Homelessness has risen 70% in California’s capital.Inside the staggering emerg (opens in new tab)

-California is a desirable place to live, with the main limiting factor being cost of real estate

-People who are already in tenuous living situations move to California because "Its not meaningfully more expensive to couch surf/share an apartment with 10 people near a beach than what I'm doing here in X current location" (this is why surveys asking people if they were homeless before moving to California are hard to rely on - they probably weren't, but that still doesn't mean they weren't destined to become homeless by moving to CA, a place they can't afford)

-The above draw is compounded by California's extremely deep and varied drug market (LA/SF are the epicenter of wealthy working professionals with hard drug habits, which then subsidizes poorer drug users)

-Eventually, the tenuous living situation becomes no living situation and the person ends up on the streets

-The person, now in homelessness (and potentially drug addiction) realizes their life won't get better by moving back to where they were from, so they stay (especially since they would receive so many more services in CA than their original location)

Any of the "Other location buses the homeless to CA" is mostly political theater relative to the scale of what happens above.

Welcome to the New Hotel California where the only solution is to dramatically reduce real estate costs in California (good luck there) or build enough public housing that is marginally better than the above 'tenuous living arrangements' (this is why certain people call for more SRO-style housing)

The song is a bit more depressing in that lens

EDIT: This is not to say that native Californians don't become homeless. Just that when people are from elsewhere, they usually weren't homeless before moving to CA.

I mean a similar meme exists too with Vancouver being assumed to be a "dumping ground" for Canada's homeless too, but when you look at the data that the homeless count polling accumulates, where they ask the homeless all sorts of questions, the trends aren't really apparent. I presume the same for California.

It's less that homeless people are moving to places, and more that people are constantly moving to places, and then becoming homeless.

California is one of the economic drivers of the United States. People are moving there all the time. Of course we'd expect economically marginal people to try to move to improve their situation, just as we'd expect a young tech worker to move to California for the same.

Thinking about it the other way, if someone was poor with zero opportunities in some rural town with no jobs would it make any sense to stay there instead of moving to a larger city with more job potential? Of course not.

On occasion you hear some story about some small town mayor busing some homeless person out of their town to the big city, but on closer inspection seems often the case that there's a fair circumstance here of helping someone that can't afford travel get in contact with a relative.

Edit:

The number is 8% out of state: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28974050

But since it is probably better to be homeless in California than in other neighbouring states, they probably passively make their way there through push pull factors.

I recently finished a degree focused on this model at SFSU. There are a few really good examples like CCDC and TNDC in SF. Both of these have acquired about 4,500 units of housing so far, all of which are affordable. Many of the other districts have or want something similar.

This is the only general-purpose solution I've found to nonprofit affordable community development of not just housing but also many other types of infrastructure projects.

It's just not possible to build for-profit inventory that's affordable; the cost per unit is too high. But there are lots of exciting ways to fund nonprofit affordable housing, and the CDC model

Most of the homeless are drug addicts that are not able to maintain a job or pay for car insurance. They aren't going to be able to pay rent.

Recognizing this ends up turning this into a way harder problem, with extremely divergent suggested solutions.

Instead people work on the easier problem of housing people, that at least is solvable, and that most people can agree on, even if it absolutely doesn't solve the actual problems of the drug addicts (that are being called homeless because that's nicer to think about and easier to work on).

(Agreed about tax dollars should not be spent building in flood plains.)