[dsfyu404ed]

Once you're homeless your chances of scraping up the $100+ for a bus ticket across the country are basically 0. When your homeless your biggest asset is your local knowledge, where you can sleep, where you can work as a day laborer for a few bucks, etc, etc. and you'd be giving that up by relocating. Hence most homeless people do not relocate. The homeless guy in Bangor is going to find somewhere he can sleep inside.

[ceejayoz]

> Once you're homeless your chances of scraping up the $100+ for a bus ticket across the country are basically 0.

Read the article I linked. Quite a few cities are happy to subsidize such a bus ticket, as you become someone else's problem.

[dsfyu404ed]

The number of people being subsidized is not that large. I'd wager that it's aproximatly made up for by non-homeless people who leave the destination states and then advocate for public policy that exacerbates the homelessness problem in their new cities/states. The spread of severe homelessness problems (i.e. the difference between homelessness in Baltimore and homelessness in SF) northward up the west coast but lagging CA's level of homelessness by a couple years seems to support my hypothesis.