This topic is of interest to me however I'm posting with vague generalities out of caution for occupational reasons. This is from a LEO related perspective however I'm not LEO.
1. The junkies/users need about $45-60 a day to buy food and their drugs of choice. There are a lot of government services and most of these people use them. This is discretionary money and this doesn't include treatment at methadone clinics.
I thought a heroin addiction was a lot more expensive. Wow. No wonder there are so many addicts.
2. Homelessness, drugs and mental health are all tied together. They are not separable and you can't treat one or two and ignore the others. Digging deeper, it's not against the law to homeless, an addict or have mental health problems and so long as you aren't a danger to yourself or others, you can live on the street. That means if you want to avail yourself of government services you can and then you can simply walk out without consequence and most of them do just that. Unless you can compassionately hold people (yes that conjures up images of Cuckoo's Nest) this is not a winnable battle.
This was not the case until relatively recently. It wasn't until the middle of the last century that the standard for requiring people to get treatment was changed from the basis of "medical need" to "a danger to self and the community". The number of treatment beds in the US has tragically plummeted over the past 60 years to almost nothing as a result. Now we house the severely mentally ill in county jails, for the most part. Sad. The psychiatric community thought in the 1950's that the emerging classes of anti-psychotic drugs was going to more or less solve mental illness in the general population, but boy were they wrong about that.
I totally agree that you can't separate homelessness, drugs, and mental health as they all drive each other. Drug use causes mental illness, many mentally ill self medicate with recreational drugs, etc.
3. A fair amount of people on the street don't have problems and just choose to be feral and live where there are no formal societal rules.
Yep. For lots of street people, life's too short to spend sober following rules. Take the consequences away, and there is no incentive for them to change. Maybe a third of street people fall into this category.
4. The bikes are stolen and quickly taken to a chop shop area that can be at the end of a trail, secluded under trees at an overpass where the bikes are quickly disassembled and then the parts are swapped to build a new bike. This way you can't ID your stolen bike because enough parts have been changed where it's your word against the thief, unless you've registered your bike.
Bikes are a perfect for crimes of opportunity. The cops here busted a bike chop shop operating out of a motor home a while back. Catalytic converters are a similar situation.
5. The bikes are sold on eBay.
6. Druggies and their dealers love Venmo. It's how they transact nearly all their business.
7. Heroin is on the wane and Fentanyl is the rapidly surging drug of choice. It's cheap, it's plentiful and it's less expensive than Heroin. You can thank China for making that possible.
Aren't they effectively the same for the user? Fentanyl is just 100's of times more concentrated.
8. You can easily spot a meth addict because they have scars and/or scabs on their shoulders, upper shoulder blades, face and torso. This is because meth makes your skin hypersensitive and itch and they scratch. Lather, rinse, repeat on a daily basis. A lot of homeless people take meth at night because it keeps them awake so they won't get beaten up or robbed. They are the ones you see crashed and sleeping hard during the day. Meth people also feel hot and this is why they remove their clothes.
There's more but that's the essence. Every community in every city, rich or poor, hot or cold weather all has the same problems.
Every user that I've ever known who got clean for any length of time has told me that the only way they were able to break free was hitting bottom. Whatever that meant for them. "I'm going to die", "I'm losing my family", "I'm losing my career", "I'm going to jail", etc.