And it is definitely beyond your power to make threads 
From the start, I was specifically using LA as a stand-out example.
I think Iāve been pretty clear I was talking mostly about the west coast of America. Iāve never made any claims that America is homogeneous in regards to homelessness.
My first trips to America were all to New York City/State. The homeless population wasnāt so apparent there. I didnāt notice it.
But America has places where the weather is a lot more conducive to being homeless. The homelessness is going to be a bigger problem where the weather is better.
To connect this with the UK, I can imagine there being a time when, due to climate change, it will be as ācomfortableā (totally not the right word!) to be homeless in Edinburgh on January 10th as it is in LA on January 10th. At the moment that canāt be true. Not yet.
Thatās not really a good conclusion to draw from your data, which you would know if youād just read that HUD report I linked to here:
To paraphrase you, repetition is tiring.
But you keep trying to compare different numbers. In the same sentence you link to bith a newspaper article about London with a 100 page PDF about all of America.
How do you want me to respond to that?
Someone else posted about how homelessness in the USA, from a federal point of view, is gauges by something literally called a Point Of Time survey, and that it is done in January. And that it is in the best interest of cities to show they are doing well with reducing homelessness, because then they get more funding.
And that article you shared is measuring everyone who slept rough for a single night, at any point in an entire year.
With these different sources of numbers, itās hard to compare the situation on a one-to-one basis.
However, and this is my entire point, there reaches a scale where the quality of a problem changes. In LA, and with my experience in SF and the west coast, it seems that the scale of homelessness means it is a fundamentally different issue than it is in the UK generally or London specifically.
You can disagree with that if you want. Please tell me how Iām wrong! But more and more numbers counting different things, and arrived at by different measures, and recorded with different motivations, is too tricky to parse.
For clarity, my first answer to Dazzle wasnāt about homelessness per se. It was based more on this passage from the article I posted in the opening of this thread.
ā consider another example: the ānomadic retireesā. They live in their cars. They go from place to place, season after season, chasing whatever low-wage work they can find ā spring, an Amazon warehouse, Christmas, Walmart.
Now, you might say ā āwell, poor people have always chased seasonal work!ā But that is not really the point: absolute powerlessness and complete indignity is. In no other country I can see do retirees who should have been able to save up enough to live on now living in their cars in order to find work just to go on eating before they die ā not even in desperately poor ones, where at least families live together, share resources, and care for one another. This is another pathology of collapse that is unique to America ā utter powerlessness to live with dignity. Numbers donāt capture it ā but comparisons paint a bleak picture.ā
https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-be04d9e55235
Now, if this is becoming the case within the UK too, then I think including how the symptoms of the American Collapse are also being seen there is great.
At the moment, I donāt see that quite being the case. But I might be wrong! Dazzle lives in London, and I live in Berlin.