A lot has been made of California’s population exodus since the pandemic lockdowns exposed how high the cost of living was in the state. But there is one population in California that is continuing to grow: the homeless population.
California’s homeless population increased by 5.8% this year to a total of just over 181,000 homeless people. California also has a higher percentage of its homeless people living on the streets and sleeping outside (roughly 70%) than any other state. It is the worst of both worlds, and it comes even as California has spent $17.5 billion on homelessness from 2018 to 2022.
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Somehow, despite all that spending, California’s homelessness crisis has only grown worse. When you look around the halls of the state leadership and at where that money goes, it isn’t hard to see why. In California, that money is funneled through government bureaucracies and homeless activist organizations. Texas spends just a fraction of what California does on homelessness and has seen a drop in homelessness in the past decade, while California’s population has only gone up.
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Meanwhile, debates about homelessness in California have become a blame game. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who promised to end homelessness in San Francisco in 10 years exactly 20 years ago, blames Democrat-appointed judges for not letting San Francisco clear homeless encampments. Democratic district attorneys and mayors are bickering with each other about who deserves the blame for this problem. All the while, California residents are being leeched of their hard-earned money to feed the California government machine that can’t solve homelessness or much of anything else.
California needs a wave of new leadership both at the state level and in the major cities where these problems are most pervasive. Otherwise, California will continue to see each of these problems grow worse, no matter how much money is burned by the “solutions” put forward by the Democrats who have a vise grip on power in the state.