> One advantage of having 50 states with various laws is that we don’t need to just speculate about this stuff.

That's actually a disadvantage, and explains why the US will never be able to address the homelessness problem.

If you have one jurisdiction where the approach is to aggressively kick out the homeless and another where they try their best at solving the problem, the would-be solver location will inevitably fail because all the homeless will migrate there. No single city or state can solve homelessness for the entire country.

You need every jurisdiction to cooperate at solving it simultenously, but the prisioners dilemma of 50 states encourages individual states to push the problem onto others, solving nothing and guaranteeing nobody else can solve either it.

The 50 state solution is a great feature because it effectively prevents unification solutions.

I think something similar happened in British Columbia.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/29/british-columb...

That isn't really much evidence though: unhoused, who are more likely to get addicted to fent, have long migrated to west coast cities due to mild weather and social services, ever since the late 19th century when the meme was a classic hobo with a bindle hopping a freight train to San Francisco. You will see similar horrible affects of fentanyl in Vancouver BC as well, so we don't even have to speculate if American policy is to blame.

I'd encourage you to read the article. This is something that has been studied in depth. It's true there was an increase in visible homelessness in cities across the west coast (although, at least in SF, this has since declined) but drug overdoses have been much, much worse in Portland than in other west coast cities.

The article is paywalled so I can only get through the beginning. I live in Ballard (Seattle) and every other day there is a fent overdose. SF is having the same problem, as are LA and Vancouver. It might be worse in Portland (though maybe just relative to population), but it is bad across the entire coast (Seattle's problem is worse than Portland's because Seattle is more populated than Portland).

There is a lot of politics involved in politicians saying their city has the worst problem. But you are going to see similar problems if you do a one day drive (or take the Cascade amtrack) from Vancouver BC to Portland OR. Drug enforcement in all of these cities (+ Californian cities) is all fairly lax, even if drugs aren't decriminalized, people are still doing fent in public or on public transit without much harassment.