California’s $37 Billion Homelessness Bet Is Missing a Scorecard
California Politics / Accountability | ~500 words
Thirty-seven billion dollars. That’s what California has directed toward homelessness since Gavin Newsom took office. The number gets cited so often it’s starting to lose its weight. It shouldn’t.
The state auditor said it plainly in 2024: California can’t tell you whether most of that money worked. Three of the five major programs reviewed — accounting for $9.4 billion combined — couldn’t be evaluated at all. Not because the programs failed. Because nobody was tracking them closely enough to know either way.
That’s not a footnote. That’s the story.
What we do know: the homeless population in California grew sharply from 2019 through 2023, dipped modestly in 2024-25 by official counts, and still sits around 300,000 people receiving services statewide. Project Homekey — the program that converts hotels into housing — showed real cost efficiency, running at roughly 2.5 times cheaper per unit than new construction. The CalWORKs Housing Support Program showed results too. Two programs out of five with credible data. The other three? A “data desert,” as state Sen. Dave Cortese put it after requesting the audit himself.
Meanwhile, the 2026-27 budget proposal cuts the principal homelessness program from $1 billion annually to $500 million — and even that is conditional. This year’s allocation was zeroed out entirely before lawmakers put a placeholder back in. Cities that built staff and services around state money are now scrambling. Some programs that can’t document outcomes will lose funding. Others, frankly, probably should.
Here’s what bothers me about how this gets covered: the story usually runs as “Newsom vs. mayors” — the governor threatening to withhold funds from cities not doing enough, local officials firing back that they can’t plan around one-year grants. That framing isn’t wrong, but it skips the deeper accountability problem. The state has been the one dragging its feet on data collection. You can’t credibly demand performance from cities while your own agency is running nine programs across 41 funding streams with no coherent tracking system.
The interagency council that’s supposed to coordinate all of this — Cal ICH — has been moving slowly on standardized reporting requirements since 2021, when a law requiring it was signed. Progress has been made, but slowly enough that a 2024 audit still found major gaps. A new reporting requirement passed last year should help. Whether agencies actually comply is a different question.
The cynical read is that some of this opacity is structural — not accidental. Agencies that can’t document outcomes also can’t be defunded based on outcomes. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s how bureaucracies survive budget cycles.
The governor now says he wants to cut spending and demand more accountability. That’s a reasonable position. It would be more credible if his administration had demanded accountability five years ago, before the money went out the door.
California has a homelessness crisis. It also has a measurement crisis. Right now, it’s hard to know which one to fix first.
— Jose E. Navarro, The Navarro Report / Human-Directed AI Journalism: Research, analysis, and editorial direction by the author. Drafted in partnership with Claude AI (Anthropic).