Why is Gavin Newsom suddenly in desperation mode?

Thanks to wealthy benefactors and a one party state, this man has spent a career on cruise control.

“If we don’t see demonstrable results, I’ll start to redirect money. This is a sincerely held belief that we need local government to step up. This is a crisis. Act like it.”

Thus spake Governor Gavin Newsom in the San Fernando Valley last Thursday afternoon. Setting aside for a moment the fact that when a politician like Newsom says he’s expressing a sincerely held belief, what follows is anything but, let’s pause and reflect on sheer the chutzpah of his remarks, especially his threat to local governments. He has been Lieutenant Governor and Governor for 13 years (good God, has it really been that long?). Cities have been following his lead on homelessness that whole time. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place! He was a walking platitude generator, droning about “our unhoused neighbors,” “compassionate care,” and “housing first.” He was the one talking about how we “must not criminalize homelessness” even as homeless people in California were dying by the tens of thousands every year in illegal encampments he refused to clear on state lands when he could have.

Four years ago, in his first state of the state speech, Newsom proclaimed: To “meet the moment” (another favorite Newsomism) with the commitment it demanded, “we will advance a new framework. We will reduce street homelessness quickly and humanely through emergency actions. We will be laser-focused on getting the mentally ill out of tents and into treatment. We will provide stable funding to get sustainable results. We will tackle the underproduction of affordable housing in California. And we will do all of this with real accountability and consequences.”

In 2019, the year he gave that speech, California’s homeless population was 150,000. After four years of Newsom’s laser-focused new framework, last year the number was 181,000. Those are the official numbers. The real numbers are much, much bigger.

With apologies to The Who, the new framework turned out to be the same as the old framework. Newsom did not fulfill his promises. Instead, homeless spending has exceeded $25 billion since he took office, supplemented by billions more spent at the county and local levels and by private charities and faith groups, with nothing but more human misery and more death to show for it. The body count on Newsom’s watch is assuredly well over 100,000. The nonprofits have made out like bandits, as have politically connected developers, consultants, and lawyers. It’s a lot like the bullet train: Lots of promises, lots of money, zero progress. The similarities aren’t coincidences.

Now, suddenly, in the space of a week, he’s gone from “compassion and care” to “get ‘em the fuck outta there.” I’m going to need a political neck brace. The sheer, brazen gall. Again, there’s nothing new here. His animosity toward local government is characteristic. One of Newsom’s trademark policies has been a relentless assault on the power and authority local government, and indeed local democracy itself. On issue after issue the Governor, along with Attorney General Rob Bonta, have inserted themselves and their agendas into local matters. Nowhere has this hostility to local self determination been on brighter display than on the issue of housing. Over the last five years the legislature, with Newsom’s enthusiastic support, have passed some 400 new laws that kneecap local control over development, zoning, land use, public safety, and environmental protections.

Local governments, you see, are “exclusionary,” applying complex, convoluted, overlapping zoning restrictions to the territory within their boundaries to keep out newcomers like armies building trench networks to prevent invasions. These barricades to new housing must be blitzkrieged, and boy howdy have they. Never mind that the evidence supporting the agenda is flimsy at best, mendacious at worst. Newsom and the state establishment has been eviscerating local control for years, sometimes abetted by self-immolating local electeds themselves.

With that recent history in mind, it’s pretty rich for this selfsame blowhard to now demand that local governments “step up.” He’s the one that wanted to cut state affordable housing funding just three months ago! In May he submitted a budget to the legislature that slashed state homeless spending by more than $3 billion. The deepest cuts would have been to – wait for it – affordable housing subsidies, which would have lost $1.7 billion. The legislature restored the funds, and the cut to affordable housing was only $260 million.

The Governor handicaps local governments, he cuts their funding — then he demands they “step up.” Chutzpah, indeed, and not the good kind.

Gavin Newsom is playing a game of Stop Hitting Yourself with local governments.

Of course he’ll get away with it. A few cities will put up fights, but they will be political equivalents of throwing rocks at an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. The vast majority will cave to his demands. Because what’s left of local and Sacramento media are a docile herd of pusillanimous pen pushers. Gavin speaks, they transcribe. Lather, rinse, repeat. Aside from a few blogs like this one, and a small handful of outlets like the Westside Current, you won’t hear a peep.

Gavin Newsom has been one of California’s point politicians on homelessness since the turn of the century. In that time the issue has gone from a serious but manageable concern to a humanitarian crisis of historic proportions. That happened on his watch. Again, you won’t hear that from the L.A. Times, the Frisco Chronicle, or the Sacto Bee.

A California journalist, waiting for a Newsom press conference to start.

Nevertheless, Californians should never forget that the Homeless Industrial Complex as we know it was originally his idea – or rather, the idea of the folks who manage him. When he ran for Mayor of San Francisco a policy called “Care Not Cash” was a key plank in his platform. The idea was that homeless people used traditional cash assistance on drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and other sins. Therefore, the city in its beneficence would re-route those funds into comprehensive services and shelter, operated by “nonprofit partners.” And thus the profit-seeking bureaucratic sperm met the homeless crisis egg. It was a match made in the Ninth Circle of Hell, and it was Newsom’s handiwork.

Newsom refused to consider alternatives to the housing first approach to the crisis, insisting along with the rest of the establishment that the state could provide housing for every single homeless person in California. At one point the legislature considered a bill that would have required cities to provide housing and services to anyone who had been in the zip code for more than 72 hours. The bill would have empowered homeless people to sue cities to enforce this newly created right, even if they literally just arrived from out of state three days ago.

As I and others have pointed out many times, the costs of housing first are not just prohibitive, they’re fantastical. To house the official number of 181,000 people, permanently, with services, would require an up-front investment of at least $200 billion, with tens of billions more in annual costs. There would be billions more for homeless people traveling to California to secure their free apartment for life. The numbers make high speed rail, look like a bargain at $110 billion.

Why the sudden urgency?

Which brings us full circle to the curious case of Newsom’s newfound inner enforcer. It may be just another attention seeking moment from a man who excels in little else than grasping attention. He tends to announce grand new plans to score political points, only to abandon them and revert to the established ways of doing things once the cameras and lights are turned off. A prime example is his 2023 homeless CARE Courts initiative. The courts are alternatives to criminal courts, offered to unhoused offenders with serious mental health and/or addiction issues. It sounded promising, and it even became one of the few issues upon which most candidates for L.A. District Attorney agreed during the 2023-24 primaries. In the fall of 2023 Newsom did a media blitz culminating with a nationally televised interview on 60 Minutes. The idea wasn’t perfect — what political policy is? — but it had potential to have a positive impact. If pursued with commitment and resources, it could even have been a game changer.

Alas, since the media blitz it’s been radio silence on the issue. You’ll search news feeds in vain for any sort of progress update either from the Governor’s office or the media. Newsom set his feet, took his shot, and scored his political points, then was on to set up the next play. Which, as it turned out, for the last nine months meant spending most of his time pretending he wasn’t running for President (the Kamala thing has really got to sting).

Which, I think, is what the sudden sense of urgency is all about. Newsom gets his political advice from the primary sources, like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the Obamas. He knows as well as any of them which way the political winds are shifting. He was among the few prominent national Democrats who stood by Joe Biden to the bitter end. Like the rest of the Democrats’ inner circle, he very likely knew what was coming on June 27 at the first presidential debate. Even if he didn’t, he knew that Biden’s days were numbered by 9:01pm that night. My guess is he thought the nomination would be his to lose once the party poohbahs showed Amtrak Joe the Acela exit.

Then Biden endorsed Kamala Harris and sent the situation sideways. For a party that has built its entire identity around identity, it would have been political suicide to shove aside a black Indian woman candidate. And so Newsom’s lifelong ambition (or, again more accurately, the ambition of those who created him) slipped through his fingers. He was no doubt angry, but in the context of Democratic Party elders he’s a spring chicken. He can wait four years.

And that’s the key — four years. Unlike Harris, who was given four months to reinvent herself as a traditional centrist Democrat who could broaden the party’s tent, Newsom has four years. He’s wasting no time. He and his operatives are watching Harris and Tim Walz play hot potato with their own political skeletons. They’re not going to make the same mistake. Newsom’s sudden pivot on homelessness is the start of a major rebrand. In the coming months expect him to take a sudden interest in California’s crippling taxation and regulatory regimes. Expect the resurrection of the “business friendly centrist” who first ran for San Francisco Mayor 21 years ago. Expect a trip to Israel.

Gavin Newsom knows his time is coming. He’s already setting himself up to be the comfortable centrist alternative that Joe Biden was supposed to be. The person who ought to be most concerned is Kamala Harris. Her California frenemy is acting like a 2028 run is a foregone conclusion. What does that say about her prospects? Newsom is acting as if he’s expecting to run in an open race after four more years of Trump, or in a contested primary against a vulnerable, unpopular Democratic incumbent, which, of course, would be Harris.

I say all this as someone who has been consistently wrong about Newsom’s political fortunes. He wasn’t so much Mayor of San Francisco as he was the city’s most infamous party bro. This is a man who, at the age of 44, was photographed handing a glass of wine to his 19-year-old girlfriend, at a city event, no less. He showed up drunk at San Francisco General Hospital to get a photo op after a police officer was shot. He even picked a fight with the San Francisco cable care operators, which is kind of like the mayor of Anaheim picking a fight with Disneyland employees. If you’d told me 20 years ago that he’d be on the cusp of the presidency I’d have laughed you out of the room. Yet here we are. Mea culpa.

This time, I think I’m reading the situation correctly. He’ll be termed out in 2026, ideal timing to start a run for 2028. The irony is, Newsom’s political reboot — this will be his third, at least — may augur well for California. It may mean he tempers the more radical aspects of his first five years, like the assault on local democracy. Maybe he’ll finally stay focused on homelessness, which he knows well is the one issue that can kill his presidential aspirations. Will he run as the governor that finally cracked the homelessness code?

It would be the ultimate act of political chutzpah, taking credit for solving a humanitarian crisis he did as much as any one person to create. It just might work.