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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> America has an unusually severe homelessness problem.

Maybe.

Over 580,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness. That is a rate of ~0.18%, if my calculations are correct (600k / 332m).

Contrast to Sweden (population 10m) which had an estimated 33,000 homeless people in 2020, yielding a rate of 0.33%. [1]

Contrast to Japan, which has an estimated effective homelessness rate of 0%.

So Sweden has a worse homelessness rate than the US but we all suck compared to Japan and Finland!

1. https://www.homelessworldcup.org/sweden#:~:text=Country%20st....

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In the US, a lot of homeless people are likely in prison. There is also a second class of people who live on the streets during thr week(San Francisco), but then travel back to their home for the weekend

The Japanese do have homelessness problem, they are just not recorded. Knowing Japan, it is something bureaucratic. Unless you register yourself as living in the street, it is assumed you live on your last known adress. And you likely can't register yourself as living on the street as that is illegal.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/19/japan.justinmc...

A lot of people lose their support network in prison (or lose it before going in) and are released to the streets. They just get an open bus ticket courtesy of the state, go where it’s possible to live as homeless, and that’s it. A lot of the bussing we hear about is simply these open bus tickets prisons (especially Texan prisons) give out to people with no one picking them up.

As well the negative feedback loop of how hard it is to get good employment after going to prison.

Correspondingly, I understood Japan's covid numbers were so low during the early stages of the pandemic due to the fact that you could only get officially counted covid tests with great difficulty and discouragement.

Definitions of homelessness and data collection methodologies vary to such a degree that it is difficult to make direct comparisons between countries. The term "homeless" includes a broad range of conditions, from sleeping on the streets to living in temporary accommodation. Japan's purported homelessness rate is transparently false to anyone who has spent time in the less salubrious parts of Tokyo.

What is clear is that homelessness in the US is very unequally distributed geographically and has become associated with increasingly severe social problems. The level of homelessness might not be exceptionally high, but there's a prima facie case that the severity of homelessness has. Being inadequately or insecurely housed is undoubtedly bad, but it's a heck of a lot better than living indefinitely in a tent underneath a freeway overpass.

The last time I looked into these numbers, the definition of "homeless" between the countries was so wildly different that the numbers were impossible to compare

Japan has homeless people. Not to the same degree as USA but they exist.

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