Perhaps you just never went into the "right" areas to experience it but I've seen it in many cities. Instead of basing your thoughts on personal anecdotes you

Perhaps you just never went into the "right" areas to experience it but I've seen it in many cities. Instead of basing your thoughts on personal anecdotes you should look towards statistics. For instance the New York City Department of Homeless Services estimated, in 2013, they had almost 50,000 homeless living in the city[1]. But this is just an example; you can look at a huge variety of statistics for many types of places to see how widespread the issues are. Overall there are over 500,000 homeless people in America on any given night[2]. There are real problems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States#Situations_in_specific_U.S._cities_and_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... (shitty source I know; it references a dead article but this is mostly just an example). [2] http://www.endhomelessness.org/library/entry/the-state-of-homelessness-in-america-2015 http://www.endhomelessness.org/library/entry/the-state-of-ho... (though perhaps a little bit of a bias source; sorry didn't feel like reading too deeply into the government documents to find their data)