The answer is Yes
Without anything done about rents, it will get nothing but worse. Look at the slums surrounding various third world countries. The US is heading straight for that on a bullet train.
Without anything done about rents, it will get nothing but worse. Look at the slums surrounding various third world countries. The US is heading straight for that on a bullet train.
My understanding is that those tend to develop when the rural population moves en masse to the cities for better opportunity. The people in those slums are mostly "normal" and have familial support networks; they're just really poor and there aren't enough houses for them. Also, third-world countries have much less state capacity to clear the slums and enforce order.
The problem in the US is quite different. The US has already urbanized, so there isn't a flood of internal migration to the cities. Instead, homeless people are either mentally ill or are "normal" but can't afford the cost of housing. The "normal" people are usually able to access assistance like shelters and eventually get back on their feet, maybe moving to a lower cost-of-living area, or maybe moving in with family. The chronically homeless are usually mentally ill. Also, the US has very high state capacity to clear encampments and slums when it chooses to do so. You can generally bet on the US government to enforce the property rights of landowners and evict encampments on private land.
There are "a lot" of chronically homeless in the US, but there are orders of magnitude more slum dwellers in the third-world. The types of people are very different in each situation, and the relationship between these people and the government are very different as well.
There's simply no way for large-scale slums to develop in the US.
In one sense, that's correct. If there were a slum in the US, the cities could buy back the land through eminent domain and resell it to a developer to build economy apartments. And who would fight it?
On the other hand you have Portland, OR, where a lot of people are living on the streets in tents. No matter where you go, you'll see the tents downtown. I was last there this summer, and downtown Portland is just not a city that I'd enjoy. If the cops move them, they'll just move someplace else.
Also, it's worth noting, that Portland, OR has a map for the homeless encampments reported to the city.
https://pdx.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/c68d1d2e29e444a7...