The problem is that the transit agency doesn't have a lot of agency over its city's homeless population.

The transit agency also doesn't have a lot of agency about the budget they receive from the city either

You can’t unless were willing to forcibly put these people in shelters. Many of the persistent ones are hardcore drug users waiting to die, they don’t give a damn about being rehabilitated.

The number of people who can afford a home is very strongly correlated with how affordable homes are. I therefore propose that if we can make homes more affordable, homelessness will decrease.

Most people here don’t realize how much the homeless are hated and how willing trump voting Americans are to literally let them die on the streets or worse.

Schadenfreude is the dominant feeling of the times, and many if not most Americans would basically celebrate a “purge” of the homeless.

This is just not true generally. It might seem stupid or incredibly obvious, but homelessness is mostly caused by housing prices.

In places with less affordable housing, there is more homeless people. The solution to homelessness is to build more housing.

That's the solution a 5 year old would come up with, too, but it's correct.

Nice Faith based argument there. Requiring "free" citizens to care about a problem they didn't have anything to do with. No different than saying "if everyone went to church/temple/mosque and and adhered to $DEITY all problems would vanish"

Weird. You didn't just move the goalposts; you built new ones and declared it was what your opponent was kicking towards.

It's not "our" homelessness problem.

Most of the homeless in SF and LA aren't from California. Red states love to "deal" with their homeless by buying them bus tickets to the West Coast (something that Texas used to openly brag about).

If SF and LA shipped the homeless back to where they originally came from, we'd all be talking about the Midwest homelessness crisis.

Do you have proof of this? Can you link to a budget from a red state with a line item of "Homeless bus tickets to California"?

I don't have sources on hand, but my understanding is that there are a lot of people who come to CA without a good plan nor a social support network, become homeless, and then people misinterpret that situation as them coming here while homeless, which then gets misinterpreted as homeless people being intentionally shipped here.