Perspectives on Homelessness

Skid Row: brief overview

Los Angeles’s Skid Row—also called Central City East—is an approximately 50-block downtown neighborhood bounded roughly by Third, Seventh, Main, and Alameda streets. Its concentration of homelessness grew from its early role serving transient railroad and industrial workers and was reinforced when Los Angeles concentrated shelters, missions, inexpensive single-room-occupancy hotels, and social services there. The city’s 1976 planning approach preserved low-cost housing but also functioned as a geographic “containment” strategy. Los Angeles City Planning

Today, Skid Row is simultaneously:

• A residential community of housed and unhoused people.
• One of America’s densest concentrations of homelessness and supportive services.
• A center of advocacy, missions, shelters, clinics, and permanent supportive housing.
• A stark example of how housing scarcity, poverty, disability, addiction, institutional failures, and geographically concentrated services interact.

LAHSA maintains a dedicated 2025 Skid Row data summary, underscoring that the area is measured separately from Los Angeles’s broader city and county totals.

Ten largest urban homeless populations

These figures are January 2024 Point-in-Time estimates for HUD Continuums of Care, not always municipal boundaries. A CoC may encompass a city, county, or several neighboring jurisdictions.

The newer 2025 national count found 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on one night, including 266,320 living unsheltered. New York and Los Angeles remained the two largest urban CoCs, at 125,683 and 67,777 respectively. HUD’s 2025 report, USAFacts’ HUD-data analysis

Point-in-Time counts are useful but imperfect snapshots. They can miss people staying temporarily with others, living in concealed locations, or otherwise not encountered during the count.

What continues to drive American homelessness

• Housing costs and inadequate supply. Rents have outpaced low incomes, while decades of underbuilding—especially affordable units—have left households with few alternatives. HUD research finds housing-market conditions strongly associated with local homelessness.
• Low and unstable incomes. Employment does not necessarily prevent homelessness. Many working households remain severely rent-burdened and can lose housing after reduced hours, job loss, medical expenses, or vehicle repairs.
• Eviction and weak prevention systems. The inability to meet rising rent is a major source of eviction. USICH cites research associating each $100 increase in median rent with a 9% increase in homelessness across the twenty largest CoCs. USICH eviction-prevention analysis
• Insufficient rental assistance and supportive housing. Vouchers, deeply affordable apartments, permanent supportive housing, and treatment-linked housing remain substantially below demand.
• Mental illness, substance-use disorders, and inadequate healthcare. These conditions can increase vulnerability and make homelessness harder to exit. They do not, by themselves, explain why homelessness is more prevalent in housing-constrained markets.
• Domestic violence and family breakdown. Domestic violence is a leading pathway into homelessness, particularly for women and families. Survivors often face financial insecurity, poor credit, landlord requirements, and shortages of safe housing. Federal prevention framework
• Discharge from public institutions. People leaving foster care, incarceration, hospitals, psychiatric facilities, or military service may become homeless when discharge planning and housing support fail.
• Racial and other structural inequities. Redlining, discrimination, unequal wealth, mass incarceration, disability barriers, and exclusion of LGBTQ+ people—especially young people—produce sharply unequal risks.
• Natural disasters and climate displacement. Fires, floods, hurricanes, and extreme heat destroy housing and strain already limited rental markets. Maui disaster shelters materially affected HUD’s 2024 count.
• Shelter and service barriers. Insufficient beds, eligibility restrictions, separation of partners or pets, curfews, and poor coordination can leave people outside even where programs exist.

The central distinction is between causes of homelessness at the population level—chiefly housing availability, affordability, and income—and individual conditions that influence who is most vulnerable or how difficult homelessness is to escape. USICH homelessness data and trends

What about world cities elsewhere? Dubai?

Yes—but it is far less visible and much less measurable than in American cities.

Dubai does not publish a transparent, HUD-style homeless count. Rough sleeping is uncommon in prominent public areas, partly because:

• Begging is illegal and actively policed.
• Most residents are foreign nationals whose residency depends on employment or sponsorship.
• Migrants who lose work may lose their legal status, leave voluntarily, be repatriated, or face detention and deportation.
• Emirati citizens have access to government benefits that generally are not available to foreign workers.
• Employers must provide accommodation for some low-paid workers.

Consequently, Dubai can remove people from public space or from the country more readily than an American city can. A low visible street count therefore does not necessarily mean that everyone has stable, adequate housing.

The more common forms are hidden homelessness and severe housing insecurity:

• Migrants stranded after wage theft or job loss.
• Domestic workers escaping abusive employers.
• People sleeping temporarily in workplaces, cars, mosques, labor camps, or friends’ rooms.
• “Bed-space” arrangements in which many workers share subdivided apartments—or even beds in shifts.
• Workers facing eviction from employer-provided housing after losing employment.

A 2025 investigation found low-paid Dubai workers living in illegally partitioned, severely overcrowded apartments; enforcement actions left some residents struggling to avoid sleeping outside. It reported monthly incomes of roughly $300–$550, compared with an average one-bedroom rent around $1,400. Associated Press

The UAE’s anti-begging law allows authorities to refer qualifying people for social assistance, but the policy is also punitive and does not create a comprehensive right to housing. UAE government Human-rights organizations continue to document wage theft, recruitment debt, inadequate worker housing, and abusive conditions among migrant workers. Human Rights Watch

So the accurate conclusion is:

Dubai has homelessness and serious housing insecurity, but its migrant-residency system, policing, employer housing, overcrowded informal accommodation, and repatriation practices prevent much of it from appearing as enduring street encampments. It has less visible homelessness—not necessarily an absence of people without secure homes.

Mumbai, India

How many people?

There is no reliable current census:

• India’s 2011 Census counted 57,416 homeless people in Mumbai.
• A later municipal survey produced the much lower figure of 11,915, which advocates and monitoring bodies disputed.
• A 2023 BMC survey reportedly estimated about 40,000.
• Homelessness organizations have historically suggested totals between 100,000 and 300,000, but these are advocacy estimates rather than verified counts.

The discrepancy reflects the difficulty of enumerating mobile people during a one-night count. People sleeping at worksites, railway stations, markets, religious buildings, beneath flyovers, or temporarily with acquaintances are easily missed. Indian Express, Mid-Day

What homelessness looks like

Unlike Dubai, Mumbai has plainly visible pavement homelessness. Families and individuals sleep:

• Beneath bridges and flyovers.
• On sidewalks and railway platforms.
• Outside shops, hospitals and religious institutions.
• At construction sites or workplaces.
• In improvised shelters vulnerable to eviction and demolition.

Many work as casual laborers, vendors, domestic workers, waste pickers, cleaners or construction workers. The 2011 data indicated that only a small minority were classified as beggars; homelessness and unemployment are not synonymous.

Shelter shortage

In 2025, Mumbai’s municipal government said it funded 23 shelters, but many served only designated groups such as children, women or young people. Reporting placed their combined capacity at roughly 740 people—tiny relative to either the official count or the 40,000 estimate. National guidelines imply that a city Mumbai’s size should have around 125 shelters. Indian Express

Mumbai’s monsoon makes this shortage particularly dangerous. Heavy rain and flooding can soak belongings, spread disease and make usual sleeping places uninhabitable.

Why homelessness persists

• Extremely expensive land and rents relative to low wages.
• Migration for irregular and seasonal employment.
• Eviction and redevelopment of informal settlements.
• Limited low-cost rental housing.
• Insufficient shelters and public housing.
• Loss of work or employer-provided accommodation.
• Family breakdown and domestic violence.
• Mental illness, disability and substance-use disorders.
• Difficulty obtaining identity documents and accessing benefits.
• Caste, tribal and other forms of social exclusion.

Homelessness versus slum housing

Mumbai’s homeless count does not include most residents of Dharavi and other informal settlements. A household occupying a roofed hut or unauthorized room is normally considered housed for census purposes—even if it lacks secure tenure, sanitation, ventilation or safe construction.

So Mumbai has three overlapping problems:

1. Literal homelessness: no dwelling or roof.
2. Hidden homelessness: temporary accommodation, worksites and extreme overcrowding.
3. Inadequate housing: slums and informal settlements that provide shelter but little security or infrastructure.

In contrast with Dubai, Mumbai generally does not make street homelessness disappear through visa cancellation and deportation. It is consequently more visible—but both cities contain substantial hidden housing insecurity among low-paid workers.

Probably not by itself.

Communism could reduce some major causes of homelessness if it meant housing was treated as a guaranteed public good: large-scale social housing, controlled rents, universal healthcare, and protection from eviction. Several noncommunist countries already use versions of those policies successfully.

But converting the entire economy to communism would not automatically produce enough safe, well-located homes. Historically, communist governments often reduced visible street homelessness through state housing and compulsory placement, but they also experienced housing shortages, overcrowding, long waiting lists, poor maintenance, restricted mobility, and sometimes coercive institutionalization. “Nobody sleeping outside” is not necessarily the same as everyone having a decent home.

Homelessness has several layers:

• Economic: insufficient affordable housing, low incomes, eviction, unemployment.
• Medical and social: severe mental illness, addiction, disability, domestic violence, and family breakdown.
• Administrative: people leaving prison, foster care, hospitals, or the military without housing.
• Operational: slow construction, fragmented services, restrictive zoning, and inadequate treatment capacity.

Public ownership might address the first layer, but the others still require competent services and accountable institutions. Government can also fail as a landlord, builder, or care provider.

The strongest evidence points toward a practical package rather than wholesale ideological conversion:

• Build substantially more market-rate and publicly supported housing.
• Create deeply subsidized and permanent supportive housing.
• Provide reliable rental assistance and eviction prevention.
• Expand voluntary mental-health and addiction treatment, with intensive care for people unable to live independently.
• Improve discharge planning from prisons, hospitals, and foster care.
• Make permitting and construction faster while preserving tenant protections.
• Measure success by stable housing outcomes—not merely cleared streets.

So the useful question is less “capitalism or communism?” and more: Will society guarantee a minimum standard of housing, build enough homes, and provide the care required to keep vulnerable people housed? A mixed economy can do that. Communism can promise it, but the label offers no guarantee that the institutions will deliver it.

Generally, an economy is more likely to grow under decentralized public ownership with autonomous corporations and dismissible executives than under comprehensive state central planning.

The decisive distinction is not simply “public versus private ownership.” It is centralized allocation versus decentralized decision-making.

State central control

A central authority determines production quantities, investment, prices, wages, and resource allocation.

It can perform well when:

• The objective is narrow and measurable.
• Coordination matters more than consumer choice.
• The country is mobilizing for war, reconstruction, electrification, infrastructure, or rapid early industrialization.
• Existing technologies can be copied and deployed at scale.

It usually becomes less effective as the economy grows more complex because:

• Planners cannot collect or process millions of constantly changing local facts.
• Administrative prices conceal scarcity and consumer demand.
• Managers are rewarded for satisfying plan targets rather than customers.
• Bad investments persist because admitting failure threatens the bureaucracy.
• Innovation is difficult to command because its outcome cannot be specified beforehand.
• Political priorities begin directing credit, labor, and production.

Central planning can therefore produce rapid extensive growth—more factories, workers, steel, and electricity—but tends to struggle with intensive growth based on quality, productivity, experimentation, and invention.

Publicly owned, independently managed corporations

Under this model, society owns corporations—perhaps through public investment funds, pension funds, municipalities, employee trusts, or citizen shares—but firms still:

• Compete for customers.
• Buy and sell through markets.
• Set prices in response to demand.
• Borrow under genuine financial constraints.
• Appoint professional boards.
• Hire and fire executives.
• Close unsuccessful operations.
• Retain or distribute profits.
• Enter bankruptcy rather than receiving automatic state rescues.

This arrangement preserves much more of the market’s information and disciplinary machinery. It is closer to market socialism or a publicly owned market economy than Soviet-style planning.

It could plausibly grow at competitive rates, but only if its governance is credible.

The crucial governance test

“Fir-able executives” helps only if someone can evaluate and remove them competently. That raises a chain of accountability:

Citizens → ownership institutions → directors → executives → operating managers

Every link can fail. Political appointees might reward loyalty, boards might become passive, executives might manipulate targets, and governments might protect failing firms to preserve jobs. Private corporations have parallel agency problems, but competition, takeovers, bankruptcy, and investors provide additional discipline.

A workable public-ownership system would therefore need:

• Independent boards chosen for competence.
• Transparent, audited accounts.
• Published commercial objectives.
• Protection from day-to-day ministerial interference.
• Competitive neutrality between public and private firms.
• Hard budget constraints and credible bankruptcy.
• Executive compensation tied to long-term productivity—not crude output quotas.
• Multiple competing public firms, rather than one national monopoly.
• Citizens’ ownership distributed through diversified funds, not controlled directly by politicians.
• Independent courts, regulators, media, and anti-corruption enforcement.

Likely economic ranking

All else equal, urbanicity expects:

1. Competitive mixed economy with strong institutions and varied ownership
2. Decentralized market economy dominated by autonomous public corporations
3. Politicized state-owned companies with soft budget constraints
4. Comprehensive central planning

Public ownership can capture more returns for society and support long-horizon investment. Private ownership can provide stronger entrepreneurial incentives and resistance to political interference. A mixed system can exploit both advantages.

The most promising design is therefore not a single state directorate controlling production. It is social ownership at the portfolio level, competition at the firm level, and professional accountability at the management level. The public owns the wealth, but neither ministers nor a central planning office tries to run every enterprise.

Carmen Delgado was born in Cuba, living the first eleven years of her life living in this Communist system.