And yet as home prices have gone up the number of homeless remains pretty much about the same in California. So if the number of homeless don't really increase with the rise in home prices, then it makes me think there's really just always some % of the population that can't integrate and be productive in society regardless of the cost of housing or economic conditions.
I feel like there’s a vast number of potential variables here. For example, maybe rent prices have not yet caught up.
If you're on meth or fentanyl, it doesn't matter what the price of rent is--you can't afford it when you're using those drugs. I'm sure high rents don't help but pretending that homelessness is a housing issue is wrong--it's very clearly a mental illness and drug problem.
We know that only a large minority of the homeless abuse drugs routinely and that a similarly large minority are homeless due to mental illness. One would expect the two groups to overlap, so it seems reasonable to say that a large proportion of homeless people are neither mentally ill nor drug addicted, or at least that a large proportion aren’t homeless for this reason. Given that this is the case, you would expect a rise in the price of housing to correlate with a rise in homelessness. Since we don’t observe that, I’m guessing that there’s a variable we’re missing. Another potential explanation could be that people tend to move out of the high cost area before going homeless, so they don’t contribute to the homelessness statistics in the high cost area.