California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

So, lets imagine that the problem is being caused by other states sending their homeless over. Well, in the US you can't stop that, at least by direct migration, you might be able to stop particular organizations like city governments from doing so. But in a general sense there is freedom of movement.

The problem comes with that, the better you're at solving homelessness the more people will get sent there, and even more homeless will want to come there even if they are not sent. Suddenly Texas, for example would see California spending billions on the problem... Texas would have no motivation of spending billions to solve the problem themselves, in fact in terms of getting rid of the appearance of a homeless problem it would be more beneficial for them to be draconian on homelessness. This would push individuals to migrate to the promise land of California.

California would see is homeless costs increase dramatically and would be incentivized to stop (increasing?) funding on the problem themselves. Moloch wins. More people suffer. Yay humanity.

Yes, homeless people don't actually sit on the streets of e.g. Quebec City, begging until they can fund a trip to Vancouver, with the aim of living on the streets here instead.

But people are often in some kind of unstable living situation wherever they are, and find out about some job offer, or housing offer, in Vancouver, that lures them to come here for a chance at a more stable living situation. But after coming here (and spending what little capital they have to do so), their job offer falls through, or it was just a seasonal job, or a job with very tenuous stability (e.g. in construction); or the housing they found was a sublet in a rent-stabilized building, but the building owner then figured out how to work around this by "rennovicting" all the tenants so they could jack up the rents; etc.

I live in the East Hastings area. I speak to the people wandering the streets pretty often. I get the impression that many of these folks had a "stable living situation" for a year or two after coming to Vancouver. But this stability was an illusion. They didn't have the earning power to support themselves long-term in Vancouver's high-cost-of-living environment.

These folks are used to smaller low-cost-of-living towns, and just want to escape a failing small town with no economic opportunity; but they don't tend to have job skills that are highly-valued in dense urban areas (e.g. doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) These people can still move — but not to high-cost-of-living Vancouver. (Even the highly-employable "service class" of Vancouver, can't afford to live in Vancouver; they have to commute in from quite far away.) Rather, these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.

There's also a strong correlation between homeless people and parking garage density.

Housing prices are high where there are people. People are homeless where there are people. It comes with the territory. Throw in amazing weather and states bussing their homeless to CA and it becomes a very attractive proposition for someone without a home.

If there was a correlation then sending the homeless to Arkansas would solve the problem, but it wouldn't. They'd just be homeless in the woods.

The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead they’re dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the mentally unwell.

I despise paying taxes to the corrupt government that allows this. I hate that so many people are seemingly just “oh well, what can we do?” About all this. There is a LOT we can do, we don’t have to live this way. We don’t have to put up with any of this.