Make Homelessness Investments Where We See the Solutions
After the passing of this pandemic, 160,000 Californians will remain mired in another epidemic: homelessness. As encampments become an increasingly ubiquitous feature of our urban landscape, Californians of all ideologies consistently identify homelessness as the state’s most pressing problem. The crisis most acutely appears on the streets of our state’s thirteen largest cities, which contain 28% of California’s population, but 59% of our unhoused residents.
Too often, our greatest crises afflict us when we have the least resources to address them. Today, however, we encounter the rare collision of a problem of historic magnitude and an unprecedented, $76 billion budget surplus in the California budget — not including a $26 billion windfall of federal relief dollars. Leaders have the resources this year — far more than any other year — to finally get traction on our most intractable problem.
To his credit, Governor Gavin Newsom and the legislative leadership — Senate President pro tem Toni Atkins, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, and the heads of the Budget Committees, Senator Nancy Skinner and Assemblymember Phil Ting — have all propsed historic levels of spending to counter homelessness. One critically important element of the legsilature’s proposal, however, remains at issue: a billion-dollar annual allocation to cities and counties to nimbly deploy rapid solutions to homelessness in their communities.
Details matter. So do results: direct allocations of flexible state dollars to large cities in the past three years have enabled a wave of much-needed homelessness solutions, at an unprecedented pace. After decades of wheel-spinning, we now see cabin communities in Oakland and Riverside, bridge shelters in San Diego and Los Angeles, pallet housing in Fresno, and navigation centers in San Francisco and Sacramento. We’ve seen swift expansions of many cost-effective homeless prevention programs, tiny homes, safe parking, and rapid rehousing efforts. Cities have become laboratories for innovation by necessity, because the past approaches to homelessness haven’t worked. Even the state’s successful and much-lauded Project Homekey initiative in 2020 — purchasing hotels to house homeless residents — has antecedents in similar prior initiatives in cities like San Jose and Los Angeles.
With the onset of the pandemic, California’s cities shifted all of these initiatives into overdrive, rapidly deploying flexible state and federal emergency dollars to house tens of thousands of homeless residents through a variety of makeshift shelters, rapidly converted from convention centers and community centers. In my own city of San Jose, we used $17 million that Governor Newsom allocated last year to build three prefabricated dormitories, moving more than 300 San Joseans off the street. In a Bay Area construction market where apartment buildings cost nearly $800,000 per unit and four years to develop, we built all three projects in ten months, at about $110,000 per unit.
Here’s the rub: without dollars from the state, we will push thousands of these recently housed residents back into the street. We need ongoing, flexible funding to keep these projects operating, and to keep people housed.
Beyond this imperative, many other reasons compel an allocation of state dollars beyond the clutches of state bureaucrats, directly to local communities. Cities control the land use in their jurisdictions, and counties allocate drug treatment and mental health dollars. Together, cities and counties can better coordinate those decisions with local investments in shelters and affordable housing than can a faraway state agency. Cities also understand better than any state bureaucracy their own community’s unique challenges with homelessness. For example, statewide formulas for the allocation of affordable housing bonds have shut out Bay Area cities that have higher construction costs than Southern California or the Central Valley.
Of course, should the State provide local communities with dollars, they should demand accountability. Cities must not receive additional funding without proven success, defined by clear metrics and verifiable outcomes, and they must face consequences — including clawbacks — with failure.
Mayors know accountability well. When there’s an officer-involved shooting in my city, dozens of protesters march to my house. When a park suffers from neglect, I receive pointed emails and phone calls. Consider whether anyone knows the names of which state bureaucrats authorized billions in fraudulent disbursements of EDD checks, or which state regulators failed to properly identify the neglect of safety protocols at PG&E that led to deadly wildfires or gas explosions.
Big cities display California’s greatest problems — including homelessness. By necessity, however, they hold the most promising solutions. They simply need the dollars to put those solutions to work — nimbly, effectively, and accountably.
