Since Gavin Newsom started his governorship greater than 4 years in the past, the state has spent upwards of $20 billion on efforts to unravel – or a minimum of cut back – California’s worst-in-the-nation homelessness disaster.
The spending continues, however the variety of folks residing on the streets, in squalid camps or in ramshackle motorhomes and trailers continues to climb.
That unhappy truth was underscored not too long ago by a new census of homelessness in Los Angeles County, which has 1 / 4 of the state’s inhabitants however practically half of its homeless folks. The examine discovered a 9% rise within the variety of homeless folks within the county to 75,518, with greater than half (46,260) within the metropolis of Los Angeles.
“The homeless depend outcomes inform us what we already know – that we have now a disaster on our streets, and it’s getting worse,” mentioned Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, CEO of the Los Angeles Homeless Providers Authority, which carried out the depend.
The census not solely depicts a worsening drawback, however illustrates the issue Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass faces as she makes an attempt to make good on her marketing campaign pledge to get folks off the town’s streets.
California’s failure, a minimum of to date, to get a deal with on its homelessness disaster has made it a goal of scornful nationwide and worldwide media consideration and a mannequin of what to keep away from for different states.
The main underlying trigger for the disaster is a lack of housing that’s reasonably priced to Californians on the underside rungs of the financial ladder, exacerbated, amongst many, by alcohol and drug addictions and psychological sicknesses.
These elements point out that if California is to realize the higher hand on the disaster it should work on all causes concurrently and by some means forge coordination among the many alphabet soup of federal, state and native companies which personal slices of the general drawback and sometimes squabble amongst themselves.
The obvious of these squabbles has been the working feud between Newsom and native authorities officers. He accuses the locals of being insufficiently vigorous in implementing packages whereas they are saying they want everlasting sources of financing slightly than the year-to-year appropriations Newsom has provided.
Whereas the homelessness disaster is most evident, or visually jarring, within the state’s main cities equivalent to Los Angeles and San Francisco, it additionally afflicts the downtowns of smaller cities and paradoxically, the realm surrounding the state Capitol in downtown Sacramento is a working example.
A couple of years in the past, the development of a brand new basketball area and the opening of an expanded conference middle, plus new inns, house homes and eating places, indicated that downtown Sacramento had lastly arrested its decay.
Nonetheless, the COVID-19 pandemic was a heavy blow to the area, significantly since tens of hundreds of state staff have been informed to make money working from home, adopted by violent demonstrations in the summertime that broken downtown companies. As downtown Sacramento was hollowed out, encampments proliferated.
Metropolis officers equivalent to Mayor Darrell Steinberg – whom Newsom tapped as a significant advisor on homelessness coverage – have feuded with their counterparts in county authorities over who ought to bear duty for anti-homelessness packages.
The newly elected Sacramento County district lawyer, Thien Ho, accused metropolis officers of refusing to implement their very own ordinances banning sidewalk encampments and threatened felony expenses to drive them to behave.
Steinberg and members of the town council, in the meantime, couldn’t agree on the place to web site accepted tenting grounds that might persuade street-dwellers to maneuver, lastly handing the job of choosing websites to their metropolis supervisor.
Homelessness is an exceedingly troublesome problem by itself, but it surely’s made infinitely worse when public officers can’t cooperate on strategy it.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.
