[lazyasciiart]

At this point I wonder if you’re really just striking the trivial observation that the west is majority white and so are the homeless people there. In literally every state, black people are over represented among the homeless and white people are underrepresented. However, in most states, the majority of homeless people are still white, because the state population is mostly white. It is, in any state, a complete falsehood to say that homelessness is “a very white specific thing”.

Talking about Hispanic homelessness is much harder, because there are many variations on how studies count white/Hispanic, and because it’s a less visually identifiable group than black people. Let’s look at Tucson. Pima County was ~37% Hispanic in 2015 (https://www.tucsonhispanicchamber.org/uploads/5/8/0/4/580457...) Tucson homeless population in 2016 was 30% Hispanic. Among adults without children, it was much lower: just over 20%. So non-Hispanic people are actually a little overrepresented, but probably looked very overrepresented among the visible population. And if we look at why there is that difference, my first thought would be that the Hispanic population is weighted towards children (about 50% of school enrollments, from that doc above) who are less likely to be homeless. So I would still disagree that it is at all a “white-specific thing” even in that location. (calculated from here - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/apitl/1/AOcbyEzOLNSVbwFWOs... )

And if we just look at white/not-white: you do realize that Tucson is over 70% white people, right? And the homeless population is also just over 70% white. That’s not any kind of argument for it being a “white thing”.