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Visit any major west coast city. You'll quickly know the answer.
Spoiler for everyone not on the West cosst?
The data shows that the biggest factor is the increase in rental rates relative to income. Drugs and mental health problems are more of symptoms of poverty and a terrible health care system.
If you want to put it in the simplest terms, the increase in homelessness is caused by wealth and income disparity.
Damn, who knew the reason they were poor was because they don't have money. Now watch as nothing is done about it because we treat the poor like shit.
Yup. And there will be continued efforts to completely ignore every bit of data that definitively shows the ruling ideology to be the cause of the problems because that would mean rich people gaining wealth at a slower pace.
In the last ~4 years, the homeless population seems to have exploded. Shanty towns and zombie RVs everywhere. Trash everywhere.
Personal and commercial property vandalism and crime seems more prevalent, though I don't have numbers to back up that anecdote.
Open air drug use has also become unsettlingly normalized.
All this to say, homelessness certainly seems epidemic, at the very least on the west coast.
But the question is "WHY is there a homeless epidemic?"
Oh, sorry.
Everyone on the west coast would be inclined to say, "it's a complicated issue" and then continue to do virtually nothing.
Seems to me like the usual suspects. Financial hardship, drug abuse, and mental illness. All intertwined.