A fed-up Gavin Newsom pushes California cities on homelessness

SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom has recited a consistent message to cities and counties over the years as he tries to leverage billions in state funds to combat homelessness: Get people off the street, or else.

He said it in 2022, when he briefly froze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid by rejecting every local plan to address homelessness. He said it in 2023, when he questioned the rationale to “provide them one dollar more” if they “can't clean up the encampments.” He said it in April, warning they “sure as hell shouldn’t get another penny if they didn’t use the money wisely.”

This time, he says he means it.

But some local officials aren't buying it and are pushing back, arguing the governor is unproductively threatening needed dollars and shifting blame for a problem he’s been unable to solve.

“If we don’t see demonstrable results, I’ll start to redirect money,” Newsom said in mid-August, wearing aviator sunglasses, a T-shirt and a cap as he cleaned up an encampment in Los Angeles with news cameras recording — a recurring feature.

The repeated threats illustrate the gravity and intractability of the homelessness issue for ambitious Democrats like Newsom, who has called it “the biggest scar on the reputation of the state of California.” Newsom’s aides describe a yearslong effort to raise the political cost for mayors and county supervisors who refuse to clear encampments or get people housed, often buckling to pushback from voters who don’t want shelter or services in their neighborhoods.

The intraparty dispute is unfolding as the nation’s most prominent California Democrat is running for president and fending off Republican attempts to tie her to the state’s homelessness crisis.

But Newsom’s persistent need to reiterate the same call also shows the limited power of his office and the fundamental necessity of local officials’ buy-in to execute his vision. The federal count of unhoused Californians has risen by 30,000 people since Newsom took office in 2019, to roughly 181,000 last year .

Newsom, emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling in June that lifted constraints on clearing encampments , issued a sweeping executive order to get unhoused people off of streets weeks later. But the order only applied to state land, limiting its scope.

Prominent Democratic officials have pushed back on the governor’s threats, and even some who welcome Newsom’s pressure play warn it won’t allay the deeper problems.

“We can't simply wave a magic wand and make encampments disappear. We also have to offer people a place to go,” San Jose’s Democratic Mayor Matt Mahan said. “My fear with the [Supreme Court] decision and the governor's executive order is we could create a race to the bottom in which cities and counties focus their taxpayer dollars on simply shifting people to other jurisdictions.”

Newsom’s office declined to comment, referring back to his remarks in Los Angeles.

Repeated threats

When Newsom froze funds in 2022, the result was a meeting where local officials promised to make larger reductions in their unsheltered populations and ultimately saw the funding restored. At the time, Newsom said he was satisfied with their “recognition that we have to get to another level.”

The next year, Newsom questioned in his January budget press conference whether cities deserved another dollar. Months later, he signed a budget allocating another $1.4 billion for two marquee programs, touting “new accountability measures” that required better regional coordination. Applicants also have to set more concrete targets — like building shelters or hiring outreach workers — and show progress on them.

This year, one way he’s trying to crack down is through a budget that imposed more conditions on aid dollars, allowing the state to block funds if local agencies have made “insufficient progress” toward goals like getting people out of encampments. Newsom said in L.A. that next year’s budget will withhold money from places that don’t show “specific results in the next few months.” His encampment crackdown met resistance from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and county officials.

He’s also pushing legislation that would make cities and counties plan low-cost housing, which cleared the Legislature last week and now awaits Newsom’s signature.

But even the Democrat who carried Newsom’s planning bill bemoaned a lack of clear expectations.

“We have had strings attached through the budget and those strings have gotten stronger every year about what the expectations are for performance, but there is no data,” said Assemblymember Chris Ward from San Diego. He said that threatening to pull money is “unfair, because we are not stating what the clear expectations are for success.” He warned Newsom against “knee-jerk reactions to ultimately stop momentum that we’re trying to build on over the years.”

And while Newsom faults local intransigence, his detractors believe he is cynically shifting blame after his administration unaccountably spent billions of dollars with little to show for it: A scathing state audit earlier this year found the administration hasn’t tracked if homelessness money is producing results.

Where Newsom vows progress, critics see more posturing — and a self-serving effort to offload blame for a political liability.

“This is what Republicans and Democrats can’t stand about Gavin Newsom,” said Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher. “He looks bad because of his failures on homelessness, so he does this big PR stunt and blames everybody else.”

And while local leaders don’t dispute Newsom’s focus on the severity and urgency of street homelessness, they warn yanking money will only exacerbate the situation on the ground.

“The scale of the resources needs to match the problem. A billion dollars a year for the [homelessness grant] program is wonderful, but that’s not alone going to be able to move the needle,” said League of California Cities lobbyist Jason Rhine. “We’re not going to be able to accomplish this by pulling funding and threatening.”

A new era?

Newsom and his allies, meanwhile, frame this moment as the culmination of a multi-year effort. The governor has allocated roughly $24 billion toward homelessness since 2019, championed laws to push people into treatment for mental and behavioral health and persuaded voters to narrowly pass a bond generating billions of dollars for services and beds.

“We had a vision of the pieces that needed to be put in place,” said political consultant Jason Elliott, who until recently was Newsom’s point person on homelessness. “The pieces are now in place; we expect results. The results have not materialized.”

Newsom sent a $10 million message last month by redirecting a grant to build tiny homes from San Diego County to San Jose after San Diego leaders reneged on plans for a site. Assemblymember Ward’s bill from Newsom would compel cities to plan housing for their lowest-income residents or risk forfeiting money and control over zoning, expanding his tactic of penalizing cities that do too little on housing — although the consequences won’t bite until after he leaves office.

Assemblymember Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat who until recently led the budget committee, said the homelessness program Newsom has used to shower local governments with cash was never intended to be a blank check.

“The intent was always that if the money isn’t being spent properly it should be clawed back,” Ting said. “It’s very easy to deliver a message because next year we’ll revisit those budget items and that money could be pulled away.”

Democrats have also rebuked the governor for demanding they move people off the street now that the Supreme Court has dissolved a requirement that cities have enough beds before initiating encampment sweeps. Los Angeles officials like Mayor Karen Bass have warned against an overly punitive approach that she cautioned could mean simply shuffling people around or citing them.

Similarly, some lawmakers who are scrutinizing the latest round of hundreds of millions of dollars for encampment clearances fear the funds could be used simply to paper over an inconvenient issue. Assemblymember Alex Lee, a Democrat from the San Francisco Bay Area, called the encampment resolution grant fund “a trash abatement program disguised as a homelessness program.”

“A lot of this encampment money was actually to push people out of sight and make them less visible,” Lee said. “That’s hundreds of millions of dollars that could go to rehabilitative services.”

Still, Newsom’s defenders hope he is gradually shifting the calculus for local leaders. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria argued mayors and council members, who are hesitant to take action like opening new shelters because they fear the political fallout, would only change if they begin to see a “political cost” for inaction.

“I’m hopeful that what the governor's trying to accomplish with his considerable bully pulpit is to force cities and counties to do the hard part,” he said. “Not the easy part of saying, ‘We don’t like encampments,’ but the hard part of saying, ‘You can’t be here, but you can go over there.’”

Elliott argued Newsom’s aggressive stance would be most effective as a deterrent that persuades local officials to act before they risk forfeiting money or zoning authority.

“It’s better for the governor or an attorney general or an assemblymember to say, ‘Why are you fighting this fight? You will lose,’” Elliott said. “Lose could be lose your seat, lose could be you lose a lawsuit, lose could be you lose votes.”

But putting the onus on local governments could also extend a stalemate.

“What we’re seeing now with the court decisions and what Newsom’s doing is people are trying to get out of the business of homelessness,” said Democratic political consultant Andrew Acosta, “and that leaves some municipalities stuck trying to figure it out.”