California Cities To Gavin Newsome : Pay Up On Homeless Crisis

Up Date To This Post: Aug. 8, 2024 With television cameras rolling and traffic on a busy San Fernando Valley freeway humming in the background, Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened on Thursday to take away state funding from counties that don’t show improvement on homelessness.“If we don’t see demonstrable results, I’ll start to redirect money,” Newsom said. This is a sincerely held belief that we need local government to step up. This is a crisis. Act like it.”

Unbridled frustration from the Democratic governor over the lack of progress on his top issue — homelessness — isn’t new, nor is warning about stripping money from reluctant counties. As he nears the halfway point of his second and final term in office, Newsom is using his soapbox as governor to increase public pressure and lay blame on local leaders for California’s most glaring humanitarian crisis. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-08/gavin-newsom-homelessness-fight-california-counties

Add Note August 9, 2024: For decades, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has been making homelessness the centerpiece of all his political campaigns, whether in San Francisco or in California at large. He’s always wanted voters to know that he’s against it. To that end, he’s poured bazillions of San Francisco and California taxpayer dollars into multiple government agencies and NGOs. Doing so proved that if you build an expensive homeless infrastructure, the homeless will come. Now, to hide his failures as a politician, Newsom is trying something new: He’s complaining about homelessness as a taxpayer.

Note, please, that this is not the homelessness of the Great Depression, when the entire economy collapsed. As we all know, today’s homeless are almost entirely comprised of drug addicts and the mentally ill—and often both, which it almost impossible to know which preceded the other.

Now, though, Newsom is seeing that it’s possible to put the homeless genie back in the bottle. Off the top of my head, I can think of three reasons for this change. He may hope that Kamala’s candidacy still goes down in flames, leaving an opening for him to save the Democrat party ticket. He may hope that, if Kamala wins, she’ll invite him into her administration. Or he may hope that if the entire Democrat party goes down in flames, there’ll be room for him in 2028. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/governor_gavin_newsom_dons_his_taxpayer_hat_to_complain_about_homelessness.html

California cities want more money to tackle homelessness. That was the main takeaway from a rally Wednesday where about 100 city officials made a big ask of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and the Legislature: They want $3 billion a year in guaranteed homelessness funding from the state.

That could be a tough sell this year, as the state is facing a $22.5 billion to 25 billion that will require some belt-tightening. But gathered under the sun in the state Capitol Park, holding signs that read “Real progress starts local #InvestInCities,” the city representatives demanded that lawmakers prioritize homelessness in this year’s budget.

It’s the latest sign of the homelessness crisis causing tension between local leaders and the state — recently Newsom briefly withheld $1 billion in funding from cities and counties because he said they weren’t doing enough.

Erica Stewart, mayor of San Luis Obispo: “We believe every single person deserves housing. The cities alone are not going to be able to do this forever. We can’t do it. But we are your partners in action…We want the state Legislature and the governor to act and provide permanent, long-term, stable, on-going funding.”

Newsom poured unprecedented sums of money into homelessness during the pandemic, including $15 billion over the past two years.

But critics complained that because most of that was in one-time grants.

it’s been difficult for cities, counties and nonprofits to build the kind of multi-year programs that could actually make a dent in the crisis. Guaranteeing $3 billion a year for homelessness would be a shift in strategy by Sacramento.

Though 84% of California cities have launched programs to address homelessness, most are struggling to fund them, according to a survey of 189 cities released by the League of California Cities, which held a joint conference on homelessness Wednesday with the California State Association of Counties. Of the cities surveyed, 87% said they have concerns about financing their homelessness programs long-term, and 79% said they have used their general fund to address the crisis since fiscal year 2018-2019.

Carolyn Coleman, executive director and CEO of the League of California Cities: “The demand for housing and services are outpacing their efforts alone, straining capacity and draining resources for all the essential services that our cities provide.”

Speaking of homelessness: Marisa also reports on the increasingly tricky bind lawmakers find themselves in when it comes to clearing homeless encampments.

Though Democrats recently quashed Republican-backed bills that would make it illegal for unhoused people to settle near certain areas statewide, more and more cities led by Democrats are passing local ordinances cracking down on illegal camping.

Frustrated voters concerned with health and safety want these encampments gone.

But displacing unhoused communities is morally and logistically complicated.

Advocates argue that the process is traumatizing to individuals, and liberal lawmakers don’t want to be perceived as criminalizing homelessness.

But with scarce affordable housing options available in California, there is no clear solution.

As one UC Berkeley professor studying homelessness told Marisa: With nowhere to go, the people shuffled away from one area to the next often become “a problem for another neighborhood.”

https://calmatters.org/newsletters/whatmatters/2023/04/california-homeless-cities/