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Melissa Melendez: California can’t solve homelessness while ignoring key drivers of homelessness

April 3, 2023

As part of his extended state-of-the state tour this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “new” multi-tiered plan to address the state’s homelessness crisis seems curiously like so many of his previous plans to address the issue that has dogged him throughout his more than two decades career in elected political life.

Who can forget San Francisco’s 2002 Proposition N (euphemistically titled “Care not Cash”) that turbocharged that city’s homeless industrial complex in the name of providing services, and not direct payments, to the chronically indigent? Now the governor proposes even more bureaucracy, more rhetoric and redirection away from the real issues, and more of the same misery for thousands of chronically homeless and drug-addicted Californians. Yet, if the numbers show anything, decades of cash transfers to Newsom’s public sector union allies have only witnessed an exponential rise of chronic homelessness and its sorry effects on Californians’ quality of life.

What did Prop. N, in fact, yield? A 2018 Los Angeles Times lookback at Newsom’s record in San Francisco showed marginal fluctuations in official homeless numbers between the enactment of Prop. N and the first six years of his mayorship were a result of re-housing people who were already in shelters and did little to affect the chronically homeless — essentially it was a “re-purposing of existing money.”

What about the decade plus Newsom has been in statewide office? The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness tracked an almost 30% increase in the official number of homeless people statewide between 2011 and 2020, to 161,548, a third of whom are “chronically homeless.”

It is bewildering, to say the least, that the governor now wants to double down on the same failed policies. Take for instance his proposal to amend Proposition 63 (2004), a tax increase voters approved under the guise that it would fund the state’s mental health infrastructure. A 2018 state auditor’s report noted that funds have been diverted, misspent and even unspent, amassing as county slush funds. Now Newsom wants to spend these and even more funds on “treatment beds” for mental health patients and drug addicts, adding additional bond debt for expanded homelessness programs and infrastructure. Prop. 23 and its attempts to address “mental health” infrastructure were sloppily implemented and failed to curtail the explosion of homelessness in the nearly 20 years since its enactment. What purpose is served by more spending on so-called “infrastructure” (and the associated bureaucrats), other than to contribute to the mirage the governor has any control over this crisis? Why else would Newsom double down and expand failed and poorly administered programs?

There is an important concession the governor surprisingly admits in this expensive and unworkable plan: that drug use must be addressed.

It raises the question: Why do Newsom and his allies repeatedly deemphasize the central role drug abuse and trafficking has in causing and perpetuating California’s homelessness crisis?

Instead of properly supporting existing anti-drug enforcement measures and stressing the contributions criminal courts have made in incarcerating drug traffickers, the fentanyl crisis and other lethal drugs are just an afterthought.

For decades, California prosecutors used criminal penalties to plea-bargain drug users into treatment and imprison dealers. In fact, Sacramento County estimated in 2019 that 60% of its homeless population were admitted users (although substantially fewer individuals acknowledge that substance use impacted their homeless condition), a number consistent with the San Francisco Chronicle’s 2020 report that 28% of that year’s fentanyl overdose deaths were among the unhoused.

Whether due to his ideological commitments or to cover for his poor record and sheer incompetence on this issue, the governor continues to emphasize more bureaucracy, less criminal enforcement and offers only passing acknowledgements of the drug crisis.

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California will never resolve its homelessness scandal so long as its leaders ignore its core contributing factors.

Unfortunately, Gov. Newsom’s “new” plans are more of the same failed plans he has championed for 20 years: increased bureaucracy, further spending, and, consequently, ongoing misery. The difference in 2023 is we now have evidence that what once sounded so bold and cutting edge has proved an ineffective cover for cynically raising taxes and redirecting funds to his political allies.

And so the blocks of tent cities, “safe” injection sites and homeless encampments that were formerly contained to San Francisco, Skid Ro, and certain urban cores — encampments more fitting for the shanty towns of developing nations than the world’s fifth-largest economy – will continue to be commonplace and multiply throughout the state.

Melissa Melendez previously served as a California state senator and assemblymember. She is now president of the Golden State Policy Council.

Orange County Register

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Melissa Melendez: California can’t solve homelessness while ignoring key drivers of homelessness

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