I spent nearly six years homeless. Long before that, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in Fairfield. Most of my homelessness was spent in California and I actually moved to Washington to get back into housing. I blog about homelessness and still talk with homeless people online and in person.

1. If you are destitute, traveling is a huge barrier to moving elsewhere.

There are parts of the US where the only road through there is a highway and it is illegal to walk on it. If you leave on foot, you are trekking into territory you aren't familiar with where there may be no readily available bathrooms or eateries etc. Think about how awful it is to travel by car into unknown territory, be in need of a bathroom and have no idea how long until you find one. Then multiply that by at least 100.

You can also die of exposure or run into other seriously scary stuff when traveling by foot. People can wind up homeless with zero prior experience with camping, hiking, etc. Being suddenly without housing in no way guarantees that you are prepared for hiking long distances to go elsewhere.

2. It's vastly easier to find food, bathrooms, support etc in familiar territory.

Being destitute and homeless is scary and problematic enough in familiar territory. Being destitute and homeless in unfamiliar territory is just mind bogglingly more challenging.

3. It's hard to get a job elsewhere first before moving under the best of circumstances.

Going someplace new while homeless to then look for work looks about as fun as jumping off a cliff not knowing what will be at the bottom. Maybe it's a river and you will be okay. Maybe it's jagged rocks.

4. Some homeless people are in the city they have lived in their entire life. They would find it intimidating to go elsewhere under good circumstances. It's too much to contemplate while destitute.

5. Adjusting to a new city is hard under the best of circumstances. It's unthinkable for some homeless individuals who are not only destitute, they may also be physically or mentally ill.

6. The OP seems to have some friends and family helping out. Moving may mean losing what remains of their support network.

7. They can have ties to the local community that are a barrier to leaving, such as having a child with an estranged partner and leaving would mean not seeing their kid again, or they have a job or they are on probation and forbidden from leaving, as just a sampling of issues that can be a barrier to leaving.

I managed to pull off relocating to get back into housing someplace cheaper because I have portable unearned income, I intentionally sought to develop portable earned income on top of that, I'm a former military wife who is no stranger to moving around, and I spent like three years researching where I could go to try to put my life back together. And that's just some of the obvious factors I can list.

I try to encourage homeless people to move someplace cheaper if they can. I try to provide useful information to support such moves and support other solutions.

But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute. Suggesting it for someone who is destitute utterly strips them of their humanity and completely ignores that they are a complex person with more facets to their life than their income and it really just does not work. Doing that tends to just make problems worse.

(This comment is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination.)