Newsom remains politically vulnerable because of homelessness

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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While delivering his final State of the State address and proposing his final state budget last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom apparently sought to neutralize an issue that has dogged his political career for more than two decades and could derail his presidential hopes: homelessness.

First, a little history.

Just months after being elected mayor of San Francisco in 2004, Newsom revealed a plan he said he would clear city streets of homeless people in 10 years. Fourteen years later, while running for governor, Newsom declared that homelessness in San Francisco had “never been worse.”

He said that eliminating homelessness will be a top priority and promised to appoint homeless ‘king’ who could cut through red tape and intergovernmental friction to get the job done. Later, when pressed by reporters about the king promise, he snorted, “You want to know who the homeless king is? I’m the homeless king in the state of California.”

Despite this self-appointment and devoting nearly all of his 2020 State of the State address to homelessness, the number of homeless Californians has continued to rise to record levels. As he did so, Newsom began accusing local governments of not spending state homeless grants effectively and threatened to freeze annual funding.

However, in 2024 State Auditor Grant Parks angered Newsom’s California Interagency Council on Homelessness for failing to effectively oversee and coordinate homelessness programs — even though the state spent more than $20 billion during Newsom’s governorship.

He later reorganized the council and last year it issued a gloss “Action Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness.” Newsom hailed it as “not just a report on our investments, but a directive for ongoing accountability and action toward specific, quantifiable goals.”

It lists numerous things that need to be done to alleviate the homelessness crisis, but never mentions how its lofty goals are to be achieved, nor does it say anything about how the state’s deficit budget will pay for them.

Last week Government address statusNewsom sang the political version of the World War II tune, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” cataloging his accomplishments over the past seven years, including progress toward elimination unemployment.

“When I started as governor, there was no homelessness plan, no mental health plan, and certainly no housing plan,” Newsom told lawmakers. “There was no accountability and little investment. The onus fell on cities and counties, with little interest from Sacramento.”

Newsom noted the efforts he’s made, boasting that “The first data just collected shows that the number of homeless homeless people in California will drop by 9% in 2025,” while “the nation saw an overall increase in homelessness of 18.1%. Our investments are paying off.”

But he couldn’t resist another jab at local governments, saying he was “giving the counties what they wanted: predictable funding for housing and substance abuse treatment. No more excuses — it’s time to get people off the streets, into camps, into housing, into treatment. Counties have to do their job.”

County officials took offense. The California State Association of Counties complained in a statement Newsom’s budget shifts the financial burden for several health and social care programs to county governments and fails to protect them from federal cuts.

The organization also cited the omission in the new budget of an annual grant for homeless programs and the administration delayed the delivery of money from past allocations “that were approved by the Legislature 18 months ago.”

Although Newsom cites a 9% drop in homelessness, if true, it would be from a a base of nearly 200,000 homeless Californians. There are still plenty of miserable camps to be videotaped and featured in ads attacking a potential presidential candidate named Newsom two years later.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.