California officials keep claiming ‘progress’ on homelessness. Here’s where they’re wrong

A new report by a California advocacy group considers how one city dramatically reduced homelessness and identifies a solution that shouldn’t surprise anyone: more housing.

Nor should it come as a shock that the city successfully providing that and other effective responses to homelessness is in another state.

Housing is the unavoidable crux of any answer to homelessness with any hope of making a difference. But try telling that to anyone in power in California, where even the most supposedly urgent and earnest attempts to tackle the humanitarian crisis seem determined to avoid that fundamental reality.

Consider last week’s long-awaited agreement between city and county officials in Sacramento, a region beset by homelessness in its parks, neighborhoods and any given untended space big enough for a tent. The deal promises more sorely needed services and cooperation among local officials. But after months of negotiations under pressure from businesses, activists and voters, Sacramento County agreed to build enough shelter for just 200 more people — about one of every 50 now sleeping outdoors.

Among those most vociferously unhappy with the lack of progress on homelessness in Sacramento and every other jurisdiction in the state was Gov. Gavin Newsom. To prove his point, he declared last month that he was withholding $1 billion in state funding to help cities and counties shelter and support homeless people on the grounds that their goals were insufficiently aggressive.

Newsom’s announcement may have seemed counterproductive to the cause of reducing homelessness, but it was exquisitely timed, coming as it did five days before the election.

A few weeks after the voting stopped, however, Newsom released the funding almost as suddenly as he had bottled it up, explaining vaguely that “after honest and robust convos,” most of the threatened jurisdictions had “committed to higher goals on ending street homelessness.”

“Progress,” Newsom asserted.

A place that has made real progress on homelessness, Houston, is the focus of a new report by the California YIMBY Education Fund. Over the past decade, the Texas metropolis reduced its homeless population by over 60%, from nearly 8,500 to about 3,200. During the same period, California has seen its homeless population grow by about 40%, while Sacramento County has seen its homelessness nearly quadruple, from about 2,400 to nearly 9,300. With about a third the total population of Houston’s Harris County, Sacramento County has nearly three times as many homeless people and almost four times as many sleeping outside.

The difference, the report notes, is housing. In dramatic contrast to California, where about three-quarters of developable land was until recently restricted to single-family housing, Houston has no zoning code. It also produced nearly 10 units of housing for every thousand residents last year — twice the Sacramento region’s rate, three times the Bay Area’s and four times Los Angeles County’s. That means that even though Houston is growing far more rapidly than California’s major cities, its housing is far more abundant and affordable.

“The evidence is overwhelming that high housing costs are the primary driver of homelessness,” the YIMBY report says. “While other factors may contribute to homelessness on an individual level, housing costs are what explain homelessness as a large-scale social phenomenon.”

The California Legislature has begun to ease the state’s restrictions on housing in recent years, allowing Newsom to sign bills to loosen single-family zoning, undo parking minimums and ease redevelopment of disused commercial properties. These and other measures will gradually alleviate the housing shortage that has put over 170,000 Californians out of their homes.

That won’t produce results quickly, however, and neither will any state or local effort that fails to provide housing or at least shelter on a scale comparable to the crisis. Any bureaucratic box-checking that doesn’t answer the fundamental question of where people will go might be called progress, but that won’t make it so.

This story was originally published December 14, 2022 at 5:00 AM.