“To say it’s been a real wake-up call would be putting it mildly,” says Raphael Sonenshein, the director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University’s L.A. campus. “It continues to be the No. 1 issue voters keep pointing to. This is going to be the issue of our time for the next few years out here. I think it’s going to dominate the rest of the mayor’s administration.”

Homelessness is by no means a problem unique to Los Angeles, of course. It’s a national crisis of varying degrees in cities from San Francisco to Boston, and one that officials at all levels of government seem hard-pressed to know how to address. Ahead of the first presidential-primary debates, the issue has barely registered, if at all, on the 2020 campaign trail, even as the bursting field of Democratic contenders issues policy proposals to address a wide range of other social and economic problems. But the candidate’s may be forced to confront the issue before long if the crisis continues to spread across the country.

For the moment, the latest numbers here have provoked outraged press releases, mournful editorials, and millions of dollars for emergency street cleanup to attack the growing health risks, but not so much in the way of bold new ideas.

“It’s not an emergency like an earthquake,” Sonenshein says. “But it’s not something you can ignore. It’s something where the symptoms have to be addressed while you’re getting at the root causes. I think it’s going to be a tremendous challenge for elected and appointed officials. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an issue where there’s more money, more public support, and it’s still so difficult to carry out a fix.”

When Mayor Eric Garcetti announced in January that he would not run for president, in the aftermath of a contentious public-school teachers’ strike, he was likely spared a raft of negative campaign ads that could have surveyed a local landscape that too often looks like a slum. But just as surely, the latest numbers—which Garcetti called “heartbreaking”—have given national Republicans, already contemptuous of deep-blue California as the seat of resistance to Donald Trump, a handy new way to paint Los Angeles as the capital of a dystopian liberal culture.

“One of the great ironies is that the worst poverty and the greatest inequality is all in the city where the social-justice warriors live,” says Joel Kotkin, a prominent demographer at Chapman University in neighboring Orange County, which recorded a 43 percent increase in the homeless population over the past two years, after officials changed their counting methodology by sending survey teams to blanket the entire area. “California is becoming feudal.”

“This is a different kind of homelessness than we have seen before, and I don’t see that the politicians are doing much to solve it, because the housing situation is insane and the whole blue-collar industry in L.A. is disappearing,” Kotkin told me. “All that’s left is hospitality and tourism, which pays very badly.”