Hearing about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal to pump billions more dollars into combatting homelessness, including encampment cleanups, made me remember a day when he was Mayor of San Francisco. I think it was in 2008, when he was running for a second term. He was hosting a fundraiser at a restaurant South of Market, and a big part of his campaign theme was the success of Care Not Cash (CNC).
Newsom had introduced CNC as a ballot proposition in 2002, when he was still a San Francisco Supervisor. It severely reduced the monthly cash stipend given to the city’s 3,000 homeless people, but increased their access to housing and food. CNC, Newsom had promised, would go a long way toward ending homelessness in San Francisco.
I remember getting off BART, the subway, and making my way a few blocks to the fundraiser. Along the way, I had to literally step over the bodies of homeless people sprawled on the sidewalks or in the gutters. I thought how weird and ironic it was that Gavin, a friend, was touting CNC, which in the previous six years appeared to have done very little to tackle homelessness. To this day, the number of homeless people in the city continues to rise. It’s now up by more than 50% since 2009, suggesting that CNC, whatever its initial success had been, had zero long-term impact.
Now, the Governor’s $286 billion budget—California’s largest ever, thanks to a record surplus—proposes to add an additional $2 billion in homeless aide, on top of the $12 billion that was approved last year. The combined $14 billion is more than the annual budgets of 14 U.S. states. It’s very good news that California has weathered the pandemic and associated economic slowdown so well as to have a budget surplus, and it’s commendable that Newsom—who always took homelessness seriously—is trying yet again to do something about it. But long experience watching these things tells me that throwing more money at homelessness might have no more impact on the problem than did Care Not Cash.
This is not to criticize the Governor, as Republicans are trying to do. Sitting on a gigantic pile of money, Newsom clearly has to devote a chunk of it to homelessness. Were he not to do so, he would be roundly criticized by his fellow Democrats, and justly so. As a policy wonk, Newsom can be counted on to not blindly invest billions in crackpot schemes of dubious provenance.
The problem is that so many homeless people have problems that appear insurmountable with any amount of money. Many are there by choice; we know this from our own history in Oakland. Offered shelter, they refuse it, claiming that shelters are unsafe, or don’t give them the privacy they wish. Many are zonked out of their minds on drugs or alcohol or both, and even when offered treatment, turn it down. Some claim to enjoy sleeping under the stars. Now, I know these are controversial statements for me to make. Pro-homeless advocates imply that close to 100% of homeless people are there because of an inhumane capitalist system that exploits people. While I have no doubt that some homeless people can no longer afford to pay rent because of Oakland’s gentrification, I regret that after all these years we still have little clarity about who the homeless really are, or how they ended up in their wretched state. In the absence of reliable information, all we can do is make inferences. And as someone who has lived in close proximity to encampments for many years, my inference is exactly what I said above: a lot of homeless people cannot be helped by money.
Or let me put it another way: I suppose that if there were an infinite amount of money, we could end homelessness. We could craft individual plans to each homeless person and pay all the costs—short-term and long-term—for cleaning them up, healing their illnesses, giving them psychotherapy, housing and transportation, training them for jobs, buying them clothes, and so forth. We could, in fact, give them more or less the same lifestyle that you and I enjoy, for as long as it takes for them to get back on their feet and commit to living industrious, tax-paying lives.
But how much money would that cost? And for how long? Beyond that, do we really want to create a new class of individuals who live on the largesse of the state?
I thank Gov. Newsom for doing what he proposes to do. He’s got a good heart because he was raised that way, and he wants to do the right thing. It’s just that, with everything I’ve seen, I’m dubious whenever I hear about more money thrown at homelessness. It never seems to work, and I’m sorry to say I don’t think it will work this time, either.
Steve Heimoff