Here's a recent statistic from San Francisco:

"City officials said that 40% of the unhoused population surveyed in San Francisco came from another California city or even from out of state, increasing from 28% in 2019." Source: https://www.ktvu.com/news/tickets-outside-san-francisco-requ...

This guy's article would lead you to believe that number is closer to 8%.

A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

I don't believe these papers/studies, etc. that continue to purport the plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing. All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society.

The reason these people are not living with relatives isn't "explained by the inability of the family and friends of potentially homeless people to afford extra living space." It's because they have burned through all ties with friends and family as a result of their drug use.

The unsheltered go where they can do their drugs unbothered and even get a lot of free services. Los Angeles LAHSA (the department tasked with tackling homelessness) budget has ballooned from $75 million in 2016 to a whopping $875 million in 2024. Anyone with a pair of eyeballs can see how all that spend has actually made the unsheltered problem worse based on our existing policies and likely is just attracting a lot more drug addicts.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15136