The number of people experiencing homelessness in Kansas slightly fell this year after reaching its highest point over the previous decade in 2024.
But that data comes just as President Donald Trump is moving to block funding for programs that homeless advocates say helped reduce the problem in Kansas. The president is targeting Housing First programs that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people with no strings attached, like requiring sobriety.
Representatives for the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition, which conducts a large portion of the yearly count and provides services throughout the state, say Trump’s order could result in more people living on the streets.
That would scrap the drop that’s led to a total of more than 2,600 people experiencing homelessness, a 5.5% decrease from the year before.
Christy McMurphy, executive director of the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition, said proactive measures are making a difference in reducing homelessness, like the outreach program in Lawrence that led to a 30% reduction in homelessness in Douglas County.
Kansas Republican lawmakers have also scrutinized Housing First programs, suggesting they don’t work. In a 2023 report on homelessness, a special committee in the Kansas Legislature described Housing First type programs as “inadequate.” It also suggested that mental health and drug use were the primary drivers of homelessness in the state.
That’s in contradiction to the homeless coalition, which argues that stable housing is needed before treatment is possible. They point to studies that show Housing First approaches work. McMurphy said the drop in homelessness in Kansas this year was not an accident, and the Trump administration’s changes could reverse that.
“That's because of work we do and our providers do,” McMurphy said. “So if they upset the apple cart here, it's going to increase homelessness, not decrease it.”
Recent data
Each year, the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition and some community governments record the homeless population throughout the state with a point-in-time count.
These groups count as many homeless people as they can on a single night in January. This is a method required nationwide and is later reported to the federal government for tracking.
This year, the Kansas statewide count was 2,658 people. That’s 157 fewer people than last year, when the count reached a recent peak of 2,815 people.
However, the number is still much higher than it has been over the past decade. In 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the homeless population fell to 1,803.
Still, McMurphy said the drop is encouraging and shows that some proactive measures are working. For instance, Lawrence was able to reduce its homeless population by 124 people this year, nearly one-third.
That community, historically, is home to one of the largest homeless populations in the state. Misty Bosch-Hastings, the homeless solutions coordinator for the City of Lawrence, said her team launched a program last year that made a significant difference.
She said the team sends licensed professionals to homeless encampments to build trust and ask how they could help people get services. In the past, the programs waited for homeless people to come to them and ask for help.
“Most ill people in the worst part of their addiction, they're not gonna come to you for help,” Bosch-Hastings said. “A lot of times they don't even know that they need help.”
The city also expanded the number of beds at emergency shelters, which helped decrease the unsheltered population drastically to just 52 people. It fell a whopping 63%.
Bosch-Hastings said that kind of decline usually takes multiple years.
"It's a pretty big deal,” she said.
Ending Housing First
As part of his executive order to crack down on crime and homelessness in Washington D.C., Trump ordered federal agencies to stop funding homeless programs that use the Housing First approach.
In the order, Trump said that Housing First programs “deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.”
Kansas advocates contend that this view suggests that homelessness is a personal responsibility issue, not a systemic housing problem. They’ve long argued that homelessness is mostly driven by a lack of affordable housing, not issues like drugs.
But when the issue is drugs or mental health, they’ve said people need the safety of housing before they can fight off other problems.
Molly Mendenhall leads Housing First initiatives for the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition. She said the Housing First approach is based on the idea that shelter is one of the first foundational needs in human psychology. Studies also have shown that the programs are effective.
“This executive order is really going to set us back on that,” Mendenhall said. “We do things this way for a reason, because it’s been backed up by studies and science.”
Mendenhall said Trump’s executive order does not create more treatment options. So the change may lead to people experiencing homelessness longer while they wait for behavioral health support.
The coalition also provides services for the vast majority of counties in Kansas which are mostly rural areas. Those areas account for one-third of the homeless population in Kansas. The group has received federal funding in the past specifically for Housing First programs that were deemed successful.
But it will now have to move away from them and focus on other programs instead.
“We're already seeing success in the way we have been doing it,” Mendenhall said. “And to have to change that, it gets a little uncertain.”
Increasing barriers to housing may also make the state’s data less reliable. Shanae Eggert, director of continuum of care for the coalition, said that turning away some homeless people from shelter will make it harder to count them.
That could cause the annual tally to undercount the population of people who are homeless.
“We have to ask if we can truly trust the data at that point,” Eggert said. “Because right now our data is based on no barriers. We're counting everybody. We're finding everybody that we can find.”
Dylan Lysen reports on social services and criminal justice for the Kansas News Service. You can email him at dlysen (at) kcur (dot) org.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
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