![]() But lawmakers considering how to budget diminished revenue see the buck stopping with Newsom. Housing costs indisputably play a role, with median home prices roughly doubling in the last decade, and locals surely bear some responsibility. Newsom threatened to withhold hundreds of millions until he saw more detailed homelessness plans. ![]() He warned this year that, unless locals make significant strides on encampments, “I'm going to be hard-pressed to make a case to the Legislature to provide them one dollar more” beyond the $400 million he’s proposing. Newsom has long faulted cities and counties for not doing enough to build housing. But the numbers continue to march upwards. He has extolled behavioral health funding and argued his Care Courts program will help people who are chronically homeless because of underlying mental health problems. Newsom has trumpeted the state’s clearing of hundreds of homeless encampments. The governor’s office points to successes like the Homekey project funding hotel and motel conversions. “What have these programs actually accomplished in terms of reducing the number of people living on the streets?” Sen. John Laird called the LAO’s summary “a long list of things” lacking evidence of “what’s been successful.” With Newsom proposing to spend $3.4 billion on homelessness in the next budget, “all of us would very much like to see, against each of these allocations, either number of units or number of people served,” budget Chair Nancy Skinner said. The chorus: How do we know if all that spending is working? Democrats and Republicans sang from the same hymnal during a Senate budget hearing on homelessness Monday. ![]() Lawmakers want to know more about how that money is being spent. California has increased its homelessness outlays from about $515 million for the 2018-19 cycle to roughly $4.6 billion for the current one, per the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Statistics show they’re not imagining it: The number of homeless people in California stands at roughly 171,000, compared to roughly 130,000 in 2018. Gavin Newsom has prioritized the issue and dedicated billions of dollars to addressing it.Ĭalifornians rank homelessness the state’s most pressing issue, and yet three years after Newsom dedicated his entire State of the State address to the issue, 73 percent of voters say the problem has worsened in the last year, a record high. What do they have in common? They’ve risen year after year, contributing to Californians’ sense that their state cannot make concrete progress on a fundamental societal failure - even as Gov. THE BUZZ: Homelessness in California, spending on homelessness in California, and voter frustration with homelessness in California. ![]()
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