I volunteer with the homeless in the Bay Area and am tapped into the "scene" as it were and so can speak to this. Absolute numbers of homelessness are on the r

I volunteer with the homeless in the Bay Area and am tapped into the "scene" as it were and so can speak to this. Absolute numbers of homelessness are on the rise, in the Bay Area there was a dramatic uptick in COVID. This is in part due to rising housing costs and because homelessness is a "cumulative" problem. The most common outcomes for homeless people are either get it together after 2-4 years or become so damaged they're never able to re-enter society. We've been accumulating at an ever increasing rate since the 90s. Visibility is also due to "management" side as you called it. IMO the driving force is the Supreme Court decision Martin v. Boise which forbids criminalizing homelessness. Previously a lot homeless were hidden out of necessity, being visible meant that police would confiscate your belongings and either jail you or move you forcefully. It's now quite easy to get restraining orders against cities who try to do this and people are doing it. For an example of how this can go see this article[0] on a Sausalito homeless encampment. The city spent north of $2 million trying and failing to disperse a homeless encampment. > If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it. Plenty of people are deeply intolerant of the homeless, but the reaction is usually to hurt not help. Homeless people I know are regularly brutalized by the police and even by ordinary citizens. The blocker here is that a large number of Americans don't believe that the state has a role in providing the necessities for life. This means its hard to fund programs and even if you do there's no institutional expertise to run them with any competency. IMO we're decades away from a solution. [0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sausalito-homeless-encampment-17531723.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sausalito-homele...