Individual cities can’t solve national problems. Due to migration there are no great solutions at the individual city level, other than being “blessed” with an inhospitable area.
I live in SoCal so I thought you would even see more homeless migrants because of the weather. However, from speaking with homeless I would say in my experience most have lived in the area for a long time, with only one beach bum guy I spoke with who actually was "fresh off the bus". Until I saw the statistics though I was also under this misconception.
Anyway, hospitality isn’t really a question of weather as Alaska for example has relatively high rate of homelessness and NYC one of the highest. Mississippi on the other hand has the lowest rate despite mild winters and significant poverty.
The stigmatization and criminalization of not paying taxes to lease a deed of property is a big problem, this planet as a whole belongs to all forms of life inhabiting it, not just the primates that choose to play that game.
This problem was working much better in the 70s and 80s when their was a national framework for it. While SF and LA's government is flawed, this blame state/city is like blaming the individual ushers when the fans run on the field after a football upset. It was more of a structural failure than a local.
From an accounting standpoint, gross money in be money out is what matters. Per capita makes sense to compare relative benefit, but realistically Montana is small potatoes on the Federal Balance sheet. Measuring per sq mile seems like some ludicrous ploy by Alaska’s senator to screw over New Jersey.
Or, the same data with a very hard to read circular bar graph visualization:
https://howmuch.net/articles/federal-budget-receipts-and-exp...
The numbers are actually pretty straightforward. "Expenditures is a broad category and covers a variety of things, including direct payments to people like Social Security, contracts for local governments, wages for federal workers and sub-contracting work."
Infrastructure costs are U shaped where extreme density is expensive, but so very low density. Mail delivery is a clear example where ultra low density just makes things more expensive.
The selective "my tax dollars would never" is anti-american