We have always had I homeless population in California, especially LA, SF and Oakland. Even under more conservative governor like Deukmejian and Wilson because the mentally ill and drug addicts have been drawn to California.
But the last 3 years it seems the homeless population has exploded. We see tent cities in places where you would never expect them. The video here is along the Santa Ana River in the City of Orange near Angels Stadium. The city recently had the police clear the tent city out and many of them went to the Sanctuary City of Santa Ana. I feel a lot of this due to Jerry Brown essentially opening the doors of California to every illegal and derelict and they are flocking here in droves.
I live in the city of Pomona in the far eastern edge of LA County. I live in a community called Phillips Ranch. While 50% of Pomona is crap hole, it has some real nice areas too. Phillips Ranch is a real nice area. Pomona hasn’t had a lot of homeless until recently. There have been problems with the young homeless wandering into Phillips Ranch because of an area called “the jungle”, a heavily wooded area along the main drag where they have been tenting up and doing their meth. The started a fire last summer. The city has since fenced the area off.
I think a lot of these people have been flushed (literally) out of usually more secluded areas from flooding. In particular down in San Jose, there were hundreds living in the brush and thickets along coyote creek all the way up to Anderson dam.
A few years back I had to do some bacteria sampling on coyote creek from a good sized sewage spill. My upstream (from discharge point) “background” levels were 3000-4000 units per milliliter from all the homeless bathing and crapping in it.
This recent multi day flooding and high level discharge has probably done more to clean up the Bay Area than human efforts of the last 10 or 20 years...