Gov. Gavin Newsom has played Santa Claus for the last week, promising bigger state subsidies to Hollywood’s film and video industry and giving cities and counties a new tranche of state aid to combat homelessness.

Dan Walters

CalMatters

Opinion

The amounts are in the same ballpark but the recipients could not be more dissimilar, $750 million to improve the balance sheets of a few already wealthy entertainment producers and $827 million to help an estimated 186,000 homeless people gain shelter. The governor’s attitudes about recipients of the political largesse, as expressed in closely spaced news conferences in Los Angeles, are also markedly different.

Newsom characterized the expansion of entertainment subsidies from $330 million a year to $750 million as “investing in the future of this industry and the future of this state,” but devoted much of his homelessness announcement to warning local officials that they must do better and will face new performance standards.

“We’ve given our local partners the tools and the resources they need,” Newsom said in a statement. “It’s time to end this crisis now. These new funds represent the hard work, accountability and strategic planning needed to address homelessness with real, long-lasting results.”

The governor’s office said that, “as a condition of receiving the funding, the awardees must agree to increased accountability, transparency, and compliance measures. These new measures will help enhance the ability for these state investments to drive real, measurable results and will help improve the tracking of data and outcomes. This ensures that grant recipients remain accountable and protects state funding.”

Over the last four years, the state has allocated $2.4 billion in aid to local governments for homelessness programs, and Newsom has periodically threatened to withhold further appropriations, saying the recipients were not spending the money effectively.

However local officials have countered that getting money one year at a time, with no commitments of long-term financing, makes it difficult to establish permanent programs to help homeless people find shelter and deal with the issues that made them homeless in the first place.

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State Auditor Criticizes Homelessness Council

It’s also noteworthy that Grant Parks, the state auditor, has excoriated Newsom’s Interagency Council on Homelessness for failing to monitor anti-homelessness programs as it was created to do. Until the council does its job, “the state will lack up‑to‑date information that it can use to make data‑driven policy decisions on how to effectively reduce homelessness,” Parks said in a report last April, just before Newsom and the Legislature staged their annual tussle over homelessness spending in the state budget.

As the number of homeless people continues to climb, the squabbling between Newsom and local officials seems less over how the crisis should be attacked and more over who will be blamed for failure.

Newsom has just 26 months remaining in his governorship, and it’s dead certain that when he leaves homelessness — particularly unsightly encampments on streets and sidewalks and in parks –— will still be high on the voting public’s list of issues. It might even be worse.

He is obviously eager for the political onus to be on local officials, rather than be part of his gubernatorial legacy, as signaled by his remark that “we’ve given our local partners the tools and resources they need.”

In fact, it’s far short of what would be needed for an all-out program to clear the streets by housing the unhoused.

The new allocation includes $254 million for the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, but a recent study commissioned by Los Angeles City Council says that eradicating homelessness in the county would cost $22 billion over 10 years or $2.2 billion a year, nearly 10 times what the state is providing.

About the Author

Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He began his professional career in 1960, at age 16, at the Humboldt Times. CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more columns by Dan Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary.