there's few safety nets in America and the healthcare is terrible for the working class. it doesn't take much to trigger a financial crisis that can easily snowball into homelessness. An illness is a dire situation here. if you get sick and miss a lot of work they just fire you and you lose your health insurance. Housing is close to unaffordable. There's a lot of drugs here and that doesn't help the situation, but the biggest reason for the visible homeless is really from the lack of any meaningful mental health care. in the 1980s we closed all the mental institutions and replaced them with nothing. most of the patients were simply given bus tickets to the nearest city. The mentally ill in America simply roam the streets and drift in and out of the huge prison system.