By KeyCrew Media
The federal government’s most recent count put the number of unhoused Americans at 771,000. That number is from 2024, and according to Daniel Kaufman, founder of Kaufman & Company, it is almost certainly an undercount by a significant margin, not because the count was careless, but because of what it leaves out entirely.
The Count Only Captures One Kind of Homeless
Point-in-time counts, the method federal agencies use to track homelessness, primarily capture people sleeping outdoors, in shelters, and in transitional housing. They are not designed to capture what Kaufman calls the hidden homeless: the family sleeping in a relative’s living room, the person rotating between weekly short-term rentals because they cannot scrape together a deposit, the couple living out of a car between shifts.
These people do not show up in the data. They are not sleeping under a bridge. They are, by every practical measure, without stable housing, and there are a lot of them. “It could be two million people,” Kaufman said. “It could be even more.”
Kaufman encountered a direct example while working in Orlando. In the unit next to his temporary housing, a young couple with a baby was moving from one short-term rental to the next because they could not afford a deposit on an apartment. Both were working. Neither qualified for emergency housing assistance. They would not appear in any official homeless census.
“In Orlando, which has so many empty apartments, because the landlords would rather have them empty than bring down the rents, that’s a real crisis,” he said.
When the Math Doesn’t Add Up
The undercounting problem points to a deeper flaw in how affordability itself is defined. The federal definition of affordable housing is pegged to Area Median Income, a figure that averages household earnings across an entire metro area. In cities where high earners push that average up, the resulting affordability threshold bears little relationship to what most working people can actually pay.
The people left out are not the destitute homeless most Americans picture when they hear the term. They are baristas, nurses, new graduates, and construction workers, the people who make daily life function, and for whom the current housing market has largely stopped working. As Kaufman puts it, “The person who works at Starbucks, drives Uber, cleans buildings, teaches your kids, 60% of their income is going to rent. That’s absurd.”
Orlando Is a Case Study, Not an Outlier
Orlando illustrates how wide the gap between the problem and the policy response has grown. The city has vacant land, empty commercial buildings, and a growing number of residents who cannot afford rent. It also operates under an AMI-based affordability framework that qualifies people earning significantly more than most of its working residents.
Kaufman argues this is not a scarcity problem. It is a priority problem. The land exists. The demand is measurable. What is missing is a commitment to build for the people who actually need it, rather than for the income brackets that produce the easiest returns. “It’s not an effect of space,” he said. “It’s an effect of will.”
What a Private-Sector Response Looks Like
Rather than waiting for federal policy to catch up, Kaufman is building housing specifically for the income ranges the standard AMI framework ignores. Through his workforce housing platform Oldivai and a newer initiative called Mr. Good Container Homes, which converts shipping containers into workforce units, he is targeting people earning $30,000 to $80,000 a year.
The container conversion model addresses several layers of the problem at once. It is faster to build, lower in cost, and well suited to populations in transition, people moving out of shelter situations, traveling workers, and families who need a stable short-term option while they get on their feet.
He is also direct about the financial case. Undersupplied markets at the lower end of the income spectrum have near-zero vacancy rates and no need for concessions to attract tenants. The demand is there and the returns are real. The assumption that serving this population requires charity or sacrifice is, in his view, a convenient myth the industry has relied on for too long.
A Number That Should Make Everyone Uncomfortable
Whether the true count is 771,000, two million, or higher, the direction is clear. The housing affordability crisis is not improving at a pace that matches the scale of the problem, and the metrics used to track it are not capturing the people most affected by it.
Kaufman’s argument is straightforward: start with the right number, build for the right people, and stop accepting a framework that lets the industry feel good about a problem it has not actually solved. “Housing is a right,” he said. “Everyone should have a right to be housed. And I think we can do that, and still make money.”
Daniel Kaufman is the founder of Kaufman & Company, a Los Angeles-based private investment and holding firm with portfolio companies spanning real estate development, workforce housing, venture investment, and infrastructure. His workforce housing platform, Olduvai, focuses on delivering attainable housing in undersupplied markets across the United States. Learn more at the Kaufman & Company case study page.
Disclaimer: This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
