‘No more excuses’ on homelessness, Newsom warns counties. Has California done all it can?
Gov. Gavin Newsom made an unannounced visit to Los Angeles Thursday to help CalTrans crews clean up a homeless encampment beneath a freeway and chide local leaders for not moving hastily enough to follow suit.
The visit came two weeks after the governor issued an executive order directing state agencies to clear encampments from state-owned land. It pushed cities and counties to do the same.
In recent years under Newsom’s leadership, the state has bolstered resources for people with behavioral and substance use disorders and removed barriers to order people into treatment.
A final barrier was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in June. Now Newsom is frustrated with the pace some local governments are moving at to clear encampments. And he’s threatening to withhold funding from counties that don’t make swifter progress on an issue that has beleaguered the state for years.
“There’s no more excuses,” he said Thursday near an LA freeway, wearing work gloves with a pile of debris from the cleared encampment behind him. “You got the money, you got the flexibility, you got the green light, you got the support from the state.”
Newsom praised Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for reducing homelessness in her city by 10.4% and said his criticisms were aimed at counties.
“As a former county mayor, I intimately appreciate the role of counties as it relates to their service. Counties need to do more,” he said. “If we don’t see demonstrable results, I’ll start to redirect money … and that will start in January.”
The governor’s frustrations over the stubbornly high rate of homelessness in California has been simmering for years. In late 2022 he rejected local governments’ homelessness plans for not being aggressive enough. And in December, he slammed Sacramento County for delaying implementation of a new law easing restrictions on new conservatorships for people with severe mental illness, after the county cited a lack of appropriate treatment facilities.
Has the state done all it can to prevent widespread homelessness?
As the number of homeless people in California has grown in recent years, so has pressure on state and local leaders to improve the situation.
Newsom’s terse warning to counties signals his diminishing willingness to be the face of California’s thorniest issue as he approaches the second half of his final term.
The state has poured $24 billion into trying to fix the problem: converting hotels into housing for homeless people and sending $4 billion in grants to local governments to spend on homelessness.
But the reason tents continue to line the street? There aren’t enough shelter beds and the steep cost of California’s housing markets mean people are pushed into homelessness daily, said Dr. Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UCSF and leading researcher on homelessness in California.
“The state had 40 years of really terrible local, state and federal housing policies that led us to this mess,” said Kushel, who also directs the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. “This didn’t happen overnight. … It’s hard to unwind 40 years of bad policies in four years.”
There are about 70,000 shelter beds in California, far less than the 180,000 people who are homeless on any given night.
A recent report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed California had only 24 affordable and available rental units for every 100 extremely low-income families. The report said the state needs about 1 million new affordable housing units to fix the housing shortage.
Ending homelessness requires local, state and federal governments to work together to build more housing and shelter beds, Kushel said. When he first campaigned for governor, Newsom pledged to build millions of new homes, but the shortage persists.
“We definitely need that kind of Marshall Plan” he ran on, Kushel said. “And frankly, we need the cooperation of the general public. We need to say yes to housing in every place we can. We need to recognize that the roots of this problem are absolutely economic.”
Would it be effective to withhold funding from local governments that aren’t doing enough?
Newsom threatened Thursday to redirect funding away from counties that don’t provide “demonstrable results.”
It’s unclear whether he was referring to local Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) grants, other housing dollars, or some other program.
But there’s no reason to believe it’s an empty threat: Newsom has shown a willingness to trim homelessness funding in recent years as the problem persists.
Mayors of large cities that struggle with homelessness have warned losing funding would reverse any progress made on the issue in recent years.
“This problem needs funding,” Kushel said. “I would love to see the state funding places that are using that funding for real solutions.”
Despite the seemingly intractable nature of California’s homelessness crisis, Kushel said there are places that have begun to see improvement.
“What success looks like is something like we’re starting to see in the city of LA,” she said. “They moved people not only from (being) unsheltered into shelter, which is great. More importantly, they also move people from shelter into permanent housing” despite pressures on the city’s housing market.
In Sacramento County, county officials reported a 29% decrease in homelessness earlier this year, though a major service provider questions that number.
“Let’s not get distracted,” Kushel said. “We know that there are things that work really well. Let’s just bring those to scale.”
This story was originally published August 9, 2024 at 4:19 PM.
