The homeless population accounts for 0.23% of the total U.S. population, or about ~771K people.
https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
For comparison, more people are getting DUI citations per year,
Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states.
An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.
That sure as hell sounds like a crisis to me.
How does it follow? Not having a severe mental illness makes one normal? It's as same as saying that not suffering from severe obesity makes you fit and healthy.
The unhoused has those people with a housing disorder, aka mental illness, and those who, simply, don't "house" enough.
Why don't they house enough? Many reasons. But nearly 4 out of 5 are not ticking the severe mental illness part. So there is less water in the argument that homelessness is caused by mental illnesses which is the leading reason I hear when people talk about homelessness. So, they aren't "mental," they are "normal."
No - the word there is severe. Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, often. When you look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.
That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you.
There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF.
That's a homeless person every 2 blocks.
Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.
People looking like they have homes or acting like it won't stop this. It doesn't make people inherently dangerous.
Don't get me wrong, I think any percent of the population being homeless because of lack of options is a tragedy. (I don't really care if someone wishes to be so, and I think we should have appropriate living options for this). I understand that you can't really stop temporary homelessness - fires and urgent things happen - but that's something we can deal with as needed.
y% LIVES on the blocks - so the multiple on y is higher (higher probability you encounter them), and the desperation factor is also likely much higher.
The problem which sticks out to me is that homelessness can be addressed by providing housing, but that’s not an easy solution to provide in a country that gets 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. So why is someone talking so much about homelessness relative to other issues? Do they want the U.S. to provide a house for every illegal immigrant who crosses a border? If political officials in states struggling with homelessness really care about solving the problem, they would do what other states are doing, as mentioned in OP’s article.
Or are you just what-about-ing?
Homeless people can be a problem independent of housed-drug addicts being a problem.
They're a burden on society and should be removed. But why stop there? The bottom 20% of school kids are just going to end up being a burden on society too! Prison costs something like $50k/inmate/annum. So let's inject them too!
But why wait for the kids? We know who is popping out all those burden-on-society babies. Sterilize them. Then we can use them as "comfort women" for our brave, selfless Immigration Enforcement heroes!
USA! USA! USA!
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-involuntary-letha...
Granted, this is pretty obvious satire, but upvoting it?
If you did, is it because you support murdering poor and disadvantaged people?
I hope not. But some folks around here make me wonder.
Maybe I'll just stop, as I certainly don't want to encourage murderous pieces of shit.
While property crime is more likely to be committed by people the lower their income level is, the majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.
In fact, the homeless are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than any other income demographic.
Furthermore, the unstable and dangerous people you see behaving erratically on the street are not necessarily sleeping there - and the homeless in the area probably feel much more unsafe about their presence than you do.
Gee, I wonder why, they make up 99% of the population.
How could they ever make up more than 50% of crime?
> I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does
Which is that if you’re scared of being assaulted by someone you should be scared of everyone around you at all times. Someone’s housing status does not make them any more likely to attack you.
Being scared of homeless people hurting you is like being scared of flying in a plane when you drive a car every day.
I think that one of the huge limitations of how we think about homelessness in the US is that we view it as a problem that non-homeless people encounter. This encourages a bunch of policies that make it easier for somebody to avoid ever having to see a homeless person but which do little to mitigate the suffering of a homeless person.
You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem.
Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
That's not doing anything about the root causes.
The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings.
It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc).
Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-...
And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past.
It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."
But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.
We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.