In my area, people complain that there are homeless people 'now', when I was a kid, fishermem would come home from Alaska with thousands of dollars of cash in their pockets, buy a tent and a sleeping bag and just camp right next to the bar. Lots of couch surfing. People had bars on their windows.
These PNW cities have always had a lot of drugs and poverty and depression. Cities built on logging, fishing, lumber mills, paper plants, shipping ports and airplane factory work.
The tech hub vibe and the people who moved to here from the suburbs see this as new. And in a way, it's been exacerbated by skyrocketing rent, but part of what we're seeing is a lack of places where these people could hide in plane sight.
They've always been here. This is a subculture that has always existed.