The definition of homeless was quite different at that time --- note that there was an entire class of people defined as hobos/migrant workers who began the year helping out with cutting lumber and harvesting maple sugar in the winter, then working south to help with the planting of truck crops (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas...) in the spring, pruning fruit trees and harvesting early crops in the summer, then in the fall helping with the harvests and picking cotton and so forth, then helping to plant cover crops and so forth and moving north to repeat the process.

Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/828165.Education_of_a...

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andy99 an hour ago | parent [-]

The people that are homeless now would have been institutionalized or dead back then.

	▲	Schiendelman 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's an interesting point - we may be keeping people alive better now. And the rate of people experiencing homelessness is 5-10x lower now than it was during the Great Depression.