When I was a kid there were no “homeless”. There were bums and derelicts and they mostly slept in one room “hotels” or other types of flop houses. Now and then the cops would find a bum sleeping in an ally. The cop would call for the Paddy wagon and the bum would be taken to the drunk tank for the night. It worked very well.
The attraction of CA is that so long as you have free $ for cheap food & laundry, you can actually get by quite well in just a tent - no need for the overhead expenses of residing in an actual building, all you need is about 100 sq ft of lawn or forest.
The homeless problem was caused when the libs forced the insane asylums (as we called them back then) to open their doors and literally put people on the street.
Even today many/most of the homeless are hopelessly mentally ill but won’t allow themselves to be committed.