When I lived in Atlanta across the street from a homeless shelter, I frequently saw vans from rural areas come in and drop off homeless. One shelter (not the on

When I lived in Atlanta across the street from a homeless shelter, I frequently saw vans from rural areas come in and drop off homeless. One shelter (not the one I lived next to) even sent out fliers to rural communities soliciting their homeless to come there. The one time I got to talk to the driver of one of the vans, he said he ran a church that simply didn't have the means to take care of the homeless that popped up in their community so the only thing they could do was give them a ride to a city that had facilities for them. It didn't sound like they were intentionally dumping their problems on the city, they simply didn't have the means to do anything for them. The gas it took to drive the van to the city and back probably was a dent in their limited budget. Even if that community only brought one homeless person to the city every other year, when you think of how many rural communities that struggle financially there are, it adds up to lots of homeless ending up in big cities. The bad thing for the homeless is that even if their support network back home was broken, there was some possibility of repairing it. Once they're moved to a big city where they have no social network other than the shelter, it's difficult to recover.