Gov. Gavin Newsom has performed Santa Claus for the final week, promising larger state subsidies to Hollywood’s movie and video trade and giving cities and counties a new tranche of state assist to fight homelessness.
The quantities are in the identical ballpark however the recipients couldn’t be extra dissimilar, $750 million to enhance the stability sheets of some already rich leisure producers and $827 million to assist an estimated 186,000 homeless folks achieve shelter. The governor’s attitudes about recipients of the political largesse, as expressed in intently spaced information conferences in Los Angeles, are additionally markedly completely different.
Newsom characterised the growth of leisure subsidies from $330 million a yr to $750 million as “investing in the future of this industry and the future of this state,” however devoted a lot of his homelessness announcement to warning native officers that they need to do higher and can face new efficiency requirements.
“We’ve given our local partners the tools and the resources they need,” Newsom stated in an announcement. “It’s time to end this crisis now. These new funds represent the hard work, accountability and strategic planning needed to address homelessness with real, long-lasting results.”
The governor’s workplace stated that, “as a condition of receiving the funding, the awardees must agree to increased accountability, transparency, and compliance measures. These new measures will help enhance the ability for these state investments to drive real, measurable results and will help improve the tracking of data and outcomes. This ensures that grant recipients remain accountable and protects state funding.”
During the last 4 years, the state has allotted $2.4 billion in assist to native governments for homelessness packages, and Newsom has periodically threatened to withhold additional appropriations, saying the recipients weren’t spending the cash successfully.
Nevertheless native officers have countered that getting cash one yr at a time, with no commitments of long-term financing, makes it troublesome to determine everlasting packages to assist homeless folks discover shelter and cope with the problems that made them homeless within the first place.
It’s additionally noteworthy that Grant Parks, the state auditor, has excoriated Newsom’s Interagency Council on Homelessness for failing to observe anti-homelessness packages because it was created to do. Till the council does its job, “the state will lack up‑to‑date information that it can use to make data‑driven policy decisions on how to effectively reduce homelessness,” Parks stated in a report final Aprilsimply earlier than Newsom and the Legislature staged their annual tussle over homelessness spending within the state funds.
Because the variety of homeless folks continues to climb, the squabbling between Newsom and native officers appears much less over how the disaster ought to be attacked and extra over who can be blamed for failure.
Newsom has simply 26 months remaining in his governorship, and it’s useless sure that when he leaves homelessness — significantly unpleasant encampments on streets and sidewalks and in parks –— will nonetheless be excessive on the voting public’s record of points. It would even be worse.
He’s clearly longing for the political onus to be on native officers, relatively than be a part of his gubernatorial legacy, as signaled by his comment that “we’ve given our local partners the tools and resources they need.”
In actual fact, it’s far wanting what could be wanted for an all-out program to clear the streets by housing the unhoused.
The brand new allocation contains $254 million for the Metropolis of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, however a latest research commissioned by Los Angeles Metropolis Council says that eradicating homelessness within the county would price $22 billion over 10 years or $2.2 billion a yr, practically 10 instances what the state is offering.
