When you say “significant portions of the population” and then reference a segment of society that could collectively all fit inside one college football stadium, it feels like hyperbole.
Despite what you read online, the amount of Americans who see unsheltered homeless on a daily basis is very low.
- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today released its 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) Part 1 to Congress. The report found 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2022 (https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HU...)
Experiencing homelessness for one night is very different than the chronic homelessness which people are picturing. That second population is much smaller and way more visible.
What’s your source for this claim? Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting. In no large city that I’ve ever been in can you go a day without seeing homeless people, unless you work from home and order all your food from an app.
Forgive the nitpick, but absolutely nowhere near 80% of Americans are encountering homeless on a regular basis. Homelessness in particular and inequality in general are major problems! I don't mean to sweep that under the rug! However, I don't think it's true that anywhere near a majority of Americans encounter homeless people on a daily basis.
Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting
Yes, for the Census Bureau's particular and extremely loose definition of "urban" which includes what anybody in America would call "suburbs" and even a lot of places people would call "rural": https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
The key TL;DR determination factor (there are others, read for yourself) is this:
In order for a block to qualify as urban, it must have a den-
sity of 1,000 people per square mile (ppsm).
That is not a lot. I live in a very stereotypical suburb (everybody has a driveway, and a small yard) and population density here is like 8,000 people per square mile... nobody would call this place urban besides the Census Bureau. (For reference, NYC's population density is 26,403 per square mile)
I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person outside a major city... you just don't see it in suburbs or rural areas.
Again, major problem, it's just that most Americans don't see it on a regular basis... which perhaps is part of the root of the problem. Makes it easy to ignore.
I just looked up the math and this is probably right. It looks like 1 in 3 Americans live in a city of >100K people, which, again, just in my experience, is where you’d be hard pressed to not encounter a homeless person. This however probably skews higher when we factor in things like working age adults vs the total population.
Even within large cities that have many homeless people, the homeless are not evenly distributed. Police often keep them out of "desirable" shopping and business areas, and homeless often cluster in camps.
I'm most familiar with Philadelphia where you'll either see multiple homeless people every day... or rarely. Depends on where you live and work. Every other city I've been to in my life seems similar.
Anyway, I don't want to get too far in the weeds with my nitpickery. I don't even remember what we were originally talking about!
Despite what you read online, the amount of Americans who see unsheltered homeless on a daily basis is very low.