Citizens assembly is a way to study tough problems and find solutions
Dear Governor Newsom, You've made real progress in addressing California's long-running homelessness crisis —from instituting the use of hotels as temporary housing to securing billions in new funding. But the crisis persists. And its costs — to the well-being of the unhoused, to public health, and to trust in government — are mounting.
In a new Berkeley IGS poll, 2 in 3 voters rate your handling of homelessness as “poor” or “very poor.” And it's not just you. The people of Californians are telling focus groups that they don't think any elected official can solve homelessness.
Which is why you should ask the people of California to solve the problem themselves. How?
The answer lies in a tool of popular democracy that has become a common method in other countries for responding to the most divisive problems.
The tool is called the citizens assembly — a temporary government of regular citizens convened to study a problem and find solutions.
Ireland used citizens assemblies to resolve social conflicts over abortion and same-sex marriage. France convened a citizens assembly on climate change. North Macedonia recently had one on vaccine hesitancy.
While citizens assemblies are little known in California, they aren't entirely novel. Petaluma is contemplating a form of citizens assembly, a policy jury, to determine the future of the SonomaMarin Fairgrounds property. Not long ago, your columnist proposed an international citizens assembly to govern the U.S.-Mexico border.
How might such a process be applied to homelessness here?
To be effective, the California Citizens Assembly on Homelessness would need official authorization from you and the Legislature. Such an assembly would consist of California residents chosen by lot from a pool of everyday people — but with checks to ensure the body's membership is representative of the state in geography, race, ethnicity, political party and gender.
It would be wise to have one population overrepresented in such an assembly: people who are currently unhoused, or have experienced homelessness in recent years.
The citizens assembly would also need power to subpoena witnesses, and a budget large enough to bring in technical experts to help the citizens. Most of all, the assembly must have the authority to turn its ideas and recommendations into laws and constitutional amendments.
You should make sure that any constitutional measures proposed by the assembly will automatically be placed on the statewide ballot.
Critics, including many of those who work in homeless services, will dismiss the assembly as too novel, too multifaceted and too trusting of regular people. They'll urge you to keep the homelessness portfolio in your own hands and those of wellconnected experts, to call special legislative sessions, or to draft new funding or ballot measures yourself.
Don't let them rattle you. And don't let them tell you that everyday Californians don't understand homelessness. At this point, homelessness is so prevalent that public knowledge of the problem is deep.
If the Legislature balks at funding such an assembly, you'll find that California's philanthropic community would step up, and that public universities will provide experts, technology and students for such an enterprise.
Indeed, the best case for a citizens assembly is that it would galvanize Californians, creating a common statewide forum for figuring out homelessness.
Right now, our homelessness responses are divided — by local jurisdictions, by a set of overlapping state programs and by political campaigns who see homelessness as a wedge issue. A citizens assembly could bridge those divides.
And since the assembly would gather in public — both online and in person — it could provide a model of how, even in polarized times, Californians can hash out their differences, and find better ways forward.
Yes, it's possible that the assembly would fail. But that would leave California no worse off than it is right now. And if the state were to convene a citizens assembly, and that body were to help end the homelessness crisis, California would become a true national leader on housing the unhoused.
And on democracy itself.