Gov. Newsom’s homeless plan is funded the wrong way
Everyone agrees that the California government has spent record amounts in recent years to address the increasingly visible homeless situation. Lawmakers “have provided unprecedented funding to support our cities, counties, continuums and providers in our collective effort to prevent and end homelessness,” confirms the chairman of the state’s Interagency Council on Homelessness, in a 2021 report that tracks the spending.
Everyone also agrees that the problem isn’t showing signs of subsiding. As the Public Policy Institute of California reported last month: “Homelessness continues to grow in California: nationally, California has topped the list for the state with the largest homeless population for more than a decade.”
That has led to a new push from lawmakers from both parties for more accountability, as CALmatters reported. That interagency council report found that the majority of homeless people who participated in state homeless programs remained unhoused “or the state lost tract of their whereabouts.” This is a tough problem, but California’s typical big-spending approach isn’t yielding results.
Against that backdrop, we turn to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest idea – asking California voters to approve a $3-to-$5-billion bond measure to finance construction of facilities to treat the homeless. We appreciate the measure focuses on dealing with mental-health and substance-abuse issues – rather than just pretending the homelessness crisis is solely about a lack of affordable housing.
As the governor’s office explained, the bond would fund “thousands of new community behavioral health beds in state-of-the-art residential settings to house Californians with mental illness and substance use disorders, which could serve over 10,000 people every year in residential-style settings that have on-site services – not in institutions of the past, but locations where people can truly heal.”
The measure also prioritizes services for homeless veterans and revamps a 20-year-old law that taxes millionaires so that it earmarks more homeless-related funding to local governments. The basic concepts are fine. Yet given the failures of California’s latest record-setting spending efforts, it’s not overly cynical to ask why this new spending program will succeed in ways that the last ones haven’t.
If lawmakers are serious about accountability, then they need to embrace something other than the same-old spending approach. Actually, this funding mechanism evades accountability. The state last year had an unprecedented budget surplus of $97.5 billion and now faces a deficit. Nothing promotes accountability better than making hard choices by funding new programs out of existing budgets – rather than borrowing.
We applauded Newsom for his legislation last year that creates so-called CARE Courts (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment), which epitomizes innovative thinking that the state needs to embrace. It’s designed to divert homeless people toward public services rather than jailing them when they get in trouble with the law.
As the Sacramento Bee reports, opponents of that law faulted it “for failing to guarantee housing for everyone who needs it” and see this bond measure as an attempt to provide that housing. The problem, of course, is there isn’t enough money in the world to provide permanent housing for every person who needs it – especially at absurd $700,000-plus per-unit costs that are typical in these government-directed projects.
We’ll pay close attention as further details emerge, but Californians are right to be skeptical that this new approach will accomplish more than the last approaches.