California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a slew of bills Wednesday, including one that would have required state agencies to report how successful the state’s costly homeless programs are to Newsom’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH) every year.
In his veto message, Newsom said while he supports efforts “to increase accountability and the effectiveness” of such programs, “similar measures are already in place.”
“For these reasons, I cannot sign this bill,” Newsom wrote after listing several bills in the legislature that will require additional reporting of outcomes of several programs. “These reports will be made publicly available by Cal ICH.”
California’s homelessness spending — more than $20 billion since Newsom took office — has drawn more scrutiny from legislators, including Democrats, this year. Meanwhile, cities and counties have drawn the ire of Newsom, who blames them for not properly handling allocated funds. The frustrated second-term governor picked up trash left behind by homeless encampments over the summer as he continued to make calls for municipalities to take accountability.
Republican state Rep. Joshua Hoover, the author of AB 2903, said in a statement that “Governor Newsom is doubling down on his failed response to homelessness.”
“Our state has spent billions of taxpayer dollars in recent years only to see the homeless population increase statewide,” Hoover said. “We will not solve this crisis until we get serious about accountability.”
Despite the price tag to reduce homelessness, the problem has only gotten worse in the Golden State in the last decade.
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Earlier this year, an independent state audit report found that Newsom’s Cal ICH failed to track how billions of dollars have been spent trying to tackle the crisis in the last five years. Cal ICH was established in 2017 and has since only produced one report in its seven years in operation.
Over the past five years, the report found that the CICH didn’t consistently track whether the money actually improved the situation, the audit concluded. It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs due to the lack of a consistent method.
In a letter to the governor in April, the state auditor wrote that “the state must do more to assess the cost-effectiveness of its homelessness programs.”
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Despite billions spent on homelessness and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities, according to the state auditor’s report. Since 2013, homelessness has risen more than 53%. In 2023, the state estimated about 180,000 people in the state were homeless, more than anywhere else in the U.S.
California follows what’s known as a “housing first” policy to address homelessness, which is the idea that providing housing units to homeless people regardless of substance abuse or mental illness is the first step to relieving the crisis.
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