A lot might depend on how hard each state (or municipality) is working to do such counts. Jurisdictions must also differ in how quickly and frequently people in this situation are incarcerated (and thus removed from such counts).
At least all the data is coming from one source this time. Quizmaster had to compile it from various sources himself for older versions of this quiz. He did a great job, but with data coming from all over it was hard to know if it was all collected with similar degrees of accuracy.
Less than 4,000 homeless in Chicago's metro area of 10 million? Less than 4,000 people squatting in abandoned, windowless, unheated, unlit houses in Detroit? 4,500 of New York City's 8.7 million, let alone the other 11 million in NY State?
The numbers also seem plausible based on what I've seen in real life. Where would you rather be homeless? Detroit or Los Angeles? A cross country bus ticket is not that expensive.
Only 12 people living in their cars in North Dakota? People breaking up in a relationship, the great influx of oil workers with a housing shortage in small towns. There must be more than 12 people a day camping behind the wheel or in a tent because they don't have a permanent place.
I can personally visualize about 25-30% of my state's homeless population. If I really made the effort across the entire state I'm sure I could tally the low number by myself.
Interesting how it is mainly liberal states that have higher homeless populations. I assume it is because it is the high cost of living in those areas.
Liberal states also provide more services to homeless people and are generally more tolerant of people living on the streets or camping. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a large amount of migration from conservative states to liberal ones.
I think this is probably it. I've been to lots of cities around the US, and the one where the homeless seemed the most "at home" was Portland, by far. They seemed to have more resources handy, and the average citizen did not seem to blanch at their presence the way people often do elsewhere.
Florida is a swing state, like Colorado. Texas has a warm climate, so it is easier to be homeless as opposed to somewhere like New York, Colorado or Washington.
Except Texas has almost 3/4 of the population of California yet barely 1/10 of the homeless. Florida too has half the population yet a little more than 1/10 of the homeless. Both also have a climate where someone won't freeze to death in winter.
Yes, but you're cherry-picking California, which is well-known for having the largest homeless population. The fact that these two states -- like every other state -- have homeless populations much lower than California's doesn't say much.
Highers costs (and standards) of living has little to do with it. Climate matters only a little. All of these states have large urban centers, including Texas, Florida, and Georgia. And as QM points out, someone living in a tent in California, Hawaii, or Massachusetts probably has better access to healthcare than someone living in a dilapidated $500 trailer (and therefore not technically homeless) in Arkansas or Mississippi.
I lived for a few years in Arkansas and I saw no more "dilapidated trailers" there than in any of the other 41 states I've been in. That sounded very disdainful, Kalba. No one has pointed out that half of these are the states with the highest populations. Unless the figures are per capita, then one would expect those numbers to be higher. One would also expect the numbers to be higher in warmer climates. That only leaves WA, OR, and CO, and I have no idea why their numbers are higher.
Really? I drove through Arkansas and was shocked at just how true the stereotypes seemed to be. Kept passing by houses with rusted out trucks trucks sawed in half sitting out on the lawn and other assorted things you might expect to see. But anyway I wasn't saying everyone in Arkansas lives in a dilapidated trailer (any more than I would say that everyone in California is homeless). I was saying, or implying, that it's cheaper to find some (barely liveable) form of shelter in some places, that in those places you are very likely to be at or near the bottom of the list of US states that provide adequate public services or any kind of reasonable healthcare (even though it is also in those states that more people are likely to need or rely upon those services), but that doesn't show up on this quiz because if your domicile is a mansion or a shed in your brother's back yard you still don't count as homeless.
re: population yes I thought that was pretty obvious. I did mention large urban centers. States with high populations tend to have big cities in them, too.
Neither situation is ideal but I honestly think I would prefer living in a tent city in Los Angeles over some broken down trailer home in Mississippi... or like the ones that I have seen in southern Virginia. ::shrug::
Regarding your mobile home figures, just wanted to point out that not all mobile (now called "manufactured") homes are dilapidated. Many of the modern ones are difficult to tell apart from frame homes, and then there are the modular homes which are sort of a hybrid of both. Also, some of the trailers you see in the Ozarks may be weekend places or deer/fish camps. There is a big difference between rural and urban living. Personally I would prefer a broken down trailer in the country any day over even a mansion in a large city. That's just who I am, and I understand that's not who you are.
I had totally forgotten that I actually lived a few months in a "dilapidated" trailer in Arkansas. When I was first married we were still in college and we spent our first few months living in married student housing which at our university consisted of narrow streets of 10' x 30' old trailers with a sidewalk and narrow strip of grass between them. It was pretty bad, but we were newlyweds and at first we didn't care. The wiring was bad in our trailer and they never seemed to get around to fixing it. One morning I woke up smelling smoke. I traced it to the bathroom where one of our bath towels was smoldering at the end of the metal towel rod it was hanging on. I assumed some type of short had caused it. I told my husband that was it for me in the trailer, and he took a second job and we soon moved off campus to a nice duplex in the country. Young love couldn't top my fear of death from remaining in that fire trap. We drove through 10 yrs later and that same trailer #13 was still there.
The quiz asks for the highest number, not highest percentage. So it's probably population, rather than politics, that give New York and California the top spots.
I'm sure cost of living is partly related, but there are other liberal states with substantial populations and high costs of living (Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland) that aren't on this list. I'm wondering why it is the northwest states seem to have higher rates of homelessness.
Having actually spoken with a number of homeless people in northern California, I think tolerance of homelessness is one of the main reasons they are here. I've heard a few of these dear people say they came here for the services, but many of them will tell you they like California because nobody will bother them. I currently live in an agricultural area that offers exactly zero social services, but our creeks and greenbelts are lined with homeless encampments for miles.
The absolute numbers do means something, as do climate and relative size (+ demographics, as in %age of people living in the cities). But politics ain't nothing in this case emphasized by %change. It's probably no coincidence that the republican states (in terms of governorship and state legislature) show large decreases in homelessness, whereas those with liberal, laisse-faire policies tend to show large increases. (FYI, if Hawaii wasn't 4+ hour flight away and if the state wasn't paying people to leave and take a flight back, there surely be even more homeless there). "A civilization is measured by how it treats its weakest members” (Ghandi; we should all take a page from Utah and how they treat their homeless population -- housing first, but together with aggressive followup & social work support).
Two of the three BIGGEST INCREASES are in RED STATES.
9 out of the 10 POOREST states are RED STATES.
Then there is New Mexico, a blue state, really the ONLY really POOR blue state, but it's basically a big DESERT with an INDIAN RESERVATION on it. And you know how INDIANS are treated in this country.
9 out of the 10 RICHEST most PROSPEROUS states are BLUE STATES.
And then it just so happens that two of the blue states that also have high homeless populations, are the two states with the BEST WEATHER FOR YEAR ROUND OUTDOOR LIVING. You gotta figure that ATTRACTS homeless people from all sorts of POOR RED STATES. And the homeless in does NOT attract, who stay in states like North Dakota and Wisconsin and Iowa and Kentucky, simply FREEZE TO DEATH there in one of the first deep freezes of one of the first winters.
Other states actually fly their homeless people to Hawaii on one-way tickets. The state has the highest number of homeless people as a percentage of the population. The cost of living is also outrageous, and real estate prices are insane (the median single-family home on Oahu goes for $795,000). Or as everyone who's never had to make ends meet there calls it, paradise.
All the squatters in windowless abandoned buildings with nowhere else to sleep in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, etc. are now considered housed apparently. Good job, America! 3 degrees of lies: Lies, damnable lies and statistics.
Just because Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio didn't make the list doesn't automatically mean that people living in abandoned buildings in those states aren't considered to be homeless. Again, perception and fact are very different things.
The reason that prices are so high in San Francisco is easy: the tech industry. It's typical for senior engineers to make $200k-$500k in annual compensation. The San Francisco Bay Area also has More Billionaires than any place on the planet. These people are not affected by high prices or high taxes. Being a member of the middle class in San Francisco is practically impossible nowadays.
There are plenty of first-hand sources available on youtube.
Just search something like "homelessness (San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, etc.". Use an extension to block the news channels if there's spam. Find some channels doing first-hand, unedited, interviews.
-I Investigated the City that Pays You to Do Drugs...
-America - streets of philadelphia | October 30, 2023
-NYC homeless man poops in mop bucket
-Los Angeles Homeless crisis: Homeless man throws human feces at Sherman Oaks business owner
The app to report human feces isn't some myth. The problems homeless people create in communities is real. That's where the reputation comes from. People don't like the communities they built & pay for destroyed.
...Which is not about politics. The west coast states have more services towards homeless people and they have warmer, milder climates where you won't freeze to death in winter.
I remember when I lived in Austin my grandparents visited and we went downtown. which they thought was so cool because they have never been to a big city. (they live in a farmhouse in texas) but on the drive over, we saw a homeless man peeing in a can while flipping us off.
When I lived in San Francisco (this was before the homeless problem there became the crisis it is now), my mother-in-law had come to town for a visit. She called for us to come meet her: "Hi, I'm right down the street on the corner...Oh my God! That man is taking a s**t right on the sidewalk!"
Curious to know what happened to the homeless populations in Florida and Georgia. That's a huge drop in both places. Did they move out? Die off? Get under or over counted in one year? Or actually find homes?
For Florida. These are changes over a ten-year period, so actually trends in the right (or wrong) directions are possible, and I wouldn't chalk up the differences to statistical variability (I'm not saying you are).
The change was from 10 years ago, which was at the bottom of the housing bubble. There were lots of risky mortgages in rapid growth suburbia that were foreclosed upon. The four with negative changes were the epitome of this, so you had lots of recently displaced people. Cost of living was still relatively low in them and soon their economies started growing again with jobs markets that recovered especially for the working/middle class. So lots of those homeless people got back on their feet over the ten years.
In case you missed it, Georgia and Arizona went blue this time around. But otherwise, yeah, let's engage in facile reasoning to confirm our biases. Always a good move.
Standard reporting "rate" is # per 100k. I think that's the stat here. QM specifies "unsheltered" homeless as well. Sqatters may count as "sheltered," but not people in condemned properties, iirc.
*It may help to include the statistical convention in the "rate" column or instructions.
I dread to think how rough it is to be homeless in Alaska 😔 Shocked that they made the top 10 if for no other reason than that even surviving one of their winters is by no means guaranteed
That was my first impression, also. But upon reflection, snow is an incredibly efficient insulator if one is resourceful enough to employ it. Might be far rougher to be homeless through winters on the plains and prairie states with ferocious winds, flat grounds, and scarce snow, even if the air temp isn't quite as low.
It's interesting that these are mostly blue states, with the exception of Florida, which has decreased its homelessness since 2013. Then again, I have been told homeless people are treated like garbage in red states and are pittied in blue states, so it'd be natural that they'd migrate to blue states
Sadly, the state of things here in Seattle is not really one of compassion, but of neglect.
Because we are not willing to enforce rules on homeless people, we let them suffer from drug addiction and untreated mental illness.
In 2023 alone, over 1,300 people died of drug overdoses in King County. In trying to be compassionate, we are in fact just letting people destroy themselves, and in the process have let crime and decay run rampant.
Things are slowly turning around, but we dug ourselves a big hole from 2013–2023.
More of a Western US thing it seems, probably partially due to their love affair with single-family housing as opposed to the more dense east and northeast.
I'm very surprised by the last answer. Seems like a rather inhospitable place to be homeless but apparently there's been a large increase since 2013. Any ideas what factors may have led to it making the list?
I can personally visualize about 25-30% of my state's homeless population. If I really made the effort across the entire state I'm sure I could tally the low number by myself.
Mississippi is at 13.8%. Arkansas is at 12.8%. Hawaii is at 0.2%. I don't think honesty is a form of disrespect.
9 out of the 10 POOREST states are RED STATES.
Then there is New Mexico, a blue state, really the ONLY really POOR blue state, but it's basically a big DESERT with an INDIAN RESERVATION on it. And you know how INDIANS are treated in this country.
9 out of the 10 RICHEST most PROSPEROUS states are BLUE STATES.
And then it just so happens that two of the blue states that also have high homeless populations, are the two states with the BEST WEATHER FOR YEAR ROUND OUTDOOR LIVING. You gotta figure that ATTRACTS homeless people from all sorts of POOR RED STATES. And the homeless in does NOT attract, who stay in states like North Dakota and Wisconsin and Iowa and Kentucky, simply FREEZE TO DEATH there in one of the first deep freezes of one of the first winters.
Just search something like "homelessness (San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, etc.". Use an extension to block the news channels if there's spam. Find some channels doing first-hand, unedited, interviews.
-I Investigated the City that Pays You to Do Drugs...
-America - streets of philadelphia | October 30, 2023
-NYC homeless man poops in mop bucket
-Los Angeles Homeless crisis: Homeless man throws human feces at Sherman Oaks business owner
The app to report human feces isn't some myth. The problems homeless people create in communities is real. That's where the reputation comes from. People don't like the communities they built & pay for destroyed.
For Florida. These are changes over a ten-year period, so actually trends in the right (or wrong) directions are possible, and I wouldn't chalk up the differences to statistical variability (I'm not saying you are).
*It may help to include the statistical convention in the "rate" column or instructions.
Because we are not willing to enforce rules on homeless people, we let them suffer from drug addiction and untreated mental illness.
In 2023 alone, over 1,300 people died of drug overdoses in King County. In trying to be compassionate, we are in fact just letting people destroy themselves, and in the process have let crime and decay run rampant.
Things are slowly turning around, but we dug ourselves a big hole from 2013–2023.