I'm not sure you can make such a bold claim. If California is spending money on homelessness, then all things being equal, it will attract more homeless people than if it didn't spend money on homelessness. Some percentage of these homeless will come from other states. For any two states there is going to be migration of homeless between the 2, and the attractiveness of the state is very much effected by the amount of spending for homelessness. So California could very much be net importing homeless from many of the other states that choose not to spend on homelessness (thus offloading their homelessness problem).
I actually think this a fundamental problem with homelessness, any locality that chooses to affect change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally. Worse, is it's all a collective action problem where each player can benefit by not spending on the problem. So there is constant pressure to do nothing with the problem. I wish I had solution to these kinds of problems, they're the type of thing that requires governments to tackle, but it quickly becomes political, and I'm not sure it gets any easier there either.
Homeless people aren't stupid and they aren't immobile house plants, they respond to incentives like everyone else. If you want to live on the street and do drugs and be crazy the best place to do that is CA because the weather is great and they largely don't enforce vagrancy, shoplifting, and drug laws and they spend billions of dollars subsidizing homelessness (free needles etc etc etc).
>>> "any locality that chooses to affect[sic] change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally"
I think the people who think they are positively effecting change are usually actually making things worse. There's a difference between making it easier to be homeless (ie the CA way) and making it easier to not be homeless (ie a way that might work).
I certainly agree that how you spend money could just encourage people to become homeless, I’d hoped to convey that idea by talking about percentage increases in the homeless population, since not every new homeless is going to be a transplant. I wish there were better guides as to what spending actually helps. I suspect soup kitchens are a general positive good, but they may only make it easier to be homeless by allieviating some of the pain. I personally think access to housing should be a basic constitutional right, but I’m also weary of things like projects and tenements which may purpetuate more problems than they help.
But I think we agree that this is not an easy issue.
Unrelated, I thought I was using affect correctly, but seeing sic in your quote and spending a few minutes googling, I still don’t know if effect was more correct than affect :/
In the absence of data, this is pure conspiracy. And considering the obvious issue of California being one of the most expensive places to live on the continent, it seems like quite a stretch.
There is an important phrase in economics, “all other things being equal”. That phrase covers the idea that if you chose another state that was equally expensive as california, and was equavalent in every other aspect, then this one difference would have this expected effect. You are correct that I don’t have emperical evidence to cite, and it would be a very very difficult experiment to run on a state level. But economists definitely try to run these kinds of experiments trying to find as similar as possible locals to try to answer the kinds of questions as “do changes in spending attract things that the money are spent on?”.
Now, I consider what I said to be self evident, but I certainly accept that my line of reasoning may be flawed, and it is possible that spending on homelessness does not increase incentives that attract homelessness. I’m extrapolating from the belief that spending money on business attracts business, but that may also be incorrect as popular as that idea is.
I actually think this a fundamental problem with homelessness, any locality that chooses to affect change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally. Worse, is it's all a collective action problem where each player can benefit by not spending on the problem. So there is constant pressure to do nothing with the problem. I wish I had solution to these kinds of problems, they're the type of thing that requires governments to tackle, but it quickly becomes political, and I'm not sure it gets any easier there either.