Walters: Homelessness crisis remains one of Newsom’s biggest political liabilities
While delivering his final State of the State address and proposing his final state budget last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom clearly sought to neutralize an issue that has haunted his political career for more than two decades and could torpedo his hopes of becoming president: homelessness.
First, a bit of history.
Just months after being elected mayor of San Francisco in 2004, Newsom unveiled a plan he said would clear city streets of homeless people in 10 years. Fourteen years later, while running for governor, Newsom declared that homelessness in San Francisco had “never been worse.”
He said eradicating homelessness would be a high priority and promised to appoint a homeless “czar” who could cut through red tape and intergovernmental friction to get the job done. Later, when pressed by reporters over the czar pledge, he snapped, “You want to know who’s the homeless czar? I’m the homeless czar in the state of California.”
Despite that self-appointment and devoting almost all of his 2020 State of the State address to homelessness, the number of unhoused Californians continued to rise to record levels. As it did, Newsom began blaming local governments for not spending state homelessness grants effectively and threatened to withhold annual funding.
However, in 2024 State Auditor Grant Parks excoriated Newsom’s own California Interagency Council on Homelessness for failing to effectively monitor and coordinate homelessness programs — even though the state had spent more than $20 billion during Newsom’s governorship.
He later reorganized the council and last year it issued a glossy “Action Plan for Preventing and Ending Homelessness.” Newsom hailed it as “not just a report of our investments, but a directive for continued accountability and action towards specific quantifiable goals.”
It listed multiple things that should be done to alleviate the homelessness crisis, but never mentioned how its lofty goals should be achieved nor said anything about how the state’s deficit-ridden budget would pay for them.
In last week’s State of the State address, Newsom sang the political version of the World War II tune, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” cataloguing his accomplishments during the last seven years, including progress toward eliminating homelessness.
“When I began as governor, there was no homeless plan, no mental health plan and certainly no housing plan,” Newsom told legislators. “There was no accountability and little investment. The responsibility fell to cities and counties, with little interest from Sacramento.”
Newsom ticked off the efforts he had made and bragged that, “Early data, just compiled, shows that the number of unsheltered homeless people in California dropped 9% in 2025,” while “the nation saw an 18.1% overall increase in homelessness. Our investments are paying off.”
He could not, however, resist another jab at local officials, saying he is “providing counties what they’ve been asking for: the predictable funding for housing and substance abuse treatment. No more excuses — it’s time to bring people off the streets, out of encampments, into housing, into treatment. Counties need to do their job.”
County officials took umbrage. The California State Association of Counties, in a statement, complained that Newsom’s budget shifts the financial burden for several health and welfare programs to county governments and fails to protect them from federal reductions.
The organization also cited the new budget’s omission of an annual bloc grant for homeless programs, and the administration’s stalling the delivery of cash from a past allocation, “which was approved by the Legislature 18 months ago.”
While Newsom cites a 9% drop in homelessness, if true it would be from a base of nearly 200,000 Californians without homes. There are still plenty of squalid encampments to be videotaped and featured on ads attacking a potential presidential candidate named Newsom two years hence.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.