The state certainly has a surplus of tax revenue but can't seem to fix our homeless problem which is the largest in the nation.
I really think that all the other states are contributing people into the homeless count there. Someone on here said a while back that they thought it was mostly californians, but I'll never believe that. They go there from red states which likely crack down more on the issue, or cold states. For example, it's 16 degrees right here, and it's probably like 60 degrees warmer over there right now. If someone is homeless here, there is hardly a reason for them to stick around
Supply/demand, in part. We have more people, and people want to live here. We also have plenty of rich NIMBYs who refuse, at the local level, to let more housing be built. And a lot of areas are zoned only for single-family housing, so things like apartment complexes can't be built.
From what I can tell, you have a lot of tech work, and highly paid tech workers probably don't really like low income housing too much. And likely, you don't have a base of stable blue-collar jobs there anyway, if that area of the country ever did. It seems like it was always more of a frontier/innovation type area over there. Here in the midwest, it was more about blue collar jobs at one time, but those kind of dried up, and now we are the 'rust' belt
Homelessness grew into what it is today for many reasons, but one that gets frequently overlooked is the emptying of mental institutions in the 60s and 70s. And even that isn't one reason but a complex combination of many factors.
That's one thing people like to say, but there are other things that are overlooked. In decades prior to that, in the great depression especially, and far before, the working class seemed like it traveled. This goes into the history of railroad hobos, and cowboys, who are their ancestors. Now those were the sorts of people that might have been kind of 'off,' but society had things for them to do - to travel and work, even to build a lot of the country.
