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One of the major problems win any homelessness related study or homeless census is that they only interact with the homeless in shelters and the most agreeable ones on the street. The ones in super-camps in the woods or parks are beyond the resources of most organizations and cities to locate, let alone survey. Additionally, the homeless are obviously highly mobile and move around a city throughout the day, so visiting a particular freeway overpass camp won't capture data about any one in a food tent, public library or a block over panhandling. I don't see why this particular paper is supposed to have solved these sampling issues.
This. There are people that live mostly "normal" lives and live in their cars or even in the woods. They're clean, showered, hold down jobs. I've heard of undergrads doing this as well as people with blue collar jobs.
I mean, I'm speaking to my experience in Austin, where you go half a mile from downtown and any undeveloped wood will have a massive 10-20 person camp complete with literally tons of trash and thousands of used needles. This is a hazard that comes up in many new construction projects. For commercial work, it gets dozered into a dumpster or buried on site. For state work, it usually turns into a huge health and environmental hazard requiring more consultants and specialists to document and remove these materials (the new TxDOT campus was delayed for almost a year over this issue).
So in my experience, these kinds of camps are some of the worst for drug abuse and theft just generally the most negative kinds of homeless. But it's also a good point that plenty of semi-functional people don't his as well. Hell, I considered doing this in college to save on rent.
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