California Governor Gavin Newsom is warning towns and cities that fail to clear the homeless encampments in their jurisdictions that they will lose funding if they refuse to follow his executive order on the issue.
"We're done with the excuses. The last big excuse was, 'Well, the courts are saying we can't do anything.' Well, that's no longer the case, so we had a simple executive order: Do your job," said Newsom. "There's no more excuses. You've got the money, you've got the flexibility, you've got the green light, you've got the support from the state and the public is demanding it of you."
California has spent $24 billion on ways to house the homeless in the last five years. Despite that gigantic sum, the state has no idea why the problem didn't improve in many cities. The towns and cities claim there's no reliable data to tell them what works and what doesn't.
An audit of homeless spending published in April "concludes that the state must do more to assess the cost-effectiveness of its homelessness programs," State Auditor Grant Parks wrote in a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers.
In truth, they're not even trying to address the problem. The homeless, like any other interest group, have their own infrastructure of advocacy groups, charities, and fanatics. They're not spending money on mundane things that would address the problem like more shelters and lots more low-income housing.
The "housing first" approach is very expensive and the jury is out on whether it makes a difference at all in the number of homeless who are able to get off the street.
The “housing first” approach involves moving long-term street homeless individuals — the majority of whom are living with mental illness, substance abuse disorders and other serious health problems — directly into subsidized housing and then linking them to support services, either on-site or in the community.
First and most important, some dedicated to drugs or alcohol will never go straight unless they want to. Pulling them off the street and sticking them in a house won't matter even with all the support services possible. Addicts got to want to quit. Full Stop. End of story.
The Supreme Court's Grants Pass decision gave the green light to cities and states to clear out the homeless encampments. But where the cities and states should put those homeless people remains the crux of the crisis. Many cities in California are refusing Newsom's order to clear the tent cities. This has created the impossible situation of a patchwork of enforcement and non-enforcement jurisdictions that has only exacerbated the homeless crisis.
"All this order does is cut off those areas and force people into the municipalities and jurisdictions where they are subject to yet another patchwork of enforcement strategies," said Shayla Myers, a lawyer who works on homeless issues with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. "It is becoming harder and harder for people to figure out where they can go without breaking the law."
On the more pro-enforcement side, elected officials said the large spending effort under Newsom needs to be matched with more urgent enforcement of anti-camping laws governing public places.
In a July 31 San Francisco Police Department notice, the department said staff are "encouraged" to provide people experiencing homelessness with an info card highlighting shelters, but they're "not required to do so."
I don't think there's any "solution" to the homelessness problem that doesn't involve some kind of institutionalization for many of these wretches. It's impossible − and unfair to a doctor − to declare a mentally disturbed person is or is not a threat to himself or the community. They are wrong so often and so tragically that a rethinking of integrating the mentally ill into society must be undertaken.
First things first: get them off the streets.
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