US sees biggest ever spike in homelessness as country sees record 11% year-over-year rise to nearly 600,000 rough sleepers: San Francisco and Oakland are ‘hotbeds’ with ‘drug tourists’ flocking to the cities

The United States has seen its biggest spike ever in homeless living on the streets – preliminary figures showed a record 11 percent increase in one year.

There are nearly 600,000 sleepers in cities and towns across America, and the jump from 2022 to 2023 so far is the highest since the government began tracking the data in 2007, according to the WSJ.

Places like Oakland and San Francisco in California have become breeding grounds for homelessness as people living on the streets are like “drug tourists” who arrive to get their hands on narcotics easily.

Also in Los Angeles and Seattle the numbers continue to increase year after year.

Using data from 300 entities that count the number of homeless people in different neighborhoods, the WSJ an estimated 577,000 people are sleeping on the streets so far this year, compared to 582,462 in all of 2022.

Last year’s total was dramatically higher than the 380,630 recorded in 2021 — a total that the WSJ says is lower due to pandemic counting disruptions.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is expected to release formal figures this year, but the preliminary study has shown how the problems of crime, drug abuse and lack of housing have exacerbated the number of homeless people.

And the number of chronically homeless people for 2022 – categorized as people with a disabling condition who have been away from home for a year or more – was 138,361.

This was up from 64,278 in 2021 – again thought to be lower than normal due to pandemic counting disruptions.

During the pandemic, there were relief programs all over the US to ease the burden of housing problems – including tenant eviction bans – but as these schemes die, homelessness has become an acute problem.

Cost and the lack of available housing are also big problems – as is the migrant crisis.

In city centers such as New York, an average of 2,300 migrants arrive from the border each week, straining housing and forcing many to take to the streets.

Just last week, hundreds of people were forced to sleep for days outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan as they searched for temporary housing.

Seneca Scott, founder of Neighbors Together Oakland, shared Fox about the California cities: “Oakland and San Francisco have become the promised land of milk and fentanyl, and people are coming here.

“People who are now homeless in Oakland don’t usually come from here. They are drug tourists. They come here for the safe and easy access to their drug of choice and the opportunity to also steal to support those habits because there is no rule of law.

“Our homeless crisis has contributed to our property value dropping. If you combine that with the eviction moratorium and other government policies, we now have a situation in which the value of people’s homes plummets.’

According to city data, the number of homeless people in Oakland has grown to more than 5,000 since 2015 — a 50 percent increase.

The devastating homeless crisis is also plaguing downtown LA – where seedy rickety tent cities are infested by drug-smoking zombie-like residents, while others sell stolen goods on street corners.

An estimated 42,260 people are currently sleeping in the City of Angels — a surprising 10 percent increase from last year, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported.

It emerged this week that the city had resorted to sending mobile teams with oxygen cylinders to Skid Row in a desperate attempt to prevent overdoses amid the crippling opioid crisis.

Employees of the nonprofit Homeless Health Care Los Angeles now patrol the streets between winding rows of makeshift housing where homeless people can be seen sleeping among the few possessions they own – while others in poor health inject or smoke illegal substances.

The number of homeless people in LA has more than doubled in the past decade.

According to the LAHSA’s latest data, there was a 9 percent increase in homelessness in Los Angeles County between 2022 and 2023, with the homeless population now totaling 75,518 people.

The city of Los Angeles saw an estimated 10 percent increase to a total of 46,260 people.

And in Seattle, residents were outraged after hundreds of tiny homes intended to house the homeless have been locked in storage as sprawling homeless camps grow.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), the agency charged with coordinating the city’s homeless services, has been on the run because of the delay in deploying the miniature homes.

Komo News revealed that there are at least 204 unused houses locked up and guarded by a fence, leaving people sleeping on the street.

Seattle’s homeless population grew nearly 38 percent from 2020 to 2022, with about 7,620 people reportedly living outside in King County.