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That's true and not true depending on what state/country you are looking at. Vermont has a very similar homeless population to Ireland, for example. I'm also terminally skeptical of any white perpetrator rates coming from America considering whites and hispanics are often lumped together. And whilst there are certainly parts of America that are poor, the same can also be said for European countries that aren't western.
They are only lumped together in the FBI UCS statistics though. For homelessness and BJS victimisation studies they are separated and homelessness doesn't seem to correlate with state wealth and looking at an individual state for this seems strange due to the phenomenon where homeless across the country gravitate towards states with more inclement weather and services that cater to them, just like they do in Sweden and end up in Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö.
For victimisation, the crime rate of whites is marginally higher than their murder rate (combined with Hispanics) but if we use the relationship between black victimisation and murder rate and apply that to get an adjusted rate for whites, we still end up with a murder rate far above that of any European wester European country, Nordic or otherwise.
Here are the murder rates per 100,000 people in a bunch of Western European non-microstates and the adjusted white murder rate in the United States:
Norway: 0.49
Italy: 0.53
Austria: 0.66
Portugal: 0.74
Ireland: 0.75
Denmark: 0.83
Germany: 0.87
Netherlands: 0.94
Sweden: 1.07
Finland: 1.12
France: 1.16
United States (adjusted white murder rate): 1.58
Bear in mind that these are total murder rates for the European countries and the same issue with minorites committing disproportionate amount of crime (often even the majority), especially murder, exists here but isn't accounted for.
This doesn't contradict anything I've said. Pending on state and country you have higher or lower rates. For murder various states have marginally higher rates than many EU countries, and are lower or on par with others, such as Finland which stands at 1.5 when we look at intentional homicide victims. As I said before, poverty is a big problem, but if you account for race the problem looks completely different.
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