Cupertino, home to Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable company, has a population of 58,000 people. It’s median household income is more than $134,000.

The homeless population of Los Angeles County would fill Cupertino.

It’s a staggering thought. There are more than 58,000 people here – men, women, and many children – living on the streets. And it is getting worse. The homeless population in the City of Los Angeles, according to the most recent count, has jumped 20 percent since last year.

In an environment where we are shielded by class and steel as we zip along on freeways, oblivious to the people hunkered down in tents under the overpasses, it is possible to be blind to this blight on our region.

To our credit, the residents of the city and county have voted to tax themselves to pay for housing and supportive services to address the problem, but its persistence is a shame we bear and to which we have paid too little heed.

The costs of homelessness, whether born of bad luck, mental illness, or drug addiction, are borne by us all as municipal resources are directed to this vulnerable population. We have chronicled in these pages how the momentum of businesses leaving downtown has increased as encampments have spread and, in many cases, gotten more dangerous.

And in an environment in which hospital emergency rooms are increasingly becoming the primary provider of health care for a growing number of residents, it is hard to ignore the costs passed along to the rest of us in this public health crisis.

In the wake of the most recent homeless count, Providence Health & Services, a Catholic nonprofit health system, came out with a report showing it spent in excess of $55 million last year on “charity care,” a figure which does not include the $185 million in Medicaid shortfalls it covered. This for one health system in Los Angeles alone.

The business community must be a vocal, vigilant stakeholder in the process of deploying the hundreds of millions of dollars we have appropriated to address homelessness in Los Angeles. Anything less is an abrogation of our collective responsibility.