ABQ street homelessness grows 40% since ’23, outpacing shelter use by 2-to-1, count shows

Albuquerque’s unsheltered homeless population jumped 40% over two years, outpacing increases in shelter bed usage, up 18% over the same period, by two-to-one, according to the latest Point-in-Time count from the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness. 

By the numbers

The annual statewide and local census of homeless persons, conducted each January but released just this month shows that Albuquerque’s total homeless population rose from 2,394 people in 2023 to 2,960 in 2025.

The unsheltered population — people living on the streets, in vehicles or places not meant for human habitation, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition — climbed 40% over those two years, jumping from 977 to 1,367. 

At the same time, emergency shelters housed 1,327 people when counted in Jan. 2025, up 18% from 1,125 in 2023. 

Nearly half of the people counted in 2025 said they were experiencing homelessness for the first time, up from 40% in 2023.  Persons asked about causes for their homelessness reported missing documentation, such as a lost identification card, as a significant barrier. That rose to 47% in 2025, up from 35% in 2024, the largest increase among housing obstacles.

Advocates, allies raise concerns, again

William Bowen, the coalition’s Albuquerque program manager, told City Desk the rise suggests the city’s prevention efforts aren’t keeping people housed, even as Albuquerque adds shelter space for those already on the streets. Gateway “hasn’t had a huge outsize impact” on the city’s homeless counts, he noted. 

He attributed the increases primarily to “housing prices, increases in fees,” and the repeal of COVID-era protections like eviction moratoriums that “were preventing people from falling into homelessness.”

Bowen said the coalition treats 2023 as a baseline because earlier counts were skewed by pandemic restrictions and severe weather.

The city bought the Gateway Center in April 2021 and opened services in phases through 2024. City Desk has reported spending climbing past $121 million as councilors kept pushing for more accountability.

“Just about six years ago, there were zero people that the city was actually helping, zero off the street, 24/7, with help and now we know, in aggregate, there’s roughly about 1,000 [people] in different forms,” Keller told City Desk during a tour of the Gateway hub in September.

Keller’s administration has frequently promoted the Gateway network of services as part of the solution, but Keller has also said the city needs as many as 100 sanctioned tent encampments, while also clearing unofficial ones.

The 2023, 2024 and 2025 reports each said city encampment sweeps made the counts less accurate. The 2025 report said surveyors often arrived to find “evidence of recent encampment clearings, in some cases extremely recent.”

While the city paused sweeps during survey days, NMCEH found the approach was not all that helpful because sweeps in the days before the count had already displaced people from known locations.

“The city did abide by the agreement that we had with them this year,” Bowen said. “The scope of that agreement wasn’t enough for it to be all that helpful for the purposes of a count.”

Survey refusal rates also rose slightly from 37.3% in 2024 to 41.4% in 2025.