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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

yes almost all americans now have running water and indoor toilets

except we have more homeless than ever so they don't even have that

with taxes slashed for billionaires and safety-nets for food and healthcare being destroyed, we are actually headed back to 1926 on purpose

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The definition of homeless was quite different at that time --- note that there was an entire class of people defined as hobos/migrant workers who began the year helping out with cutting lumber and harvesting maple sugar in the winter, then working south to help with the planting of truck crops (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas...) in the spring, pruning fruit trees and harvesting early crops in the summer, then in the fall helping with the harvests and picking cotton and so forth, then helping to plant cover crops and so forth and moving north to repeat the process.

Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/828165.Education_of_a...

The people that are homeless now would have been institutionalized or dead back then.

That's an interesting point - we may be keeping people alive better now. And the rate of people experiencing homelessness is 5-10x lower now than it was during the Great Depression.

I did a quick check, and the HUD point-in-time counts show the rate of homelessness was dropping slowly from 21.5 per 10000 in 2007 (the first year of a national standard), to around 17.5 per 10000 in 2020, then rose in 2023-2024 up to 22.9, and in 2025 was back down to 21.9. During the Great Depression this rose up to 100-200 per 10,000.

Keep in mind that "more homeless than ever" (and I would prefer "more people experiencing homelessness than ever") may be technically true, but per capita we've seen a post-covid bump that's likely already back to 2007 levels. Without understanding the trends I wouldn't predict what happens next.

I've done some research to try to help you understand more - can I ask you to think about your frame and beliefs and consider changing them?

Thanks for providing some actual facts.

Feels like a bit of a dramatization.

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