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References? It's rather simple and obvious math. If your city's population doubles, and the homeless portion started at 1%, and ended at 1%, your number of ho
by newnewpdro 8y ago
References? It's rather simple and obvious math.
If your city's population doubles, and the homeless portion started at 1%, and ended at 1%, your number of homeless people on the streets doubled.
We like to focus on per-capita figures/%ages because they can make us feel good about ourselves. Except the problems you see on the street are not constant when their incidence %age stays constant, as the population grows. For them to stay constant, the %age must shrink in proportion to the growth, which is practically impossible.
Growth applies to everything, including your problems.
- dredmorbius 8y agoActually I was referring to the homelessness increasing as population increases. The periods of most rapid population growth in the US were the decade of the 1810s, with a subsequent peak in the 1850s. In the 20th century, the peak decades were the 1900s and 1910s (21% each), then the 1960s (18%). Rates of growth have fallen consistently since the 1960s, with the exception of the decade of 2000 - 2009. As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, use of the term "homelessness" took off in the 1980s, during a period of modest population growth, by historical standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State... See also: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population
- newnewpdro 8y agoOk, I was not referring to the rate increasing. I am simply stating that the rate doesn't have to increase for the homeless problem to grow, because it grows in absolute numbers with the population.