Seriously, they have. That’s the “great” thing about current housing markets - many of these people aren’t even poor. They have jobs, and they’re making what should be, what used to be middle class wages. It’s just that the number of cities where a “middle class” wage isn’t actually a living wage has increased.
Oh, but they totally haven’t! It’s just illegal to sleep in your car on the street. You can still sleep in your car on private property, so that’s fine! Also, sure, you can’t sleep in public parks, or on sidewalks, but there’s always homeless shelters! Assuming you don’t have a pet or children, haven’t been banned, or - really it doesn’t matter because there’s not sufficient room anyways. So there you have it - they’re totally not outlawing homelessness itself so long as you have private property on which to sleep or because there are, in theory if not in reality, shelters.
This has been true for California as a whole since it became a state - people move here without anything lined up because it seemed like a place of opportunities, or just a cool place to be (or at least a warm place to be homeless). Lots of marginally employable people ended up here, and as long as it was affordable, they could survive, if barely. It hasn’t been affordable for decades, though. I’ve been seeing people sleeping in cars for most of my life (and cleaning up after they used my sidewalk for their toilets). Now the problem is so much worse because you can’t even get housing if you do have a job. Which is probably why we have a quarter of the country’s homeless population.
But they’ve got great imaginations - they’re imagining that the economy is suddenly doing well, after all! I was reading that consumer spending among the poor and middle class is up. This is odd because wages for those groups haven’t gone up at all in real money terms (the opposite, in fact). The extra spending turns out to be entirely from savings and newly-taken-on debt. The “good” economy amounts to more people living more precariously. I’m reminded of an interview of a Trump supporter immediately after his election. Obamacare had been bad, she agreed, but this new Trump healthcare plan was working out really great for her family. It was, of course, still Obamacare.
