Blueprint to End Homelessness

Homelessness is increasing again in Philadelphia. The city’s 2025 point-in-time count found about 5,500 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2025, and roughly 14,000 Philadelphians cycle through homelessness over the course of a year. Encampment closures in Kensington and growing concern from Center City businesses have pushed the issue back into the headlines, once again framed as a question of public safety, economic vitality, and “cleaning up” public spaces.

If that sounds familiar, it is because Philadelphia has been here before. In the late 1990s, as City Council debated a “sidewalk behavior” ordinance and business leaders complained about panhandling downtown, a coalition of advocates, service providers, and people who had lived on the streets developed “Our Way Home: A Blueprint to End Homelessness in Philadelphia” as a direct response to an enforcement-heavy approach to visible homelessness. According to current President and CEO of Project HOME, Donna Bullock,this work “unfolded amid welfare reform and punitive policies that punished people for being poor; today’s landscape includes historic Medicaid cuts, threats to federal housing funding, the Supreme Court’s City of Grants Pass v. Johnson decision, and national rhetoric that again frames homelessness as “crime and disorder.”

She notes that this framing feels uncomfortably similar today: “the persistent tendency to treat unsheltered homelessness primarily as a public safety problem instead of a housing and affordability crisis.”

On the ground, homelessness is both visible and hidden. Some people experiencing homelessness sleep in transit stations and doorways, and encampments surface and re-form around Kensington. Others move between couches, shelters, and motels, often never appearing in a one-night count.

Behind this issue is an affordability problem. More than half of renters and over a quarter of homeowners in Philadelphia are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing, and many pay more than half. This means the affordable housing crisis extends far beyond those currently experiencing homelessness.

In response, the city is expanding shelter and low-barrier options – Mayor Parker has pledged 1,000 new beds through her One Philly plan to address street homelessness – but these additions are arriving amid growing need and constrained federal resources. At the same time, encampment and corridor clearing of tents and stricter rules on where people can sleep or engage in, revive old arguments about whether the goal is to move people indoors or simply to move them along.

2025 Point In-Time Count at a glance, image from City of Philadelphia 2025 PIT Count Summary Report

Data snapshot

• Just over 14,000 people experience homelessness in a year.

• About 5,500 people are homeless on a given night up from around 4,500–5,200 in the early 2020s. (2025 PIT).

• More than half of renter households and over a quarter of homeowners in Philadelphia are cost-burdened.

• Philadelphia is short more than 64,000 homes that are both affordable and available to households with the lowest incomes.