I'm not sure you can make such a bold claim. If California is spending money on homelessness, then all things being equal, it will attract more homeless people than if it didn't spend money on homelessness. Some percentage of these homeless will come from other states. For any two states there is going to be migration of homeless between the 2, and the attractiveness of the state is very much effected by the amount of spending for homelessness. So California could very much be net importing homeless from many of the other states that choose not to spend on homelessness (thus offloading their homelessness problem).

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.

Homeless people aren't stupid and they aren't immobile house plants, they respond to incentives like everyone else. If you want to live on the street and do drugs and be crazy the best place to do that is CA because the weather is great and they largely don't enforce vagrancy, shoplifting, and drug laws and they spend billions of dollars subsidizing homelessness (free needles etc etc etc).

>>> "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).

I certainly agree that how you spend money could just encourage people to become homeless, I’d hoped to convey that idea by talking about percentage increases in the homeless population, since not every new homeless is going to be a transplant. I wish there were better guides as to what spending actually helps. I suspect soup kitchens are a general positive good, but they may only make it easier to be homeless by allieviating some of the pain. I personally think access to housing should be a basic constitutional right, but I’m also weary of things like projects and tenements which may purpetuate more problems than they help.

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 :/

In the absence of data, this is pure conspiracy. And considering the obvious issue of California being one of the most expensive places to live on the continent, it seems like quite a stretch.

There is an important phrase in economics, “all other things being equal”. That phrase covers the idea that if you chose another state that was equally expensive as california, and was equavalent in every other aspect, then this one difference would have this expected effect. You are correct that I don’t have emperical evidence to cite, and it would be a very very difficult experiment to run on a state level. But economists definitely try to run these kinds of experiments trying to find as similar as possible locals to try to answer the kinds of questions as “do changes in spending attract things that the money are spent on?”.

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.

Ok..then what is it caused by? Provide your sources.

There is no one cause. Anyone who says there is, is wrong.

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.

It’s a warm climate with large cities which provide sufficient incentive for people to choose to be homeless over other avenues of living

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

Your argument is that an immigrant would rather be homeless in the US than housed in their home country?

Almost no data backs that up.

lol people would rather be poor in the US than mexico yes.

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

Why do they live in SF and further north if it's for weather?

You think people choose to be fucked up? And what's the solution here, shoot the homeless?

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!).

people who take this emotional and illogical approach is exactly why the homeless suffer to the extent they do

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

Even if it is caused by other states, is it valid to complain about that? What is the solution to that? Borders between states (while having no borders between countries)?

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.

Two words: Federal Support.

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.

Exactly. The logistics may not be simple (i.e. actually getting the federal government's support) but the logic should be obvious: piecemeal support results in the ones that are doing the most to help get "penalized" with more people seeking help.

>What is the solution to that?

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.

What you describe is what happens in Canada. Most homeless in Canada end up in Vancouver, because of weather and assistance offered. The other provinces, with the 6 months freezing winter, not as much assistance, and I think a bit of enforcement, causes the homeless to end up at Vancouver.

If it is caused by other states, that would indicate the problem is not uniquely California related, making the likely necessary solutions to be federal.

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.

Good luck getting the federal government to do anything to help a coastal state that isn't already covered by the executive branch.

I don't think the frame of "does this help or hurt a particular state" is a useful frame for the problem.

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

That's a useful answer to one of the questions the article did not answer. Now, do you have a reliable source?

As others have pointed out, the problem has many sources. Other states/cities busing their homeless to California has historically been at least a minor contributor. California won a suit against the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, for specifically the practice of closing a psychiatric hospital, placing its freshly unhoused patients on Greyhound buses to Sacramento or San Francisco with one-way tickets, and giving the patients instructions to "call 911" when they arrive. [1]. 24 persons were documented and cared for by San Francisco specifically, but allegedly Nevada's largest mental health hospital did this with approximately 500 people.

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