(BUSINESS INSIDER) November 16, 2019

• More than 10 US states have seen their homeless populations rise in the last decade.
• We’ve rounded up the states with the largest share of homeless residents.
• Washington, DC ranks highest, followed by New York and Hawaii.
• Visit Businessinsider.com for more stories.

Talk of homelessness in the US tends to center on the most visible crises in a few major cities: open-air drug markets in San Francisco, crowded encampments in Los Angeles, and tent cities in Seattle.

But nationwide, more than 10 states have seen their homeless populations increase since 2008. A few states with a relatively small number of homeless residents, like Idaho and Vermont, have seen an increase of more than 35%. South Dakota, meanwhile, has seen a 23% rise in the last year.

One way to evaluate the extent of homelessness in America and pinpoint the nation’s worst crises is to look at the share of homeless residents relative to a state’s population size. This controls for the fact that states with more residents tend to have higher total homeless populations.

We crunched that data across all 50 states using numbers from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for 2018. Here’s what homelessness looks like in the nine states with the worst crises, which also have some of the highest housing costs in the US.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-homelessness-states-worst-crises-2018-11