The point about Germany is absolutely true, and merits closer examination. The three main cities in my life are Berlin, Budapest and San Francisco. Budapest a

The point about Germany is absolutely true, and merits closer examination. The three main cities in my life are Berlin, Budapest and San Francisco. Budapest and San Francisco have very serious homeless problems; Berlin does not. It's easy to point at Budapest and say: it's much poorer than Berlin, in a much poorer country, with government not much interested in the poor, etc. But San Francisco is waaay richer than Berlin, and of the three has (in my experience) the worst homeless problem. (I realize you probably couldn't "solve" homelessness in SF without simultaneously "solving" it throughout the US, but that's kind of the point: this is not some force of nature we are doomed to live with in an advanced economy.)