The one in Portland has a couple dozen people living in it and has existed for maybe a year. It is routinely cleaned up/moved to different locations as well, hence a "camp". The population of a single slum in Mumbai (Dharavi) is over a million and has existed since the 1800s. Are you really concerned that they don't receive the same international attention?
I think the point being made is less about international attention, and how we (as in U.S. citizens) see our own poor compared to the poor other places. The impression, which I think has some truth to it, is that often our own poor are viewed much more unfavorably than we view the poor in other places. When it's the poor across the world, they get our sympathy, but when they're in our backyard we just want them gone.
It's not about which one is the greater humanitarian problem, it's about the hypocrisy.
it might go back to the american superiority complex; african and asian homeless people are different and distant enough to make us feel good about ourselves (poor foreigners), american homeless are “like us” so they shouldn’t have an excuse (just get a job like i did)
