Newsom vows action on homelessness
Governor says aggressive measures will confront ‘disgrace’ in California
Gov. Gavin Newsom touted California as a thriving model of success in many ways during his second State of the State speech Wednesday but called the worsening scourge of homelessness a “disgrace” and vowed aggressive measures to confront it.
Newsom outlined a five-point framework that included emergency actions to quickly and humanely reduce street homelessness, providing mental health treatment for the homeless, spurring affordable housing production, stabilizing funding to tackle the problem and measuring progress.
“By any standard, by nearly every recognizable metric, the State of California is not just thriving but, in many instances, leading the country, inventing the future and inspiring the nation,” Newsom said in the morning address to state lawmakers.
“No amount of progress though can camouflage the most pernicious crisis in our midst, the ultimate manifestation of poverty: homelessness,” Newsom continued. “Let’s call it what it is, it’s a disgrace, that the richest state in the richest nation — succeeding across so many sectors — is fall
ing so far behind to properly house, heal, and humanely treat so many of its own people.”
Political experts said it was highly unusual for the governor to devote so much of the annual address to a singular and vexing topic like homelessness.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political science at the University of Southern California and UC Berkeley. “There’s never been a governor of California or to my knowledge any other state who’s made this issue such a high priority.”
Bill Whalen, a Hoover Institution fellow who had worked for former Gov. Pete Wilson, noted that Newsom made no mention of other pressing issues, from education and college costs to efforts to protect residents from the deadly coronavirus outbreak in China.
But experts also agreed Newsom, who had vowed as a candidate to solve California’s homelessness problem, had little choice but to prioritize it.
“If you look at the polls, this issue is at the top of the charts,” Whalen said. “The public expects action. He has to deliver in that regard.”
Schnur added that Newsom “didn’t create the
homelessness crisis” but said “he’s smart enough to know that Californians won’t forgive him if he doesn’t fix it, so he’s pulling out all the stops.”
More than one in four of the nation’s homeless — 27 percent, or 151,278 people — live in California, where the number of homeless people grew 16 percent from 2018 to 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. New York is home to 16 percent of the nation’s homeless, and Florida 5 percent.
Newsom dedicated more than $1 billion in last year’s budget toward fighting homelessness, though much of that money is just now being deployed. For his 2020-21 budget, he’s proposed another $1 billion, including $750 million for a new fund that would help build housing for the homeless and also help keep atrisk families in their homes.
Newsom also offered local governments free use of 286 state properties — vacant lots, fairgrounds, armories and other state buildings — for the homeless. And last month he issued an executive order to provide 100 emergency mobile housing trailers throughout the state as shelters, including 15 in Oakland, where the homeless population has surged 47 percent since 2017 to more than 4,000.
Even so the Legislative Analyst’s Office has indicated
a need for more planning to make efforts to tackle homelessness effective.
Newsom noted that “the crisis was not created overnight and it will not be solved overnight — or even in a year.”
Jennifer Loving, chief executive officer of Destination: Home, a San Jose nonprofit dedicated to reducing homelessness, said it’s a solvable problem, but it takes funding and commitment, and she was encouraged to see that in Newsom’s speech.
Loving said her organization has helped move 14,000 people into housing in the last five years, and prevented nearly 4,000 from losing their homes in Silicon Valley, where soaring home prices and rent have put housing beyond reach for many.
“We can do more, that’s what makes the governor’s commitment extremely important,” Loving said.
As part of his effort to provide urgent action to house the homeless on the streets, Newsom called for expanding statewide a suspension of California Environmental Quality Act review for homeless housing and shelters, which was implemented by legislation last year in Los Angeles.
“We need more housing, not more delays,” Newsom said.
The governor also called for a new approach toward treating mental illness, which afflicts many of the homeless on the streets. He traced their plight to a wellintended effort over the last half-century to move the mentally ill out of institutions in favor of outpatient care and drug therapy.
Legislation like California’s 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in 1967 aimed at ending lifetime commitment of the mentally ill and a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court decision that mental illness alone cannot justify forced institutionalization bolstered rights against involuntary treatment.
Newsom noted that more recent legislation like Laura’s Law, which allows family members and service providers to ask courts to compel those who need treatment into communitybased outpatient care, are “too hard to use.”
“We need better legal tools, ones that allow local governments, health providers, and law enforcement to more effectively help people access the treatment they need,” Newsom said.
And he noted that much of the money from Proposition 63, the Mental Health Services Act tax on millionaires, isn’t being spent on the most critical needs like the street homeless. He said $160 million hasn’t been spent and threatened local officials that if they don’t spend their mental health dollars by June 30th, “we’ll make sure they get spent for you.”