The number of homeless people in the US will see a “staggering and unprecedented” increase because of the coronavirus crisis and its impact on the economy, experts have warned. Some say without an “astronomical” response by the government, the numbers could double.

As more people lose their jobs and are unable to pay their rent – on Friday it was reported almost 17 million people had filed for unemployment benefits in the last three weeks – so pressure will be placed on a sector already at capacity.

The people most likely to join the ranks of the homeless are those who are not part of the digital economy. People of colour are also likely to be disproportionately represented, they said.

“I think there’s no question there’s going to be a phenomenal increase,” Sara Rankin, an expert on housing and homelessness, and an associate professor at Seattle University, told The Independent. “It is going to be staggering and unprecedented. Anytime you’re putting that much of a strain on what is already a completely starved infrastructure … It’s going to come home to roost in a way we can’t even comprehend right now.”

The way in which the country counts homeless individuals and the language it uses for them, is imprecise and sometimes misleading.

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, a federal agency within the executive branch, estimates the total number of homeless people to be around 570,000. This includes people sleeping in shelters, in their cars, or families being forced to squeeze into a spare room of relative’s home.

Around 25 per cent of the homeless are defined as “chronically homeless”, that is people who have been homeless for a year or more, and are struggling with a disabling condition such as a serious mental illness or substance use disorder. More than a third are “unsheltered”, and live on the streets or abandoned buildings, according to figures for 2019 collated in the annual report published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Across the US, and especially on the west coast, homelessness has been on the increase for a number of years. The reasons are multiple, but economics and a failure to build affordable housing is at the root.

In places such as San Francisco and Seattle, specific sectors, such as the well-paid technology industry, have had the impact of pushing up property prices, and making affordable housing all the more scarce.

“One erroneous belief is that people become homeless because they have mental illness and substance abuse, and that’s just not the case,” said Nicholas Barr, a social scientist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. “People become homeless or are unstably housed, because they can no longer afford housing or cannot find affordable housing. That’s the reason people become homeless.”

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He said that with 17 million people being added to the unemployment rolls and more businesses closing all the time, if only small proportion of those who lost their jobs become homeless, it would result in an “an enormous increase”.

Many states and cities have enacted rent or mortgage relief, or moved to prevent evictions while the crisis is ongoing. But nobody knows how long that will last or whether people will be asked to repay their rent, or if the government will step in.

The response to the problem has varied from city to city, and state to state.

In Las Vegas, homeless people were initially housed on a parking lot after a shelter was closed because a person tested positive or Covid-19.

Critics called on the authorities to house people in hotels, which have many vacant rooms.

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“After criminalising homelessness this year, Las Vegas is now packing people into concrete grids out of sight,” tweeted Julian Castro, the former presidential hopeful and mayor of San Antonio.

In Los Angeles, authorities made a more serious effort to use unoccupied hotels. In Washington state, which has more than 20,000 homeless people, authorities expanded shelter capacity.

In Seattle, officials opened the Seattle Centre Exhibition Hall to help relieve capacity at its most highly used shelter.

Dr Ashwin Vasan, a professor of family health at Columbia University, also heads Fountain House, an organisation that advocates for people with mental illness. He said predicting how many additional people would become homeless would depend to an overwhelming extent on the willingness or readiness of the government to support businesses and people who lose their jobs – especially those who already operate on the lower rung of the economic ladder.

Just as evidence has been emerging that a disproportionate number of those being infected by the virus are African American, a similar disparity exists among the homeless, he said.

“We’re going to see significant numbers of additional homeless and people at risk of homelessness, or people moving in and out of homelessness as a result of the tenuous economic situation,” he said.

Asked if he thought it could be hundreds of thousands or even a doubling of the current total, he said: “I mean, it could be doubling. I don’t know. It’s so hard to make a guesstimate without knowing what economic buttressing the government will do.”

Dr Margot Kushel, professor of medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and director of the University of California San Francisco’s Centre for Vulnerable Populations, said she could not think of a time when so many people were at risk of becoming homeless.

“It would be very easy to imagine that we could have a doubling. And if we do nothing, that is what we will see, I think a doubling would be easy to see,” she said.