580,000 Americans were homeless in 2020, report says. What about in Washington?

At least 580,000 Americans were homeless in 2020 — and that was before the pandemic.

Nearly 23,000 of those people were in Washington.

On any given night in 2020, 22,923 people in Washington were homeless, according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Thursday.

Of those people, 6,725 were people in families with children, 1,777 were unaccompanied youth, 1,607 were veterans and 5,943 were chronically homeless, according to the annual Homeless Assessment Report.

The report looks at one-night counts of people who were homeless, both sheltered and unsheltered. The count happened in the last 10 days of January 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What makes these findings even more devastating is that they are based on data from before COVID-19,” HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said in a video about the report. “We know the pandemic has only made the homelessness crisis worse.”

Across the country, homelessness increased significantly from 2019 to 2020, Fudge said in the video.

Washington, like the country at large, reported an increase in the number of people who were homeless from 2019 to 2020, according to the report. Nearly 1,350 more people were homeless in 2020 than in 2019 in Washington.

The state also had one of the country’s highest number of families with children living in “unsheltered locations,” with a 20% increase from 2019 to 2020, according to the report.

Washington had some of the nation’s largest populations of unaccompanied youth and veterans who were homeless. The state also had the second-highest increase in chronic homelessness from 2007 to 2020, according to the report.

“As a nation, we have a moral responsibility to end homelessness, and we know how to do it,” Fudge said. “It has been shown time and again that helping people exit homelessness quickly through permanent housing without restrictions prevents a return to homelessness.”

This story was originally published March 18, 2021 at 1:59 PM.