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...)
- Largest college football stadium: Michigan Stadium (Ann Arbor, Mich.) 107,601 (https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2018-07-30/25-big...)
- The population of Baltimore, MD is 576,498 as of the last census, so would be a closer point of comparison.
Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting
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).
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'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!
Instead of being in the middle of the city, there are entire tent metropolises hidden in the woods in Berlin.
The US is below most of Europe per capita in homelessness.
Reading the , the stat on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... for the US is ~500k, while the page linked in the table, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S..., starts with "In the United States, the number of homeless people varies from different federal government accounts. In 2014, approximately 1.5 million sheltered homeless people were counted." so the higher ~1.5M would seem to correspond to the definition for number reported in the table from France.
The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next to destitute people but the rich are perfectly fine with this as long as they can have their nice houses and neighborhoods. Or that there are significant part of the population who can't get meaningful healthcare.