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It’s different. The homeless psycho monster problem in America is visible even in the richest parts of rich cities like NYC and Miami. Even in LA you’ll see it when you drive to work, to many stores, or if you live in neighborhoods plagued by it that are still very expensive like Venice beach, Santa Monica, much of Hollywood. There is an idyllic, peaceful, rich and safe American suburbia and unless you have American family you’ll probably never see it as a median foreign tourist from a rich country. Why would you?
I hear this all the time from rich Europeans I work with and know socially. I’ve heard it from wealthy Australians. You go to America on business or for tourism, stay in a $800 a night hotel in San Francisco or NYC or LA, and outside feels like the worst train station neighborhood ghettos of European countries. Sure, some corner of the Paris or Malmo banlieues might be worse, but no tourist or wealthy local is ever going there.
You need distance for this but the vibe in DTLA like 2 years ago was closer to like, Cape Town or Rio, than it was to big cities in other countries in the rich world. Constantly checking the streets, are there enough people walking around, can I dodge that group of addicts in tents, is this block still safe or is it the next one where things get real bad? Even NYC, while slightly improved from Covid nadir, is still very bad, and totally different from when I was a kid and teenager.
In Australia (kind of like Canada) the really dysfunctional poor are the small aboriginal minority who largely live deep in the bush and outback in towns that are like 30-90% indigenous and have huge issues, but your average rich person there will literally never encounter them unless they go out of their way to.
"Even"? The highly compactized urban congregations pretty much the only place where that problem existed. I mean, sure, you can be homeless in rural Idaho, if you really try. But I don't think you'll find an establishment like Skid Row there. Megapolises are "rich" because they are concentrated, and they have burgeoning homeless population because that's where the feeding grounds are (for every possible value of "feeding").
That's a relatively recent phenomenon. 20 years ago SF was very tourist-friendly and NYC had Giuliani clean it up and LA was pretty decent too. Then the Long March came to its conclusion, the wokes took power and implemented their compassionate policies. Now there's literal shit on the streets. Sigh.
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I haven't been to Australia since the 80s (very nice, very safe, very distinct un-American culture), but I can assure you that the major urban centres of Canada are pretty full of addicts in tents and other screaming maniacs. StatsCan will probably say that these are disproportionally Indians, but my feeling would be that it's a lot less disproportionate than it used to be -- many many skinny white crackheads, and significant numbers of chubby white schizos.
The real problem here is that it's bleeding into the (previously) nice 30-100k population centres -- people there are pissed.
When you get super-rural there's little homelessness but a fair amount of drug-associated petty crime -- probably a little worse than the past, but people do have guns so there's a bit of a disincentive. Actual remote reservations vary wildly -- some are pretty bad, others more or less have their shit together. This probably boils down to whether the individual leadership are actually good people, or are more interested in siphoning government/resource revenue off for themselves; both are common. To be fair there's a lot of pressure from band memberships to siphon the revenue directly to the entire population of that particular reserve -- which seems less corrupt but also doesn't usually work out particularly well.
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