Could you dig up sources on that? Not challenging you, but as an Angeleno I've always believed this to be true myself. Curious what may actually be happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
This article is several years old but does a good job illustrating where people are moving to and from. It's also not any local government policy to bus homeless people to other cities. Most of the time it's family and friends buying them tickets.
> 70% from San Francisco
22% from rest of California
8% from out of state
I think the source is from this study: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R...
If I had a choice to be homeless here or homeless in the Bay Area, it's not even close. The weather here is terrifically worse than anywhere near the water in CA.
[1] https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-ange...
In 2018, the LA Times ran a series of articles on the homeless situation, and had reporters accompany county social workers. More than half of the homeless were from out-of-state, with Texas being the largest single source of homeless in LA. More than 3/4 of LA's homeless weren't local to LA.
The tricky is they had an expansive definition of "local": they were measuring where people most recently became homeless, which means almost any housing in SF for almost any amount of time meant they counted as local.