| What actually tends to happen is the following: -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. |
Which has been evaporating more and more. There used to be tons of them in SF and LA and now it's been severely reduced. This style of housing at least housed the "upper" level of destitute/poverty and without it that entire population is on the street.