Winter Is Coming.How Many of Our Own Species Will We Allow to Suffer?

Winter is approaching.

For some Americans that means holidays, warm blankets, and the comfort of knowing that when the temperature falls, they can turn up the thermostat.

For others, winter brings fear. Fear of the next utility bill. Fear of the next rent increase. Fear of choosing between keeping the children warm and putting a healthy meal on the table. Fear of falling asleep in a vehicle and wondering how cold it will get before morning.

And for people living on the street, winter can mean something worse: the possibility that they may not survive it.

These are not strangers from another species. They are not a separate category of life whose suffering becomes acceptable because of income, employment, disability, age or housing status. They are human beings. They are members of our own species. They are us.

So as another cold season arrives, one question should disturb every American: what kind of country have we become if we can watch members of our own species live in conditions that shorten their lives, and carry on as though nothing is fundamentally wrong?

This is not only an emotional argument. The evidence exists. The suffering is documented. The consequences are measurable. And for the first time in this piece, so is the future: the numbers below show where each of these conditions is headed if we do nothing.

On a single night in January 2025, 745,652 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. Of those, 266,320 were unsheltered: living on streets, in vehicles, in encampments, in places never meant for human habitation. Another 479,332 were in shelters (Congressional Research Service).

That count fell about 3.3 percent from the record of 771,480 set in 2024. It is still 36 percent higher than the 549,928 counted in 2016. We should not mistake one year of improvement for the end of a national crisis.

745,652 is not a statistic. It is hundreds of thousands of individual lives. People who were once children. People with parents, siblings and histories. People who have worked, raised families, served their communities, and still have abilities, ambitions and futures.

And the count does not capture everyone. It is one night, not a year. It misses the family doubled up in a relative’s spare room, the worker rotating between friends’ couches, the elderly person staying somewhere unsafe because there is nowhere else to go. In 2025, 29 of the country’s roughly 400 local continuums did not conduct an unsheltered count at all.

We must stop treating the people we manage to count as the only people who matter.

Now consider the Americans who have a home.

In the federal government’s most recent full survey, 34 million households, 27 percent of all households in the country, reported difficulty paying energy bills or keeping their homes at a safe temperature. Five million could not use their heating equipment because it was broken or they could not afford the fuel. In 1.4 million homes, someone needed medical attention because the house was kept at an unsafe temperature (U.S. Energy Information Administration).

Those figures are from 2020. They are a floor, not a measure of today. Since then the pressure has only grown: one in six households is behind on its utility bills, and utilities cut off electric service about 13.4 million times for nonpayment in 2024 alone (NEADA, ConsumerAffairs).

What good is a heating system if the people who need it cannot afford to turn it on?

Picture a child at home in November, wearing a jacket indoors. The parent knows the house is too cold. The parent also knows what happens when the heater runs: the bill goes up, and that money comes out of groceries, medicine or rent. So the thermostat stays low. Extra blankets. Rooms closed off. Try to get through another night.

The child does not understand utility pricing or wage stagnation. The child only understands that they are cold, that their parent is worried, and that there are things you learn not to ask for.

A child’s body does not become less deserving of warmth because their parents earn less money.

The same math follows that family into the grocery store. Fresh food gets compared, calculated and put back. A parent skips a meal so the children can eat. And for the person living in a car, even affordable groceries raise questions with no answer: where do you refrigerate them, cook them, wash them?

A person can have an address and still live in deprivation. A person can have a job and still live in poverty. Survival is not the same as security. And security is not luxury. We are talking about warmth, food, water, shelter, sanitation and health care. These are not extravagant demands. They are the conditions of staying alive and well.

Across America, people sleep in vehicles. Some are employed. Some are elderly. Some are veterans. Some have children in the back seat.

Think about what that means. Where do you park safely? Where do you use the bathroom, shower, store medication? Where does your child do homework? Where do you go when it drops below freezing, or when someone tells you to move? And what happens when the vehicle that is your last shelter breaks down?

We have built a society in which a person can work, pay taxes and still have no secure place to sleep. Then we treat that person’s presence in a parking lot as the problem.

A vehicle is transportation. It should not have to become someone’s final defense against homelessness.

This is not only hardship. It is a measurable health emergency.

The largest study ever done of homeless Americans followed about 140,000 people for twelve years. It found that people who experience homelessness face 3.5 times the risk of death of people who are housed. A 40-year-old without a home faces about the same risk of dying as a housed person nearly twenty years older. And a shelter bed did not change that risk much: people counted in shelters died at about the same rate as people counted on the street (National Bureau of Economic Research).

Twenty years. That is how much older a body becomes, in its risk of dying, when it has no home.

The cold itself is killing more of us too. The rate of cold-related deaths in the United States more than doubled between 1999 and 2022, and the researchers named rising homelessness and social isolation among the possible reasons (JAMA study, reported by Healio).

A person moved from one sidewalk to another sidewalk is still exposed. A person discharged from a hospital with nowhere to recover goes back to the conditions that made them sick. Housing and health are not separate subjects. They are the same subject.

Our economic systems did not come from nature. Human beings made them. We wrote the laws that govern corporations. We built the incentives that reward financial performance. We decided which costs could be passed along and which protections the public would get.

Now watch those decisions land on one household.

A company raises prices. Another cuts labor costs. A manufacturer finds cheaper ingredients. An investor wants a higher return. A landlord raises the rent. A utility files for a rate increase. Each one can be explained as normal business. Each one says it is only responding to conditions.

But the worker is also the consumer. The worker is also the parent, the tenant, the patient, the person paying the light bill. And that person cannot raise their own income every time another institution raises its prices.

So they cut the grocery budget. They put off the doctor. They lower the thermostat. They work more hours and sleep less. They take on debt. They move somewhere smaller. Some lose their homes. Some start sleeping in the car.

No single company has to intend that outcome for the combined system to produce it.

That is why this is not a hunt for one villain. A system can produce harm without anyone choosing harm as its goal. But once we can see the harm, we are responsible for the machinery that produces it.

If our systems can generate extraordinary wealth, why are they still leaving so many members of our own species unable to afford warmth, shelter and food? The purpose of an economy is to serve the people in it. It is not to require those people to give up their health to keep it running.

We do not have to guess what doing nothing looks like. The trend lines already exist. Extend them, and this is the country we are choosing.

Every year communities open warming centers, add shelter beds, hand out blankets and meals. Those efforts save lives, and the people behind them deserve recognition. But a warming center protects someone for a night. What happens the next night?

Winter should trigger protection, not another cycle of emergencies. If we know that cold, housing insecurity and energy deprivation create measurable risk, then we should measure that risk and be held to reducing it.

That is the purpose of a National Winter Human Protection Standard. Not another bureaucracy that counts suffering. A public standard with eight parts:

1. 1

   Count every cold-related death.

   Report them, including deaths among people without housing, and examine whether timely action could have prevented each one.

2. 2

   Measure heating security.

   Track how many households cannot keep a safe indoor temperature, along with shutoffs, utility debt and unsafe heating.

3. 3

   Prove shelter capacity.

   Every community reports whether its shelter and warming space is enough in dangerous weather, and who is being turned away or cannot get there.

4. 4

   See vehicle homelessness.

   Safe parking, sanitation, outreach and a path into permanent housing for people living in cars.

5. 5

   Protect the most vulnerable first.

   Children, older adults, and people with medical conditions or disabilities, based on actual health risk and not on assumptions about who deserves help.

6. 6

   Report in public.

   Plain reports showing what improved, what got worse, and where intervention is needed.

7. 7

   Answer for outcomes.

   Independent evaluation. What fails gets revised. What works gets expanded.

8. 8

   Give affected people a real voice.

   The people living these conditions help design the standard and judge whether it works.

Success is measured in lives protected, suffering prevented and healthy years preserved. Not in dollars distributed or programs announced.

Whenever a proposal like this comes up, one question follows: how much will it cost? That is a fair question. Public money must be managed responsibly. But it deserves a partner: how much does doing nothing cost? The table above is the beginning of that answer. Until we count both, we are measuring the price of helping and leaving the price of neglect off the books.

There will be honest disagreement about funding, about federal and state roles, about what works. Those debates should happen. They should not be used as a reason to wait through another winter.

Tonight, millions of Americans will come home to warm houses. They will make dinner, put their children to bed, and sleep under blankets.

And tonight, somewhere close by, another person will be looking for a safe place to park. Another parent will be working out how long they can afford to run the heater. Another elderly person will sit in a cold room to avoid the bill. Another child will wonder why their home is so cold.

These lives are happening at the same time, in the same country, among members of the same species. Sometimes only a few streets apart.

The person on the sidewalk has the same need for warmth as the person in the mansion. Money changes a person’s access to protection. It does not change their worth.

One day the children growing up now will look back at what we accepted. They may ask why people slept outside in freezing weather while buildings stood empty. Why working families could not afford heat. Why we spent so long arguing about whether people deserved help instead of finding out what worked.

And they may ask the hardest question: if you knew people were suffering, why didn’t you do more?

That it was complicated? That it was expensive? That it was someone else’s job? Those answers describe the obstacles. They do not erase the consequences.

Winter will come. That was never the uncertainty. The uncertainty is whether we will be any different when it does.

So ask every institution that serves you one question this winter: what are you doing to make sure the people of this country can live, and not merely survive?

Because a nation is not moving forward if it leaves its own people freezing behind.

We are one species. Every life has value. And the future we build must reflect that truth.