California homelessness goal pledged by Gavin Newsom lapses in failure today | Opinion
Five years ago today, on May 11, 2021, California Gov. Newsom announced his plan to “end family homelessness within five years.” Any objective grader would give Newsom an F on homelessness, and Californians should be worried if the state elects any of the top Democrats running for governor who gave him A’s and B’s.
That questionable list includes former Attorney General Xavier Becerra, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, former Rep. Katie Porter and billionaire Tom Steyer. Mahan has split his answer between a B for effort and a D for implementation, which is less fawning than the others but still a passing grade.
They may all want Newsom’s endorsement, but look at his record. According to 2024 data cited by the California Senate Housing Committee, “there were 25,369 people in families with children experiencing homelessness, 21% of which are unsheltered.”
A May report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that nearly 300,000 K-12 students in California were experiencing homelessness. The PPIC said, “a vast majority of these students are in the care of their parent or guardian, but about 3.3% are unaccompanied.”
Meanwhile, Newsom’s overall record on homelessness is equally dismal.
Once upon a time, as mayor of San Francisco, Newsom promised to end homelessness in ten years.
The city’s homeless population rose from 5,550 in 2005, Newsom’s second year as that city’s mayor, to 5,669 in 2011, his last year in office. The number of sheltered homeless actually fell over this period, from 2,895 to 2,298. But the unsheltered, those whose presence is painfully visible because they sleep on sidewalks, in bus stops, in parks, in encampments and in any other makeshift billet, grew from 2,655 to 3,371. In the years that followed his efforts, the city’s homeless population increased from 7,008 in 2013 to 8,323 in 2024. If there’s anything to brag about in these data, we’re not seeing it. California’s homeless ranks have also swelled. In 2018, the year of Newsom’s initial gubernatorial run, the overall population was not quite 130,000, according to federal data. The count in 2019, his first year in the governor’s mansion, went past 151,000. By 2022, his reelection year, it soared past 171,000. It gets worse. In 2023, more than 181,000 were homeless, and a year later, the count reached 187,000. Newsom desperately wants to be president. But if he can’t solve homelessness in San Francisco and California, how will he end it in a country where the number of homeless has reached a record high of 771,480, roughly 23 out of every 10,000 people? California taxpayers have poured more than $37 billion into anti-homelessness programs since 2019, not including the money that has been spent in the last year. That’s “about $245,000 per each of the 151,000 homeless people counted in 2019,” says UCLA economics professor and Hoover Institution senior fellow Lee Ohanian. To say this is a rotten return on an immense investment is stating the obvious. Yet policymakers want to keep spending as if more money will miraculously reverse the growing problem. It won’t.
California has spent more than a trillion dollars on anti-poverty programs since 2015, yet the supplemental poverty rate, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau, remains the highest in the country, tied with Louisiana. This reflects a strategy that substitutes spending for sound policy — one that moves beyond a housing-first approach to focus on mental health and addiction, adopts proven private-sector innovations, deregulates to spur housing development, and encourages new thinking
Though Newsom says he supports “increasing transparency and accountability for cities and counties’ use of state funding to address homelessness,” he vetoed a bill in 2024 that would have evaluated the state’s grant activity. Maybe it’s not the same Newsom who had a habit of promising to end homelessness yet failed on every occasion. Or maybe it is the same Newsom and he’s terrified that the results would make it awkward for him to promise that if elected president, he’d end homelessness across the country. Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
This story was originally published May 11, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California homelessness goal pledged by Gavin Newsom lapses in failure today | Opinion."