Gavin Newsom’s Tragic Mistake on Homelessness

More than two years before the 2028 presidential election, California Governor Gavin Newsom is a leading Democratic contender, and it’s easy to see why. The two-term governor of the most populous and powerful state, and a two-term mayor of San Francisco, he is, by recent presidential standards, comparatively youthful at 58. Charismatic and savvy, he’s taken on Donald Trump with gusto, mocking the president on social media and succeeding, by an impressive margin, in pushing a ballot measure to redistrict California’s congressional seats in response to the Texas gerrymander that the president sought and got. 

With an autobiography, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, out last month, Newsom has become even more ubiquitous: the star of lengthy profile pieces, podcast interviews, and right-wing slammings. Armed with name recognition and bound by term limits, national politics is the only summit left for the governor to climb. As he readies his all-but-announced presidential run, however, Newsom must defend his record on perhaps the most high-profile of California’s problems: homelessness, a crisis so multifaceted, intractable, and defiant of simple solutions that few candidates anywhere—let alone here, where it’s at its thorniest—have dared to run on a platform of addressing it. 

Yet during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, Newsom did, taking a big risk in a business that often favors the poll-tested and risk-averse. “We’ve been ‘managing’ [homelessness] for too long,” his website declared, “it’s time to solve it.” Over the past seven years, the state spent an unprecedented $27 billion on housing and homeless services. 

Newsom has prioritized affordable housing and what’s called “permanent supportive housing,” which combines affordable housing with available (but not mandatory) social services like mental health care, addiction treatment, and case management. In California, residents of such projects face no requirement to stay sober or participate in treatment. This approach, known as “Housing First,” is considered by many public health and housing experts to be the gold standard in homelessness solutions. Studies in The Lancet and The Journal of Public Health Management & Practice found that Housing First programs are more effective at reducing homelessness than alternatives. Homeless advocates widely favor this approach. 

Since the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson allowed jurisdictions to penalize sleeping outside even where shelter is unavailable, Newsom has also cracked down on the state’s notorious homeless encampments, which, in places like Los Angeles’s Skid Row or San Jose’s Coyote Creek, can span dozens of acres and house hundreds of people. Homeless advocates like the governor’s encampment sweeps much less than his focus on permanent supportive housing. 

But for all the political capital and taxpayers’ billions Newsom has spent on the issue, over 187,000 Californians were still homeless in 2024, nearly 124,000 of whom were unsheltered (meaning they slept outside or in vehicles). California’s shortage of housing, especially the affordable kind, still ranges in the high hundreds of thousands to multimillions of units, depending on who’s counting. And the state is nowhere near the 3.5 million new-unit goal that Newsom campaigned on in 2017 (and which critics say was “never anywhere realistic”). In January, the governor’s office announced that unsheltered homelessness dropped by 9 percent in 2025; significant, surely, but that still leaves around 113,000 Californians sleeping in vehicles or camping in the state’s public lands, spaces, and thoroughfares. 

Charismatic and savvy, Newsom has taken on Donald Trump with gusto, mocking the president on social media and pushing a successful ballot measure to redistrict California’s congressional seats in response to the Texas gerrymander that the president sought and got.

Granted, housing and homelessness in California present bespoke challenges. The sheer size of the state’s homeless population, for one. The fact that, despite the governor’s admirable efforts to roll back regulation and jumpstart construction, Golden State development remains notoriously expensive and slow, for another. 

That Newsom has faced uniquely problematic problems won’t stop political opponents from targeting his homelessness record. “If Newsom wins the nomination, Republican attack ads will inevitably roll the tape of children walking home from school past unsheltered people using drugs in public,” Marc Novicoff and Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic. The story of Newsom and homelessness is shaping up to be the tragedy of his gubernatorial tenure: Heart in the right place, he bravely tried to do something big, to solve a crisis other politicians chose to ignore. Unfortunately, the governor likely doesn’t have enough to show for it. 

Perhaps there was another path Newsom could’ve taken, one that might have better positioned him to face voters. In the first year of his first term, the governor’s own homelessness task force leaders proposed such a route, and Newsom declined. Should he run for president, that choice may catch up to him. 

Forty years ago, another high-profile Democratic governor was eyeing a presidential contest: Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. In 1983, his state faced a ballooning homelessness problem, driven by the closure of the state’s psychiatric facilities and rising drug use. Dukakis, then in his second term as governor, advocated for and ultimately signed the nation’s first “right to shelter” law, which has guaranteed homeless families with children and pregnant women access to temporary lodging and services since. As a result, Massachusetts built a robust system of shelters, 105 of which opened during Dukakis’s tenure, that credibly minimizes the number of people sleeping outdoors. 

Offering shelter to homeless families and individuals is far less ideal than providing permanent housing. Shelters often entail sleeping side by side with dozens of strangers; sometimes, they separate couples, prohibit pets, or don’t offer storage for one’s belongings. Shelters are temporary, with some limiting an individual’s stay to 90 days. And they can be dangerous: A 2025 CalMatters investigation of California’s shelters found reports of black mold, cockroaches, and sexual violence, including some incidents perpetrated by shelter staff. Those conditions might explain why only 30 percent of homeless people in Los Angeles surveyed by the RAND corporation, a federally funded think tank, said they would move into a group shelter. As it stands, many people—especially women—consider camping in the street or sleeping in vehicles to be safer, and, depending on the shelter, they may be right.  

Housing, on the other hand, provides long-term stability. Permanent supportive units, the type Newsom has pushed, come with lease agreements and generally place no conditions on how long an individual can stay. But shelters are quicker and cheaper to bring online: The cost of each unit of permanent supportive housing could fund five shelter beds, and, in 2025, California still had a shelter bed shortage of over 111,000, according to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. 

Today, Massachusetts remains the only state with a right-to-shelter law. However, New York City has a similar policy, arising from a 1979 court mandate, that guarantees shelter to homeless individuals and families. The result is that while homelessness remains a huge problem in these places, it’s a less visible one because fewer people sleep in public spaces. 

The most astonishing case is Boston. In 2023, due in large part to a severe shortage of affordable market-rate housing, Boston saw a sharp increase in homelessness, ranking second in homeless individuals per capita among America’s major cities. The same year, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency as demands for emergency shelter skyrocketed amidst an influx of migrants and refugees. However, unlike in California, where 66 percent of the homeless population lived unsheltered in 2024, that figure remained just 3 percent in Boston—despite the surge in demand for beds. ​(Only 3 percent of homeless New Yorkers were unsheltered in 2024, too.) Chronic homelessness, defined either as being homeless for a period of 12 months or on four separate occasions within the past three years, is also less than half the national average in Boston, which the research center Boston Indicators credits to the state’s shelter system. In California, over 37 percent of the state’s homeless population fit the chronic definition, putting the state slightly above the national average. 

In the 1980s, another high-profile Democratic governor eyeing a presidential contest, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, built a robust system of shelters that minimized the number of people sleeping outdoors. That strategy gave him credibility to run on homelessness in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries.

Boston and New York City also run Housing First programs that connect people to permanent supportive housing as units become available. Still, it is their strong shelter systems that primarily keep people without housing off the streets, and help make homelessness a less salient political issue. 

Dukakis’s shelter strategy in Massachusetts gave him credibility to run on homelessness in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries. “It’s time this country recommitted itself to one very basic principle, and that is that decent and affordable shelter ought to be the birthright of every American,” Dukakis said in a campaign ad showing homeless people in the streets of a snowy Washington, D.C.

​​Newsom has not followed Dukakis’s path. On one hand, he has worked to increase shelter capacity: State and local agencies have spent around $1 billion on California shelters during Newsom’s tenure, doubling the number of emergency beds. The governor added $1 billion to his Behavioral Health Bridge Housing Program, which supports “interim housing,” meaning quick-build, modular projects like tiny-home villages that are generally much nicer than traditional shelters, offering privacy and longer stays. ​And jurisdictions can use the state’s annual pot of Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention funds, which Newsom established in his first year in office, for sheltering.​​ 

​But on the other hand, the governor refused to back a right-to-shelter proposal by the leaders of his own homelessness task force in 2019, which would have forced municipalities to construct sufficient shelter relative to local homeless populations. He also prohibited billions of dollars in state housing funds from being spent on temporary shelters and interim housing, instead requiring jurisdictions to pitch expensive permanent projects to access those sources.

There are clear reasons why Newsom avoided Dukakis’s route, and why no state besides Massachusetts has enacted a right-to-shelter law since: added state liability is one; the pesky truth that sheltering doesn’t actually solve homelessness is another. At best, shelters are a step toward permanent housing, but in markets without enough affordable units—most major U.S. cities—people cycle between shelter and the streets, rarely exiting homelessness. (See figure one: New York City, which guarantees shelter yet consistently ranks among American metro areas with the highest homelessness per capita.) Moreover, sheltering isn’t cheap: In 2025, the San Francisco controller priced a single bed in the state’s shelter system at $41,248 annually. Once built, the operating costs of permanent supportive housing projects are about 50 percent lower per unit. 

Newsom cited insurmountable costs to the state in his comments on the 2019 right-to-shelter proposal he declined to back. By my (rough) calculations, it would have cost at least $13.3 billion to create the additional beds California needs, and north of $6.8 billion each year to manage the system afterward. That annual cost would represent around 2 percent of the governor’s proposed $349 billion budget, slightly higher than the 1.7 percent of its 2025 budget that Massachusetts spent on sheltering.  

Shifting significant state funding from permanent housing to shelters would have drawn criticism from homeless advocates and some lawmakers, who maintain that limited funds are better spent on permanent solutions. If lack of housing is the root cause of homelessness, they argue, why fund expensive, temporary non-solutions like sheltering? The answer, a counterargument voiced by a chorus of California mayors and state lawmakers, is simple: to get more people off the streets, faster, because the public won’t stand for it. Californians today have grown so “frustrated” with unsheltered homelessness that 37 percent of voters surveyed by Politico and UC Berkeley in 2025 supported arresting homeless people who refuse shelter. (We wonder if these voters knew that shelter isn’t always on offer in their state.) 

This debate is playing out across California. The pro-permanence stance could be heard on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall last summer, when Jackie Fielder, the city’s youngest supervisor (equivalent to what other cities call a council member), joined housing advocates and formerly homeless individuals to oppose Mayor Daniel Lurie’s reallocation of $35 million from permanent housing to sheltering. Meanwhile, the pro-temporary approach has taken root 50 miles south, in San Jose, where Mayor Matt Mahan—a recent entry to the governor’s race—has pushed a shelter-first, tiny-home-centric approach over initial objections from his council and continued criticism from Santa Clara County supervisors.

“The answer to ending street homelessness is not constructing homes approaching a million dollars each—it is safe, decent, individual units that can be prefabricated and placed on government-owned land for a fraction of the cost of our current programs,” Mahan, a frequent Newsom critic, wrote on Medium. Since taking office in 2023, he has brought 16 new interim housing facilities online and created thousands of new beds, which, due to the safety and privacy of tiny homes relative to traditional congregate shelters, boast 95 percent occupancy. In just three years, San Jose has seen a 10 percent drop in unsheltered homelessness, although how to fund the sites’ operating costs amidst state and federal funding cuts remains an open question. 

In January, when Mahan launched his gubernatorial campaign, Newsom seemed unfazed by the mayor’s shots at his record on homelessness. “I don’t know enough about him,” Newsom said. “I wish him good luck.” 

Now, as he eyes a run for the White House, homelessness is among Newsom’s biggest political weaknesses—both because of California’s profound homelessness problem, which is bad enough, and because of his high-profile pledge to fix it. The crisis has served as a backdrop for Newsom’s rise over the last two decades, and, to the governor’s credit, he has embraced the challenge each step of the way. 

In 2002, as the dot-com boom hiked up San Francisco housing prices, Newsom—then a city supervisor—stepped into the national spotlight with his controversial “Care Not Cash” initiative, which shrunk cash welfare payments to unhoused residents and rerouted funds to housing, mental health, and substance abuse services, creating 1,321 affordable housing units by 2008. “I take your cash, and I buy drugs,” rang a Care Not Cash television spot. “The program rankled advocates,” Erin Baldassari wrote for KQED. “It also helped get him elected mayor.” (“Rankled” is an understatement; some activists burned Newsom in effigy over the program.) 

Shortly after being sworn in as San Francisco mayor in 2004, Newsom promised to end chronic homelessness in the city in 10 years. Under his mayoralty, the city built thousands of permanent supportive units and housed around 7,000 people. But chronic homelessness, predictably, did not end. Newsom nonetheless defended his pledge, saying danger lies not in “setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark”—a refrain that foreshadowed the “big, hairy, audacious” goals he’d set in his campaign for governor. 

As mayor, Newsom also pushed a more contentious initiative: a law prohibiting sitting or lying on public sidewalks during daytime hours. In his telling, he was hesitant to push the ordinance until a morning walk with his five-year-old daughter along Haight Street, where the pair encountered a scene painfully familiar to most Californians. “As God is my witness, there’s a guy on the sidewalk smoking crack,” Newsom said at the time. Supported by the business community and opposed by the San Francisco Democratic Party, the ACLU, homeless advocates, and the president of the board of supervisors, voters passed Newsom’s sit/lie law as a ballot proposition in November 2010. 

Newsom’s San Francisco mayoralty previewed the approach he would bring to Sacramento as governor: build permanent housing and target so-called “quality of life law violations” like camping on sidewalks. Unfortunately, neither comes cheap; after spending $20.6 million enforcing quality-of-life laws in 2015 alone, a San Francisco budget analysis concluded that the cost was too high, with “limited results.” 

As lieutenant governor from 2011 to 2019, Newsom sat in the backseat of an administration criticized for ignoring homelessness as the state’s unhoused population grew by tens of thousands. While Governor Jerry Brown infamously neglected to say the word “homeless” in one of his State of the State addresses, Newsom was admirably candid during his run for governor from 2015 to 2018 about the need to keep the crisis front and center. “As Democrats, we have a unique responsibility to address this issue head-on,” Newsom said of the state’s high poverty rate during a 2018 gubernatorial debate. “With all due respect, this has happened on our watch.” 

On the campaign trail, Newsom promised to produce 3.5 million new housing units by 2025 (which would have required doubling the state’s peak production), increase affordable housing tax credits, streamline regulations bogging down development, and expand homeless services. Breaking from prior gubernatorial candidates, including Brown (his boss), Newsom did not frame homelessness primarily as a local issue. Instead, he pledged leadership, terming homelessness “the ultimate manifestation of our failure as a society.” Under Governor Newsom, for the first time, the state has owned that failure. 

Breaking from prior gubernatorial candidates, Newsom in 2018 pledged state leadership, terming homelessness “the ultimate manifestation of our failure as a society.” Under Governor Newsom, for the first time, the state has owned that failure.

Analyzing California’s decentralized housing and homelessness strategy under Newsom is, in a word, daunting. A better word might be “impossible,” based on the State Auditor’s 2024 report, which found that the state was unable to account for spending or track outcomes. Under Newsom, nine state agencies have administered more than 30 separate programs, with state funding recipients ranging from California’s 44 Continuums of Care (CoCs)—regional bodies made up of counties, cities, and service providers—to the entities within those CoCs. Recipients may then spread the funding they receive among a smattering of nonprofits, outreach teams, and service providers. 

Central to the governor’s strategy, however, is one unwavering priority: build permanent housing. In the first weeks of Newsom’s first term, the state sued Orange County’s Huntington Beach for blocking new affordable housing, and, in 2021, the governor created a Housing Accountability Unit to compel local government action to meet regional housing needs. Newsom has also led efforts to fast-track the rollback of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a law notorious for its use in local crusades to obstruct construction. “We are asserting ourselves in ways that the state has never asserted itself into local planning decisions,” Newsom boasted on The Ezra Klein Show in December. In his first year as governor, he oversaw a 160-percent increase in the construction of units financed by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. 

Newsom’s aspirations were summed up by his 2020 State of the State address, in which he devoted most of his remarks to homelessness. “I don’t think homelessness can be solved. I know homelessness can be solved,” he said. “This is our cause. This is our calling … Let’s get to work.” 

But for a term-limited governor, betting billions on permanent housing to substantially decrease unsheltered homelessness, let alone in numbers that would be visible to his state’s voters (and thus the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina), was always going to be a risky gambit. Building in the Golden State remains notoriously expensive and slow; land and labor costs, energy-efficiency requirements, earthquake engineering, and lengthy permitting processes—all these factors drive up project costs and timelines compared to states like Colorado or Texas. The average cost of a single unit of permanent supportive housing in California is around $600,000 (which Mayor Mahan seemingly rounds up to “approaching a million”). And an affordable housing project in California takes at least five years start to finish, according to Matt Schwartz, president of the California Housing Partnership. 

Consider Los Angeles, where voters passed Proposition HHH in 2016, allowing the city to issue up to $1.2 billion in bonds to create permanent supportive housing. Eight years later, only 5,487 units had been completed; meaningful progress, but far short of what L.A.’s 43,699 homeless residents need. 

Newsom’s headline achievement, the Homekey program, had similar unit-to-dollar results. Homekey granted jurisdictions $3.6 billion to rehabilitate existing properties, such as hotels and motels, into either interim or permanent units. The program has been lauded: It created 16,000 homes and “reached” over 172,000 Californians, according to the governor’s office. It’s one of only two homelessness programs that the State Auditor determined was “likely cost-effective” in its ill-fated audit. But as in the City of Angels, 16,000 homes do not compute for the hundred-thousand-plus Californians still unsheltered. 

The scale of unsheltered homelessness in California, tens of billions of dollars later, gives Republicans leverage to declare Newsom’s strategy a “failed, ideological” blue state mess.

And as street homelessness has persisted, Newsom’s approach to those out in the cold has toughened; if his first term was defined by “our cause, our calling,” his second-term mantra is shaping up to be “take back the streets.” 

Since 2021, he’s waged a campaign of encampment clearances: removing over 12,000 on state property and making $1 billion in Encampment Resolution funding available for jurisdictions to follow suit. The governor has pushed local governments to adopt a model ordinance that makes camping in one location for three consecutive days unlawful, and, last summer, made access to the state’s main pot of homelessness services funding contingent on following his encampment guidance. Unsurprisingly, California now has more prohibitions on sleeping in public than any other state, and a 2025 CalMatters investigation found that homelessness-related arrests and citations were up statewide, with San Francisco seeing a 500 percent increase. 

Homeless advocates’ description of Newsom’s encampment sweeps ranges from “inhumane” to “costly and ineffective.” “Inhumane” may be subjective (Newsom has called encampments themselves “inhumane”), but, considering California’s shelter deficit, it’s hard to argue with encampment sweeps being “ineffective.” 

In Fresno County, officials have enforced a camping ban since 2024 at an annual cost of about $1.1 million, excluding law enforcement staff time. Faced with a 1,000-shelter-bed shortfall, the county uses state grant funds to provide motel stays to displaced individuals for up to two weeks. Often, the motel vouchers are refused, Amina Flores-Becker, Fresno’s deputy county administrator, told me, because people don’t want to leave the community they call home for a temporary stay in an unfamiliar one or have pets that motels can’t accommodate. When asked if the ordinance, passed in August 2024, has changed anything in terms of day-to-day life in the county, Flores-Becker responded “no”: “The folks that were against it before are still against it, the folks that were in support of it are even more in support of it now.” 

Still, moving people along is often important, as the questions Fresno County uses to prioritize encampment clearances show: Is it in fire-prone terrain? Did the reporting individual see weapons or drug paraphernalia? Is it near a school? And so on. “The longer an encampment is in existence, the more health and safety risks it poses,” Flores-Becker said. But in jurisdictions with inadequate shelter, encampment sweeps usually result in people pitching camp elsewhere at high cost to taxpayers. 

So, if Newsom wanted to “take back” California’s streets, why hasn’t he empowered jurisdictions to shelter their unsheltered? Under Homekey+, a $2.2 billion extension of the Homekey program, projects proposing shelter or interim housing are ineligible. Even​ the state’s Encampment Resolution​ ​grant program stipulates​ that funds ​may be used only​​ for proposals with “clear pathways to permanent housing,” placing yet another roadblock in the complex processes local governments must navigate to access and deploy state funds. 

In the rearview mirror, Newsom’s approach appears dangerously close to asking constituents, unhoused and housed, to hold tight for a far-off future in which California has built enough affordable housing.

The governor, a reputed policy wonk, has maintained California’s lopsided focus on permanent housing because housing is the solution to homelessness, and he wanted to solve it. Shelters suck up money that could be spent on permanent supportive housing; low-density tiny home villages occupy valuable land that could instead host high-density permanent housing; and neither creates permanent housing, which California direly, obviously needs. So, Newsom did a noble thing: He focused on solving the crisis, rather than decreasing its visibility. 

Now, in the rearview mirror, Newsom’s approach appears dangerously close to asking constituents, unhoused and housed, to hold tight for a far-off future in which California has built enough affordable housing. In the meantime, it seems, those in places that lack shelter must move along—every three days, per Newsom’s guidance—until a caseworker miraculously tracks them down in their latest make-do abode to offer the golden ticket: a permanent housing slot. 

The scale of unsheltered homelessness in California, tens of billions of dollars later, gives Republicans leverage to declare Newsom’s strategy a “failed, ideological” blue state mess, despite decades of evidence showing Housing First-style permanent supportive housing to be the best solution we’ve found to homelessness. (Since 2010, veteran homelessness has been cut in half, and three states have effectively ended it, which the VA credits to its Housing First approach.) Had Newsom recognized that swiftly decreasing street homelessness is key to the political support needed to end homelessness overall, he could have mitigated his opponents’ arguments; California could have cemented itself as a leader in developing quality interim housing—while still funding permanent projects—and more people could have come inside. The governor could have run for president without camera crews inevitably descending on his state’s least fortunate. 

In truth, however, there was a simpler, less courageous way Newsom might have improved his standing in the politics of the years to come: avoid making promises on homelessness. Before Newsom, this was the conventional route for California gubernatorial candidates, if not for pols across the country. Homelessness was considered a high-voltage third rail: make commitments, fail to deliver, and feel the deadly jolt of voter anger. So politicians steered clear of pledges altogether. 

In truth, there was a simpler, less courageous way Newsom might have improved his standing in the politics of the years to come: avoid making promises on homelessness. The governor will pay a price for his bravery.

The governor will pay a price for his bravery. Of all the landmines littering Newsom’s path to the presidency, homelessness is the Republicans’ most marketable. Tent cities translate lamentably well to visual media, from TikTok to television news. 

Newsom can take credit for the 4 percent drop in statewide homelessness and the 9 percent decline in unsheltered homelessness in California under his tenure. And, as the regulatory rollbacks he’s championed increasingly pay off, as I suspect they will, more permanent units will come online. Perhaps then, the country will view his crusade to end homelessness more favorably. But come 2028, the tragedy of Gavin Newsom and homelessness could spell tragedy for Democrats, too.

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