From my old hometown's paper:
No matter how bad the homelessness problem looks in other metropolitan areas, they pale compared to California’s. While the state accounts for not quite 12 percent of the U.S. population, roughly 28 percent of the nation’s homeless are in California. The lesson: Don’t copy the Golden State’s policies for mitigating homelessness – they simply don’t work.
California’s homeless population was not quite 139,000 in 2007. Within seven years, it had fallen to about 114,000. From there, it grew sharply to more than 161,000 in 2020. Over the same period, the total homeless in the rest of the states fell from a little more than 508,000 to 419,000.
