Homelessness Is Behind the Anger at Gavin Newsom

Tent cities, street chaos and public disorder have spread to every corner of California under his watch.

By Stephen Eide. Mr. Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. Excerpts:

"homelessness in California rose 40% over the past five years. Though only 12% of the U.S. population lives in California, the Golden State hosts half of the nation’s street population."

"The proliferation of tents and permanently parked recreational vehicles on city streets in California has coincided with prodigious increases in government spending intended to solve the problem. Mr. Newsom’s most recent state budget committed $12 billion to addressing homelessness over the next two years. That expense, which the governor touts as “the largest in state history,” comes in the wake of successful ballot initiatives to raise taxes to pay for homeless programs. Examples include Measure H in Los Angeles County (March 2017) and Proposition C in San Francisco (November 2018)."

"Ease regulations on housing quantity and quality. Most cities once had neighborhoods loaded with shabby rental stock such as single-room-occupancy hotels. They were nobody’s idea of a great places to live, but few slept on the street during the heyday of the SROs."

"During the 2010s, the number of permanent supportive housing units in California increased 65%, to 65,872 from 39,772. But the cost of constructing a single unit of housing for the homeless in California has soared, reaching as high as $750,000 in Los Angeles under the Proposition HHH initiative, which city voters passed in 2016 to pay for 10,000 units of housing for the homeless. It took more than three years to open the first unit."

"The state’s millionaire tax generates more than $2 billion a year in dedicated funding for mental-health programs. All that money and all those programs haven’t been able to prevent Los Angeles and San Francisco from becoming exhibits A and B in the ongoing national crisis of untreated serious mental illness."