Nearly 553,000 people are homeless in America, with California and New York having the highest homeless populations, according to the report.
Homelessness has surged 75 percent in Los Angeles, California, over the past six years. Prior to 2017, homelessness in the US had been in decline for seven years.
In New York City, authorities report that 114,659 children in New York City public schools are either homeless or living in temporary housing — that's one out of every 10.
The "basic explanation" for rising homeless in the United States, the wealthiest country on earth, is the "profit system, or if you like, capitalism — just [to] reduce it to a simple word," author and economist Richard Wolff told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear.
The perversity of those incentives has led to a "bizarre situation in a modern capitalist economy like the United States, that on the one hand we have hundreds of thousands — and I would guess it's more in the millions — of people without adequate housing, and at the same time we have huge amounts of housing that has nobody in it for all kinds of reasons, mostly reducing to the fact that it isn't profitable to provide housing for the poor who need it, and it is profitable to [have] housing even if it sits empty for a while because eventually the capitalist hopes and believes that somebody will come in and make it a profitable investment over time," Wolff argued.
Wolff isn't the only one who believes that the number of homeless people in the US is in the millions. In 2011, Amnesty International's then-director of its Demand Dignity project, Tanuka Loha, wrote that "approximately 3.5 million people in the US are homeless, many of them veterans. It is worth noting that, at the same time, there are 18.5 million vacant homes in the country."
That's well over the number of homes required to eradicate homelessness, which in the US is often criminalized, subjects people to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" and is in violation of international human rights treaties, the United Nations Human Rights Committee declared in 2014.
"We know that there are vast tracts of housing that has been allowed to become dilapidated — often it sits empty. I recently went on a trip of Detroit, and I was shown block after block of abandoned houses," Wolff said. "Many of them remain standing, eminently renewable, and so if there were a concerted government effort, it would be less costly to renovate what's already available… without a big new building program, even though" such a project would also have benefits, Wolff argued.