Walters: California spends billions on homelessness, lacks data on effectiveness

California has allocated more than $20 billion to alleviate the state’s homelessness crisis since Gavin Newsom became governor in 2019, but there’s precious little data on how the money was spent and what effect it’s had, other than the number of unhoused people has continued to climb.

Despite the absence of hard information, Newsom has been highly critical of what he characterizes as the shortcomings of local governments and has threatened to withhold funds from those deemed to be laggards. Local officials, in turn, say they cannot construct comprehensive, long-term strategies unless Newsom is willing to make multi-year commitments of financial support.

Earlier this year, state Auditor Grant Parks issued a harshly worded audit of the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Newsom administration’s tool for coordinating homelessness programs.

“The state lacks current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs, because (the council) has not consistently tracked and evaluated the state’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness,” Parks wrote, adding that its most recent data is three years old.

Moreover, Parks said, the council “has also not aligned its action plan to end homelessness with its statutory goals to collect financial information and ensure accountability and results. Thus, it lacks assurance that the actions it takes will effectively enable it to achieve those goals.”

It’s rather cheeky for Newsom to blame local officials if his own agency has been so laggard in gathering information about where billions of dollars have been spent and how effective those expenditures have been.

The footdragging on data, however, is not confined to the state.

Since 2020, David O. Carter, a federal judge in Los Angeles, has been presiding over a lawsuit filed by the LA Alliance for Human Rights, a coalition of persons from businesses, neighborhoods and homeless groups demanding to know how officials in Los Angeles County have spent homelessness funds. He’s angry about a lack of response from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

“If there isn’t documentation of the work being done, it’s not being done. That can be our only conclusion,” Carter said during a recent hearing, telling agency officials, “You’re not working on your time frame now. You’re working on mine.”

Meanwhile, back in Sacramento, the quest for hard information on homelessness has taken a baby step forward.

Before adjourning its 2024 session, the Legislature approved a bill that would direct state agencies that administer homelessness programs to annually file reports on spending and outcomes to Newsom’s interagency council, which then would be required to make the information available to the public.

Assemblyman Josh Hoover, a Folsom Republican, carried Assembly Bill 2903, which implements one of the Parks audit’s recommendations.

“Improving accountability over the dollars we are spending is the first step toward real reform,”’ Hoover said in a statement. “Spending billions of taxpayer dollars only to make the crisis worse is the definition of failure.”

That should be obvious. Now we’ll see if Newsom signs the bill.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.