California and Vancouver has more homelessness because you can survive in the streets with the weather there far easier than Toronto.
It also has a network effect, their friends are out there so they want to go. More homeless people the more community they have and less hassle from the police. Same with drug users, the more junkies around the more drug dealers there will be to serve them. Most of those westcoast homeless areas turn into open drug markets which you wouldn't find in Toronto. A lot of the opioid stuff is coming from Asia so it's possible being closer to the west coast shipping ports attracts more users.
The biggest problem is certainly drug use. I've never been there, but I've heard horror stories, and exchange horror stories from California.
My other points, especially health care, still stand - and Chicago is comparable, weather-wise, to Toronto, and still contained far more visible homelessness, and things like needles on the sidewalk, that I just rarely, rarely see here.
Isn't SF the most liberal city in the US but has one of the worst homeless problems in the US?
I see needles all the time living downtown in Toronto. Especially when I lived near Parliament and Queen there were tons everywhere. Even now near Cityplace people constantly complain about needles on the FB group.
The difference with better . weather is that you see the homelessness a lot more in urban areas. But you're right the weather is not a good indicator it seems, although far more west coast cities seem to be having a problem with it: https://blogs-images.forbes.com/niallmccarthy/files/2018/12/... Numbers alone is probably a poor metric for it being a 'problem', since Manhattan was famously 'cleaned up'.
> Half of all people experiencing homelessness are in one of five states - California (129,972 people), New York (91,897), Florida (31,030), Texas (25,310) and Washington (22,304).
Four out of five of those states also rank as the most 4 most populated states in the union so there is some unwanted skewing going on there; a better metric would probably be per capita. The maps in the 2018 AHAR[0] are done that way for an easy comparison.
It also has a network effect, their friends are out there so they want to go. More homeless people the more community they have and less hassle from the police. Same with drug users, the more junkies around the more drug dealers there will be to serve them. Most of those westcoast homeless areas turn into open drug markets which you wouldn't find in Toronto. A lot of the opioid stuff is coming from Asia so it's possible being closer to the west coast shipping ports attracts more users.