California’s Next Governor Is About to Inherit a Crisis Nobody Actually Fixed

With California’s June primary weeks away, every candidate running for governor is being asked some version of the same question: what will you do about homelessness? The answers range from cautious to ambitious. None of them fully reckon with what the past decade actually produced.

Nearly a quarter of all homeless Americans live in California. The state holds 11 percent of the nation’s total population. That gap is not a coincidence — it is the product of policy choices, funding failures, and governance structures that were broken long before any of these candidates entered the race.

According to CalMatters reporting from May 2026, more than a third of homeless Californians regularly use drugs, and more than a quarter have been hospitalized for a mental illness. Encampments remain visible on freeway underpasses and sidewalks from Sacramento to San Diego. Voters are not just frustrated. They are exhausted by a crisis that appears immune to political will.

The candidates are drawing real distinctions. Steve Hilton, the conservative commentator turned candidate, is calling out what he describes directly as corruption in the system — arguing that money flows to special interest groups rather than programs that demonstrably work. He wants to scrap existing frameworks and enforce laws against sleeping on public property. Former Superintendent Tony Thurmond is proposing a one-time tax on billionaire assets to backfill federal cuts to Medi-Cal, which serves as a linchpin of the homelessness response. He wants to open school district land to affordable housing development and expand public construction funding.

What is striking across the field is the degree to which the problem is treated as solvable with the right policy framework, when the evidence suggests it is also a management failure — an inability of existing agencies to deploy funds effectively, track outcomes, or hold contractors accountable.

No candidate has fully addressed what happens when the federal HUD homelessness count — the report that benchmarks state progress — has been withheld by the Trump administration for months. As CalMatters reported in May 2026, some counties, including San Francisco, have already released their own 2026 count data because the federal report is so far overdue. The Newsom administration attributes the delay to a Trump-era decision to suppress data that would show California’s strategies working. Critics point out that California’s own audits have documented unreliable data for years.

California is heading into a governor’s race in which homelessness is the dominant domestic issue, simultaneously contested on the facts and deeply felt on the streets. The next governor will inherit a depleted HHAP fund, a federal fraud task force actively investigating how billions were spent, and a bureaucratic infrastructure that multiple audits have described as broken.

That is the job. Anyone who wants it should be required to read every audit first.

Sources: CalMatters, May 22, 2026; CalMatters, May 14–16, 2026; KPBS, May 2026; Latino Times, May 2026; CalMatters May Revision analysis, 2026.*