Multiple state agencies spent nearly $24 billion on housing and homeless programs to alleviate California’s homelessness crisis in the first five years of Gavin Newsom’s governorship, but the number of people without homes continued to grow, rising by 20% to more than 180,000 in the most recent federal count in 2023.

State Auditor Grant Parks cited that stunning level of spending this year in a sharply worded report concluding that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, Newsom’s umbrella agency that’s supposed to coordinate and track state programs, has utterly failed to do so.

Parks said the agency “has not aligned its action plan for addressing homelessness with its statutory goals, nor has it ensured that it collects accurate, complete, and comparable financial and outcome information from homelessness programs. Until Cal ICH takes these critical steps, the state will lack up‑to‑date information that it can use to make data‑driven policy decisions on how to effectively reduce homelessness.”

City and county governments have spent additional billions of dollars on homelessness, which stands at the top of the list of worrisome issues continuously cited by California voters in polls. California’s homelessness crisis is very apparent.

If spending of that magnitude — probably $30 billion-plus by now — has not made noteworthy progress on reducing California’s homelessness crisis, one must wonder how much it would cost to provide shelter and necessary support services for every homeless person in the state.

No one in Newsom’s administration or the Legislature has ventured into that analytical territory. As Parks says, state officials don’t even know how well their current programs are working, and until they do, the state cannot chart a comprehensive and realistic plan for ultimate success and remediation of California’s homelessness crisis.

Nevertheless, a report presented to the Los Angeles City Council by the city’s homelessness services agency gives us a rough idea of what it would cost and it’s a truly stunning number, something north of $100 billion or more than $500,000 for each homeless person.

Read the full article about California’s homelessness crisis by Dan Walters at CalMatters.