Scott Alexander

Otherwise, we're in the awkward position where everyone, including stores, reports higher shoplifting numbers, but two datasets both disagree.

Homelessness and tent encampments.

Here's a graph of homelessness, courtesy of Claude.

So the graph shows the time period from around 1950 to around 2020...

It shows historical estimates before 2007, and then it shows the HUD point-in-time count from 2007 to 2024.

You may have to check this out in the post, but it does look like it's plausibly high compared to the 1980s and 1990s.

Plausibly, it's at around the same level because the uncertainty is high.

It's captioned, I've confirmed the post-2009 trend.

I haven't fully double-checked the others, but they match my impressions.

Audio note, there is a big spike since 2020.

It was trending down and then it spiked back up again.

Scott writes, this looks like a similar pattern to crime, although here the likely explanation for the COVID bump is the pandemic-associated rise in house prices.

Good measures of tent encampments over long periods are hard to find.

San Francisco has this one.

Here's a graph.

Number of tents and structures used by homeless people reaches new low.

So it goes from 2020 to 2025, and we see that in terms of total tents there was a big spike in the early 2020s, and it's currently at all-time lows.

Various points in time are marked.

We have the Shelter loophole injunction lifted.

That leads to a sharper downward trend.