Addiction, mental illness, poor choices- these are the answers most individuals will give about the causes of homelessness. When the truth is, the causes of someone being unhoused are most commonly a lack of affordable housing and a cost-of-living crisis. Recognizing that experiencing homelessness is not a moral failing but a failure of affordability for so many is the first step in fixing these issues.
First, the math underneath all of it
In Indiana, 38% of households—more than a million Hoosiers—don’t earn enough to cover the basics. That’s the ALICE measure: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. (You can read more about ALICE here) These are working households above the federal poverty line who still can’t make ends meet.
The basics themselves are what moved. Between 2007 and 2024, the cost of what ALICE calls essentials- housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, technology rose 70%, while overall inflation rose 52%. Leaving many feeling that their bills outran “inflation.” The data shows us that the needs of current households have been rising faster than the average.
A single adult in Indiana needs about $28,764 a year to cover a survival budget. A family of four with two young kids needs about $74,028 for basic survival in Indiana.
Affording a modest two-bedroom apartment in Indiana now takes $24.13 an hour. The state’s median wage is $23.65. The median is the middle of the whole labor market, and it no longer clears the bar.
People in that gap aren’t reckless. They’re a hundred dollars short every month, and they’ve been closing it with credit cards, skipped car repairs, and a savings account that used to have something in it.
Families with children
Family homelessness rose 39% in a single year nationally. On a January night, roughly 150,000 children are homeless in this country, and most of them are under twelve.
In Michigan City, Area Schools has identified more than 155 students as McKinney-Vento, the federal designation for kids without stable housing. Those children are in classrooms, and most people locally have no idea we have a population of unhoused children in our community.
The detail that undoes the stereotype fastest: between 40% and 60% of people experiencing homelessness are employed. For families, the usual story isn’t unemployment or underemployment. It’s a rent increase, a reduction in hours, a car that died, or fleeing an unsafe home, and then no unit anywhere in the county priced at what’s left.
Older adults on fixed incomes
This is the group almost nobody expects, and it’s the fastest growing one.
Older adults, classified as 50 and older, now make up close to half of single homeless adults, up from about 11% in the early 1990s, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. In 2023, roughly 138,000 people aged 55 and older were homeless on a given night, about a fifth of everyone counted, and nearly one in four of them was outside rather than in a shelter. National projections have the number of older homeless adults tripling by 2030.
How does this happen? Do the arithmetic on a fixed income. Average Supplemental Security Income benefits range from about $553 to $943 a month. One-bedroom apartments across most Indiana counties now require more than $15 an hour to afford, and above $20 in more than a fifth of counties. A retiree whose rent goes up by $150 has no levers to pull. Social Security offers no overtime.
So, for example, a woman who rented the same apartment for fifteen years gets a notice of a rent increase. She can’t reach anyone at her number at the now-corporately owned apartment complex, and moves in with a daughter in another town, or doesn’t have a daughter and ends up somewhere much worse. That’s no longer rare. It’s a growth category.
The bills that broke the margin
Two costs have hit Northwest Indiana particularly hard.
Energy bills in Indiana households rose by as much as 27% in a single year, and NIPSCO, the utility serving most of our region, saw some of the largest increases in the state. For a household already $100 short each month, a $40 jump in a utility bill isn’t an annoyance. It’s the difference between making rent and not.
Food is included as an ALICE essential number, and it behaves the same way: it can’t be skipped, and it’s been climbing faster than inflation. When rent, power, and groceries all rise together, a household’s slack disappears.
This is what people mean, or should mean, when they say homelessness is a housing problem. It isn’t only that rents are high. It’s that the total cost of staying housed has outgrown what ordinary work pays, and households with the least margin fall out first.
Why this matters for what happens next
Most policies currently take a different approach. Indiana’s new public camping law and the federal initiative to reallocate homelessness funding toward treatment both focus on the idea that the individual involved is an unhoused single adult with an addiction or an untreated health condition, someone whose issue is primarily behavioral.
For a large and growing number of people becoming homeless in Indiana, the shortfall is arithmetic. The answer to arithmetic is housing they can actually afford.
Other Blog Posts In This Series:
The 2025 Count in Context: Indiana’s Rising Homelessness by the Numbers
We Can’t Cite Our Way Out of Homelessness: Why Criminalization Fails
Indiana Bill SEA285: What It Means Now That It’s in Effect
The Federal Retreat From Housing: What the Latest Funding Cuts Mean for People at Risk
Sources
• United Way of Central Indiana, 2026 ALICE Report for Indiana https://www.uwci.org/blog/2026-alice-report
• UnitedForALICE, State of ALICE in Indiana https://www.unitedforalice.org/state-overview/Indiana
• Housing4Hoosiers, Out of Reach 2026: Indiana’s housing affordability crisis (July 23, 2026) https://housing4hoosiers.org/2026/07/23/out-of-reach-2026/
• National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach: Indiana https://nlihc.org/oor/state/in
• National Alliance to End Homelessness, Paint by Numbers: Older Americans and Homelessness https://endhomelessness.org/blog/paint-by-numbers-older-americans-and-homelessness/
• Mirror Indy, Here’s why electric bills are up across Indiana (June 25, 2026) https://mirrorindy.org/heres-why-electric-bills-are-up-across-indiana/
