Could you dig up sources on that? Not challenging you, but as an Angeleno I've always believed this to be true myself. Curious what may actually be happening.
This article is several years old but does a good job illustrating where people are moving to and from. It's also not any local government policy to bus homeless people to other cities. Most of the time it's family and friends buying them tickets.
(As a resident of MA,) I'd also like to see the data.
If I had a choice to be homeless here or homeless in the Bay Area, it's not even close. The weather here is terrifically worse than anywhere near the water in CA.
In LA, 20% of our homeless population last year came from out of state and another 2% from out of country. See slide 24 at [1]. People like to downplay this as “only 20%” which is ridiculous. 20% is a huge portion. As always, though, lack of affordable housing and true social safety nets are the biggest drivers by far.
LAHSA's statistics are skewed, since they count someone as local once they've been living in LA for a certain amount of time (I think it's a year), even if they have been homeless their entire time in LA.
In 2018, the LA Times ran a series of articles on the homeless situation, and had reporters accompany county social workers. More than half of the homeless were from out-of-state, with Texas being the largest single source of homeless in LA. More than 3/4 of LA's homeless weren't local to LA.
There was a big study a while back that showed something like only 30% from out of state?
The tricky is they had an expansive definition of "local": they were measuring where people most recently became homeless, which means almost any housing in SF for almost any amount of time meant they counted as local.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
This article is several years old but does a good job illustrating where people are moving to and from. It's also not any local government policy to bus homeless people to other cities. Most of the time it's family and friends buying them tickets.