Your link is from 2015. Missouri is still collating data from their 2017 count. The LA and Seattle counts are increases from 2016; for some reason Missouri didn't release a 2016 report. It'll be interesting to see what they have to say.

LA County has a population of about 10m. In 2015, there were 44,000 homeless. 60% of that is 26,000 - more homeless than Missouri but not stunningly more. In 2014, 20% of the country's homeless were in California but then, so was 11% of the nation's population.

I've never been homeless. I've known homeless, I ride among homeless, and I've been close to people who work with homeless. There's a stickiness to the situation - for whatever reason, these are people who don't have the resources or support network to start fresh somewhere else. It's one thing to pick up your life and move when you have resources; it cost me $7k to move my family from LA to Seattle and that was heading into a house we already owned. It'd be a lot less if we didn't have a house full of stuff but then the slip from "house full of stuff" to "living on the river" is a gradual one.

I just don't understand the appeal of spending all your money to live in LA.

I spend a substantial amount of money to avoid doing exactly that and I have no regrets. But there are people who were born there, who live there, who have friends there, who have family there, and it's what they know. I grew up in New Mexico - "Land of Enchantment" which we all called "the land of entrapment" because it's super easy to lose all the resources necessary to leave.

And Albuquerque is like an HO scale model of Los Angeles.