It's not rocket science, but it's hard for the average American to understand what happened on the west coast to advance homelessness. So I'll tell this shorten version of the 'saga'.
Somewhere along the 1970s/1980s....suburbs reached a point where they felt enough construction had been done, and put political pressure on various city councils....to lessen construction. In effect, the 'boom' came to a much lesser state of being at that point around places like LA, SF, and Seattle.
Even if you were a property speculator.....you found that deals were now much less in terms of size and development. Apartments for lower income folks? That really started to cease.
Rents then started to escalate, and the average waitress or short-order cook....was pushed to the limits.
In this same era....housing or forced hospitalization of paranoid schizophrenia folks ran into issues.
Also in the same era....came drug usage.
These three took a non-existent problem and made it into a rocket-science situation.
The final problem was that people felt the west coast had opportunity....so if you were a loser in Chicago, Dayton, or Tulsa.....you might get this crazy idea to haul your stuff out to the west coast, and hook onto some success there. Over the past twenty years....this giant magnet existed and just complicated the overall problem even more.
So there is a new agenda of problem approaching. Various 'help-groups' want to come in and fix all of this? Their stumbling block? Well....they want to force cheap housing to be built. Added to this....the jobs just aren't there. And finally.....with various rehab efforts underway, if you deliver the cleaned-up guy to a zero-job situation....then he falls back into the pit.
There's tons of money to be wasted, and no one really understands this angle of the whole deal.
