Gavin Newsom’s determination to keep himself in the national news — on display since his first weeks as mayor of San Francisco way back in 2004 — has always been considered an overt sign he has his sights on the White House. The latest example came with the March 6 release of the first episode in his new podcast in which the California governor’s out-of-right-field break with progressives on some high-profile social issues made plenty of waves. Whether his latest maneuvering will pay off is unclear, but the overall strategy has plainly worked. Reliably polished and camera-ready in the media spotlight, Newsom is given a solid chance of winning the Democratic nomination in 2028 by many pundits.
To which polls show millions of Californians say, “What gives">growing public disenchantment reflects that they share these doubts.
One recent story helps show why there is a gap between national and home-state perceptions of California’s 40th governor: his latest attempt to shift blame from the Capitol to local governments for the state’s entrenched problem with homelessness. It came as part of an announcement that the state was prepared to hand out $920 million in new funding to local communities to address the issue, in particular by removing encampments. Newsom’s office stressed that the additional funding was linked to “stronger ability measures to hold local governments able if they fail to make progress in addressing homelessness.” The governor has also made clear that he wants the authority to “claw back” funds that have already been given to local agencies which haven’t had significant progress in reducing homelessness.
Now the idea that many local governments in California could do a better job of handling their duties is hardly controversial. Nor is the hunch that much of the $24 billion the state allocated for homelessness in Newsom’s first five years — a span in which the total number of homeless people in California went from 151,000 to 181,000 — could have been better-spent.
But their are two huge problems with the governor blasting local elected leaders for poor oversight of taxpayer-funded homeless programs that hindsight shows to be ineffective.
The first is that Newsom’s own istration was slammed repeatedly last year after a state audit found that it failed to track what worked and didn’t work as it kept pumping more money into homelessness programs involving housing, outreach services and more. So much for the governor’s career-long attempt to sell himself as a savvy hands-on .
The second is the very real possibility that however the next $24 billion on homelessness is spent, California can never make significant long-term progress until it doesn’t just contain but reduce the cost of housing — a gigantic challenge.
This is because the cost of shelter is by a wide margin the leading cause of homelessness in California, as shown by the research of economists like UCLA’s Lee Ohanian and by a comprehensive 2023 UC San Francisco study. Given that California has 1.9 million households which pay half or more of their pretax income as rent, there is a huge group of residents at constant risk of losing shelter, Ohanian notes. Lead UCSF researcher Margot Kushel detailed how being unable to afford rent made many individuals’ struggles with substance abuse and mental illness far more acute — putting them in a “personal doom loop” created by California’s “toxic combination of deep poverty and high housing costs.”
Which brings us back to Newsom. In 2018, a centerpiece of his successful campaign for governor was his promise to stop the growth in the cost of housing by building “3.5 million new homes by 2025.” Only about one-fifth that many homes have been issued building permits — not necessarily been built — since then.
This, of course, is not remotely all or even mostly Newsom’s fault. Between the fact that the state’s far-reaching environmental laws often make it easy to obstruct housing — and the fact that large chunks of many communities don’t want zoning rules weakened or wiped out — he faces many obstacles. But, to put it mildly, it is disingenuous for the governor to blame local officials for not being able to solve a problem that he hasn’t laid a glove on — even though he is by far the most powerful official in the state.
It was President Harry Truman who made the phrase “the buck stops here” famous. Might the next member of the presidential club be the governor who says “the buck stops over there”? We are likely to find out.
