>> Suffice to say CA has some of the highest taxes of any state, yet it also has some of the worst social problems - poverty, homelessness, etc.

I was under the impression that much of the homelessness problem is because CA is a nice place to live (with or without a home) and because the climate is temperate and thus safer to live than most other places (where a homeless person could literally freeze to death.)

Sorry if this sounds insensitive -- I really want to understand this: I concede that cost of housing could lead to homelessness, but I dont understand this -- isnt the housing cost really a problem just in the two major metro areas? Is housing exorbitant once you leave those areas? For someone who is homeless, is there any gravity anymore to -- say -- being close to SF/SV/Hollywood?

You're right on both counts. CA has a big homeless problem because of the weather, and other states exploit that to use CA as a dumping ground for their own homeless.

LA Times' Steve Lopez interviewed a number of homeless last year in a series of articles. Most of them weren't from LA. They just came because they were told the weather was great and that drugs in LA were free.

CA is a huge state, and while the big cities are mostly liberal, the rural parts of the state are very conservative. Nixon and Reagan hail from Southern California, and up until fairly recently, Orange County and the Inland Empire were more conservative than the Southeast.

A number of far right groups can trace their origins to the Inland Empire or to CA's far North.

As for the homeless issues: multiple states admit that they use CA as their dumping grounds for their homeless. It was, and still is, the unofficial policy of the state of Texas to buy their homeless tickets to LA. (Former TX governor Rick Perry used to openly brag about this, including when he was running for president.) A recent survey conducted by the LA Times last year found that more than half of LA's homeless aren't even from California. They just came here because authorities back home suggested that they would enjoy CA more. Excluding the non-local homeless, LA would have enough beds to house its own homeless. We just don't have enough to house the entire country's homeless as well.

I'm confused as hell.

I keep hearing that most of the homeless in SF are actually from SF.

As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco. This figure is up from 61% in 2013.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...