people who choose to be homeless in coastal California have only first world problems. You can rent a very nice three bedroom house with two bathrooms and a garage and a yard in Modesto for $1000 a month, but it is not hip or near the beach.
It's the drug, sadly by criminalizing cocaine it created a demand for a cheap alternative and there was meth.
But crack heads don't have the stamina to rip all the pipes out of someone's house, they don't generally have the drive to build elaborate shantytowns.
Cocaine is actually fairly easy to quit and low on the scale of addictiveness, relative to meth for sure. Crack heads neglect their kids, meth heads abuse them.