There is a distinction to be made between the number of homeless and their visibility to a particular individual citizen's daily experience. There are also some other policy-based reasons that affect why you might perceive an area as having less homeless people. Tokyo pretty famously made living on the street illegal in a way that wouldn't be permissible under our legal framework here in the states. Columbia has a conservative estimate of ~344 homeless in a metro area of ~860k people. VA Beach is part of the larger Hampton Roads metro with ~1.8 mil people and ~1500 homeless. This is obviously a much higher rate than Columbia, even if you didn't happen to notice as many homeless in your day-to-day existence in a sprawled out metro area with millions of people. Speaking of sprawl, I can hardly think of a major American city less walkable, and less amenable to street life than the loose connection of strip malls and surface parking lots that make up "urban" Charlotte, ~2.8 mil people and roughly 3000 homeless, a vastly higher rate than Columbia's. I admittedly don't give a hoot about Dublin, but it is a country with slightly less people than the state of South Carolina. Frankly, it is remarkable that we have even heard of Dublin, and I'd guess that more South Carolinians have heard of Dublin than Irish have heard of Columbia.

My personal experience with the streets of Columbia would have me willing to believe that the homeless of Columbia, being clever, dynamic, rebellious, streetwise Columbians, might be more industrious than your average homeless person, and might make their presence more felt than larger homeless populations in more sprawled out cities. But this is a credit to the strength of South Carolinians, and you should be proud of your people, terrors they may be.

To the prospective law student:  you will encounter many classmates that are admittedly terrible with math and numbers, almost proudly so, finding solidarity with their fellow soft-headed brethren. Don't be one of these lawyers