What NPR touches on briefly is that mental illness and drug addiction are the other two components. Simply housing people with these problems doesn't get rid of the problems, it just moves them to one place. (Every hotel in Seattle that houses the homeless sees a rise in crime in the neighborhood.)

NPR is recycling the liberal trope that all four West Coast cities (L.A., San Fran, Seattle and Vancouver, BC) have a housing crisis because those rich tech workers have driven all the prices up. While this is true, it is an oversimplification. All these cities share similar features besides milder weather - they offer good welfare benefits in a short amount of time, have liberal residents that tolerate (and, in some cases, encourage) bad behavior, and generally have police and prosecutors that have been ordered to leave them alone (and this was before COVID and all it's problems).

For what it is, it is a good article, but again, they focus too much on the housing issue and not enough on the social policies that encourage the homeless to stay in their rut.