Posted on 01/08/2020 11:58:44 AM PST by Red Badger
SACRAMENTO — California will open vacant state land to emergency shelters for homeless people under an executive order that Gov. Gavin Newsom intends to sign Wednesday.
The order, which Newsom announced ahead of his annual budget plan due this week, would also create a fund to pay rent and build affordable housing for homeless people. The governor will propose to start the fund with $750 million in taxpayer money, which the Legislature would have to approve.
With the homeless population surging by double-digit percentages in many cities across the state, and California coming under fire from President Trump for its widespread encampments, Newsom is under increasing pressure to get people off the streets. Homelessness has become the biggest issue of concern to Californians, recent polls show.
Newsom’s executive order will create a state system to track how well local governments are doing in moving homeless people from the street to more stable living situations, according to a summary provided by the governor’s office.
Newsom said in a statement that the order aims to directly connect homeless people with emergency housing and treatment programs.
“Californians have lots of compassion for those among us who are living without shelter,” he said. “But we also know what compassion isn’t. Compassion isn’t allowing a person suffering a severe psychotic break or from a lethal substance abuse addiction to literally drift towards death on our streets and sidewalks.”
The order instructs four state agencies to identify properties that could be made available for short-term homeless shelters. The properties include excess state land that has been set aside for affordable-housing development, lots next to highways and state roads, decommissioned hospitals and health care centers, and fairgrounds.
It will also provide cities and counties with 100 travel trailers from a state fleet and tent structures to set up temporary housing and health and social services. Details about the timeline and eligibility criteria were not included in the summary of the executive order.
There is ample precedent for using excess government land for homeless programs, starting with a 1987 law that allows the leasing of surplus federal property for homeless services for free. And over the past two years, San Francisco has put two Navigation Center shelters on underused Caltrans property on Fifth Street and in the Bayview, at virtually no cost for the land.
Although the governor’s order creates the new fund to support housing access for homeless people, which could also include board-and-care homes for the mentally ill, any state appropriation would require the Legislature’s approval as part of the budget process. Lawmakers will not approve a spending plan until June. In the meantime, Newsom said he will seek contributions to the fund from the private sector and philanthropies.
As part of his 2020-21 budget plan, Newsom will also propose expanding Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for the poor, to include preventive care and housing support services that could keep chronically homeless people out of the emergency room and other costly care. With matching federal money, the expansion would cost $1.4 billion a year.
Other new initiatives in Newsom’s budget proposal include a task force to redesign mental health services for homeless people and a study of the root causes of homelessness in California.
Newsom entered office a year ago promising a greater focus on combatting California’s homelessness crisis, including by appointing a statewide homelessness czar to lead the state’s response.
In his first year, he gave cities and counties $650 million in emergency aid to fight homelessness and signed laws to speed up shelter construction by granting exemptions to environmental regulations and eliminating the public’s ability to challenge the approval of Navigation Centers that meet local zoning requirements.
But his czar never materialized. In August, Newsom said he would rely instead on the advice of a task force he appointed to explore strategies for addressing homelessness.
The panel has been looking into possibilities including mandating shelter or housing for street people, and Newsom credited it for inspiring many of the ideas in his order. But several members have long said that their understanding is that whatever they come up with, Newsom will follow his gut.
“Gavin is the homeless czar in California. Period. End of story,” said Philip Mangano, who is on the task force and was national homeless czar as head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “He will own this issue and do the right things — not the task force.
“He is a businessman, and he is smart enough to want some R&D, so he appointed the task force. And that is what we are doing. We are bringing research and development to the governor, and he will act.”
Mangano worked closely with Newsom when he was San Francisco mayor to steer the city’s emphasis more toward supportive housing than shelter, and the effort dramatically reduced the street counts for several years in the mid-2000s before they began climbing again. The city’s homeless population was up 17% over the past two years in the most recent count.
Statewide, homelessness has also shot up in recent years, despite billions of dollars being approved by voters up and down California for supportive and affordable-housing programs. The latest count taken in 2019 found 151,278 homeless people in the state, an increase of 16% since 2018.
A sign reading “Where do we go?” sits on University Avenue next to a homeless encampment on CalTrans property as one of the residents of the encampment prepares to ride a bike on Tuesday, October 22, 2019 in Berkeley, Calif. Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle
The homeless places would be empty if there was a sign that said No Blacks or Whites.
The more you give them the more they want.
And the more your make.
Which promptly evaporated into the ether.............
Oh Goody
That should bring another 200,000 of them or so
Hundreds of thousands of square miles of open land in the West and the MidWest owned by the FedGov that could be homesteaded but...nooooo....they gotta live in the prime real estate country
NewScum is so gone
Where did that $650 MILLION DOLLARS go?..................Now he wants to give away $750 MILLION DOLLARS.............to somewhere over the rainbow.........
Why work?
Camp outside, stay stoned and rob someone when you need more drugs, repeat.
This always ends well..../not
I think it is a great idea.
There will be more than 200K
Every case manager in the country will have discharge plans consisiting of a bus ticket to California.
They all smoke and all flip butts and matches on the ground, maybe an Australia Inferno thing will help them into the promised land they thought they found
Let me guess... vacant state land, i.e., uber-dry foothills. Cali evenings can be a bit on the cool side, so someone will want to keep warm with a campfire... what could possibly go wrong?
Raise taxes...why didn’t they think of this before..it’s so stupid it might just work!
I didn’t know there was anything left to burn in California!..............
If they raise taxes high enough the problem will solve itself..................
I am sure that the residents of Del Mar will be happy to have thousands of vagrants living across the street at the Del Mar Fairgrounds /s. That is California Department of Agriculture land as is the Los Angeles Coliseum.
I wonder which of th 4 richest power families in Cali will benefit the most.....probably pelosi....
This worries me as it says nothing about ownership. If I bought a decommissioned hospital with some future use in mind, does this mean the state can come in and dump the homeless there? Not clear to me.
Institutionalized squatting/vagrancy.
Heck, why buy a home when you can just set up shop on some unincorporated state land?
Concentration camps for the homeless?
About time. It’s what progressives have been doing since the British starved and allowed to die by disease tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in the South Africa Boer war of the late 1800’s in THEIR camps.
Should work well. Kudos Chairman Newsome, kudos.
In addition, how about putting up a soothing, welcoming sign, maybe something like "California State Hospice"? And the state workers could wear nice, crisp white uniforms too boot.
LOL. I have said it for awhile, but there was never going to be any movement forward on the issue of mentally ill addicts living on the streets until proglibs made the move.
And who represents the biggest segment of so-called bleeding heart felt proggies? (Single) women + children. And who is impacted the most by filthy mentally ill lurking around public places, such as parks, parking lots, toilets, etc?
At the end of the day, there is truly cosmic justice, as well as some kind of universal balance. The only reason Newsome/state is moving to re-institutionalize is because of their base, and that's because women have finally had enough.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.