Homelessness in Bellingham and Whatcom County has reached critical levels driven largely by the growing disparity between housing costs and household incomes. One of the key factors exacerbating this issue is the lack of housing supply which has increased the costs of homes and rent resulting in 24% of homeowners and 56% of renters in our community being cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
To provide more perspective, recent data released by The Muljat Group noted that in 2024 Bellingham’s median sale price of a home was $765,000.00, while the U.S. Census Bureau reports Bellingham’s median household income to be $54,867.00 — far below what would be needed to make a 20% down payment on a house. As housing costs rise, so does the cost of rent. As of January 2025, Bellingham’s average cost of rent for a 2-bed home is $2,200 per month. The high cost of living reduces the ability to save which makes cost-burdened renters vulnerable to housing instability and homelessness when rent rises. In 2023, homelessness hit record highs and remained steady though 2024 as reported by Whatcom County’s Annual Report on Homelessness which attributes the main cause of homelessness the inability to afford housing.
Key demographics experiencing homelessness include individuals and families from diverse backgrounds, ages, and circumstances.
● Families with Children: Many families are forced to live in vehicles, temporary shelters, or overcrowded situations, which severely impacts the well-being and education of children.
● Working Individuals: Despite having jobs, many residents are unable to afford rent due to the mismatch between wages and housing costs.
● Seniors and Disabled Individuals: Fixed incomes make it nearly impossible for these populations to compete in the housing market.
● Youth and Young Adults: A growing number of youth experience homelessness due to family conflict, economic instability, or aging out of foster care.
For individuals and families experiencing homelessness, The Whatcom County Homeless Service Center is the point of contact for those seeking help. Households can apply for assistance through a database called the Housing Pool. In 2018, there were 781 applications to the Housing Pool. In 2022, the number of applications increased to 1,071 households.
The total number of people experiencing homelessness is much higher than represented here, this data only includes individuals who seek assistance. Sadly, of the 1,071 applicants to the Housing Pool, the large majority were disabled.
With the high rate of homelessness and over half of Bellingham’s renters cost-burdened, the demand for social services is at an all-time high, yet there are not enough resources to meet the need. Bellingham receives federal grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and every five years the City is required to prepare a plan for how they will utilize approximately $9 million per year to support low-income household. The Bellingham Housing Authority receives about $22 million a year from the Federal government which supports 1 in 4 families in Whatcom County, but staff report they need about $90 million to fully address the housing need; that’s an estimated $68 million more needed specifically for housing. This raises the question: What is the monetary cost of homelessness in our community and can we be directing dollars to more effective housing stability solutions?
While there is no readily available comprehensive number that breaks down what Whatcom County spends on homelessness each year, it is a question that other cities and counties across the U.S. have asked as communities try to assess the monetary and non-monetary impacts of homelessness.
The Costs of Homelessness
More than anything, the human cost of homelessness is devastating for individuals and families causing a cascade of health, social, and economic setbacks that can create cyclical patterns that impact individuals throughout their lives.
Healthcare
The impacts of housing instability have profound consequences on a person’s health and wellbeing as the traumatic experience uproots a sense of self-worth, safety and security. Those experiencing homelessness have an increased risk of mental health and chronic health illnesses, and lower life expectancies. More so, children who are homeless can face a lifetime of physical, mental, and emotional challenges. Studies show they are more likely to experience developmental delays and poor health outcomes compared to children who are raised in a stable home.
Access to quality health care is essential for the unhoused as homelessness is a social determinant of poor health yet many unhoused people aren’t able to access health care for a number of interrelated reasons such as not having proof of residency or valid identification like driver’s license which requires an address. This impedes access to health insurance and preventative primary care services, so many patients use hospital emergency department care for treatment. In fact, statistics show the unhoused are more likely to be readmitted to the hospital for emergency care, making three times as many visits to an Emergency Department compared to their stably housed counterparts. One estimate shows that it can cost about $18,500 per year for the average user of the Emergency Department and up to $44,000 per year for more frequent users of emergency healthcare services. Unable to pay for treatment, the costs get absorbed by the hospital and passed on to taxpayers in the form of higher healthcare costs.
Tracking and aggregating medical costs incurred by those experiencing homelessness is not standardized, though a number of states have commissioned studies to better understand the cost to the community. In California, Santa Clara County commissioned a study in 2015 to determine the public cost of homelessness in their community. Compiling data collected between 2007 and 2012 the study, “Home Not Found: The Cost of Homelessness in Silicon Valley,” discovered the community spent $520 million dollars a year on services for the unhoused of which 53% or $312 million a year was spent on healthcare services.
Homelessness is recognized as a significant public health issue and the Santa Clara study underscores this. The annual expenses on homeless healthcare showed more than 54% of costs were spent on outpatient services, over 27% on emergency room care, 17% on mental health treatment, 14% on inpatient health care, 13% on drug and alcohol rehab, and 6% on emergency psychiatric services.
Because safe and stable housing is a significant factor in someone’s health and well-being, in 2022 the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness called for health organizations to collaborate with non-health related organizations to create a more comprehensive approach to addressing and preventing homelessness. Preventative measures are critical for a number of reasons because of this some healthcare providers have adopted screening processes for patients who might be at risk of losing their housing in effort to connect them with support services to help them stay in place. For the unhoused seeking medical treatment, studies show when hospital providers are able to connect a patient to a case worker who can place them in permanent supportive housing (PSH) it not only reduces emergency department use and costs but the patient’s health and quality of life improves.
in 2023, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services formally recognized homelessness as a healthcare issue and now provides payment and reimbursement to providers and hospitals who deliver care to homeless Americans. This enables street medicine providers to offer more consistent primary care services to unhoused individuals living on the streets in effort to prevent emergency room visits to reduce the associated costs.
Crime
In addition to high health care costs, communities spend millions on criminal justice and legal expenses, particularly on unsheltered homeless individuals. Santa Clara’s community spent $196 million per year on Justice system agencies between 2007 and 2012. Between 2014 and 2015, the Los Angeles Police Department estimated that it spent between $53.6 million to $87.3 million on interactions with the homeless— and these costs did not include officers’ salaries. Another study, The Cost of Long-Term Homelessness in Central Florida, looked at 37 chronically homeless people in Osceola, FL who were arrested 1,250 times over a 10-year period. The cost of incarcerating these individuals cost the community over $6.4 million dollars.
Laws are often made as a quick fix in response to public protest to move unhoused people away from a public area, but the data shows criminalizing homelessness is costly to the community. Outlawing sleeping in vehicles, loitering, panhandling, and sleeping or camping in public spaces can cost the public between $30,000.00 and $50,000.00 per person per year. Plus, fining and incarcerating unhoused people for being homeless is ineffective at solving the issue as it makes it harder for people to apply for employment and housing and get their lives back on track because they can’t afford to pay their fines which further compounds their legal issues.
Central Florida’s study followed a cohort of 107 people calculating the cost the community spent on homelessness, incarceration, hospitalization and emergency health care services amounting to $31,065 per person per year— over $3.3 million per year collectively. In assessing the overall expenses, the study found that providing a Housing First approach could reduce the cost per person per year by 68% amounting to $10,051 per person which would save the community over $2.2 million a year.
A Housing First Approach Reduces the Community Cost of Homelessness
Even Emergency Shelters are costly for communities. In the U.S. an estimated $10.6 billion is spent each year on emergency shelter and housing: about $2B from the Federal government and $8.6B from non-profit services. In December of 2024, a petition to open emergency shelters in Whatcom County when temperatures reached 40° instead of 32° circulated to help get people off the streets sooner but the director of the Whatcom County Health and Community Services, Erika Lautenbach, said it wasn’t feasible as there was not a non-profit agency available to manage the emergency shelter. Under the management of the County it costs $655,000 to operate the shelter for 55 days because of staffing, sanitation, food, and security services expenses. "There are finite resources," said Lautenbach. "Every dollar we're spending on a shelter is a dollar we're not spending on building a tiny house village, or recovery housing for folks exiting the jail, or treatment services. It's a very difficult balancing act."
Most providers of temporary housing for families spend more than double the cost of permanent supportive housing for families. In one example, in 2015 it cost $56,000 a year to provide temporary housing to a single family whereas permanently housing that family in 2015 would have cost $25,390.00.
Providing permanent housing to homeless individuals and families has generally proven to be a more cost-effective solution to reducing homelessness than other approaches. The Housing First model emerged in New York City in 1992 when Sam Tsemberis and colleagues founded Pathways to Housing allowing homeless members access to housing without having to undergo addiction and/or mental health treatments that were required by Continuum of Care programs which implemented a Treatment First model prior to providing housing. The result of four major randomized controlled studies comparing the two programs revealed that Housing First had more successful outcomes than Treatment First. After many more studies comparing the two methods researchers found, “Housing First programs decreased homelessness rates by 88 percent and improved housing stability by 41 percent. Participants in Housing First programs reported improved quality of life, community integration, and positive life changes compared with clients in Treatment First programs.”
It’s important to note that Housing First clients who have access to and participate in comprehensive wraparound services that include mental health counseling, addiction services and job training have more successful outcomes with long-term housing stability than those who don’t participate in these services. Still even without robust support, evidence shows that those in Housing First programs are less likely to misuse substances and more likely to stay on medications and follow prescribed therapies than those in Treatment First programs. In one example, the Journal of American Medical Association conducted a study of chronic homeless individuals with severe alcohol problems who participated in a Housing First intervention in King County, WA and found that those who stayed in housing for at least a year voluntarily reduced their alcohol intake, abstained from emergency healthcare services, and were less likely to engage in criminal behavior. Researchers estimate the Housing First approach reduced the cost per person from $42,964.00 (emergency room and criminal costs) to $13,400.00 per person which includes the cost of housing, food and staff services. In looking at the overall costs to the community, adopting a Housing First approach has shown to be a more cost-effective solution to addressing homelessness.
A Look at the Numbers Should Inform Our Strategy
The consistent finding across studies is that homelessness is not only a social and humanitarian issue but also an economic one that can often be mitigated through strategic investment in housing and supportive services. One policy analyst, Rob Moore from Scioto Analysis, pulled the numbers and asserts it would cost between $11 and $30 billion dollars to house America’s homeless population which is less than what is annually spent on three of the largest anti-poverty programs in the U.S. His article does not dive into details about the costs of wraparound and support services, which are critical components to long-term housing stability, but Housing First has been proven to be successful and this method can help reduce the overall costs spent on homelessness. It begs the question, what if we invested $68 million into building more housing to close the gap between the funds the Whatcom Housing Authority receives and the need in our community? Wouldn’t this help reduce the strain on social services while providing a more secure and stable place for those in need to become more involved community members?
To better understand the annual costs that Whatcom County spends on homelessness we need to commission a study that looks at several years of comprehensive data involving healthcare, judicial costs, security, emergency services, warming shelters, administrative coordination, property damage expenses, and the costs it takes to clean up homeless camps like the 20-acre site at East Stuart Road and Guide Meridian that is estimated to be around $5 million. Understanding where the costs are going gives us an opportunity to make more informed decisions for how we invest in infrastructure, housing development, and job training programs so that we can support effective long-term solutions to increased housing stability while improving the overall safety and quality of life for all Whatcom County residents.