Her reply has always stuck with me. "Oh! No, they're not homeless, they're Roma."
[All of this is a simplification, and I'm omitting a lot here. The gist ought to be correct, and, I hope, fair to all.]
There are certain cultural barriers when it comes to the Roma. When you have an itinerant population like the Roma (and in Ireland and the UK, Travellers), you will naturally end up with with a conflict of some kind between the settled and travelling populations in a given area, unless both populations are familiar with one another, and even then the opportunities for discrimination are huge. The situation with Travellers in Ireland and the UK isn't as bad as the Roma situation, as the itinerant Roma population is self-isolating and can't speak the same language as the host settled population, whereas at least Travellers can speak the same language, so they're not as isolated from the settled population as the Roma are.
With Travellers, the core issue is that the trades that once allowed them to afford their lifestyle are no longer useful to society at large, so their opportunities for employment are few and far between, which unfortunately leads a greater number down the path of criminality [aside: the vast majority are decent people, but when you're deprived of opportunities, that's going to lead some people to crime]. Add to this that the modern state practically demands a settled lifestyle for things like taxation, education, healthcare, &c., which even further alienates the Traveller and settled populations. Now, you could suggest that they just settle, and some do, but people tend to be attached to their heritage, so for many that's not a runner.
With the Roma, all of that is even worse because they have the added language barrier and an even bigger cultural barrier. Moreover, you also have a trafficking problem surrounding some of the Roma where they're exploited as beggars, and sometimes worse.
So yes, the Roma situation is a completely separate situation from that of homelessness in general, and one nobody has any good answers for yet.
Worse is the homeless situation in third world countries where even less services are available. Being homeless in a Western nation is far different than anywhere else. It may be exaggerated in SF and LA simply because of two reasons, climate and more support for those in need. So the city may actually being doing a good job but is simply attracting more people because they are
tl;dr do not for a moment think that homelessness isn't as bad issue elsewhere, let alone countries where the US is equal to economically.
It's really disheartening to see the plight of people who could have been helped. Especially, given that we (US) spend more per capita on healthcare...
Another interesting observation is the difference between LA and SF. In LA (beach areas and west LA/Westwood) a side from minor inconvenience of a line outside public beach restrooms/showers and some encampments, there really isn't a disruption. In SF, people walk in yelling into stores, act out aggressively in broad daylight and generally don't seem to feel any restraint. I never felt particularly unsafe in LA, but definitely had to watch my surroundings last weekend in SF, much more than ever before in the last decade.
I looked up "Homelessness in the UK" on Wikpedia and the first line is:
> Homelessness in the United Kingdom is kept somewhat at bay
> by a reasonable volume of housing, statutory rights, and
> various government initiatives.
I don't know what figures you are looking at, but one caveat that occurs to me is that the UK's main homelessness charity, Shelter, has a fairly broad definition of homelessness. You don't have to be sleeping in the street for them to consider you "homeless". Which is good, because relying on your friends' sofas for housing is indeed a very crappy situation which government policy should seek to minimize, but bad, because that's not what other people consider homelessness to be.
