Health care, homelessness and housing in California: Have Gavin Newsom’s promises panned out?
When he first won office in November 2018, Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to build millions of homes to alleviate a housing shortage, end chronic homelessness, and institute a statewide single payer health care system, three of his most frequently talked-about commitments on the campaign trail.
Six years later, he’s survived a recall and myriad other failed attempts, weathered a pandemic, and coasted to reelection amid speculation about his ambitions for higher office.
Newsom cannot run again after November 2026, when his second term ends. That leaves him roughly 22 months to burnish his record. Some of those initial goals have since been scaled back, like his housing pledge. Others, like a $12 billion plan to housing chronically homeless people, are ongoing. His allies, while acknowledging that he has not enacted a single-payer health care system, say he’s come the closest of any governor to ensuring Californians have universal access to care regardless of their immigration status.
‘Stretch goals’
Earlier this week, the governor told reporters the state no longer faced a projected $2 billion deficit thanks to a stronger stock market, but cautioned that could change by May when he submits his revised budget proposal. And while he has a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature, leaders like Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said they want to focus more on making life affordable for Californians than sparring with incoming President Donald Trump.
Political consultant Dan Schnur said in an interview it doesn’t matter whether Newsom’s goals ever come to full fruition, calling him one of America’s “savviest politicians” who frequently makes bold promises and then walks them back when they fail to materialize.
“Newsom has set himself up to be in a position where whether he keeps his campaign promises or not doesn’t matter,” said Schnur, who teaches at UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California. He pointed towards Newsom’s initial “sizable” housing pledge, when the governor said he would push to build 3.5 million homes by 2025. Newsom later pared that down to 2.5 million units by 2030, calling his original commitment a “stretch goal.”
“Theoretically, he can apply that [label] to any promise,” Schnur said. And because Newsom is now termed out, “he can just shrug and say it doesn’t matter. It’d be a different conversation if we were talking three years ago.”
‘Flat growth’ in homelessness
The state has received permit requests for 1.3 million units statewide since 2018, according to data from the Department of Housing and Community Development. That’s in addition to the governor’s ongoing $12 billion plan, which he announced in May 2021, to finance the construction of thousands of units to house people who are homeless and living on the street.
A report published in April by the State Auditor’s Office said the California Interagency on Homelessness had spent billions of dollars to address homelessness between fiscal years 2018 and 2021 but had not effectively tracked how the money was spent. The governor’s office said at the time that it “added strong accountability and reporting requirements for local governments that receive state funding.”
Newsom defended his homelessness record again when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development published its annual national homelessness population report at the end of December. The federal agency recorded the highest-ever population of homeless people since it began counting in 2007.
California is home to both the highest number of homeless people (187,084) and of unsheltered homeless people in the U.S. Yet Newsom touted the state’s “significant decline in the growth (of homelessness),” citing a drop in veteran homelessness and because the state overall saw a “flat” 3.1% growth in homelessness compared to 18% nationwide.
“That is a very good statistic as it relates to the work we’re doing to get people sheltered and to get people the support that they deserve,” Newsom said at a press conference in Oakland. “Forty states saw larger increases. In California, we’re making progress, but we have to continue to do more.”
Championing single-payer health care
During his first campaign, Newsom said if elected he would prioritize a single-payer, guaranteed health care access system, earning him the support and endorsement of the California Nurses Association. Subsequent legislation failed to reach his desk.
“Making quality health care affordable is a top priority for our administration,” Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in response to a request for comment. “(We’re working) to reign in outrageous health care costs and make health care more affordable.”
In the years since, he’s signed legislation expanding Medi-Cal regardless of residents’ immigration status, leading to both the largest drop in the uninsured population of any state and the lowest rate of uninsured residents overall, according to Amanda McAllister-Wallner, the interim executive director of Health Access California, a health care advocacy organization.
Health Access began advocating nearly a decade ago for the state to remove barriers to health care access for undocumented people, which “really took off when Newsom started championing it,” McAllister-Wallner said in an interview.
“His administration has a lot to hang their hats on when it comes to accessibility,” she said, pointing to his support for the creation of the Office of Health Care Affordability and its recent pledge to cap health care costs at 3% by 2029.
More recently, the administration also directed the state Health and Human Services Agency to determine what federal waivers it would need to finance a statewide single-payer system, which McAllister-Wallner said would be difficult under the incoming administration.
“That was hard in a friendly administration (under Joe Biden). You can imagine what that’s like in a Trump administration,” she said.
This story was originally published January 9, 2025 at 1:39 PM.
