As Homelessness Hits Record Levels and Rhetoric Grows Harsher, We Honor Lives Cut Short and Demand Change
Today is National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day (HPMD), the longest night of the year — a night when communities across the U.S. gather with candles, name lists, and collective grief to honor neighbors who died without a home.
This memorial exists because we failed them. And in a nation facing record-high homelessness and rising anti-homeless hatred, the danger has never been greater.
A Night of Vigil in a Nation with Record-Breaking Homelessness
In January 2024, the United States recorded 771,480 people experiencing homelessness on a single night — the highest number since the government began tracking, and an 18% increase in just one year. Nearly 150,000 of them were children, and older adults now account for one in five unhoused people.
These numbers are not just statistics. They are the context for what today represents.
National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day has been observed every December 21 since 1990, when the National Coalition for the Homeless, the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, and the National Consumer Advisory Board first called on communities to honor people who died while homeless.
Today, in more than 100 cities, the ritual repeats: churches, city halls, encampments, and community centers become places of remembrance. Lists of names are read aloud. Bells ring. Candles burn in the cold. For many of the people remembered, this will be the only memorial they ever receive.
Homelessness Is a Public Health Emergency
Homelessness is not just about the loss of housing. It is a public health emergency that shortens lives by decades.
Federal and local data show that people who experience homelessness die nearly 30 years earlier than the average American, often from conditions that are treatable with stable housing and basic healthcare. Studies have found that non-elderly adults who are homeless face mortality risks more than three times higher than their housed peers.
Behind every number is a person whose life was cut short by untreated illness, overdose, violence, conditions on the street, or sheer exhaustion.
The Longest Night Is Getting Deadlier
The winter solstice is symbolically appropriate for HPMD because cold can be lethal when you have nowhere to go.
In 2023 alone, 1,024 people in the U.S. died from excessive cold or hypothermia, with most deaths happening in January, February, November, and December. Advocates warn that people experiencing homelessness are especially vulnerable to these deaths because they are more likely to sleep outside, in vehicles, or in places not meant for human habitation — and because losing a tent or blanket in a sweep can be the difference between surviving a cold snap and not.
Heat is increasingly deadly, too. Climate change is driving more extreme heat days, and research shows people experiencing homelessness are much more likely to be hospitalized or die from heat-related illness than housed neighbors.
Every time a city clears an encampment without offering real housing, it isn’t just “moving people along.” It is pushing them deeper into danger — away from outreach teams, away from community, and often into more extreme weather exposure.
2025: A Memorial Day in a Moment of Backlash
This year’s HPMD falls during one of the most hostile climates toward unhoused people in recent memory.
In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson gave cities broad permission to fine, ticket, or jail people for sleeping outside, even when shelters are full or unsafe. Since then, cities across the country have rushed to pass and enforce camping bans, sit-lie ordinances, and other laws that criminalize surviving in public.
At the same time, a well-funded propaganda machine has been working to convince the public that homelessness is the result of individual failure — not a predictable outcome of soaring rents, stagnant wages, and dismantled safety nets. Think tanks like the Cicero Institute craft model bills that promote criminalization. Media outlets, messaging firms, and viral creators amplify those talking points, recasting suffering neighbors as dangerous “problems” to be removed rather than people who need housing and support.
This year, that rhetoric crossed an especially chilling line. On national television, a major cable news host suggested that homeless people with mental illness who refuse services should face lethal injection — in his words, “just kill them” — a statement so extreme it sparked widespread outrage and demands for his firing.
He later walked it back. But the damage is done. The comment didn’t appear in a vacuum. It landed in an environment where:
- Livestreamers and “street documentary” channels profit from broadcasting people’s pain without consent.
- Right-wing influencers build massive audiences by describing encampments as war zones and calling unhoused neighbors “zombies,” “criminals,” or worse.
- Local leaders, pressured by fear-based coverage, choose sweeps and crackdowns over housing and services.
Words like these do not stay abstract. Dehumanizing narratives make violence and abandonment easier to justify. When people are described as less than human, policies that would have once seemed unthinkable — forced confinement, mass displacement, deliberate neglect — begin to sound like common sense.
On a day meant to honor lives lost, we have to name this, too: the rhetoric is deadly.
Saying the Names in a Culture that Erases Them
Today, across the country, organizers will do something quietly radical: they will say the names. At HPMD gatherings, you might see:
- A pastor reading names from a printed list, pausing after each one as a bell rings.
- Outreach workers and friends stepping to a microphone to share a story: a favorite joke, a kindness remembered, a talent never recognized in life.
- People with lived experience of homelessness speaking about the friends they’ve lost and the ones they fear will be next.
- Candles, posters, shoes, or photos are arranged in public spaces, turning sidewalks and steps into makeshift memorials.
For many people who died homeless, there is no obituary. There is no funeral. There may be no family present, or the family may never have been notified. Their ashes might rest in a mass grave, their belongings discarded, their last address listed as “unknown.”
HPMD insists on something different: that their lives mattered, and that their deaths were not inevitable.
Why This Day Should Not Exist
National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day is not a tradition we should grow comfortable with. It is not a ritual to repeat. It is a symptom of a deep failure.
In a country with enough wealth to send rockets into space and build luxury towers in every major city, thousands of people die each year because they cannot afford a basic human need: a safe place to sleep.
The causes are not a mystery:
- Lack of affordable housing after decades of disinvestment and speculative profit.
- Structural racism that pushes Black, Indigenous, and other people of color into homelessness at far higher rates than white peers.
- Underfunded healthcare and behavioral health systems, which turn manageable conditions into fatal crises.
- Criminalization, which treats poverty and mental illness as offenses, pushing people deeper into instability instead of out of it.
We know what works: deeply affordable housing, Housing First programs, permanent supportive housing, eviction prevention, and low-barrier shelters paired with robust services. Research has shown these approaches keep people housed, reduce reliance on emergency systems, and save public money in the long run.
Yet we continue to pour resources into encampment sweeps, temporary fixes, and PR-friendly crackdowns that look like action but leave people literally out in the cold.
That is why HPMD exists. That is why it should not have to.
Turning Remembrance into Resolve
Lighting candles and reading names is important. Grief deserves space. But if we stop there, nothing changes.
On this National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, honoring those who died must also mean fighting for those still alive.
That can look like:
- Challenging dehumanizing language when you see it — online, in the news, and in your own conversations.
- Supporting organizations that tell the truth about homelessness instead of profiting from outrage.
- Demanding that your city and state stop criminalizing survival and start investing in housing, income support, and health care at the scale this crisis requires.
- Remembering, always, that the people we memorialize today were neighbors, not nuisances — people whose lives were full of history, humor, talent, and love, not just need.
Today is HPMD.
Today, we remember people who should still be here.
Tomorrow, and every day after, we have a choice: to accept a world where this day is permanent, or to build one where it finally becomes unnecessary.
National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day is a day that should not exist. Until it doesn’t, our work is not done.