Wow. I enjoyed this read, but didn't expect to see my home state in here - If the homeless problem in Nebraska is really as bad as they claim, I can personally confirm how invisible these people are...And being invisible usually means being vulnerable.

Here's an article from NE that talks about this same issue, if you're interested.

They aren't living in the boxes. They aren't you know, visible necessarily. But they are there,” said Cheryl Holcomb, executive director of Central Nebraska Community Services. “They're just your domestic violence victims. Your veterans. The veterans are becoming more prevalent in the rural areas.

“It doesn't look like your typical homeless in Chicago or the bigger cities, where you can drive down a certain street and they're all lined up or they're all in boxes,” Holcomb said. “That's not necessarily true in the more rural areas. You might have them where they're couch surfing. Or they might be living in a small camper.”

If anyone has access to JSTOR, I'd love it if you could find a way to send me the full text of this research on rural homelessness in the Great Plains. Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

This paper suggests that the general structural frameworks, which have been developed to model homelessness in metropolitan areas, can serve as a useful starting point for understanding rural homelessness in Nebraska. By using a "key informant" survey of homeless service providers in Nebraska it is clear that there are several niches of homeless persons (Native Americans, migrant workers, meat-packing workers, and transients) present in Nebraska that are not discussed in the existing literature.