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Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

Is that really so? Homelessness rates in the US are below those in Sweden, Germany, France, Great Britain and Australia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...

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That list is a great example on how you have to treat wikipedia with a healthy dose of scepticism. It's original research of the worst case: A list of figures from different decades(!), extracted from random news sites, without any trace of even trying to explain that there is no globally accepted definition of homelessness and that those numbers likely measure very different phenomena.

Furthermore, most of these figures includes people that are insufficiently housed like on a friends couch, in a windowless room, in temporary shelters and such, and do not tell you much about the population of people "on the streets".

Fair enough, but you literally gave zero evidence for your claim that "Other countries, those with a somewhat decent social safety net, do not have such a big problem with homelessness".

You should at least consider the possibility that what you said isn't really true and just fits your preconceived notion of a heartless US society versus a supposedly more social environment in Europe.

Heartlessness isn’t a factor here. At least individually I’d say that people over here are way more indifferent towards the homeless. There is very little enthusiasm in terms of volunteering and such.

Where is over here?

The US leads the world in volunteering. https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO4.1-Participation-voluntar...

You can also look at BLS info: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/volun.pdf

Most cities have programs with volunteering with the homeless, just visit a nearby church and ask. Clothes, food and resumes are pretty popular things to help with.

Thats my point. There is an abundance of compassion, but a dearth of effective social security. The welfare states or Europe are a form of institutionalized compassion, but they are eroding fast.

It appears to be compatible with numbers from the OECD.

http://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC3-1-Homeless-population.pdf

If you look closely, you’ll find that this data has exactly the same problems. Japan has 0.0% homelessness, because they are only counting people sleeping on the street. The millions of people living in trailer parks would likely be counted as homeless in a lot of the countries on that list. Some of these figures are official, some come from advocacy groups. It is not possible to use this data for international comparisons.

You seem to have shifted the burden of proof to others to disprove your unsubstantiated claim, and then criticized the quality of the evidence offered.

Please raise the level of discourse here by offering new information to support your claim.

This is 100% true, but I wonder if the right level of abstraction for the 3rd largest country by population and 4th largest by area.

The USA undeniably has a low macro rates of homelessness overall, but I wonder if it has high micro levels of homelessness, e.g. Sydney seems to have lower rates of homelessness than San Francisco or Seattle, even though Australia has a higher homelessness rate than the USA overall. I wonder as I can't find any data that uses the same measurements across cities and countries and is easy to compare.

On numbers, Seattle has 12,000 homeless according to wikipedia, and I can't find similar numbers for Sydney. Given Sydney is about 15% larger than greater Seattle, it would need to be closer to 14,000 to be the same. I doubt Sydney has that many Homeless, but with no data I guess it may.

I could be completely off base here, but I do think the USA has some really concentrated pockets of homelessness, and that skews people's views, in both directions, based on personal experience.

The question is, does homelessness become more of a problem if it is "more concentrated"? I would argue that for the homeless individual, it actually doesn't. It's in fact probably better to be homeless in a place that is already accustomed to homeless people.

Of course for the perception of a non-homeless person, the problem will appear more drastic with a higher concentration.

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