To save you a click, the "City in Idaho", which is clearly written to make it sound like a village of like 10 people in the middle of nowhere, is Boise.
Which is about 700k people (when counting the metro area). Which is not huge...but a long way from small.
Don’t feel so bad, the article is also sounds like it was written by someone who has never been to LA. Skid Row overflowed into Little Tokyo several years ago, creating a new ad hoc neighborhood name “Skid Rokyo”.
Oh and the there’s the giant homeless encampments every 1-3 miles as you drive around LA.
I grew up in LA but moved away in 2009. I was shocked when I visited this past year. Homeless encampments everywhere, taking over sidewalks in West LA, kind of scary aggressively homeless men harassing people in the street in West Hollywood. No wonder everyone drives everywhere in LA.
Japan has homeless encampments also...I saw a nice tidy one in an Osaka park, and also around Uueno in Tokyo. They are fairly clean about it, however.
Yeah, go for a walk down the Arakawa or Sumida embankments (not right now, I guess, given that was all recently underwater) and you'll find some semi-permanent camps in a good state of repair. Talked to some of the guys by one and apparently they've got a pretty strong culture of self-enforcing cleanliness and not messing with the civilians, since they'll get cleared out if the cops get legitimate complaints from people in the area