It doesn't. It has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless. It has 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless -- i.e. people camped outside.

It has so many unsheltered homeless in part because parts of the state are temperate and dry. Much of the time, it's not a hardship to sleep outside in some parts of California.

Nice weather for homeless people basically means not strong shelter required to survive, unlike the midwest and east coast which consistently freeze in winter.

1: https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_67aeebc1-e7b...

If you need to live in a tent, or a broken RV with no AC or heat, would you rather live in Chicago (super cold), Houston (super hot and humid) or Sacrament to Portland (super mild year round, low humidity)

West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain. Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.

East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.

In the mountains, large national forests which allow dispersed camping.

It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to include them.

"inland," sorry.

If you are going to live unsheltered in the US, the cities in the PNW are definitely among the better locales to do so in terms of amenable weather.

I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent on solidifying a peasant class.

Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't already own, but even keeping a house within a family might soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being to rent from a giant housing corporation.

And everyone thinks HOAs are bad...just wait.

But only being able to rent from large corporations? That's nightmare fuel right there.

Anything political like this is going to have competing "sources of truth" which are largely funded by Super PACs and essentially just arms of political parties.

Either party can "show you the data" now to come to whatever conclusion they want.

This is a useful gambit to game all the people who claim to want to be "data-driven".

Sometimes, it's useful to zoom out to a 1000 foot view and simply observe that something is clearly broken, and the current solution does not appear to be making it less broken.

Maybe this is something everyone can agree on - but, that won't be very helpful - as there's unlikely any changing solution that both parties will agree on.

I've already heard 10000000 times the 1000 foot view. No one has told me the specific appointed people, the percentages of the total they've been distributed, and where those peoples' public records are for their own municipal budgeting.

Simplistic articles that go "money in, homeless out" don't help inform, which more and more seems intentional, because everything is political.

17 billion divided by 250,000 would be 68,000 condos (rough numbers). There are obvious problems with "give every homeless person a condo" but the numbers are huge and something's not working.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

We truly are living in an age of alternate facts.

I’ve read papers put out by research groups that were easy to debunk. Most people won’t go to that effort and will take the glossy material and legitimate sounding author as being truthful when in fact every conclusion made in the report is a lie.

Which brings me to my point, and my advice. Focus on feelings and abstract beliefs first. Don't talk about (e.g.) the specific spending bill, talk about whether military defense or caring for the poor is more important from a personal and moral perspective. Make it a small conversation, leave the paid-for "facts" out of it. What do you and I believe? Can we find common ground? After we find some common ground on a small scale, maybe we can talk about a larger scale. Maybe then we can look at the facts.

I was beat up by that black woman Ramona Cayce. I was washing dishes, and she stole the dish soap. What followed was a black woman hitting me, while people egged her on, and then I was blamed. She is a drug addict, as are almost all the residents, including T, the person who started ALL the fires, and P, who tried to control as much as the crime as possible, and G, who stole 3 cars a night. You want facts? I was there. No one, least of all the New York Times gives a shit about the facts.

Wrong.

The $17B spent on homelessness spent over several years on the problem of homelessness was not (even in a loose sense) divided across the set of people currently homeless, or a set the same size. It was spent on the set of people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness at some point during the period of expenditures, which is a much larger number.

We really need some kind of regulations to disincentivize companies from producing drivel and more incentives for well researched material.

I don’t know what those regulations would look like. But without them we are drowning in material that does society more harm than good.

The unanimous answer from the panel was that people wouldn't pay for journalism.

Now, you can take this one of two (or more) ways:

1. Journalism as widely practiced in the present environment isn't worth paying for, so of course people won't pay for it.

2. Even if journalism was "objectively" worth paying for (lemme hand wave that judgement for the sake of argument), maybe people still wouldn't value it to the extent they were willing to pay what it would cost to produce.

And we can drill into #2 even deeper: in practice, some kinds of reporting are already funded entirely by its audience. For example, Janes has made a business for decades of compiling open-source intelligence about military hardware. That's a kind of reporting, and provably one that some audience is willing to pay for.

Other kinds of reporting though may be valued differently. One of my professors won a Pulitzer prize for a story on AIDS in the Midwest. This is probably not something you can build an industry around reporting on, especially not in the way she went about it, but clearly some people felt it was worthwhile reporting.

So now we get back to the question of how we incentivize "good" reporting, which arguably the above two are examples of, but in different ways. One is basically industry reporting which seems like largely a solved problem from a financial feasibility perspective.

The other angle is less of a solved problem as far as I know, but I can see two paths to try with it: culture grants (common for certain kinds of projects in some Nordic countries - not as sure about the US) and crowdfunding. In either case, it will probably look substantially different from how we think of journalism today.

As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with people reading journalism made by one group but copied to several other places. The race to the bottom begins. There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Kardashians. Gossip is cheap.

We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever.

Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb and how they fed Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he's dead and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.

Here's what I suggest. When you see it, call it out. Doesn't matter if it is WSJ, CNN, Fox, your uncle at Thanksgiving, or whatever. Call out ads masquerading as news. Don't engage with them directly. Don't take a political stance. Reinforce the idea that you don't know shit about what's going on and not nearly enough to formulate a meaningful opinion (opinions always exist but opinions aren't always meaningful or helpful). Be HARDLINE apolitical in this respect. You can have politics about things that you know about, anything less is tribalism.

You're not going to directly topple the structures overnight nor are you going to be able to march into the president's office. But you are a meme, you are a virus. If you infect just two others, the virus spreads. And it spreads fast. This is the power you have at the individual level. You are part of a deeply connected web that people are trying to convince you is worthless. But we're all 6 degrees of freedom, or less, from one another and that's how contagions spread so fast, especially in the modern world. This is how you hit them from the market side. This isn't boycotting in the traditional sense, but it isn't dissimilar. Regulations won't happen without strong public support and MAJOR pressure on politicians, who have consistently shown they do not respect our opinions: because we don't hold them accountable. This is all connected.

Be the meme/virus. Be apolitical. Stop any tribalism. Call out ads. Be a pain, even to your friends, and force themselves to censor themselves around you. Don't force them to have no opinions, just don't let them be tribal and lazy. Force them to have nuance. Either they will have nuance, or they censor. Both are effective.

I actually think this a fundamental problem with homelessness, any locality that chooses to affect change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally. Worse, is it's all a collective action problem where each player can benefit by not spending on the problem. So there is constant pressure to do nothing with the problem. I wish I had solution to these kinds of problems, they're the type of thing that requires governments to tackle, but it quickly becomes political, and I'm not sure it gets any easier there either.

>>> "any locality that chooses to affect[sic] change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally"

I think the people who think they are positively effecting change are usually actually making things worse. There's a difference between making it easier to be homeless (ie the CA way) and making it easier to not be homeless (ie a way that might work).

But I think we agree that this is not an easy issue.

Unrelated, I thought I was using affect correctly, but seeing sic in your quote and spending a few minutes googling, I still don’t know if effect was more correct than affect :/

Now, I consider what I said to be self evident, but I certainly accept that my line of reasoning may be flawed, and it is possible that spending on homelessness does not increase incentives that attract homelessness. I’m extrapolating from the belief that spending money on business attracts business, but that may also be incorrect as popular as that idea is.

CA has many problems. Houses are expensive, and that makes it impossible for poor people to buy a house. This is something that CA can fix over time, and those who are only homeless because they cannot afford a place to live are low hanging fruit. They only need to build a lot of housing (reforming zoning for example)

There are also people who are homeless because of some other problem. Mental issues, drug addiction, and other such things. they are harder to deal with - I'm not sure what can be done about it: I've seen a lot of proposals, but people proposing them tend to be overly optimistic about the ability of their ideas to work without downsides.

There are more issues as well, but those are the big ones, and you cannot treat them the same.

Homeless people obviously want to live somewhere like Cali over Canada for the winter. California also provides massive welfare to homeless. They also have a very open arms policy to illegals who are often poor and homeless

These aren’t exhaustive reasons why, but it’s a core part of it. California politicians seem to be unwilling to address complicated social problems head on and instead virtue signal and allow these problems to grow and fester

I’m not going to provide you with sources. It’s too politicized of a subject. If you don’t want to accept it for being this way i’ve learned not to argue. But at the very least if people really can’t see why this problem exists as it does, here an entry

Almost no data backs that up.

your dichotomy is a false representation. and a poor one at that

Guess what you're in a never ending war. Every day new crazy people are born or made by our wonderful society, poverty keeps spreading (where's my replicators!).

stop virtue signaling and start thinking or kindly avoid this topic because you’re only causing harm

Edit: I dug up some data:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.

> “This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.

> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.

CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years. Really shows the bias.

If the problem is exacerbated by active policy or indirect action/non-action, then as a collection of people/states it is the burden of every state to shoulder it. And the federal government is just that, the collective power of all states combined.

So, lets imagine that the problem is being caused by other states sending their homeless over. Well, in the US you can't stop that, at least by direct migration, you might be able to stop particular organizations like city governments from doing so. But in a general sense there is freedom of movement.

The problem comes with that, the better you're at solving homelessness the more people will get sent there, and even more homeless will want to come there even if they are not sent. Suddenly Texas, for example would see California spending billions on the problem... Texas would have no motivation of spending billions to solve the problem themselves, in fact in terms of getting rid of the appearance of a homeless problem it would be more beneficial for them to be draconian on homelessness. This would push individuals to migrate to the promise land of California.

California would see is homeless costs increase dramatically and would be incentivized to stop (increasing?) funding on the problem themselves. Moloch wins. More people suffer. Yay humanity.

If it is not caused by other states, that would indicate that the problem is something happening in California, and maybe a state level solution is best.

You have to start the solution in the right place to have any hope of addressing the root cause.

We should look at it as "does this help or hurt people"

1 - https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tent...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_housing_shortage

It is the PEOPLE that reside in these communities that consistently vote down measures for building ANY housing in their neighborhood to inflate their real estate holdings. Housing homeless is an far reaching extension of that.

Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc.

If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly challenging even for people with means and support systems. Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.

You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well.

[0]https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le...

The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's not the entire solution either) Building large quantities of housing is a difficult problem, especially in California.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...

Even more have mental health issues. Some have physical health issues. The number of homeless who are perfectly healthy and just need housing is vanishingly small--those homeless are generally hiding from someone and won't want to be part of a tracked program.

We know what needs to be done: long term healthcare that needs lots of money.

We know what happened in the past: those facilities were horror shows because of underfunding.

We know what the "solutions" were in the past: shut the facility down and throw those people out onto the streets and let the prision system deal with them.

The starting point for solving homelessness is universal healthcare. Nothing less. Without universal healthcare, everything else to "solve" homelessness is just rearranging the deck chairs.

So really there is no one-size-fits all solution. Individual treatment is needed, and early intervention always has the best outcomes.

The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.

(Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans to meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)

It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less.

So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc.

That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.

These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.

You could make the exact opposite claim that "my property values!!" is the fig leaf around "I don't want [certain people] to have the chance to move near me."

And that one agrees with the numbers of how property values go up with city growth and development, not down. Would the property values in Malibu be lower or higher if LA had taken Detroit's path?

I'm not sure I completely agree with that.

Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do?

You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free.

But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone.

They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.

Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them:

Where do you put them?

For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and call it a million (some property is already controlled by cities and such, after all).

So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000 buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B.

But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can build denser. Too dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though, look at the history of housing projects. Let's do a 20 person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750 buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750 buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per project... that's gonna be tough without getting more contractors into the market and driving down the costs of construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive up the cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply.

And the more you try to push the density the more opposition you run into from both people who live and work nearby the sites and advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a problem IMO but it's not like getting rid of it would make the former go away immediately.

And you still need a large agency of operations around trying to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them out of the units before other people need them, etc.

Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts of the country? Sure, you could just try to bus people to cheaper areas without this, but that's gonna result in some deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to. There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because they don't have the scale of demand for land or the hospitable climate.

It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.

It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick the substances, get over some of the trauma from your time on the street, and want to get back into the world. Are the only local jobs "administration for the complex"? Is there no way to try to do something beyond that without having to travel a couple hundred miles and lose the support network and any social connections you'd made?

Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement.

> many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health.

> “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/california-h...

> According to advocates, in Orange county, many of the ...

So basically just grasping at straws for why the program failed.

Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out.

Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.

An LAT series of articles on homeless populations in Hollywood found that more than 60% of Hollywood's homeless, and more than 80% of the drug-abusing homeless, were not L.A. or even SoCal locals, and had come to L.A. from out-of-state. More than half of the homeless came from the Southwest, with the majority coming from Texas.

Even LAHSA's own survey of the homeless reveals that most of the homeless in L.A. weren't local to L.A. prior to becoming homeless in L.A. (However, because LAHSA's funding is based in part on the number of homeless, they characterize anyone that has been in L.A. for over a year as local, even if that individual has never had an actual residence in L.A. and was homeless upon arrival.)

In any case, the claim was made that the LAHSA data showed something which I found no evidence of, and in fact found that it showed something quite different. Lots of other data also suggest that a large majority of homeless do not come from other places.

If someone wants to share other data about this issue I’m happy to read it.

That being said, LAHSA's numbers combines both the chronic homeless and the temporary homeless. The chronic homeless in LA are mostly not local (and this is what the LAT found when they did their own investigation); the temporary homeless are almost all local (and are mostly due to financial issues or domestic violence), which is what leads to the disparity in numbers.

Oh, yes. Some samples:

1. https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/city-audit-finds-...

2. https://thefrisc.com/sf-has-fought-homelessness-with-no-bid-...

3. https://sfstandard.com/politics/sf-homeless-nonprofit-housin...

This is common knowledge for folks in the Bay Area.

Wait, what?

Why do you believe that FL's homeless crisis isn't expanding an a huge scale? Because it absolutely is. Floridians with government jobs and money in the bank are becoming homeless for the first time.

ref: Lived next to a huge FL homeless community for 10 years. Ex is frequently homeless. Me and my 5 sons barely escaped homelessness ourselves in 2021 (with long established jobs and savings).

Good climate

Cities provide cash payments to them

Legal marijuana

Open air drug markets

Soft on crime prosecutors

Liberal population that wants to provide for them

Note: I make no judgement value on any of these items, just proposing reasons

- Legal weed: There's legal weed all over the country and the homeless aren't known for buying weed from legal shops are they lol. No 'open air drug market weed' for me, sir, I'm going to the Shambhala Healing Center, says the man strung out on fenty. [1] Missouri and Illinois have legal recreational weed and some of the lowest rates of per capita homelessness [2] so you can pretty much strike this theory off your list.

- Open air drug markets: again, drugs may be visible here, but you can buy drugs in any city in this country. Opioids are the real problem, fentanyl in particular, and if you look at this map of opioid deaths by state you'll see the real crisis isn't in California but in West Virginia, which has 4X the deaths per capita. [3]

- Soft on crime prosecutors: it does have these.

- Liberal population that wants to provide for them: does it?

Honestly if the maps say anything to me, it's that all of the US' homelessness is along the west coast where the weather's nice. I think that might be the entire story.

[1] https://disa.com/maps/marijuana-legality-by-state

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/map-how-many-homeless-americ...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...

Lets take just example from this week: an announcement was made stating that the construction of a tiny house costs $1,600 per square foot [1]. All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Regardless, it's clear that this money is going to someone, and that someone is not homeless.

[1] https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/a-builder-convert...

That is not the same as needing the opposing party in America’s duopolistic system.

On the other hand one really cannot be republican because of things like this: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/anti-trans-repub...

Not really, no - unless you mean in the sense that the Republicans and Democrats are controlled opposition for one another, in which case sure, but that's true nationwide.

> All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why.

Who: landowners.

How: by artificially capping property taxes and pushing the burden onto the working class via income and sales taxes, and then using rent to capture money that should be going to said working class via wages and welfare.

Why: because they have a vested interest in doing so, and have the political influence to make it happen.

Solution: abolish sales/income tax, replace with 100% land value tax, disburse surplus as UBI. Would solve the vast majority of California's socioeconomic problems pretty much overnight.

The government could and should be pared down considerably if that's the case.

> and it's regressive

It's the literal opposite of regressive, especially when paired with UBI. The tax burden rests entirely on landowners, who already skew toward wealth; ownership of land value correlates strongly with net worth (and is indeed typically a major component of said net worth).

Meanwhile:

> VAT

That's just a fancy sales tax, with all the regression that entails. Bear in mind that the working class is spending a much greater proportion of its wealth on the very goods VAT taxes than the ownership class - which means VAT has in turn a disproportionate impact on the working class v. the ownership class.

With LVT, it's the other way around: the vast majority of people who actually work for a living either don't own any land value at all (and therefore ain't subject to LVT) or own sufficiently little land value for their tax burden to be less under LVT-as-single-tax than it would be under a system funded by income and sales taxes.

Yes, but the vast majority of that equity is in the house itself, not in the land underneath it. On top of that, land in the suburbs is not as valuable as, say, land in Downtown (which is a big part of why the house itself is most of the value of a typical home).

> Most wealthy do not have their wealth in land.

Maybe not directly, but indirectly the vast majority of their wealth boils down to land. Every skyscraper, every warehouse, every factory, every mall, all those consume large swaths of typically-valuable land. In short:

> LVT would mostly fall on middle class homeowners, not the wealthy.

It would mostly fall on whomever owns the most land value - and that is overwhelmingly massive corporations and rich people. A middle class homeowner owns a tiny amount of land value in comparison - certainly far below their equal share, and therein lies the rub: 100% LVT disbursed directly, evenly, and entirely as UBI serves as a self-balancing system:

- If you own less land value than your equal share, you're paid for it

- If you own more land value than your equal share, you pay for it

Homeowners in California largely own less than their equal share of California's total land value; unless you own a single-family home in Downtown SF or something, you're highly likely to come out ahead under LVT+UBI. The lion's share of land value ownership is corporate - and it's accordingly that lion's share that would bear the vast majority of LVT.

No, quite the contrary: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1156698343/city-of-tents-vetera...

Part of it is the routine stuff around activist-abolitionist DAs, lack of housing, NIMBY-ism, weather, decriminalization of drugs, etc. The review Shellenberger's comprehensive book on west-coast homelessness is nice level-headed take [3]

But one major cause is the rise of potent p2p meth & fentanyl in the populace. [1][2]

So not only are the homeless un-shelter-able (shelters require residents to be clean), but the nature of drugs lead to irreversible mental health issues and irreversible (ie. chronic) homelessness.

[1] https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/#:~:text=To%20get%20mo...

[2] https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/

[3] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransi...

Affordable housing is affecting the middle class rather severely in that larger portions of the middle class incomes are being spent on housing. These are people that are not homeless. These are people often in trades or hourly labor. Some will become homeless with any disruption of income. Fl has done some things to help with that. "...in recent years Florida communities have embraced evidence-based best practices such as Housing First, collaborative case management, and rapid rehousing."{1}

Mathematically speaking there is no reason why CA cannot have %50 of the homeless. CA could have %100 of the homeless if no other states have homeless. It is not related to CA population relative to the rest of the country.

The problem IMHO is that results matter more than good intentions. Many of CAs programs mean well but are either not executed well or simply do not work. The proponents continue to promote them and receive money for them despite their inability to get results. That is were all the money goes.

{1}https://flhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Good-News-f...

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html#:~:text=Florid....

Yes. States are known to literally ship out their homeless problem to other states and also do so figuratively by criminalization and persecution to drive the homeless out.

If you are less aggressive at those things, or provide better services, the net flow of homeless people is going to be in to your state, all other things being equal.

This isn’t, of course, the whole of the problem. Housing supply issues and income inequality issues produced by the fact that California has some very successful industries that reward a narrow set of people very well also play a big role, and these are self-inflicted policy problems [0] (both not adequately increasing housing supply, and not leveraging narrow prosperity better for the general good.)

[0] Not simple policy problems to resolve, the housing one for political reasons, the improving distribution without killing the prosperity you are trying to improve the distribution of one is actually tricky in policy.