Homeless in America

I remember taking a writing class two years ago and we had to do a group project on whatever topic we desired. A classmate of mine that I sat next to asked me and a friend if we wanted to be in her group and do a presentation on the homeless and how to stop the ongoing problem. The homeless situation is real and it is a problem, but the exact circumstances of this problem have always been in question. As stated in Chapter 6 The Great Crow Fallacy there is no definitive way to come up with these exact numbers and they are sometimes extremely exaggerated. The girl in my class that I mentioned previously was a real advocate for helping the homeless and was giving us the details although we had kindly told her we weren't as into it as she was and would probably be better off looking into another topic. She continued to go into the "statistics" that she had which I don't remember exactly, but they were pretty outrageous compared to the actual estimates given in the book of somewhere between 444,000-800,000. I was just reminded of this situation while reading the chapter because it shows you that these situations are real and that "meaningless" numbers sometimes do stick to people as facts. So, just remember next time you hear about those 3 million homeless people on the streets and the ensuing collapse of the housing in America, please take the time and think about it and double check those numbers because you'll probably find that us Americans in general are doing ok and the housing situation we have is a little shaky, but I predict well all be able to live in our warm and comfortable house for some time still.