a mistake. The line had been set by Scott Taylor, a seafood distributor whom the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had authorized to catch sharks for research purposes. Although Moore and Mansell clearly thought they were doing good by releasing illegally ensnared sharks, they were nevertheless convicted of theft at sea, a federal felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Prosecutors alleged that Moore and Mansell had stolen Taylor's fishing gear, which they left on the dock, where marina employees discarded it in a dumpster.

In addition to a year of probation, Moore and Mansell were saddled with felony convictions that trigger lifelong disabilities, including barriers to employment and loss of their Second Amendment rights. They challenged their convictions on the grounds that the jury instructions included a broad, counterintuitive definition of stealing that did not require an intent to use Taylor's gear for their own benefit. Last September, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected that challenge. Moore and Mansell are now asking the full appeals court to reverse that decision and correct the flagrant injustice of treating them as federal felons based on an honest, well-intentioned error.

Moore and Mansell were convicted under 18 USC 661, which applies to someone who "takes and carries away, with intent to steal or purloin, any personal property of another" within "the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States." During their trial, they asked U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks to instruct the jury that stealing property means wrongfully taking it "with intent to deprive the owner of the use or benefit permanently or temporarily and to convert it to one's own use or the use of another." After the prosecution objected to including a conversion element, Middlebrooks omitted it, although he did tell the jury that the defendants maintained they had "removed property without the bad purpose to disobey or disregard the law and therefore did not act with the intent to steal or purloin."

The jurors, who sent the judge half a dozen notes while deliberating for two days (longer than it had taken to present the evidence against Moore and Mansell), struggled to reach a verdict. When they told Middlebrooks they had been unable to reach a unanimous decision, he gave them an Allen charge, encouraging them to continue deliberating and saying they should be open to changing their positions, provided they could do so "without violating your individual judgment and conscience." After sending one more note asking whether they should consider any other defense theories, the jurors found Moore and Mansell guilty of one charge each.

In an opinion by Judge Charles Wilson, the 11th Circuit panel ruled that Middlebrooks had been right to conclude, based on the relevant precedents, that Section 661's definition of stealing does not require evidence that the defendant "carrie[d] away" property for his "own use or the use of another." But in a concurring opinion, Judge Barbara Lagoa, joined by Judge Britt Grant, highlighted the perverse consequences of that reading and harshly criticized Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-FitzGerald for his "imprudent exercise of discretion" in choosing to prosecute the case.

Lagoa noted that Moore and Mansell had openly stated their motivation in freeing the sharks, had enlisted their customers to help and to take pictures while doing so, had reported the incident to the relevant law enforcement agency, and had "returned the gear to the marina dock as instructed." Kuehl, for her part, "thought [they] were doing a great thing," and she "shared pictures on social media reporting as much to her friends." Yet "for reasons that defy understanding," Lagoa said, Watts-FitzgGerald "learned of these facts and—taking a page out of Inspector Javert's playbook—brought the matter to a grand jury to secure an indictment for a charge that carried up to five years in prison."

Despite evidence that "plainly suggests a good-faith mistake on Moore and Mansell's part," Lagoa wrote, Watts-FitzGerald "determined that this case was worth the public expense of a criminal prosecution, and the lifelong yokes of felony convictions, rather than imposition of a civil fine." Explaining that decision during oral argument last August, the government's lawyer likened the case to car theft on federal property. "If someone steals a car on a military base," she said, "the proper response isn't, well, pay restitution for that. That's a crime." Grant called that "a silly example," adding, "There's no comparison."

In her concurring opinion, Lagoa proposed a different analogy. "Imagine that Bob, walking along a path in a federal park, sees a man rush up to an elderly woman from behind, pull a gun from his pocket, and yell 'Give me your purse or I'll shoot,'" she wrote. "Bob rushes the robber, yanks the gun from his hand, and ushers the old woman out of harm's way."

What if "what Bob witnessed was not a genuine robbery, but a scene being acted out by some students from the local community college"? In other words, Lagoa wrote, "the robber was not a robber at all, but the elderly woman's scene partner for drama class. Bob, of course, had no way of knowing that when he interrupted what he believed to be a violent crime."

Under "the government's theory in this case and applying § 661 as broadly as the government did here," Lagoa noted, "this genuine mistake would be of no moment, because all that matters is that Bob took the 'robber's' property with the intent to deprive him of it. Perhaps it would move the needle if Bob's lawyers requested an instruction on mistake of fact, aiming to undermine the mens rea needed to convict." But for Lagoa, the bottom line is that Bob, like Moore and Mansell, "should not be prosecuted in the first instance."

What happens when prosecutors nevertheless defy fairness and common sense by pursuing criminal charges in a situation like this? In a brief urging the 11th Circuit to reconsider Moore and Mansell's case, the Cato Institute emphasizes the vital role that juries can play in correcting such injustices.

"From a purely originalist standpoint, perhaps the single greatest protection against unjust convictions and punishments was the institution of jury independence,
which included—but was by no means limited to—the power to acquit against the
evidence," writes Clark Neily, Cato's senior vice president for legal studies. "At the Founding, criminal jurors were not relegated to the role of mere fact-finders, as they are today. Indeed, the conception of criminal juries as having no proper role in assessing the wisdom, fairness, or legitimacy of a given prosecution is a more recent invention that early American lawyers and jurists would rightly have condemned as antithetical to centuries of common-law understanding and practice."

Neily notes that "the jury in this case appeared reluctant to convict, and only did
so after sending out seven notes and receiving an Allen charge from the trial judge." If the jury instructions had "better embodied the Supreme Court's directive that 'ambiguity concerning the ambit of criminal statutes should be resolved in favor of lenity,'" he argues, "the verdict would likely have obviated this appeal by more accurately reflecting how ordinary people understand the word 'steal' in the context of potentially ruinous felony charges."

Although "the spectacle of an imperious national government prosecuting virtuous
citizens for activities within its 'special maritime jurisdiction' would have been entirely familiar to the Founders," Neily writes, "they would likely have been dismayed by the identity of that government and by the miscarriage of justice that occurred here. It is
highly doubtful that a Founding-era jury, fully cognizant of its historic powers and
duties, would have branded John Moore and Tanner Mansell lifelong felons for their
misguided attempt to fulfill what they perceived to be a civic duty. The Court can still avoid that result by granting the Petition and applying a suitably restrained interpretation of the relevant statute."

The post 2 Florida Men Who Thought They Were Freeing Illegally Caught Sharks Are Now Felons appeared first on Reason.com.

It started, like so many overwrought home optimization projects, during the pandemic.

My wife and I, like many people stuck inside, were ordering takeout more frequently. We wanted to support local restaurants, reduce the dish load, and live a little. It became clear early on that app-based delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats were not the best way to support local businesses. If a restaurant had its own ordering site or a preferred service, we wanted to use that—or even, heaven forfend, call the place.

The secondary issue was that we kept ordering from the same places, and we wanted to mix it up. Sometimes we'd want to pick something up nearby. Sometimes we wanted to avoid an entire category ("Too many carbs this week, no pasta") or try the newest places we knew about, or maybe a forgotten classic. Or just give me three places randomly, creative constraints, please—it's Friday.

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This holiday season, thousands of foreign-born religious workers find themselves unsure whether they'll be allowed to continue serving their communities in the coming years thanks to a backlog in green card applications. Religious leaders are pushing for solutions as the Trump administration prepares to take office next month.

Many churches and other places of worship rely on foreign-born religious workers to provide services, particularly as fewer native-born Americans enter the vocation. "From 1970 to 2020, the number of priests in the U.S. dropped by 60%, according to data from the Georgetown [University Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate]," reported the Associated Press in 2021. "This has left more than 3,500 parishes without a resident pastor."

Foreign religious workers come to the U.S. on R-1 visas, which provide a temporary pathway for "ministers and non-ministers in religious vocations and occupations." The R-1 visa is valid for five years, at which point the holder must either petition for permanent residence status or leave the country for at least a year and apply for a new R-1 visa.

Following a spring 2023 State Department change in green card allocation, religious workers began facing long wait times. The Biden administration started processing neglected and abused immigrant kids in the same green card queue as religious workers, meaning they were competing for the same limited number of green cards—just 10,000 per year. Roughly 100,000 immigrant kids joined the pool. As of this August, the A.P. noted, the backlog "stands at more than 3.5 years and could increase"—potentially up to a decade or more.

Five foreign-born priests and the Catholic Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, sued the federal government in August over the 2023 change and the long wait times it created. Without relief, the lawsuit argued, the priests would have to "remain unlawfully in the United States" or leave the country and "abandon thousands of Roman Catholics that each Individual-Plaintiff spiritually guides." They would then have to "wait years, if not decades, outside of the United States" before seeking another R-1 visa "to return to their religious calling."

Earlier this month, several anonymous sources told The Pillar, a news site that covers the Catholic Church, that "bipartisan legislation is in the works to address the problem, and is expected to be introduced early next year." An interfaith group listed several potential fixes in a letter to the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security last year, such as increasing the number of available visas, reducing the amount of time an R-1 holder must spend outside the U.S. before applying for a new R-1 visa, and extending the term of an R-1 visa beyond five years. The letter also called for Congress to exempt neglected and abused immigrant kids from visa limitations.

"Religious workers provide innumerable services to American communities, including culturally competent religious instruction and rituals, as well as direct social services to those in need," wrote Rev. Mark J. Seitz, bishop of El Paso and chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Migration, in a letter to Congress last summer.

"Unfortunately," he continued, "the current situation violates both Congress' intent to provide religious organizations and our communities with needed workers and its express desire to protect vulnerable immigrant youth."

The post Foreign-Born Religious Workers Are Trapped in a Green Card Backlog appeared first on Reason.com.

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