Homelessness, worldwide

About 2% of the world’s population, or approximately 150,000 million people, are straight-up homeless, and about 20%, or 1.6 billion, live in inadequate housing.

Below is a chart published by Yale University that shows approximately where the US falls among the OECD countries (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). It’s important to understand that the numbers are rough estimates: countries have differing standards for homelessness; some prefer to conceal their homeless problems; others put little effort and few resources into creating accurate counts. Also, not all countries worldwide are part of the OECD.