Nothing is really “wrong” with it. However the change reframes homelessness as a temporary state a person experiences rather than a persistent identity of the individual.
Nobody thinks that homeless is something that can't be changed. The only reason to update language like this is to divide people and induce us and them behaviour.
"Making language clearer doesn't hurt"
Well, it does in this case, since it gives people the false belief that those who didn't update their language actually believes that homeless people can't be helped. That phenomena can then be studied by social scientists, creating articles about how some group views homelessness as a permanent state and that is the reason for all the problems...
I disagree with these kinds of reframing attempts for a couple of reasons but most of all i dislike this trend of constantly convoluting everything with "identity". Being homeless describes the state a person is in, not who they are, even though some people chose to be homeless.
Because the lack of housing should not be an identity that we assign to the women, men and children who happen to be going through a rough time in life. They are—first and foremost—human beings. Losing sight of that can lead to dehumanization which can then exacerbate the issue.
To say someone is homeless is not assigning an identity, it's just describing the state they're in.
I'm overweight. To describe me as overweight is accurate, and I wouldn't think you were saying that it's my identity. To describe me as "experiencing obesity" just sounds silly and changes absolutely nothing.
The English copula is frankly a mess that does among other things, assign identity and class membership. It's completely ok to use a verb which specifically indicates class membership in an unambiguous way.
My guess is the phrasing is meant to de-emphasize the permanency of homelessness - a lot of working class people drift in and out of homelessness. In order to better the situation you need to have it properly understood and analyzed.
I think the term "unhoused" had a similar goal but avoided the immediacy of "homeless" and was thus ineffective.
I don’t think this phrasing is the worst progressive “improvement” in language (that award goes to “Latinx”, seriously please stop using this), but it is kind of awkward and the standard is not applied evenly. We don’t say someone is “experiencing hunger”, we say they’re hungry, despite hunger typically being a temporary condition.
Edit: your point about the need to understand the background level of housing instability in less well off population is completely valid. I don’t think people understand the extent to which large portions of the working poor continually cycle through housing crises.
Edit 2: My broader point is that if you do consider educating people about the true facts/nature of homelessness in US cities, you should seriously question how much using the preferred progressive phrasing actually accomplishes that goal vs just making you sound elitist. Even under the most generous interpretation, there is nothing in the plain language of the phrase “experiencing X” as compared to the adjective form of X that even attempts confer any information as to whether X is a temporary or permanent condition. This is an an attempt to use language as a form of persuasion that does not even try to engage with the basic reality of how people are going to respond to that language. There are already predefined ways in English to denote temporary vs permanent, “chronic “ and “acute” would be appropriate in a scholarly context, “short-term”/“temporary” and “long-term”/“permanent” work perfectly fine in casual conversation.
Doesn't that put a label on temporarily homeless people, like people with experience in homelessness, which they can't get rid off. Being homeless ends the second you're not homeless anymore.
the term "unhoused" suffers from the same thing, it's just not precise.