Is There a Homeless Crisis?

My understanding is that those tend to develop when the rural population moves en masse to the cities for better opportunity. The people in those slums are mostly "normal" and have familial support networks; they're just really poor and there aren't enough houses for them. Also, third-world countries have much less state capacity to clear the slums and enforce order.

The problem in the US is quite different. The US has already urbanized, so there isn't a flood of internal migration to the cities. Instead, homeless people are either mentally ill or are "normal" but can't afford the cost of housing. The "normal" people are usually able to access assistance like shelters and eventually get back on their feet, maybe moving to a lower cost-of-living area, or maybe moving in with family. The chronically homeless are usually mentally ill. Also, the US has very high state capacity to clear encampments and slums when it chooses to do so. You can generally bet on the US government to enforce the property rights of landowners and evict encampments on private land.

There are "a lot" of chronically homeless in the US, but there are orders of magnitude more slum dwellers in the third-world. The types of people are very different in each situation, and the relationship between these people and the government are very different as well.

There's simply no way for large-scale slums to develop in the US.

Many lose all their stuff during the sweeps. Which causes them to move to another area and set up a new area to live. So many encampments now have zombiefied people who can't even stand up straight, much less fight against a system determined that they are a lost cause, have no value economically or even as a fundamental human being.

After seeing this in CA but also all across the country as I have travelled the best I can compare it to is that we have state and federal run public execution mazes that hide in plain sight nearly everywhere.

Many are provided with the money, drugs and equipment to injest the drugs, and being homeless is a maze of misery designed to keep you trapped inside.

Outside of this the amount of either not caring and pretending this isn't happening or the more common outright hatred for someone in this position. It's almost like everyone wishes this system of execution would move faster to clear the problem up.

The whole system is a scam from the Government, courts, police and homeless services... Not every shelter or food source, but very many are not getting services to those who need it.

It's surprising to seeing this economic hatred of this specific underclass in California most of all. Maybe with all the tech money, California lost sense of what matters and the inherent value in every human life, whether homeless or not.

It is a crisis on the level to call in FEMA and National Guards to sort of get these people clean so they can begin recovering.