Yes, homelessness is still a housing problem (even if some homeless are from out of state)

Supporters of new housing tend to believe that high housing costs increase homelessness, because expensive cities tend to have the largest number of homeless people.  Recently, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute has argued that homeless people are attracted to Los Angeles because they are attracted to places “where it is easy to camp, do drugs, and commit crimes…”

He reached this conclusion by asking a sample of 200 homeless people: “Where are you from?”  53 percent were from outside Los Angeles County, and “[n]early 40 percent” were from outside California.   Evidently, Rufo believes if you were not born in Los Angeles, you came there to gorge yourself on fentanyl or indulge yourself with social services.  The problem with this claim is that most NON-homeless people in Los Angeles County are also not born locally. According to table B05002 in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, only 5.05 million of the county’s 9.75 million residents were born anywhere in California, or 52 percent.   Because Rufo admits that 60 percent of Los Angeles homeless are from California, this means that homeless people are actually more likely to be from California than the citizenry as a whole.   (On the other hand, I am assuming that “from California” and “born in California” are the same thing, which may not be true.)

Moreover, as a logical matter, not being “from California” is not the same as “moving to California to use drugs without being arrested.”  If you moved to California after high school, was a stable, sober worker at first, became an alcoholic, lost your job, and then became homeless, obviously you a) are not from California yet b) did not move to California to use drugs with impunity.

Rufo is on firmer ground when he cites a Rand Corporation study showing that 36% of homeless people were not residents of Los Angeles County when they became homeless (p. 24).  Anyone who became homeless and then moved to Los Angeles for social services or warm weather would be in this category.  However, a large minority of these 36% were from other parts of California (presumably including nearby counties): only 22% of Los Angeles homeless became homeless out of state.

I have no idea how many of these 22% moved to California for the reasons suggested by Rufo.  But even if all of them did, Los Angeles still has an astoundingly high level of native homelessness.  According to a Brookings Institution estimate, Los Angeles has the fifth highest rate of homelessness among American cities (697 per 100,000 residents).  If we subtract the 22 percent, Los Angeles’s homeless rate is 544 per 100,000 residents- about 80 percent higher than the 49-city average, still the eleventh highest among 49 cities surveyed, and higher than all but five non-California cities.   Los Angeles has the third highest level of unsheltered homelessness (472 per 100,000 residents).  If you shave off 22 percent of that number, Los Angeles would have 369 per 100,000 residents, three times the 49-city average, the eighth highest rate among 49 cities, and higher than every non-California city but one (Portland).  

In other words: even if a significant percentage of Los Angeles homeless were the sort of social service tourists described by Rufo, Los Angeles would still have far more locally-grown homeless residents than less expensive cities- which supports the idea that yes, homelessness is a housing problem after all.