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throwaway167

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"US homelessness up 12% from 2022" =/= "40% of americans are homeless"

Also, the first sentence of the article literally says

>653,000 people in the USA were homeless at the beginning of 2023

I'm staring at the 653,000 figure and still can't determine if I'm shocked because it seems surprisingly low or high. Perhaps it's because the previous poster dropped a 40 million number that moved my frame of reference.

To put it into perspective for myself, 653,000 is larger than the following cities, based on 2022 estimates:

- Boston - Portland - Louisville - Memphis - Detroit - Baltimore

The number is surprisingly low. Most developed countries have worse rates of homelessness than the US, including Germany and The Netherlands [1].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

That’s using a “Boston proper” definition of Boston (“your mailing address ends in ‘Boston, MA’”), which is fine in some ways, misleading in others.

The Boston metro area (where you’d be prone to tell someone you just met in California “I live in Boston”) is almost 5M.

It says in the article that its 653,000, not 40 million. Not really sure where you are getting that figure, however it appears that the actual number is under a million people

They used 331.9 million * .12 not realizing it was a rate of change rather than a percentage of the population

"only" 653k. up 12%, not up to 12%

For a country of 320 million that isn’t even close to a large number.

It is a large number for a first world country with high GDP. Of course anything looks OK if you compare to many developing world nations.

No it’s still a very small number. For comparison that’s about the same amount as Germany, a nation less than 1/3 the size. The US simply does not have a serious homeless issue and it definitely isn’t “bad for a developed nation.”

Homelessness Realism - the belief that homelessness is inevitable and nothing substantial can be done.

Yes when it’s that small of a percentage it can be argued that homelessness isn’t the problem. Mental health and drug addiction is but those have different solutions and namely ones that can’t be argued to have a left economics solution.

I wonder if this stat includes the economic migrants, if not it could very well be much larger. This news article mentions there have been 2.8 million encounters at the border this year from Sept 30.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/30/how-ma...

Migrant workers usually live in some kind of shared housing with other migrant workers and send money back home each month. I’m sure some do end up homeless especially if anything goes wrong

Why do you call them 'economic migrants?' The longstanding description before was 'illegal aliens.'

There is currently a push by you know who to make “illegal aliens” a naughty word, a word that only the most ignorant would utter. They think it’s a pejorative because it’s associating everyone who enters the country (illegally) with a crime. However they’re ok with calling them all “migrants” or “asylum seekers” even though clearly, the vast majority are not. As you can probably tell, I am against this war on words, and think that you should be able to call a thing what it is.

I believe the actual technical term these days would be "asylum seeker" which is actually a legal status. Perhaps they are taking advantage of that status to seek immigration for economic reasons and so "economic migrant" is also a fair description.

Interestingly, if you work with construction crews in South Texas (I do not, but my parents dabble in the business), you'll find that Spanish is an invaluable language. I don't know what that says about legal status (it seems rather impolite to ask the people who are building your house for you), but it seems like these people may be part of the solution to the housing issues.

Why is the US not tracking all these humans? Count them in the census, let them pay taxes, get them all legal protections under US law. Let them fight to stay in this country with productivity.

I'm pretty sure they'll want to leave once they realize the US government robs people with taxes.

There's a two-tier system going on and we're living in a modern day Rome.

> Why is the US not tracking all these humans?

I've come to believe our government is too small to do so. If I was stopped on the street by law enforcement, I wouldn't have any way of proving my citizenship; it's just not something we're typically socialized to in the US. And obviously documents would be pretty easily forged these days (and I believe often are by/on behalf of employers).

I think you would need a pretty strong, centralized database to include various biometrics of all citizens in order to do the thing right, and that's way beyond what I think the average citizen would accept (though I'd actually be willing to participate).

I feel like immigration is like most aspects of the US economy - we leave it up to the market to decide, and labor is a market as well.

You have a good point there. I understand that citizenship is tracked at the federal level and not the state level; although the federal government relies on local county records to prove status. The system requires an overhaul and the states should have a bit more power to police their own territory.

> The system requires an overhaul

I'm sure we'll get to it one of these decades. Again, I think that a small government ethos will make it quite challenging. It's interesting when you parse the constitution carefully, particularly the 14th amendment, you'll often note that it is all about due process and it does not limit that to citizens only; it seems quite careful in using the words citizen and person.

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