California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton wants to know where $24 billion in homelessness funding went, because apparently the state government doesn’t know and Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to know.
Hilton was speaking with nutritionist and media personality Jillian Michaels about the Homeless Industrial Complex, criticizing the so-called nonprofits that make millions of dollars from taxpayers by fueling the problem, as they “just don't do anything useful with [the money], except keep themselves going. It's an employment program.”
The state of California cannot even account for billions in homelessness funding. “So that was the state auditor, totally independent of politics, [who] found [that], and what actually happened was a Republican legislator in the state legislature said, ‘We're worried about the homelessness money. Let’s ask the state auditor to do a... take a look.’ State auditor came back and said, ‘There's $24 billion where we have no idea where it went. We can't find it, or what it did.’”
$24 billion of your money for homelessness and the independent State Auditor couldn’t track where it went or what it achieved—Newsom vetoed a bipartisan audit bill from his own Democrat supermajority while nonprofits pay $1.6M salaries (from Hawaii) and crony developers charge $1M a door for “supportive housing” that could cost a quarter of that. This is the Sacramento machine Becerra would keep running: grift over results, while the streets get worse. I’ll demand real accountability, end the waste, and actually get people off the streets. WAKE UP CALIFORNIA—vote for CHANGE!
— Steve Hilton (@SteveHiltonx) October 12, 2026
In fact, the scandal was so massive that even some Democrats got worried. “The state legislature, which is two-thirds Democrat-controlled, complete Democrat machine… They passed a bill saying… it was too much even for them.” The legislature urged, “‘Let's have a real audit of this homelessness money.’ And Newsom vetoed that bill, from his own Democrat super-majority.”
The only reason to oppose an audit like that is that know there is major fraud and don’t want to fix the problem. Not only does Newsom feel no sense of responsibility for taxpayer money, but we now know that Democrats regularly harvest votes from homeless people, so why would they want to help those people out of the terrible situations they are in?
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Hilton said there are two major components to the Homeless Industrial Complex. One is “the nonprofits, and they are getting millions of dollars for services for the homeless, but they're not actually getting them better. They're not, 'cause they’re not allowed to use it for drug rehab, or anything that will… actually get them off” the drugs. “In that sense, it's just a job creation scheme for these people who are employed by these nonprofits,” Hilton argued. “By the way, just the other day in L.A., [we found] a homelessness nonprofit run by a lady who makes $1.6 million a year salary… She lives in Hawaii.”
He was evidently referring to Carol Adelkoff of the 1736 Family Crisis Center. About 94% of the center’s revenue comes from government grants and other taxpayer funds.
But the nonprofits aren’t the full problem, Hilton clarified. “Actually, a bigger part of it, and this really people don't understand, but we've been following it, is the developers, builders. There's a whole little crony group of developers who are making a fortune out of building what they call permanent supportive housing, which is … like a shelter, but it's basically apartment units for homeless people. And they charge a million dollars a door.”
Hilton’s friend who builds apartments in the Bay Area said the real cost to build them is probably $250,000 a unit, but “they layer on all these things, you've got to use union labor. You gotta use this supplier for concrete, you know, all these... It's a scam. I mean, this is what's been going on.” But everything Democrats do is a scam for their voters.
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