Tent cities, street chaos and public disorder have spread to every corner of California under his watch.
If California voters recall Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 14, homelessness will be a big part of the reason. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, homelessness in California rose 40% over the past five years. Though only 12% of the U.S. population lives in California, the Golden State hosts half of the nation’s street population. Certain neighborhoods, such as Los Angeles’s Skid Row, have been notorious for decades. Mr. Newsom’s problem is that under his watch, homelessness has spread to every corner of the state.
Most Californians disapprove of the governor’s handling of the issue. More than half of respondents to a July Inside California Politics/Emerson College poll rated his response to the problem as poor. In some parts of the state, homelessness tops even Covid-19 in surveys of public concern.
To many recall voters, the word “homelessness” connotes less a lack of access to housing than a state spiraling out of control. Homelessness means hepatitis outbreaks and deadly encampment fires. It means parks, beaches and sidewalks strewn with needles and human waste. It means urban chaos.
The proliferation of tents and permanently parked recreational vehicles on city streets in California has coincided with prodigious increases in government spending intended to solve the problem. Mr. Newsom’s most recent state budget committed $12 billion to addressing homelessness over the next two years. That expense, which the governor touts as “the largest in state history,” comes in the wake of successful ballot initiatives to raise taxes to pay for homeless programs. Examples include Measure H in Los Angeles County (March 2017) and Proposition C in San Francisco (November 2018).
Buckets of taxpayer money have been thrown at the problem. Los Angeles will devote $1 billion to homeless services over the next year. San Francisco will spend the same amount over two years. What will taxpayers in these cities get for their money? A proliferation of “comprehensive strategic plans” for combating homelessness, most of which call vaguely for some combination of less public disorder and more help for the homeless.
The lure of a compromise between hard and soft approaches makes homelessness resemble immigration, a challenge many hope to meet via a grand bargain between proponents of amnesty and proponents of enforcement. But compromise requires trust. Past attempts to resolve immigration impasses resulted in amnesty but no sustained increase in enforcement. Pushes to solve homelessness tend to result in permanently larger outlays for housing and services coupled with only temporary relief from public disorder.
As the recall campaign has heated up, Mr. Newsom has talked tougher about street chaos. “There is no compassion in leaving the status quo,” he said while helping to clear an encampment in San Francisco at the end of August. Californians could be forgiven for doubting whether the sudden forcefulness of his rhetoric will yield much follow-through.
The opposite of a comprehensive approach is a targeted one: Break up the problem and bear down on a few parts. Get rid of tents in high-value public spaces and commercial corridors like the Venice Beach boardwalk. Expand supervision for the seriously mentally ill via conservatorships and assisted outpatient treatment. Ease regulations on housing quantity and quality. Most cities once had neighborhoods loaded with shabby rental stock such as single-room-occupancy hotels. They were nobody’s idea of a great places to live, but few slept on the street during the heyday of the SROs.
Since the early 1980s, the progressive refrain on homelessness has been “housing, housing, housing.” State government and cities in California have invested heavily in subsidized housing for the homeless. During the 2010s, the number of permanent supportive housing units in California increased 65%, to 65,872 from 39,772. But the cost of constructing a single unit of housing for the homeless in California has soared, reaching as high as $750,000 in Los Angeles under the Proposition HHH initiative, which city voters passed in 2016 to pay for 10,000 units of housing for the homeless. It took more than three years to open the first unit.
In the most sanguine assessment, California’s subsidy programs have slowed homelessness’ rate of growth. They’ve yet to show much promise at reducing homelessness.
The river of public money for homelessness in California will keep flowing regardless of the recall’s outcome. The state’s millionaire tax generates more than $2 billion a year in dedicated funding for mental-health programs. All that money and all those programs haven’t been able to prevent Los Angeles and San Francisco from becoming exhibits A and B in the ongoing national crisis of untreated serious mental illness.
Mr. Newsom’s allies have tried to paint the recall as a “power grab” by “Trump Republicans.” In a pro-Newsom ad airing in California, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren ties the recall effort to controversial GOP voting-reform laws in Georgia and elsewhere. Governing magazine columnist Alan Greenblatt described the Newsom strategy as an effort to portray the recall as “a sort of sequel to the anti-Democratic assault on Congress on Jan. 6.”
Recall voters’ clearly expressed anger and frustration about homelessness belies that narrative. Heeding their pollsters, the leading candidates to replace Mr. Newsom take every opportunity to criticize his failings on homelessness. One candidate, John Cox, campaigned this summer alongside an 8-foot ball of garbage.
California’s pervasive homelessness problem—and its attendant pathologies—has nothing to do with what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. It has everything to do with why Gavin Newsom may soon be out of a job.
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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal