APEP BAR INVESTIGATION | November 5, 2026 | By Lotta Goddess
The buildings are still standing. Their original neighbors are becoming harder to find. The old brick house gets polished windows, a heritage plaque and a price tag that could buy an entire block a generation ago. Across the street, the apartment house that sheltered working families becomes luxury condominiums. A few miles away, an elderly owner sits inside a century-old house she inherited but cannot afford to heat, insure or repair. And under the highway, people sleep outdoors in a city with thousands of properties that are technically vacant.
A World Population Review newsletter on countries where old homes still stand asks why some nations preserve old dwellings better than others. That is a fascinating architectural question. It is not yet an answer to the harder question: who gets to live inside those buildings? A restored house can be a cultural achievement and a social eviction. A demolished house can eliminate unsafe housing—or destroy a family’s only foothold in its neighborhood. A new apartment can add urgently needed supply, or be priced for everyone except those who lived on the land before it was built.
The source newsletter’s full country ranking could not be independently retrieved for this report, so no unverifiable ranking is reproduced. Instead, this investigation follows separately identified national censuses, housing agencies, original studies, government records and the European Union’s housing statistics. And it goes somewhere a buildings-only ranking seldom does: from property-tax notices to redlining, from foreign-owned luxury units to insecure rental agreements, and from officially counted street homelessness to the much larger world of precarious shelter.
The scale is sobering. A 2026 United Nations account says up to 3.4 billion people face inadequate housing, insecure tenure or barriers to services and affordability. That does not mean 3.4 billion people live on the street. In the United States, HUD’s 2025 point-in-time estimate counted 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on one January night, including 266,320 unsheltered people. Those numbers were released in May 2026 and showed a roughly 3% decrease from 2024; they are not a live November 2026 count. Meanwhile, the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2026 Gap estimates a 7.2 million-home shortage for extremely low-income renters. Different measures, all describing parts of the same fracture.
Our investigation follows three movements: Part I—how older homes become profitable, uninhabitable or inaccessible; Part II—how countries preserve buildings while treating residents differently; Part III—every U.S. state, with a documented homelessness count and a consistent lowest-income rental-supply indicator.
WATCH — THE DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE AND CONTEXT
Video 1: Poverty, Politics and Profit — FRONTLINE/PBS and NPR. A documentary investigation into American affordable-housing finance and displacement, originally broadcast in 2017. This is historical reporting, not 2026 footage. Original PBS program, transcript and context.
Video 2: The Global Housing Crisis and the Power of Housing — UN Web TV. Official May 2026 World Urban Forum discussion of housing policy and inequality. A contextual presentation, not footage of a specific eviction.
Previously at Apep Bar: Black Erasure by Design? Boston’s Displacement Machine—and the American Cities That Came Before. This companion investigation broadens the focus from Boston’s historical case to the global property market and all 50 states.
PART I — THE BUILDING SURVIVES. WHO ACTUALLY GETS TO LIVE THERE?
A house has four ages, and only one of them fits on a heritage plaque
A dwelling has the year its walls were built, the year it was repaired or made safe, the year its ownership changed and the year its present occupants arrived. An architectural survey emphasizes the first. Tenants, heirs, tax assessors, insurance underwriters, investors and public-health inspectors may find the other three far more consequential. A 130-year-old terrace that has been gutted and sold as six high-end flats is physically ‘old’ but economically new. A well-kept 1970s apartment building with secure long-term rents may be more important to community continuity than a newly restored mansion.
National estimates of building age require care. Some datasets count buildings, some count individual apartments within buildings, and some count only inhabited housing. Wars, fire, land prices, historic-protection rules, urban-renewal policy, seismic safety, financing and the cost of renovation all change the age composition. Countries with ancient monuments do not necessarily have old residential housing: one famous medieval street cannot substitute for the age distribution of millions of occupied units.
What can happen to an old building: preservation, conversion, abandonment or demolition
An owner can repair and continue renting it, sell it to occupants, convert rentals to condominiums, combine apartments into larger homes, leave it vacant, redevelop its lot or abandon it while liens and hazards multiply. A government may designate a conservation district or landmark, but exterior protection does not by itself guarantee affordability inside. On the other hand, a structure with serious mold, unsafe wiring, failing foundations, lead exposure or no fire exits cannot simply be declared a victory for heritage and left unrepaired.
Adaptive reuse saves cultural memory and can avoid the materials and waste of demolition. Retrofitting a historic building, however, may cost far more per unit than maintaining it would have cost years earlier. Old construction can be harder to insulate and more expensive to make accessible. Landlords with scarce capital may defer work; owners with major financing may renovate aggressively and recoup it through higher rents. The fair comparison is not ‘old building good, new building bad.’ It is whether the resulting units are safe, genuinely affordable, suitably located, and available to the people who need them.
Do people own old houses or rent them? The Census answers
The 2024 American Community Survey table B25036 cross-tabulates year built and tenure in occupied U.S. housing units. Homes built in 1939 or earlier included 9,157,846 owner-occupied units and 5,581,327 renter-occupied units: about 62.1% owner-occupied, 37.9% rented. Among occupied units built in 2020 or later, 3,594,231 were owner-occupied and 1,817,171 rented, about 66.4% owners, 33.6% renters. The 2010–19 cohort was about 58.7% owner-occupied. The numbers are estimates subject to survey uncertainty, but the conclusion is unmistakable: a home’s age cannot tell you whether its residents own it.
A wealthy investor can own twenty nineteenth-century townhouses and rent out every one. A low-income family may own the tiny house where five generations have lived. A brand-new development can be all rental, all condominium, or a mixture. And tenure alone does not reveal household wealth: someone can own a home free of a mortgage yet lack the income to repair the roof; someone else can enjoy a secure, regulated rental for decades and never need a deed.
Property rates: how the cost of keeping a home can force a move
In the United States, the annual local charge is generally property tax, often based on a property’s assessed value and the taxing jurisdiction’s rates. Elsewhere, ‘rates,’ council taxes and related local levies work differently. Rising assessments may accompany a gentrifying neighborhood, but market price and tax bill are not the same thing. State assessment caps, exemptions, reassessment cycles and appeals can produce strikingly different bills on similar houses. Taxes support schools and essential services; the question is who is capable of paying them, and how relief is distributed.
A Tax Foundation comparison using 2024 data puts New Jersey and Illinois around 1.88% effective property tax relative to home values, well above the rates in several other states. But the property tax is only one part of the annual carrying cost: insurance, mortgage payments, heating and cooling, flood protection, roof repairs, accessibility and code upgrades may be decisive. A supposedly cheap century-old house can be an unaffordable household liability. For renters, tax and insurance hikes can affect landlords’ pricing decisions, but there is no mechanical guarantee that a dollar of increased tax produces a dollar of increased rent; market conditions and law matter.
The distribution is not race neutral. Brookings researchers reported property-tax burdens for Black homeowners about 10%–13% higher than for white homeowners in the studied comparisons, despite documented devaluation of homes in Black neighborhoods. This is an aggregate research result, not an allegation of intentional misconduct by every assessor. Assessment errors, unequal appeals, neighborhood market conditions and institutional practices deserve individual examination. Circuit-breaker credits tied to income, homestead exemptions, targeted repair grants, senior deferrals and fair assessment appeals can help, but they may shift costs unless properly funded.
Gentrification: improvement for the block, insecurity for its residents
Gentrification is not a building code violation or a single secret conspiracy. It describes a process in which investment, higher-income residents and changes in businesses and amenities transform a formerly lower-income place. Streets may become safer, abandoned buildings usable and services more plentiful. Residents who lived through disinvestment often want those improvements. The conflict emerges when the value gained by the land and its owners is extracted from renters and low-income owners who cannot match the new prices. A neighborhood can be improved and still become less accessible to the people who helped sustain it.
The evidence complicates a neat ‘every refurbished block equals an eviction’ narrative. A study of Philadelphia residents’ mobility did not find universally higher departure rates for vulnerable residents from gentrifying areas, but those who moved could face lower-income destinations. A multi-city analysis of more than six million eviction cases found many evictions concentrated in low-income neighborhoods that had not gentrified. Those results do not prove displacement is absent. They reveal that disinvestment, predatory rental conditions, exclusion from rising-price neighborhoods, and gentrification can injure residents in different ways. Displacement includes the family priced out before it ever gets to move in.
The racial mortgage line: when one family gets equity and another gets a lease
Home ownership accumulates wealth when a family can buy at a fair price, hold the property through market cycles, borrow on reasonable terms and leave a clear title to its heirs. American racial covenants, redlining, discriminatory mortgage finance, segregation and unequal access to subsidized suburban development historically placed barriers in that path. A rental payment can buy stable shelter, but it does not ordinarily buy the appreciation of the property. The missing opportunity may compound for generations, even if today’s law formally prohibits overt discrimination.
The National Community Reinvestment Coalition documents persistent disinvestment patterns in neighborhoods subject to historical discrimination. Richmond Federal Reserve research finds differences in mortgage pricing and rejection around historical residential-security grading boundaries. Yet researchers also dispute whether old grading maps themselves caused today’s full pattern or documented already operating barriers. Brookings research on appraisal bias identifies a measurable role for biased valuation but not the entire explanation of neighborhood devaluation. Treating these mechanisms separately makes the record more persuasive than attributing every price change to a single map or actor.
The Federal Reserve’s report on households’ 2025 economic well-being shows continuing differences in homeownership and rental exposure by race. Indigenous land rights and tribal housing law pose further challenges that the standard fee-simple deed does not capture. Latino, Asian and immigrant households are themselves diverse; immigration status, geography, age, income, credit access and family histories all matter. The deeper history is set out in our related investigations of Boston’s Black displacement and U.S. land policy and inherited wealth.
A new apartment is not automatically affordable housing
A demolished old rental may have housed people paying $900 a month. The replacement might be twice as energy efficient, safer and more attractive, but rent for $3,000. A developer can truthfully say housing supply increased while displaced tenants accurately say housing for them decreased. New market-rate supply is important where construction limits scarcity, and it may relieve broader price pressure over time. That is not equivalent to guaranteeing an immediate home to a family living near the poverty line.
The 2026 Gap study finds only 35 homes both affordable and available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households in the United States. ‘Affordable’ units occupied by higher-income tenants are not available to the next low-income household. And a development labeled affordable at 80% of area median income may remain well beyond the budget of someone at 30%. The practical test is who qualifies, what rent they actually pay, how long restrictions last and whether returning residents have enforceable rights.
PART II — THE WORLD: WHERE OLD HOMES STAND AND THE HOUSING SECURITY DOESN’T ALWAYS FOLLOW
The 2025 Eurostat housing publication reports 68% owner-occupation and 32% renting across the EU in 2024 (measured by the population living in those households). Germany, with 53% renting, is a notable exception. Romania at 94% ownership, Slovakia at 93%, Hungary at 92% and Croatia at 91% illustrate the opposite model. But one country may count people sleeping rough while another also counts households in temporary accommodation and a third includes overcrowded or informal housing. International homelessness rankings therefore cannot honestly be presented as a single uniform league table.
England and the United Kingdom
London’s Victorian terraces and older town homes may be split into private rentals, owner-occupied flats, social apartments or houses in multiple occupation. A preserved façade tells us nothing about the rent roll. English heritage protection can prevent demolition while private lease prices rise. Conversely, unsafe older stock needs serious repair. England’s official autumn 2025 single-night rough-sleeping snapshot identified 4,793 people; it does not include everyone in temporary accommodation or hidden homelessness.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
Ireland
Eurostat found 90% of Ireland’s population lived in houses in 2024, the highest share in the EU. A Georgian house in Dublin, a country cottage and a suburban post-1980 terrace are not interchangeable housing options. Eurostat reports Irish rents roughly doubled from 2010 to 2024 on its rent-price index; that is an index trend, not proof that each specific tenant’s rent doubled. Old-home preservation must be paired with rental security and access near employment.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Scotland and Wales
Edinburgh’s Georgian crescents and Glasgow’s tenements illustrate the Scottish importance of older apartments, while Welsh terraces and rural stone houses face different demand. Their domestic tenancy laws, council-tax arrangements and housing interventions differ from England’s and from each other. A blanket United Kingdom figure would hide that variation. Structural repair, low-income energy costs and the availability of secure social rental housing matter alongside tourist pressure in selected neighborhoods.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
France
Paris’s nineteenth-century blocks may remain physically recognizable while apartments change ownership, size, use and tenant income several times. Owners, regulated renters and short-term visitors can occupy the same building at different moments. Older French village houses also sit empty in regions losing population. Heritage laws can constrain demolition, but not automatically provide housing within reach of service workers. The true policy test tracks long-term residents, not merely postcards of preserved streets.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Belgium
Brick townhouses, industrial-era worker streets and converted city apartments represent an enduring older stock. Brussels, Antwerp and Liège confront different language, region, income and planning arrangements; national averages can blur the distinctions. A historic terrace may be rented by a newcomer while owned by an investor living elsewhere. Renovating damp or poorly insulated buildings can benefit households, but rising rents or eviction during renovation can leave them unable to return.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Netherlands
Canal houses and early-modern merchant façades illustrate preservation, yet much ordinary housing is managed by housing associations or held by private landlords and owners. Eurostat says 77% of Dutch residents live in houses, a measure of structure type, not ownership. Dutch housing associations can preserve access to lower-income homes, but waiting lists and scarcity complicate the picture. One local experiment Apep Bar covered, an intergenerational care-home arrangement, offers creative occupancy but not a substitute for national supply.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
Germany
The renter-majority counterexample: Eurostat counted 53% of Germany’s residents in rental housing in 2024. Older multifamily blocks, rebuilt cities and newer apartments can serve residents whose financial security does not depend on owning property. Tenant protections and rental institutions matter, but shortages in Berlin, Munich and other employment centers can still put pressure on new tenants. Preserving a valuable building does not settle how its residents can remain.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Austria
Vienna’s municipal and limited-profit housing institutions demonstrate that tenure can be a public choice, not merely a private market outcome. Austria’s 46% rental share in 2024 ranked among the EU’s highest. Older downtown apartments and newer subsidized units can coexist. The continuing challenges are waiting lists, eligibility, financing energy retrofit, and building enough genuinely affordable homes in attractive neighborhoods; even strong social housing policy is not a magic eraser.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Switzerland
Swiss cities contain longstanding rental apartment traditions and older European streetscapes, but also costly urban land and retrofit pressures. Some residents occupy expensive old homes as renters, while others own inherited apartments. Switzerland does not belong to the EU and its national tenure data should not be conflated with Eurostat’s EU average. Housing quality, vacancies, tenant security and the cost of green renovation matter more for residents than a travel photograph of a handsome old block.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Italy
Rome, Florence, Venice and hundreds of smaller towns offer extraordinary examples of historic residential fabric. But an ancient façade may cover an inherited home, long-term rental, holiday apartment or luxury unit. Some smaller towns have vacant housing because jobs and services moved away, while Milan and other cities have expensive housing near work. Preserving an empty village house does not automatically create an affordable place to live for someone employed hundreds of miles away.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Spain
Eurostat reports that 65% of Spain’s population lived in flats in 2024, the EU’s highest apartment share. City-centre buildings may house lifelong renters, homeowners, short-let visitors and newly renovated dwellings. Housing vacancy in less demanded areas coexists with shortages near jobs. Barcelona and Madrid have debated tourist accommodation and rental access; those problems cannot be reduced to tourism alone when wages, household growth, land rules and new construction also shape the market.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Portugal
Lisbon and Porto have drawn attention for building restoration, tourism, investment and higher-priced inner-city housing. Renovation can turn genuinely derelict homes into safe dwellings. It can also displace lower-rent occupants if legal protections and affordability conditions do not accompany financial incentives. The ethical distinction is measurable: did residents gain better homes at costs they could bear, or was the newly restored district reserved for different households?
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Greece
Old apartments, island houses, postwar blocks and inherited family homes occupy the same housing market. Greece’s heavy housing-cost burdens show why ownership is an incomplete proxy for security: repairs, energy, loans, municipal charges and living expenses continue when the mortgage ends. Historic structures must be made safe, especially in seismic areas; none of that eliminates the need to preserve secure, affordable tenancy for people without inherited property.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Denmark, Sweden and Finland
Nordic countries mix historic urban cores with postwar apartments, cooperative housing, rental stock and new districts. Denmark is one of the European nations with elevated housing-cost pressures in some official comparisons. Sweden’s tenure model includes rental and cooperative arrangements that do not map neatly onto an American detached-house deed. A strong social safety net can reduce some risks without dissolving shortages of land, family-sized apartments, accessible buildings or units near employment.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Romania, Slovakia and Hungary
High ownership is not the same as luxury. In 2024, 94% of Romanian, 93% of Slovak and 92% of Hungarian residents lived in owner-occupied housing, per Eurostat. Privatization of communist-era state housing contributed to these patterns. Older homes and apartments can be overcrowded, cold or costly to repair: Romania’s overcrowding rate in 2024 was 40.7%. A family with a deed but no repair fund is housed in a very different way from an investor who owns an entire block.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Croatia and the western Balkans
Croatia’s 91% owner-occupation rate in 2024 sits beside coastal tourism, seasonal housing and more remote towns losing residents. Elsewhere in the region, inheritance disputes, post-conflict property records, seismic safety and informal additions complicate the old-home picture. A nominally vacant building may be a second residence or a structurally unsafe inheritance, not an immediately available rental. Comparing this region requires more than photographing preserved medieval centers.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence.
Japan
Japan’s official 2023 housing survey counted 9.002 million vacant dwellings, 13.8% of the stock. Inherited rural homes, homes for rent or sale and dilapidated properties all contribute. Vacancy and homelessness can coexist when homes are far from work, legally complicated or unsafe. Japan’s January 2026 visual count recorded 2,481 homeless people under its narrow street-based survey; that number is not directly comparable with countries that include temporary or overcrowded accommodation. A country’s empty houses are not automatically a social-housing inventory.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
Canada
Older rowhouses, century homes and new condominiums share markets increasingly shaped by rent, mortgage costs, Indigenous land and housing rights, and climate resilience. Canada’s 2025 point-in-time exercise identified more than 65,000 people experiencing homelessness across 75 participating communities—not a verified national census total. The hidden crisis includes shelter pressure and people moving between households. Historical housing preservation cannot substitute for adequate year-round units near jobs and services.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
Australia
The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated 122,494 people experiencing homelessness in the 2021 census using a definition broader than visible rough sleeping. That should not be passed off as a 2026 count. Inner-city terraces in Sydney and Melbourne may be coveted assets, while public housing residents and people facing high rents have different housing paths. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experiences of displacement and land rights make the idea of a neutral property market especially incomplete.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
New Zealand
An official review of 2023 census data identified 112,496 people in severe housing deprivation, about 2.3% of the population, with Māori and Pacific communities disproportionately represented. That wider category includes more situations than the sidewalk counts used elsewhere. Older villas, aging public-housing units and new subdivisions raise a direct test: if redevelopment moves residents away from employment, schools and kin, a new roof alone may not amount to improvement.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
India
Centuries-old urban neighborhoods coexist with informal settlements, new towers, rural homes and people sleeping outdoors. India’s 2011 census enumerated about 1.77 million houseless people, a number still cited in later official materials but too old to describe 2026. Formal ownership, informal possession, rental agreements and family inheritance have very different levels of security. Clearance and resettlement must be judged by where former residents land and whether they can reach work—not just by the height of the completed buildings.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
South Africa
The effects of forced removals, apartheid spatial planning and unequal land access remain inseparable from housing tenure. Statistics South Africa’s 2022 census counted 55,719 homeless persons under its definition. Subsidized houses, informal housing, township properties and inherited plots differ in title, utilities, transport costs and local opportunity. A deed can protect a household while an isolated new development far from employment can deepen economic pressure; both realities deserve measurement.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
Brazil and Mexico
The old centers of Rio, São Paulo and Mexico City contain historic architecture, tenements, renovated units and neighborhoods built by working families over decades. Self-built housing and insecure property title are especially important categories that ‘old home’ rankings miss. Investment may improve water, sanitation and building safety but can also change prices and commercial life. Neither country has an enumeration of homelessness identical to HUD’s one-night U.S. count, so claims that one is objectively ‘worse’ require a standard definition.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
China, Turkey and Nigeria
China’s redevelopment of older urban neighborhoods, Turkey’s need for earthquake-resistant housing and Nigeria’s fast-growing cities show different pressures. Demolition may eliminate dangerous structures or clear valuable land. New towers may provide more units but not the same affordability or location. In Turkey, seismic safety is an immediate human imperative; in fast-growing Nigerian cities, secure tenure and services may be more urgent than preservation aesthetics. Comparable national counts of homelessness remain incomplete.
Source and comparative context: national, research or official housing evidence; Eurostat European comparison.
PART III — AMERICA’S 50 STATES: WHO HAS HOMES, WHO CANNOT AFFORD THEM?
For every state, the first number below comes from the 2025 HUD point-in-time count, presented by KFF: persons recorded in shelter or unsheltered on one night in January 2025. The second comes from NLIHC’s 2026 Gap table: the number of affordable and available rental homes for each 100 extremely low-income renter households. It is not a percentage of homes owned, a vacancy rate or a claim that a state caused a particular eviction. These two indicators use different populations and methods and should be read side by side, not added. No state has enough lower-income housing.
State snapshots below name the local housing mechanisms worth investigating. They do not pretend that two numbers alone prove the cause of homelessness or the racial composition of every neighborhood. A low raw count may reflect a small population or an imperfect one-night enumeration. A relatively high supply ratio can still mean a severe shortage. The same state may have coveted historic buildings, abandoned homes and overcrowded rentals.
Alabama
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 4,137 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 58 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Birmingham and Mobile have older urban housing; Black Belt communities confront maintenance and financing gaps. The relative availability measure still leaves 42 of every 100 extremely low-income renter households without a matching affordable, available unit. Rehabilitation funding and heirs’ property legal help may matter more than upscale restoration alone.
Alaska
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,655 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 35 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Anchorage’s rental market and remote Alaska Native communities face radically different challenges. Construction and heating costs are unusually high, while land and infrastructure arrangements vary. Older structures may be vital homes but prohibitively expensive to repair and winterize; statewide counts can miss remote hardship.
Arizona
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 15,259 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 26 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Phoenix’s expansion and heat exposure create pressure on older, modest homes; Tucson and smaller cities have their own rental realities. Investor acquisitions and short-term turnover are worth tracking, but so are cooling costs, wages and the loss of low-rent apartments during redevelopment.
Arkansas
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,720 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 48 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Northwest Arkansas growth contrasts with Little Rock’s older neighborhoods and the Delta’s aging stock. Homes that appear inexpensive on listing sites may need roofs, septic work and insurance the buyer cannot finance. Rental affordability, heirs’ titles and rural vacancies deserve separate answers.
California
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 181,934 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 25 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. California recorded the largest 2025 homeless count. The Bay Area, Los Angeles, coastal towns and inland counties each have distinctive markets. Rent controls, supply restrictions, property tax assessments, wildfire insurance and the cost of replacing older low-rent units meet severe extreme-low-income scarcity. The sheer total must be read alongside the state’s population.
Colorado
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 16,687 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 27 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Denver’s historic neighborhoods, Front Range growth and high-country resort towns reveal different types of displacement. A historic duplex converted into luxury space can reduce affordable options even when renovated; new market units may help overall supply but not necessarily low-income service workers.
Connecticut
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 3,735 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 40 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Older industrial-city apartments sit near high-wealth suburbs with different tax bases, schools and access to jobs. The state’s heavy effective property tax burden raises questions about assessments and relief for owners on fixed incomes. Lower-rent multifamily stock needs safety upgrades without forced tenant loss.
Delaware
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 1,573 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 41 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Wilmington’s older houses, expanding suburbs and seasonal coastal demand coexist. Historic restoration can enhance property value while rents rise. The underlying question is how much of the increased stock remains available year-round and what protections long-term renters possess.
Florida
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 27,888 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 26 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Miami’s Overtown and Little Havana, Tampa and inland communities illustrate how land values diverge. Hurricanes, sea-level risk, higher insurance premiums and investors’ demand can push out both longtime owners and tenants. A modest property tax does not mean a modest annual housing bill.
Georgia
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 12,284 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 37 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Atlanta reinvestment, Savannah’s historic-tourist economy and rural older stock follow different trajectories. The effects on Black homeownership and renting require neighborhood deed and eviction records, not visual claims about which old buildings look improved.
Hawaii
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 6,828 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 34 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Tourism, limited land and multi-generational housing create a distinctive squeeze. Native Hawaiian land rights cannot be reduced to ordinary mainland title rules. The 2025 homelessness count fell from the preceding year, but changing counts do not establish that housing insecurity has been solved.
Idaho
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,697 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 33 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Boise growth and mountain resort demand can turn older starter homes or manufactured housing into coveted land parcels. Losing these homes may remove workers’ lowest-cost choices. Rural infrastructure and wildfire exposures make simple demolition-versus-preservation debates inadequate.
Illinois
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 14,576 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 34 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Chicago’s two-flats and three-flats have long supplied apartments at different price levels. High effective property taxes can strain fixed-income owners, while decades of vacancy and disinvestment affect other neighborhoods. Saving accessible low-cost buildings can be important even without luxury redevelopment.
Indiana
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 6,675 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 34 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Indianapolis and smaller industrial cities have aging stock that may be cheap to buy but costly to repair. An older owner-occupied home can be precarious without maintenance loans, and low-rent properties may disappear through tax foreclosure, absentee neglect or conversion.
Iowa
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,816 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 39 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Des Moines development, college-town leases and rural housing availability are distinct problems. In communities with limited contractors, the price of a new roof or flood repair can overwhelm a low-income owner, while tenants face a scarcity of safe alternatives.
Kansas
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,658 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 39 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Wichita, the Kansas City region and rural towns experience different combinations of vacancy, housing age and job opportunity. Empty houses in declining areas cannot automatically meet rent demand in growing neighborhoods. Repairs and heating bills can turn low purchase prices into financial traps.
Kentucky
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 5,789 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 47 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Louisville’s older districts and Appalachian communities need different interventions. Flood resilience, heirs’ property, financing and tenant security all affect whether families can stay. Even at 47 homes per 100 extremely low-income renter households, more than half lack a suitable affordable, available option.
Louisiana
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 3,688 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 43 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. New Orleans’s historic homes command tourist attention while hurricane and flood risk raise the costs of staying. Older owners may face premiums and deferred repairs, and tenants may struggle after renovations or disasters. A one-night count does not enumerate every family temporarily doubled up.
Maine
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,413 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 52 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Old wooden houses, year-round rentals and seasonal properties occupy very different markets. Cold-weather heating and rural travel distances matter. Historic preservation means little for an elderly owner if the house is unsafely cold, or for a tenant if a winter lease ends before summer tourist season.
Maryland
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 7,120 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 34 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Baltimore rowhouses and vacant-land challenges contrast with costly areas near Washington. Safe adaptive reuse could restore homes, but rehabilitation funding should not serve only buyers able to pay luxury prices. Tax liens, rent burden and longstanding segregation remain central.
Massachusetts
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 28,311 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 46 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Boston’s gentrification narrative is only part of a statewide crisis with exceptionally high sheltered family counts. The official 2025 total should not be mistaken for 28,311 people visibly sleeping rough. Rental vacancy, shelter programs, historic conversions and the power of local zoning warrant analysis together.
Michigan
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 10,155 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 37 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Detroit’s historic housing is simultaneously a restoration opportunity and a record of mortgage disinvestment. Flint and other smaller cities add infrastructure challenges. Vacancy and abandonment can displace families even without the arrival of wealthier neighbors; repairs need access to financing and title security.
Minnesota
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 8,392 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 41 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Twin Cities rental pressure intersects with racial ownership disparities and disproportionate Indigenous homelessness. Older Minneapolis–Saint Paul duplexes and apartments can be essential lower-rent stock. The statewide 41-per-100 ratio means substantial housing shortage persists even amid policy experiments.
Mississippi
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 1,245 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 62 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. The low official count cannot be equated with low housing hardship. In rural areas, doubling up, transportation barriers and visibility of unsheltered residents complicate enumeration. Families may own inexpensive but deteriorating houses, face heirs’ title problems and lack money for storm repairs.
Missouri
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 8,345 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 37 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. St. Louis brick housing and Kansas City neighborhoods confront both redevelopment and long-term disinvestment. Unsafe vacancies can require remediation, while rehabilitated buildings should retain an affordable path for incumbent renters and buyers. The two pressures must not be conflated.
Montana
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,263 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 46 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Bozeman, Missoula and resort-market demand can outpace service wages, while small-town properties sit empty far from employment. Building seasons and infrastructure costs make new units expensive. The state demonstrates why local rent and home-age data are needed beyond one state average.
Nebraska
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,656 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 38 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Omaha’s old neighborhoods, Lincoln’s student-rental market and rural aging housing face different tax and maintenance pressures. Repair support and family-sized rental supply are crucial, particularly where redevelopment yields higher-priced units but little truly low-income housing.
Nevada
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 9,905 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 16 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. With just 16 affordable and available homes per 100 extremely low-income renter households, Nevada ranked worst in the 2026 Gap metric. Las Vegas and Reno share affordability pressure despite different historic housing stock. A construction boom alone cannot be called a success unless low-income availability improves.
New Hampshire
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,406 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 39 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Colonial homes and historic villages coexist with few available rentals. High effective property taxes can strain older owners; restrictive housing supply can exclude younger workers. Preserving the small-town landscape and permitting homes for people without inherited equity are not automatically compatible.
New Jersey
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 13,714 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 34 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Newark and Paterson’s old rental buildings, Jersey City development and high-value suburbs illustrate the extremes. New Jersey tied with Illinois in the cited effective property-tax comparison. Tax relief, assessment equity and the supply of affordable apartments near transit must be considered together.
New Mexico
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 4,683 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 41 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Albuquerque’s older neighborhoods and Santa Fe’s tourism and luxury demand reveal contrasting pressures. Tribal and Pueblo land systems require attention to sovereignty and alternative housing-finance structures, not assumed equivalence with ordinary fee-simple ownership.
New York
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 145,560 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 35 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. New York’s huge 2025 homelessness total includes many sheltered households and families, particularly in New York City; it is not a sidewalk headcount. The state has brownstones, rent-stabilized apartments, co-ops, public housing and empty rural stock. Upstate vacancies cannot substitute for affordable New York City housing near jobs, schools and services.
North Carolina
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 15,512 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 38 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Charlotte and Raleigh growth, Asheville’s tourism pressure and vulnerable coastal housing create different risks. Longstanding Black neighborhoods may face sale and reassessment pressure, while rural families can struggle to repair homes that have never attracted speculative investment.
North Dakota
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 861 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 53 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. A small statewide count needs interpretation in a sparsely populated place with severe winters. Energy-region cycles, tribal communities, crowded households and sparse rentals are not represented by downtown homeless imagery. The condition and location of housing matter as much as building age.
Ohio
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 12,196 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 37 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus have huge differences in housing demand and reinvestment. Old houses can be affordable starter stock, vacant hazards or newly expensive properties. Preservation must not freeze abandonment, and demolition must not routinely destroy the only homes poorer residents could rent.
Oklahoma
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 5,174 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 40 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Tulsa’s historic racial housing inequalities, Oklahoma City’s expansion and storm-prone smaller communities interact with rent and title security. A cheap older home is a weak safety net when an owner cannot afford structural repairs or repeated weather damage.
Oregon
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 27,202 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 24 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Oregon’s 24-per-100 affordable-and-available ratio is second lowest among states. Portland and smaller cities face rental scarcity, low-income need and differing service systems. Housing policy must protect existing affordable apartments while increasing genuinely affordable supply, not simply measure the volume of cranes.
Pennsylvania
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 14,834 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 39 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Philadelphia’s rowhouses and Pittsburgh’s old residential districts represent immense existing housing stock. Lead hazards, heating costs, roofs, title problems and unequal appraisal access can outweigh apparent purchase bargains. Restoration is most equitable when homes remain habitable and attainable.
Rhode Island
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 2,373 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 54 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Providence’s historic homes and coastal land limits create tension between renovation and scarce rental supply. The state’s better-than-average availability ratio still represents a large deficit, particularly when families seek appropriately sized apartments instead of expensive restored houses.
South Carolina
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 4,398 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 43 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Charleston’s landmark streets and coastal tourism contrast with rural inherited land and housing in need of repair. Flood damage, rising prices and heirs’ property issues can affect whether multigenerational Black families keep ownership when nearby land becomes valuable.
South Dakota
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 1,450 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 73 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. South Dakota’s 73-per-100 ratio was the highest in the 2026 Gap data—but still below adequate supply. Statewide averages can mask serious shortage and overcrowding on tribal lands and remote communities. The best position in a poor national ranking is not the absence of a crisis.
Tennessee
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 8,850 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 39 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Nashville’s rising prices, Memphis’s aging stock and rural Appalachian counties are distinct markets. Appreciation can reward owners, but property taxes, maintenance and rental turnover can force longtime residents to move. Historic protection without affordability can preserve only the buildings.
Texas
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 28,031 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 26 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Houston’s flood and insurance risks, Austin’s price pressures and Dallas–Fort Worth growth yield multiple kinds of displacement. Texas’s reliance on property taxation can strain owners, while its low Gap ratio shows how much extremely low-income rental demand remains unmet.
Utah
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 4,584 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 28 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Salt Lake City’s older neighborhoods, Wasatch Front growth and resort housing all show the limits of a simple construction total. Units affordable at middle incomes do little for extremely low-income households, and small rental stock can vanish through redevelopment.
Vermont
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 3,386 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 36 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. A small population means the PIT total deserves per-capita context. Historic villages, seasonal homes, high winter energy costs and very limited year-round rental stock combine. An old structure may be conserved even while residents can no longer pay to remain.
Virginia
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 7,240 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 35 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Northern Virginia commuting costs, Richmond redevelopment and rural/Appalachian housing require separate responses. Older Black neighborhoods face distinct property and credit histories, while high-income demand around federal employment can drive rapid housing-cost changes.
Washington
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 31,721 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 28 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Washington’s 2025 count was among the country’s largest. Seattle-region costs, Tacoma older stock and eastern-city growth interact with very low affordable-and-available rental supply. The crisis is not one downtown scene; both supply and supportive services vary by community.
West Virginia
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 1,925 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 55 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Appalachian owners may hold homes outright but face expensive heat, failing roofs, flooding, deferred repairs or complicated inheritance. A house can have a deed and be unhealthy to occupy; affordability must include the annual cost of keeping it safe.
Wisconsin
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 5,243 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 35 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. Milwaukee’s long-running racial homeownership divide and older duplexes meet Madison’s growing rental demand. Rehabilitating modest multifamily housing without large tenant rent hikes could preserve access better than clearing it for expensive replacements.
Wyoming
2025 HUD/KFF homelessness count: 535 people. 2026 NLIHC rental availability: 33 units per 100 extremely low-income renter households. The small statewide homelessness total coexists with severe affordability pockets near resorts and energy employment. Distances, winter conditions and limited social-service reach make both counting homelessness and building permanent low-rent homes difficult.
The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories deserve scrutiny, too
Outside the 50-state section, the same 2025 dataset reports 5,138 people in the District of Columbia, 2,060 in Puerto Rico, 861 in Guam and 311 in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Gap table gives Washington, D.C., only 37 affordable and available homes per 100 extremely low-income renter households. These populations are not counted as ‘states’ for this presentation, but should never be erased from a discussion of U.S. housing need.
PART IV — THE HIDDEN LEDGER: WHO PROFITS FROM AN OLD NEIGHBORHOOD?
The homeowner’s paper gain can be the tenant’s housing loss
Suppose a block of modest old houses doubles in sale value. Longtime owners who can hold their property may gain equity; heirs may gain a financial inheritance. But a retired owner with limited cash flow cannot pay a tax or insurance bill with unrealized appreciation. Renters do not ordinarily receive any of that capital gain, yet they can face higher asking rents and fewer low-cost apartments. Newly arrived owners who paid market price may be stretched by their mortgages even when their house is valuable. Real affordability is a household cash-flow question, not a Zillow headline.
The emptiest town is not necessarily the town with the most available homes
Japan’s millions of vacant dwellings offer an extreme example. A house may be legally contested, unsafe or hundreds of miles from jobs and care. Similar mismatches arise with seasonal properties, abandoned urban blocks and empty retail buildings. Bringing suitable buildings back into use can help. But abandoned structures often require legal clean-up, financing, remediation, accessible transport and permanent rental affordability. The word ‘vacant’ cannot be assumed to mean ‘ready for an unhoused family.’
Property rights versus the right to remain
Owner-occupation can improve stability, yet homeowners can be displaced through foreclosure, tax sale, condemnation, disasters, inherited-title disputes or insurmountable repair costs. Renters can have long-term security under strong legal protections and social housing systems, but many rental markets leave them exposed to non-renewal, rent increases and poor maintenance. The critical distinction is not whether the deed exists. It is whether a household has a durable, legally protected and affordable right to a safe home.
What an honest anti-displacement audit would count
First, map the actual age and physical condition of occupied and vacant housing, down to each neighborhood. Second, separate owner occupancy, landlord ownership, cooperative tenure, social rent and short-term use. Third, measure mortgage approval, assessments, property-tax appeals, insurance cancellations, renovation permits, tenancy turnover, eviction filings and relocation payments. Fourth, count restored units and demolished units by their previous and future rent affordability, not merely by building count. Finally, revisit a project after five years: how many former residents are still there?
The policy options are not mutually exclusive: meaningful renter protections, targeted property-tax relief for fixed-income owners, anti-speculation tools where legally appropriate, community land trusts, deeply affordable social housing, rehabilitated vacant stock, fair lending, enforceable rights of return, and enough well-located new homes to ease shortages. Every one brings funding and administrative tradeoffs, and none should be judged by headlines alone.
THE VERDICT — A HOUSE CAN OUTLIVE THE COMMUNITY THAT MADE IT HOME
Preserving an old home is not the same thing as preserving the right to live in it. A new home is not necessarily an affordable home. Ownership is not automatically security, renting is not automatically failure, and a low official homeless count does not prove that housing need is small. The deeper pattern runs through property taxation, inherited wealth, discrimination, repair costs, renter rights, construction and the distances between housing and opportunity.
We should preserve buildings worth saving, replace dangerous housing when necessary and construct many more safe homes where people can afford to live. But the measure of success must include what happens after the grand reopening: who kept their keys, who received the deed, who signed the new lease, and who had to leave.
When a city proudly points to a magnificent old house still standing after two centuries, there is one question its heritage plaque rarely answers: who can afford to stand inside it now?
SOURCES, PRIMARY RECORDS AND FURTHER READING
- World Population Review: newsletter that prompted this investigation
- Census Bureau: 2024 ACS B25036, tenure by year structure built
- U.S. HUD 2025 annual point-in-time count, published May 29, 2026
- KFF: state-by-state 2025 HUD homelessness counts
- NLIHC: The Gap 2026, national and state affordable-rental availability
- Eurostat: Housing in Europe, 2025 edition
- UN: 2026 global housing inadequacy / insecure tenure discussion
- England: autumn 2025 rough-sleeping snapshot
- Japan: housing vacancies 2023
- Japan: January 2026 street homelessness count
- Canada: 2025 point-in-time findings, 75 communities
- Australia: 2021 census homelessness estimates
- New Zealand: 2023 severe housing deprivation
- South Africa: 2022 census homelessness profile
- India: official national housing statistics
- Tax Foundation: 2024 effective state property taxes
- Brookings: racial inequality and property-tax assessments
- Brookings: racial appraisal bias and property value
- NCRC: historical redlining and present-day lending
- Richmond Federal Reserve: historical grading boundaries and mortgage outcomes
- Academic research: gentrification and eviction
- Academic research: Philadelphia gentrification and household moves
- Federal Reserve: 2025 U.S. household housing tenure
- FRONTLINE: Poverty, Politics and Profit documentary and transcript
- UN Web TV: 2026 global housing discussion
- Apep Bar: Black Erasure by Design
- Apep Bar: The Land Question
Methodology: Dates, definitions and denominators vary by dataset. All 50 state homelessness numbers describe a January 2025 HUD Point-in-Time enumeration; affordable-rental supply is a distinct NLIHC 2026 modeled estimate. The international national figures are not comparable without harmonizing definitions; no global ranking of ‘meanest,’ most homeless or oldest housing is asserted. Documentary photographs are contextual and are not presented as evidence of an individual eviction.
