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Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

> The United States has more homeless people than ever since the country began measuring the size of the homeless population annually in 2007.

Pretty important seeming, and a little surprising.

So based on this wording the homeless population is higher than its ever been since we started recording it?

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It makes sense that this is true. We've been systematically underbuilding housing since at least the 1980s. Lots of places had old, run-down surpluses that were being "revitalized", hiding the issue for decades. But now the housing shortage is being felt almost everywhere in the country.

And yet, every year, we're still underbuilding relative to our population growth, thus making the problem worse. Unless our population starts to shrink like in Japan or Russia, we're either going to need to build A LOT of new housing or deal with an ever increasing population of homeless people.

Even a slowly shrinking population is probably not enough to fix the problem, because rich people like to buy vacation homes, and we have a lot of rich people. We'd need rapid population decline, like what would happen from some catastrophe. I recommend building homes instead of that.

Population has also increased from 300 million to about 340 million, or more than 10%. Nothing else changing, we'd expect the number of homeless to be 10% larger than in 2007.

It is also important to note that the US population is higher than ever.

My comment is being downvoted, could someone please let me know why I am wrong?

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