Community conversations around our unhoused population are complex. Looking at the causes of becoming unhoused and how, as a community, we work towards solutions to these issues is complicated. Often, the conversation comes down to cost: the cost of inaction and the cost of working towards a solution. This month, we want to spend some time discussing the true cost of homelessness within a community. La Porte County is not alone in seeing a rise in unhoused individuals, and the cost of solving this issue is borne by all of us within the community.
What We Spend When We Do Not Intervene
When someone is living without a home, they do not just disappear from the community. They cycle through the most expensive systems we have.
Here is what that cycle commonly looks like in our community and beyond, and what it costs:
- Emergency room visits. People experiencing homelessness visit the emergency room an average of five times per year, according to the Healthcare Financial Management Association. Each visit costs around $3,700, meaning a single individual can incur roughly $18,500 in emergency room costs in a year. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 80% of those visits are for conditions that could have been treated with basic preventive care.
- Longer Hospital Stays: Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people experiencing homelessness spend an average of four days longer per hospital visit than people who are housed. Longer stays mean higher costs, costs that hospitals and taxpayers absorb. Federal law requires hospitals to treat anyone who arrives at an emergency room, regardless of ability to pay. When patients cannot pay, that cost becomes uncompensated care, and a loss the hospital absorbs that drives up rates for everyone else in the community through higher charges to insured patients and rising premiums.
- Law enforcement and court involvement. In Indiana, Senate Bill 285, signed by Governor Mike Braun on March 5, 2026, and taking effect July 1, makes camping or sleeping on public land a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. Each charge that enters the system carries its own costs: court processing, public defender services, potential jail time, and county-level administrative expenses. The National Policing Institute notes that repeated law enforcement contacts, jail stays, and court involvement for a single chronically unhoused individual can already cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. As this law takes effect, those costs are expected to grow within our community and beyond.
These are some of the costs of a community doing nothing.
What We Spend When We Do Intervene
Before we look at what national research shows, consider what it actually costs right here in Michigan City. These are Nest Community Shelter’s real operating numbers:
- $10.27 provides one meal for one guest.
- $20.55 covers the full cost of housing one guest for one night.
- $50 covers fire and safety maintenance.
- $150 covers water for food preparation and showers.
Now set those numbers next to the cost of a single emergency room visit: $3,700. One ER visit covers 180 nights at Nest. One year of average ER use by a single unhoused individual, roughly $18,500, could shelter that same person at Nest for nearly two and a half years.
The math makes the case, and the research confirms what we already know:
- Emergency shelter. The average annual cost of an emergency shelter bed funded by HUD’s Emergency Shelter Grants program is about $8,067, which is already less than what many communities spend on cycling a person through emergency rooms and law enforcement.
- Healthcare savings. A University of Pennsylvania analysis found average savings of roughly $13,000 per person per year in healthcare and criminal justice costs alone for people placed in permanent supportive housing.
- Dramatic reduction in ER use. Once people are housed, emergency room visits drop by nearly 61%, healthcare costs fall by 59%, and hospitalizations decrease by 77%, according to the website greendoors.org and the National Institutes of Health.
25 Years of Making the Math Work for Michigan City
There is a name for what happens when communities spend more money avoiding a problem than it would cost to solve it: penny-wise and pound-foolish.
The data is clear. Emergency room visits, law enforcement responses, court costs, hospital uncompensated care, municipal cleanup, and declining community confidence all carry a price tag. And that price tag grows every year homelessness goes unaddressed.
For 25 years, Nest Community Shelter has been Michigan City’s answer to that math, working in partnership with fellow nonprofits, faith communities, local and county government, and the private sector.
Every night our doors are open means someone isn’t in an emergency room, on a police call, or in a hospital bed. Every person connected to case management, employment support, or stable housing through Nest is one less individual relying on the community’s most costly systems. That is not just kindness in action. That is smart community investment.
But Nest cannot do it alone, and we never have.
Bringing homelessness costs under control requires a community framework that works at every level. It takes nonprofit partners providing wraparound services. It takes government agencies to fund housing assistance and mental health programs. It takes private-sector partners and individual donors to invest in long-term solutions over short-term reactions. It takes faith communities to support, donate, and volunteer. When those pieces work together, communities spend less, serve people better, and build something that lasts.
Michigan City has been building that framework for 25 years. Nest has been proud to be at the center of it.
This April, we are taking a hard look at the true cost of homelessness, what communities pay when shelter and services are not there, and what becomes possible when they are. Each week, we will go deeper: into emergency systems, into housing costs, into what the research shows about communities that invest in solutions versus those that do not.
A final and important note: every number in this article represents a person. A neighbor. A community member. Someone’s family. The individuals who walk through Nest’s doors are not data points; they are human beings navigating some of life’s hardest circumstances, and their worth is not measured in dollars.
This series is not about reducing people to costs. It is about making the case that investing in their journey toward stable housing is one of the smartest things a community can do, for everyone. The work Nest does, and the work our partners do alongside us, ripple far beyond the people we serve directly. It strengthens emergency systems. It stabilizes neighborhoods. It makes Michigan City a stronger, healthier, more connected community for all of us.
That is the point. That has always been the point.
Sources
National Coalition for the Homeless — Cost of Homelessness Fact Sheet
National Policing Institute — When Homelessness Becomes a Law Enforcement Problem, March 2026
MyWabashValley.com / WTWO — Indiana Law Criminalizes Homeless Camping Starting July 1, March 2026
NYU Furman Center — The Impact of Supportive Housing on Surrounding Neighborhoods, 2008
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — Emergency Shelter Grants Program
Father Joe’s Villages — What Is the Cost of Homelessness?
