How California made homelessness worse – Latest News
California has about 12 p.c of the U.S. population, however about 45 p.c of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population, at about 116,000 people.
That is down from 124,000 in 2024, however up 7% from 2019, when Gavin Newsom took workplace as governor.
Gov. Gavin Newsom appears to be like on during a press convention at Friendship House Association of American Indians on January 16, 2026 in San Francisco. Getty Images
The complete quantity of homeless people, together with these in shelters, was over 187,000 statewide as of 2024.
Since 2019, the state has poured almost $37 billion into applications aimed toward serving to people get off the streets.
That beneficiant sum works out to virtually $200,000 per homeless individual, reflecting what Sacramento calls “compassion” — and what everybody else would call a $37 billion fiasco.
But what have the state’s residents acquired in return for this spending?
Unfortunately, no one is aware of — as a result of the state doesn’t monitor the place the money goes.
Three impartial audits have reached the identical conclusion: California merely doesn’t know if its billions in spending on homelessness do any good.
The state auditor discovered that “the State lacks current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs.”
Federal auditors concluded that the California Housing and Community Development division “was not adequately prepared to prevent, detect, and respond to fraud risks.”
And the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office reported that “no data have been provided to the Legislature on how many people living in an encampment have received permanent housing.”
A homeless encampment in Santa Monica, with two people and tents subsequent to a fence. Andy Johnstone for California Post
This is a stunning absence of primary accounting, and it’s the largely Newsom’s handiwork.
In 2024, bipartisan laws that will have addressed the issue by requiring annual public stories on homelessness spending handed the State Assembly and Senate with out opposition.
But Newsom vetoed it, simply as he did a related invoice — additionally handed with no dissenting votes — months earlier.
Newsom has pointed to an accountability law that he did signal, however that invoice received’t make spending knowledge public till 2027 — conveniently, after his time period ends.
While the governor talks a good sport about accountability, he has saved the info needed to attain it underneath wraps.
The lack of transparency within the system has given rise to perverse incentives. Because funding is tied to the quantity of homeless people being served, reasonably than the quantity who enter steady housing, nonprofits and businesses have no incentive to scale back homelessness.
A 2022 San Francisco Chronicle investigation discovered that contributors within the metropolis’s everlasting supportive housing program had been twice as more likely to return to the streets or die than to search out a lasting escape from homelessness.
Many blame California Governor Gavin Newsom for failing to handle the homeless disaster. CAROLINE BREHMAN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
California has constructed a “homelessness-industrial complex,” and the losers are the taxpayers and homeless people themselves.
Making all this worse has been the state’s decade-long dedication to a failed “housing first” method, which treats placement in supportive housing as a cure-all for the advanced drawback of homelessness, with predictably poor outcomes.
At great expense, the state has tripled its everlasting supportive housing models since 2010, and the homeless population has risen proper alongside it.
Thankfully, this month the state ended its largest “housing first” grant program, all however acknowledging the failure.
Now the query is whether or not Newsom and the activists controlling Sacramento will redirect that money towards issues that truly work.
What’s needed is a clear-eyed understanding of what’s gone incorrect. “Housing first” failed as a result of this disaster of homelessness is just not primarily a housing drawback. Roughly 75 p.c of the homeless population struggles with drug abuse or mental sickness, but “housing first” provides no requirement or incentive to hunt therapy.
A greater method lies in “housing readiness,” which addresses habit and mental health as the trail to steady housing.
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California created “Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) courts” to offer a court-supervised pathway into therapy for these people. However, the CARE Courts have failed as a result of therapy plans are largely voluntary.
If the state and Newsom are lastly critical about decreasing homelessness, they may do the next:
Cut off public money to failing applications;
Embrace housing readiness by treating mental sickness and habit;
Make it simpler for CARE courts to compel therapy for the mentally unwell and addicted;
Repeal California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) obstacles to growing the housing provide; and
Encourage localities to undertake anti-camping ordinances.
There is nothing compassionate about watching our most determined neighbors reside in squalor, cycle by emergency rooms, or die of overdoses on our sidewalks.
Real compassion calls for motion and accountability, not senseless spending.
Joshua Rauh teaches at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and is the Senior Fellow in Economics on the Hoover Institution.
Benjamin Jaros is an economist and analysis fellow on the Hoover Institution.
