With a new poll showing 52% of people feel the state has performed poorly on homelessness, cities conflicted about affordable housing, and eviction bans winding down, questions persist about how the new $12 billion in state spending can fix the growing issue of unhoused residents in California.
“I'm not at all surprised by the poll results,” Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), told the Northern California Record by email.
“Newsom said in 2004 he had a 10-year plan to abolish homelessness in San Francisco while he was mayor, but a decade later, the homeless population in the city had increased sharply,” Jackson said. “As governor, he said he was the homeless czar of California. Yet homelessness has increased. Of course the public feels he's done a poor job in handling the problem.”
More California residents also could also face housing insecurity with the state's moratorium on evictions set to expire on Sept. 30; the federal ban expired Saturday after Congress failed to extend it, PBS reported.
“California is in a worse position today than it was last year, which was worse than the year before that,” Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in business and economics at PRI, said in an email response to the Record.
“The problem is exemplified by the budget spending an additional $5.8 billion to convert more hotel and motel rooms into housing for the homeless. This program has not worked. The state has been spending billions of dollars on this initiative, yet the homeless problem continues to worsen. As long as California continues to throw more money at the same programs that are not working today, it is unlikely that we will see major improvements in the homelessness crisis," said Winegarden, who with Jackson and PRI’s Joseph Tartakovsky and Christopher Rufo, has authored a new book, No Way Home, that examines policies and solutions for the state’s evolving homelessness crisis.
Litigation roadblocks often derail affordable housing in California, Jackson told the Record.
“Nothing chokes homebuilding like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA),” Jackson said. “It's abused more than used for well-intentioned reasons. It needs to be entirely rethought and overhauled. Don't even think in terms of reform. Think in terms of starting anew with more than a half-century of knowledge and experience lawmakers didn't have when the law was passed.”
One Los Angeles housing development has been delayed for a number of years following a CEQA lawsuit, The Atlantic reported.
It is not clear if the $12 billion in the new state budget will go toward new projects not yet completed.
“Half of the bill is going to the conversion of hotels and motels into housing for the homeless, which has not been successful to date. It is unlikely that it will suddenly be successful now,” Winegarden said.
“Spending money on treatment and mental health care is important, however other policies are working against these programs. For instance, Prop 47 has downgraded theft below $950 to a misdemeanor that is rarely prosecuted anymore. The result has been rampant theft, which has been widely covered. It also enables people struggling with addiction to support their destructive lifestyle. Until we address these types of problems, the policy environment will be working against the programs contained in the $12 billion budget.”
To help avoid a looming wave of evictions, housing groups across California have been advocating diligently for renters since the onset of the pandemic.
“I'd like to see governments, from Washington down to cities and counties, do less, because what they've being doing for decades hasn't worked, and private groups that have been successful in moving people off the streets do more,” Jackson said.
Quality of life citations, which increased during Newsom’s tenure as mayor of San Francisco, have been characterized as counterproductive for failing to combat the issue.
“Homelessness is a multifaceted problem that varies across the population. We need programs that combine support (ideally from private charities and foundations) and positive incentives [and not] negative incentives that enforce local quality of life laws," Winegarden said.