California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is two-thirds short of the housing goal he set when he took office in 2019, while homelessness continues to rise across the state.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday on the dismal lack of progress under Newsom, who promised to build 3.5 million homes, but has only seen 1.1 million homes permitted on his watch — not all of which have actually been built.
Moreover, homelessness has risen across California, despite Newsom’s policy of spending billions of dollars to house the homeless in hotel and motel rooms.
The Chronicle noted:
While running for governor in 2017, Gavin Newsom laid out an ambitious goal: He would “lead the effort to develop the 3.5 million new housing units we need by 2025 because our solutions must be as bold as the problem is big.”
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In 2022, when he was running for reelection, Newsom walked back the 3.5 million number when his administration set a new, less ambitious target: Cities would need to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2030. So far, cities and counties have planned for 1.1 million new homes through their housing plans during Newsom’s tenure, said Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor’s office.
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Point-in-time count data, which estimates the number of homeless people on the streets on a single night in a jurisdiction, suggests California’s population of homeless people has grown from roughly 150,000 in 2019, the year Newsom took office, to roughly 180,000 last year.
The scale of Newsom’s failure on housing matches one of his other major failures: his fire prevention policy, which struggled to get off the ground, and whose success he exaggerated wildly when running for reelection in 2022.
Newsom’s electric vehicle (EV) policy is also falling short, with sales of the cars failing to reach the levels necessary to make up for the shortfall when his proposed ban on sales of gas-powered cars takes effect in the state in 2035.
One recent success has been California’s Proposition 36, which voters passed last month to restore penalties for shoplifting. That has begun to have a deterrent effect. However, it was opposed by Newsom and most Democrats.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
