Gavin Newsom’s Homeless Policy Will Set California Back a Decade

Last month, Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, directed State agencies to clear homeless encampments on State-owned property. Last week, he doubled down on this approach to addressing homelessness by threatening to cut State housing funding to cities and counties that don’t follow the same approach to homelessness. This will provide more than enough justification for cities and counties to turn away from their short-lived path of building permanent supportive housing and return to their failed methods of simply moving homeless encampments from one place to another.

Gov. Newson’s new policy of arresting the homeless and destroying their belongings has been made possible by a recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Grants Pass v Johnson. This decision overturned what had been the law in California and other western states created by Martin v Boise in 2018, which made it so cities and counties could not make it illegal to sleep outside if there were insufficient homes or shelters to accommodate the number of people that were homeless.

The result of the Boise case over the last six years is that California cities and counties have worked hard and expeditiously to open new shelters and bring new permanent supportive housing apartments online. This has been a dramatic change from how cities were addressing homelessness prior to the Boise decision. Before then, cities were either containing homelessness in designated areas like Skid Row in LA, or arresting people who were homeless and clearing out encampments. Neither strategy reduced homelessness.

Since the Boise decision, thousands of apartments with supportive services have been built across California with thousands more under construction. These projects have been built with a combination of State and local dollars. Gov. Newsom is absolutely right when he says, “the State has made unprecedented investments to support communities.” Yet, the $24 billion he claims is not nearly enough. California has an estimated 181,000 homeless residents. The typical apartment with supportive services costs $750,000 to build. To provide every homeless resident a home, the State would need to invest over $135 billion, whish is five and a half times more than the $24 billion the State has already invested.

In order to deal with this shortfall in State funding, counties and cities have been working to find their own revenue sources to building permanent supportive housing. For example, in 2017, the County of Los Angeles passed Measure H, a quarter-cent sales tax to funding homelessness prevention programs. Measure H was not perfect, but LA is working to correct those deficiencies with a replacement sales tax measure to fund the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), which will be on the ballot in November.

This type of iteration and improvement on homeless prevention is only possible if cities and counties continue down their path of addressing homelessness by building housing. Cities and counties will only continue building housing if they have no other choice, many will be more than happy to make being homeless a crime again. But backsliding to our old ways of arresting our homeless residents, and using jails as shelter of last resort, will not reduce homelessness, just as it never did before.

As I’ve written about before, building permanent supportive housing for people who are currently homeless is insufficient because people are becoming homeless faster than we can house them. That’s why one of the required outcomes of the LACAHSA tax measure is to reduce the number of people falling into homelessness. In fact, 11% of the funds raised by the tax will go towards homelessness prevention and renter support. This is a monumental shift in how we address homelessness and is absolutely critical if we want to end homelessness in the most humane way possible.

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99% Invisible had a great story last month about the homeless containment plan that Los Angeles had for Skid Row. It’s well worth a listen to better understand some of the tensions we’re now seeing in how to address homelessness in our cities.