Affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. economy has been downgraded, income has plummeted, and unemployment has soared, resulting in a significant increase in the number of homeless people.
According to the U.S. media USA Today, one in every 500 Americans is currently homeless.
It is reported that some Americans choose to “worm” in the transportation and become “hidden homeless”, because of their mobility and difficulty in tracing, the number of homeless people is greatly underestimated.
According to USA Today, for many Americans, it is obviously more cost-effective to buy a car than paying a high rent.
For example, in California, you can buy a car with three months’ rent; as a result, more and more people have no choice but to move out of the house and live in the car.
Sarah Rankin, a professor at the University of Seattle, said that the lifestyle of “worming” in cars has become the fastest-growing form of homelessness in the United States.
However, with the continuous expansion of this “hidden homeless” group, the problems such as the acquisition of domestic water and other resources and the disposal of domestic waste will intensify the contradictions between these homeless people and create many public security problems.
A previous study published by the survey agency Economic Roundtable suggested that the surge in homelessness in the United States will continue to worsen until 2023 due to the wave of unemployment.
The report predicts that the number of homeless people in the United States will reach 1.168 million by that time, more than twice before the pandemic.
Graham Pruss, a scholar at the Center for Vulnerable Communities at the University of California, San Francisco, believes that this phenomenon fully exposes the fragility of the American social system.
