Perhaps this speaks to your point, but the situation is just as bad in the outlying Central Valley cities. There are currently people camping on the embankment of Highway 120 through Manteca. Stockton's situation only kept getting worse after the 2008 recession, and there are tent camps in drastically unsafe areas along the freeway shoulder there as well. This has been going on for years.
It's definitely a regional problem, not just something isolated to a single city. I often wonder if people move around from town to town as their connections in the community shift, or they get a bad rep with local law enforcement... a friend who was formerly an EMT had an anecdote of a woman he picked up in Antioch for a meth-induced mental health incident who he saw, years later, stumbling around outside the hospital in Oakland in much the same state.
I think it's entirely possible that people come to SF or LA as an intentional destination and then, over time, get flushed towards the outlying cities, if they don't get ground into the dirt first. The current Atlantic article about the changing meth trade features a transgender person on skid row in LA who came there from the Midwest, believing that they could eventually gain access to gender reassignment surgery: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
It's definitely a regional problem, not just something isolated to a single city. I often wonder if people move around from town to town as their connections in the community shift, or they get a bad rep with local law enforcement... a friend who was formerly an EMT had an anecdote of a woman he picked up in Antioch for a meth-induced mental health incident who he saw, years later, stumbling around outside the hospital in Oakland in much the same state.
I think it's entirely possible that people come to SF or LA as an intentional destination and then, over time, get flushed towards the outlying cities, if they don't get ground into the dirt first. The current Atlantic article about the changing meth trade features a transgender person on skid row in LA who came there from the Midwest, believing that they could eventually gain access to gender reassignment surgery: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...