California can’t solve its homelessness crisis, so it’s asking Texas for advice
Zachary Faria
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The litany of problems California is facing is made all the more embarrassing by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) defiant assertions that his state is better than any GOP-run state. Imagine how he feels knowing that California officials trying to solve the state’s homelessness crisis are doing so by traveling to Texas.
City and county representatives from Los Angeles and members of San Jose’s homelessness response team have visited Houston in the past year in search of remedies for the homelessness crisis in their cities. Texas has seen a 28% drop in homelessness since 2012, while California has seen a 43% increase. California’s homeless rate is five times worse than Texas’s, and yet last year Texas spent just $19.7 million on its main programs for homeless people while California spent $1.85 billion.
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That funding does little good when it is funneled through bloated bureaucracies and put in the hands of groups and organizations that think enabling homeless people to fall further into drug addiction is the best thing for them. California also stumbles on the question of affordability, as the cost of housing (and most everything else) is exorbitant in the Golden State compared to Texas or others.
Newsom has spent the last several years angrily and haughtily asserting that California was far superior to the two biggest Republican-run states, Texas and Florida. He’s done victory laps over the state’s gross domestic product even though California also hosts the highest poverty rate in the country. He made false or misleading claims about how California was more “tax-friendly,” or how there is no exodus of residents from the state. He is understandably defensive of the state’s failures, which are also his failures.
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Homelessness is just another one of those failures. As Newsom and California Democrats disparage red states and light billions of dollars on fire to make no progress on homelessness, city leaders from the Golden State are quietly taking notes from Texas on how to better address the crisis. It surely must be a blow to Newsom’s ego to know that Texas has the one-up on him again. You have to wonder how many more of these black eyes it would take to humble him.