I recently heard a tech-industry veteran — a friend, born on the East Coast — suggest that proposals to build low-income housing here were misguided because of the high cost of California real estate. A more efficient alternative, he explained, would be to construct homeless shelters somewhere cheap, like Nevada. Aside from the unpleasant specter of the police forcing desperate mothers and children onto buses bound for desert concentration camps (and how long would you have to be homeless to get exiled?), my friend’s remark helped me see what lurks beneath Mr. Keller’s contention that wealthy people have a right to be here because they “got an education, work hard, and earned it.”

Americans have been coming to California to make it big for so long — on wagons bound for the Gold Rush, via Route 66 for 1950s aerospace jobs — that a tacit understanding flourishes in certain quarters by which California is less a homeland full of locals like anywhere else than a reality show with a self-deportation approach to voting contestants off the island. As soon as you can’t pay the bills, and regardless of whether your great-grandparents were born here, you’re expected to get lost, or at least move to Seattle.

Discussion of causes, along with the noise about weather and drug addiction, typically includes Ronald Reagan’s evisceration of federal funding for subsidized housing and public mental health hospitals. Conventional homeless shelters get blamed, too, because of their tendency to separate romantic partners and forbid both pets and the storage of belongings — such that a few nights indoors might cost a person love, companionship and all their survival gear.

Frigid New York City, however, has more homeless per capita than San Francisco or Los Angeles, while only 7 percent of Los Angeles homeless arrived less than a year ago, fewer than the 8.5 percent of all Los Angeles County residents to have done so, suggesting that sunshine is no more of an inducement to the destitute than to anyone else. National surveys also find that 20 percent to 25 percent of the homeless have serious mental health problems and an estimated 26 percent abuse drugs. San Francisco has also pioneered a new model of homeless shelter, known as a Navigation Center, that invites entire encampments — pets included — to come in from the cold together.

The economic factors that correlate most strongly with homelessness, furthermore, according to research published in 2001 by the Public Policy Institute of California, are precisely those that bedevil every aspect of California life: extreme income inequality combined with upward-spiraling housing costs. For decades, even as employment booms have led to population booms, California voters — myself among them — have fought to freeze the good life in amber by resisting increases in housing density and mass transit.

Between 2012 and 2015, for example, the Silicon Valley town of Mountain View gained 17,921 jobs but only 779 units of housing. A report by the McKinsey Global Institute recently ranked California 49th out of the 50 states in per capita housing units. With income gains going mostly to the elite, rents skyrocket, the middle class competes for the cheapest places on the market, and the very poorest end up on the street.

Viewed in this light, sidewalk tents are merely a rational response to an incoherent society.

Californians came together for public works in the mid-20th century — freeways, public housing, the finest public schools and universities in the nation. Caring for the least among us, however, has never been a hallmark of California liberalism, and our most notable innovations of the past 50 years have been more about environmental conservation, tolerance and technology — sustainable agriculture, gay marriage, Snapchat — than formation of mutual aid societies, except for communes and cults that end with industrial-scale marijuana cultivation or mass suicide. The technology industry takes this to a millennial extreme by celebrating the moral neutrality enshrined in Google’s corporate motto, “Don’t Be Evil.”