Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.
Why? Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times rather than junkies who moved in for better weather and benefits, shipping them out seems completely reasonable.
And where will you ship them to? Smaller cities don't want them and they'll be inhospitable enough they won't want to be there either - they'd rather ship themselves back where they can stay close to their drug sources and still rotate with their panhandling around enough that the locals don't get too familiar with them.
So if you want to do something about the vagrant encampments being in the city you live in, the most effective thing that you can do is move to where they aren't, which is what everyone else who cared that much about it already did long ago.
Morality and optics of forced relocations aside, because it leads to cycles of retaliation by the places they are shipped to.
> Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times
I don't know about LA, but this has been studied for SF, repeatedly, and they are.
My friends who couldn’t afford Santa Monica moved east. Riverside, San Bernardino, etc. They bear horrible commutes but did what they needed to do to afford housing for their families.
Why do we just assume that homeless have some god given right to be housed precisely where they happen to be sleeping. Regular people migrate all the time to accommodate their own economics. Let’s build homeless some cheap housing. And let’s do it somewhere in the middle of no where where land is cheap and building costs are low.
I fail to see how this is controversial if it isn’t controversial for my friends who voluntarily do the same.