Christianity Today Column Links Houston, Texas, Housing Supply to Lower Homelessness

One night last January, the author drove through a neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles with a friend, trying to survey about 50 streets and count how many neighbors were sleeping outside. The count was part of the nationwide Point-in-Time (PIT) count, a measure used to track how cities are responding to homelessness on their streets.

The author writes that nationwide PIT counts rose 28 percent from 2022 to 2025, reaching 745,652. Data published in July found that more than 73,000 people were homeless across Los Angeles County, which the author says amounts to almost 10 percent of all homelessness and 18 percent of unsheltered homelessness in the United States.

The author points to Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) as a call to love one’s neighbor. The friend who counted with the author lived in a homeless mission downtown for more than three years before finding a permanent place to stay, and now wants to help others in the same situation.

The author argues that individual compassion, while necessary, is not sufficient. Comparing the crisis to a town facing swimming accidents, he writes that rescuing people from the river must be joined by asking why so many are falling in. He contends that Christians should consider housing abundance as a way of loving neighbors, a response he says the church has largely neglected.

According to the article, researchers with different ideological backgrounds have consistently found that housing costs are the strongest predictor of homelessness at the regional level, explaining up to 78 percent of the variation between cities. The author acknowledges that housing scarcity is not the only reason people become homeless.

Houston, which the article says has been widely praised for reducing homelessness, is credited by the author to two factors: public and private institutions, including many religious organizations, working together to quickly connect homeless residents with available housing, and keeping housing cheap and available. The article reports that Houston’s average home price is about four times residents’ median income, compared with 10.5 times in Los Angeles. The author attributes much of this gap to supply and demand, noting that Houston has permitted new housing at a rate around four times that of Los Angeles. In a metro area of 6.4 million people, the unsheltered homeless count in 2026 was 1,270, a per-capita rate almost 25 times lower than in Los Angeles.

Citing economist Salim Furth’s 2024 article “Why Housing Shortages Cause Homelessness,” the author describes housing security as a spectrum. The 2024 Census estimated 35.9 million Americans in poverty, while the PIT count that year found 771,480 people sleeping on the streets, or about 2 percent of people in poverty at a given time. Social scientist Dennis Culhane estimated in 2023 that around 2 million Americans experience homelessness at some point in a year.

The author notes that Furth identified the spare room as an especially important factor in the very poor’s ability to find housing. Andrew Berg, writing for Christianity Today, called Christians to share spare rooms, and the author observes that low-income families have been sharing housing for decades, a practice that reflects the hospitality described in Matthew 25:35.

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