The administration wants to steer more funding toward temporary shelters that require sobriety, while reducing support for permanent housing programs. That approach conflicts with California’s long-standing “housing first” model, which prioritizes getting people into stable housing without preconditions such as sobriety or participation in treatment.

A similar effort last year to redirect federal homelessness funding away from permanent housing was blocked by a federal judge. The administration is now trying again, and opponents have returned to court.

This week, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Santa Clara County and other plaintiffs filed a legal challenge in federal court in Rhode Island, contesting the administration’s latest funding guidelines.

Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti criticized the renewed effort, saying in a statement that the administration was attempting once more to dismantle a key homelessness prevention program after a court had already stopped its previous attempt. He said the action disregards people who depend on the funding to remain housed.

At stake is more than $4 billion in federal homelessness funding nationwide. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates the proposed changes could cause California to lose nearly $238 million for permanent housing programs and could put close to 15,000 Californians at risk of returning to the streets.

The debate is especially significant in California, where cities and counties across Southern California and the Inland Empire continue to face high housing costs, visible encampments and growing pressure to expand shelter and housing options. Many local homelessness programs depend on a mix of federal, state and local dollars, and changes in federal priorities can affect what services agencies are able to provide.

Federal officials argue that the existing approach has not delivered results. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner said earlier this month that the “housing first” strategy failed by placing vulnerable people in housing without producing meaningful progress.

“This ideology promised to end homelessness,” Turner said in a statement. “Instead, billions of taxpayer dollars were spent while homelessness increased to record levels.”

Supporters of housing first policies argue that stable housing is the foundation for addressing mental illness, addiction, unemployment and other problems that can contribute to homelessness. Critics, including officials in the Trump administration, say federal money should place greater emphasis on sobriety and treatment requirements.

The court challenge will determine whether the administration can move forward with the new funding rules or whether California and other states will continue operating under the existing federal framework.

Original source: CalMatters

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The Legislature is expected to approve a budget to meet its constitutional deadline and ensure lawmakers continue to be paid. But the spending plan passed by lawmakers is not expected to be the final version. Newsom and legislative leaders still must resolve major differences over education, health care, homelessness and county-administered benefits.

For Inland Empire families, school districts and county agencies, the outcome could affect everything from classroom funding and subsidized child care to in-home care services and public assistance eligibility reviews.

One of the sharpest divides is over education. Newsom has proposed reducing the number of state-supported child care slots by 6,800. Democratic lawmakers instead want to expand subsidized child care by 22,000 slots over the next several years. They also are seeking $2.7 billion more than the governor’s plan for transitional kindergarten through 12th grade schools and community colleges.

Health care is another major sticking point. Lawmakers from both parties oppose Newsom’s proposed reductions to the In-Home Supportive Services program, which helps older adults and people with disabilities remain in their homes with assistance from caregivers.

Democratic leaders also want to delay by one year Newsom’s proposed restrictions on health coverage for undocumented immigrants. In addition, lawmakers are looking to postpone a decision on increasing the monthly Medi-Cal premium paid by undocumented immigrants, effectively leaving that issue for the next governor.

State Sen. John Laird, a Santa Cruz Democrat who chairs the Senate budget committee, said the dispute is less about challenging Newsom than trying to avoid cuts where possible.

“I don’t think it’s about Gavin Newsom,” Laird said. “It’s really about trying to stretch as far as we can in the hope that we don’t have to make those cuts.”

Democrats hold supermajorities in both the Assembly and Senate, meaning they do not need Republican votes to approve a budget. Still, Newsom’s approval is required for the final spending plan.

The Legislature’s proposal also would increase homelessness funding. Lawmakers want to set aside $900 million for the state’s homelessness fund, compared with $500 million in Newsom’s proposal.

Counties also would receive additional funding under the legislative plan to carry out new federally required eligibility checks for Californians applying for food assistance and health care benefits. That issue could be significant for large counties such as Riverside and San Bernardino, where public assistance caseloads are substantial.

There are some areas of agreement. Newsom and lawmakers both support setting aside $300 million to help subsidize private health coverage for low-income Californians. Lawmakers also appear to be backing the governor’s proposal for three new tax measures.

Another budget-related dispute involves the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Lawmakers want to withhold $55 million from the DMV over concerns about a planned database that would handle information requests involving California drivers and drivers from other states.

Newsom’s office and the DMV say the data-sharing system is necessary to comply with the federal Real ID Act of 2005 and would involve a nonprofit organization made up of motor vehicle administrators from across the country. Immigration advocates, however, have raised concerns that the information could put undocumented Californians at risk if federal immigration enforcement agencies obtained access to it.

The budget negotiations come as other state races and policy debates continue to unfold. Campaigns for California’s Board of Equalization, the nation’s only elected tax board, have drawn more than $3.3 million in donations to three state lawmakers who advanced to the November ballot: Assemblymember Mike Gipson and state Sens. Tom Umberg and Shannon Grove. The board has far less authority than it once did, but donors and analysts say contributions may reflect attempts to influence sitting lawmakers or reward them for past positions.

Environmental officials also are weighing changes to protections intended to keep invasive golden mussels out of Lake Oroville, one of California’s largest reservoirs, prompting concern from some experts.

For now, the immediate focus in Sacramento remains the state budget. Lawmakers are expected to meet their deadline, but the final decisions — including how much California will spend on schools, child care, health care and homelessness programs — remain subject to negotiations with the governor.

Original source: CalMatters

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The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development notified the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority on Thursday that the agency is barred from participating in federal funding competitions until HUD’s Office of Inspector General completes its investigation.

In its letter, HUD accused the agency, known as LAHSA, of mishandling public money and failing to make progress in reducing homelessness. Federal officials alleged the agency did not properly document when people left motel housing, used government funds to pay for services covered by a separate contract, and could not provide records verifying the existence of housing units it was responsible for.

“Taxpayers will no longer bankroll an organization that puts its own self-interests ahead of the Americans it was created to serve,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement announcing the action.

LAHSA, a joint city-county agency created in the 1990s, has long served as the central coordinator for homelessness services across the Los Angeles region, which has the largest unhoused population in California. The agency receives federal homelessness funds on behalf of the city, county and nonprofit providers.

Last year, LAHSA received nearly $200 million through HUD’s Continuum of Care program, the largest federal funding stream for homelessness services.

The suspension comes after months of scrutiny and upheaval at the agency. Two critical audits found LAHSA had not adequately tracked spending or program outcomes. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors later pulled county funding from LAHSA and shifted it to a newly created county agency. LAHSA’s former chief executive resigned after criticism over contracts signed with a nonprofit connected to her husband. In April, the agency laid off 284 employees.

Despite those problems, LAHSA remains the designated lead homelessness agency for the region, making the federal suspension potentially far-reaching for programs that serve people living on the streets, in shelters and in supportive housing.

In a statement, LAHSA warned that blocking the funding could undermine existing efforts and put thousands of formerly homeless residents at risk of returning to homelessness.

“This appears to be a blatant attempt to pull yet more resources from Los Angeles, a city they have targeted time and again, when it is clear that LAHSA has either corrected or is in the process of correcting nearly all of the issues raised,” spokesperson Ahmad Chapman said.

Chapman said the agency is strengthening internal controls, updating its financial systems and improving how it tracks its programs. He said LAHSA’s immediate focus is to “explore all available options” to keep federal homelessness dollars flowing to the region.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said she shares concerns about LAHSA’s performance but argued that cutting off funding would worsen the crisis rather than solve it.

“Ultimately people will lose their lives,” Bass said in a statement. “We urge HUD to work with the City of Los Angeles to provide the necessary funding to reduce homelessness.”

The action comes as homelessness in Los Angeles County has shown signs of decline. According to the point-in-time count, the number of unhoused people dropped in both 2024 and 2025. Last year, the county had an estimated 72,000 unhoused residents.

The Trump administration has also been pushing broader changes to how Los Angeles and other California communities address homelessness. Federal officials are seeking to shift money away from permanent housing programs and toward temporary shelters, while giving preference to housing programs that require sobriety.

Earlier this month, HUD opened the latest application period for Continuum of Care funding and included those policy changes. The National Alliance to End Homelessness has estimated the changes could cost California nearly $238 million in funding for permanent housing and could put close to 15,000 people at risk of losing their homes.

California has sued over an earlier Trump administration attempt to impose similar changes. That case remains pending.

Original source: CalMatters

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Both bills reopen the debate among families and advocates over when it’s appropriate to put someone into mental health treatment without their consent.

One bill would create a pathway for the most severely incapacitated people to go directly from Newsom’s voluntary mental health court into involuntary treatment in a hospital. The other would make it easier for EMTs and other first responders to refer people to mental health court. Both bills recently passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite concerns from disability rights advocates that they would force more people into unwanted treatment.

“While early implementation shows promise,” Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, said during a recent committee hearing, “barriers in the current petition process are preventing the program from reaching many of the individuals it was designed to serve.”

CARE Court launched in 2023 as a major piece of Newsom’s strategy to get people in the grip of psychosis off the streets. It allows family members of people with untreated schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders to refer them into the court-based program, where they can work with a judge, a public defender and a case worker on a plan for medication, therapy, housing, and whatever other help they may need.

But a CalMatters investigation found the program is falling short of expectations. As of January, California courts had received 3,817 petitions on behalf of prospective CARE Court participants and approved just 893 treatment agreements. At its outset, the Newsom administration estimated between 7,000 and 12,000 Californians would qualify for the program. 

Some families who attempted to use CARE Court to help their severely ill loved ones told CalMatters they were disappointed by the results. They thought a judge could order their family members into treatment. But that turned out not to be the case. If someone is too sick to realize they need treatment, CARE Court can’t help, which means that their case can be dismissed while the person continues to languish on the street.

That’s the problem Blakespear is attempting to tackle with Senate Bill 1016. It would allow anyone filing a CARE Court petition to request that a judge order a mental health assessment to determine if the subject of the petition is “gravely disabled” or a danger to themselves or others – if the subject can’t comply with voluntary treatment.  

Depending on the results of the assessment, a judge could order that person into a conservatorship, which would likely mean a stay in a locked psychiatric facility and mandatory medication. 

The idea is to create a formal bridge between voluntary treatment under CARE Court and involuntary treatment through a  conservatorship. 

Adding the specter of forced care will make people with mental illness less likely to accept help from CARE Court, Samuel Jain of Disability Rights California said during the committee hearing.

“SB 1016 adds an expensive, coercive and convoluted layer to CARE Court that will drive up costs and further erode the rights and trust of the Californians that our system is supposed to help,” he said. 

Family ‘frustrated’ by CARE Court

Jennifer Farrell, who filed a CARE Court petition in late 2024 for her brother in Alameda County, sees it differently. Farrell’s 59-year-old brother, who struggles with schizophrenia and meth use, had been homeless off and on since 2017. He was able to stay housed via CARE Court for a few months, but then he left his placement in September and disappeared into the streets.

It was clear he needed more help than CARE Court could provide, but the program had no way to elevate him to a higher level of care, Farrell said. 

“I was really frustrated at that point,” she told CalMatters.

Farrell’s brother spent three months deteriorating on the street before a case worker found him in December. He was hospitalized on a temporary psychiatric hold and eventually placed on a conservatorship. He’s still in a locked facility, where he’s medicated and seems to be doing much better, Farrell said. 

To Farrell, it’s “absurd” that there isn’t already a direct link between CARE Court and a conservatorship — a connection that she thinks could have saved her family some grief.

At CARE Court’s inception, Newsom said people who didn’t follow their CARE plans could be moved into a conservatorship. But Farrell and other families CalMatters spoke with said if their loved one couldn’t consent to treatment, there was no clear path forward.

Technically, CARE Court judges can order participants to follow mandatory “CARE plans” — something that happened just 32 times between late 2023 and January — but judges can’t force participants to comply.

Easier CARE Court petitions

Blakespear’s other bill, SB 989, addresses another CARE Court challenge: the low number of people participating. 

Filing a CARE Court petition is a complicated, time-consuming process. Whoever is filing the request needs the person’s medical records. Then, they need to appear at the first court hearing — something overworked first responders don’t always have time to do.

That’s a key reason that people who work in public safety, such as firefighters and EMTs, say they don’t file CARE Court petitions, said Meagan Subers of California Professional Firefighters, who spoke in support of the bill at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. 

SB 989 would create a framework for first responders to refer clients directly to their county behavioral health department, which could then file a CARE Court petition on their behalf. The county would have 30 days to decide whether to file.

Some counties already make an effort to train and support their first responders in filing CARE Court petitions. Stanislaus County allows first responders to refer CARE Court clients directly to the county.

But that collaboration isn’t happening in a systematic way across the state, Subers said. This bill could help fix a broken system where first responders are constantly cycling people with severe mental illnesses in and out of emergency rooms, she said.

“When our members have to run these calls repeatedly on individuals and take them to the hospital, knowing that they’re going to have to respond to that person again, my members tell me that they feel helpless,” she said. “We see this pathway as another option for them.”

Blakespear’s bills follow a similar effort last year by Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana to make CARE Court more effective. His new law, which went into effect in January, expanded CARE Court to include people who experience psychosis as a result of bipolar disorder. The program initially was exclusively for people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other limited psychotic disorders.

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Six Democrats and one Republican on the stage in Newsom’s hometown of San Francisco took direct aim at the governor’s record on homelessness, efforts to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars and opposition to an anti-crime ballot measure that Californians overwhelmingly passed two years ago.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who unsuccessfully ran against Newsom for governor in 2018, pointed to state spending on homelessness as an example of ineptitude.

“We spent $24 billion at the state, along with billions more from the counties and the cities throughout the state, and homelessness went on,” he said. “We cannot be afraid to look in the mirror.”

The televised debate revealed the schism between the moderate and progressive Democrats hoping to replace Newsom, as well as efforts by Steve Hilton, the sole Republican who took part, to coalesce the conservative vote.

Hilton, a former Fox New commentator and British political strategist, called on his top GOP rival, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, to drop out of the race.

“My Republican colleague Chad Bianco is not here tonight to face these Democrats or his record in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter riots,” Hilton said at the event, which was co-sponsored by the nonprofit Black Action Alliance, which was founded to give Black voters a greater voice in the Bay Area.

Bianco “took a knee when told to by BLM, now he says he was praying,” Hilton said. “Chad Bianco has got more baggage than LAX.”

Bianco was invited to the debate but said he was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict. His campaign did not respond to requests for comment about Hilton’s attacks.

The, at times, feisty debate came amid a gubernatorial race that thus far has lacked sizzle or a candidate on either side of the aisle who has excited Californians. Public opinion polls show that most voters remain undecided.

Seven of the dozen prominent candidates running to replace Newsom participated in the gathering at the Ruth Williams Opera House in front of a live audience of about 200 people. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) was scheduled to participate but canceled, citing the need to go back to Washington, D.C., for congressional votes. Former Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine) also did not attend the debate.

The two-hour clash, at times plagued by audio issues, was hosted by two local Fox News affiliates and moderated by KTVU political reporter Greg Lee and anchor André Senior, as well as KTTV’s Marla Tellez.

Five takeaways from the debate:

Making California affordable again

When grilled about how they planned to tackle the high cost of living in the state — gas prices, rent, utility bills and other day-to-day financial challenges — most of the candidates prefaced their answers by talking about growing up in struggling households, often with immigrant parents who worked blue-collar jobs.

Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said he would stabilize rents and freeze utility and home insurance costs “until we find out why they’re increasing.” California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said he would raise taxes on billionaires and create tax credits to help families afford the high cost of living.

Villaraigosa and Hilton said they would lower gas prices by cutting regulations on California’s oil refineries.

Hilton blamed the state’s high cost of living squarely on Democratic policies. “They’ve been in power for 16 years,” he said. “Who else is there to blame?”

Billionaire hedge fund founder turned climate activist Tom Steyer said he favors rent control. Steyer and former state Controller Betty Yee said they would prioritize zoning and permitting reform to build more housing, particularly near public transit. Both Steyer, a progressive, and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a moderate, spoke about using new technology such as pre-fabricated homes to build more affordable housing.

Protecting immigrants

In the wake of the Trump administration’s chaotic immigration raids that started in Los Angeles in June and have spread across the nation — recently resulting in the shooting deaths of two people by federal agents in Minneapolis — the Democrats on stage unanimously voiced support for immigrants who live in California. Some pledged that, if elected, they would use the governor’s office to aggressively push back on President Trump’s immigration policies.

“We’ve got to say no to ICE, and we’ve got to take on Trump wherever he raises his ugly head,” Villaraigosa said.

Steyer, whose hedge fund invested in a company that runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border, and Thurmond both said they support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Thurmond and Mahan said they support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Politicians politicking

Amid the debate’s dodging, weaving, yammering and spicy back-and-forth, there were a few moments when the candidates rose above the din.

Villaraigosa, the former two-term mayor of Los Angeles and a former speaker of the California Assembly, insisted that the moderators call him “Antonio” instead of Mayor Villaraigosa.

“It’s my name, everybody. I’m just a regular guy,” he said, prompting a laugh.

Mahan, on the other hand, tried mightily to portray himself as being above the dirty business of politics.

“The truth is that our politics has been oversimplified,” he said. “It’s become this blood sport between populists on both sides, and you deserve real answers, not the easy answers.”

Yee, who has been running on her background as controller and a member of the California Board of Equalization, cast herself as the financial savior the state needs in trying economic times of budget deficits and federal cuts.

“We have not been accountable or transparent with our dollars for a long time,” she said. “Why are we right now and [in successive] years spending more than we’re bringing in? This is where we are. So accountability has to be a tone set from the top.”

The rich guy and the new guy

Steyer, who paints himself as a repentant billionaire devoted to giving away his riches to make California a better place for all, did not directly answer a question about his position on a controversial proposed ballot measure for a new tax on billionaires to fund healthcare. But he said he supported increasing taxes on the wealthy and boasted of having the political backing of bus drivers, nurses and cafeteria workers because he was the rich guy willing to “take on the billionaires for working families.”

Mahan, the latest major candidate to enter the race, wasn’t impressed.

“Tom, I’ve got about 3 billion reasons not to trust your answer on that,” he said, an apparent reference to Steyer’s net worth.

Although he supports closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, Mahan said he opposes the billionaire tax because “it will send good, high-paying jobs out of our state, and hard-working families, in the long run, will all pay more taxes for it.”

Money also spoke Tuesday

Although the battle over campaign fundraising didn’t overtly arise during Tuesday’s debate aside from Mahan’s comment about Steyer, it still was getting a lot of attention. Campaign fundraising disclosures became public Monday and Tuesday.

Unsurprisingly, Steyer led the pack with $28.9 million in contributions in 2025, nearly all of it donations that the billionaire spent on his campaign. Other top fundraisers were Porter, who raised $6.1 million; Hilton, who collected $5.7 million; Becerra, who banked $5.2 million; Bianco, who received $3.7 million in contributions; Swalwell’s $3.1 million since entering the race late last year; and Villaraigosa’s $3.2 million, according to documents filed with the California secretary of state’s office.

Money raised and spent by gubernatorial candidates

Bar chart of money raised and spent by the crowded 2026 California gubernatorial race. In 2025, Tom Steyer raised $28.9 million (including loans from himself) but has already spent $27.4 million. Katie Porter, has raised the second most, at $6.1 million

Mahan, who recently entered the race, wasn’t required to file a campaign fundraising disclosure, though he is expected to have notable support from wealthy Silicon Valley tech honchos. Former state Controller Betty Yee and state schools chief Tony Thurmond were among the candidates who raised the least, which spurs questions about their viability in a state of more than 23 million registered voters with some of the most expensive media markets in the nation.

Yee defended her candidacy by pointing to her experience.

“All the polls show that this race is wide open. You know, I think voters have had enough. I’ve been around the state. I’ve spoken to thousands of them,” she said. “Enough of the lies, the broken campaign promises, billionaires trying to run the world. You know, look, I’m the adult in the room. No gimmicks, no nonsense, straight shooter, the woman who gets things done. And we certainly can’t afford a leader who thinks grandstanding is actually governing.”

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When the government announced it would give rent vouchers, Aguilar, who wears her hair in a loose knot, felt relieved. But her landlord asked for cash instead.

Worried she would lose the home it had taken her a few years to find after she moved to the United States from Mexico to earn money to be able to pay for the education of her five children whom she had left behind, Aquilar contacted Catholic charities for rent vouchers. But the landlord would not accept those either.

Instead, she told Al Jazeera that the landlords’ employees stood in the building hallway, shouting insults and making it hard for her to pass through to her apartment.

At first, she slept with a stick, afraid they would break in and of the rats that scurried around her apartment. When she felt the landlords’ employees looking through the broken keyhole in her apartment door at night, Aguilar stopped sleeping. By November 2021, fear and sleeplessness got to her, and she moved out.

It began a three-year-long journey to find affordable housing in the city. Aguilar started living in her car by the city’s Dolores Park when she couldn’t find another place she could afford to rent. “I didn’t know any laws then, or I would never have left my house, whatever the situation,” Aguilar said.

Later, she learned that once she vacated her apartment, the landlord could charge a new tenant a much higher rent, according to a California law called Costa-Hawkins, which was passed in 1995.  It exempts single family homes, condominiums and post 1995 construction from local rental control laws which would limit the extent and frequency of rent increases. The law also allows landlords to charge higher rent from new tenants when rent-controlled tenants, like Aguilar, vacate the place.

The repeal of this act, to allow more expansive rent control, will come up in the November 5 ballot. Those opposed to it, mainly large developers and landlords, have raised more than $124m in the last year until October 28, California’s Secretary of State figures show, to fight this ballot measure. This is more than twice as much as the funds raised by the campaign to continue having rent-controlled housing.

An Al Jazeera analysis of campaign finance records found that much of the $124m was raised by large corporate real estate companies, such as the Blackstone Group, the Essex Property Trust, Equity Residential and Avalon Bay, which have investments from the California Public Employees Retirement System, the California State Teachers Retirement System and the San Francisco city employees’ retirement fund.

This fund flow from real estate companies allowed increased spending on flyers and advertising, skewing the battle for rent control in an election season where polls show that the cost of housing is the second-most important economic concern for voters after inflation.

Both presidential candidates have announced plans to tackle the housing crisis, including building more homes and making home buying easier. Vice President Kamala Harris has said she will bring laws to fight abusive corporate landlords whom she blames for rent increases.

Given that nearly half of all California residents and some other states are renters and often burdened by the costs, the battle over Costa-Hawkins will suggest whether supporting builders to make more homes or helping tenants stay in rent-controlled housing will be more beneficial to the average US resident.

The ballot measure to bring in rent control comes at “a difficult moment in many cities, with many people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity”, said Mathew Fowle, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Housing Initiative.

This is particularly prevalent in California, “which has more renters than any other state,” said Maria Zamudio, the executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, a tenants’ rights organisation. “And this law leaves them at a razor’s edge,” she added.

Those who defend the law believe that prohibiting rent control will encourage developers to build and maintain more homes. A possible repeal would “hamper the construction of affordable housing, exacerbating California’s housing crisis”, say pamphlets opposing the proposition, dubbed Proposition 33.

The ballot measure also came up in 2018 and 2020 and was defeated. Fundraising by landlords this time has outstripped that on previous occasions when $76m and $95m were raised, respectively. On those occasions, too, the California Apartment Association Issues Committee, which is raising funds to oppose the proposition, outraised those supporting rent control by far, thanks to large real estate groups that get funds from California public employees and teachers’ pension funds.

“This is a very conflicted situation for pension funds,” said Eileen Appelbaum, the co-director at the Washington DC-based think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). While retired public school teachers and employees are likely experiencing high rents, their pension funds are invested in real estate companies that fund the campaign against rent control, she said.

Bankrolling the opposition

Of the $124m raised by the lobby against the ballot measure, more than $88m was raised by a committee funded by the California Apartment Association Issues Committee, according to the California Secretary of State’s website. It got $32m from Essex Property Trust and $22.3m from Equity Residential, two of the largest corporate landlords in the state.

The Blackstone Group, the country’s largest private equity real estate company, gave $1m. It gave another $1.88m through Air Communities, a company it recently acquired. Avalon Bay, another large corporate real estate company, gave $20.135m. Carmel Partners, another private equity real estate company gave $1.48m.

Three other committees together raised $36m to oppose the ballot measure. Large real estate companies also funded some of these.

All of these companies have investments from Calpers, the California Public Employees Retirement System, a review of the Calpers 2023 portfolio showed. They also have investments from CalSTRS, the California State Teachers Retirement System. While the San Francisco Employees Retirement System does not publish its investment portfolio online, press releases said it had recently invested in Blackstone and Carmel Partners.

Spokespeople for Calpers and CalSTRS told Al Jazeera they had nothing to say on the issue. The other organisations did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

In essence, the private equity funds used the pension funds of California public employees, public school teachers, San Francisco municipal employees and state public employees to bankroll the opposition to rent control.

This funding allowed the campaign against the ballot measure to put out flyers against Proposition 33 across the state as well as advertisements claiming that a repeal of Costa-Hawkins would lead to cities setting rent boards that would “dictate what you can charge to rent out your own home”.

Dean Preston, a city supervisor in San Francisco and former tenant rights lawyer, told Al Jazeera that while the campaign against rent control “talks of small landlords, there is a range of landlords. We have seen corporate landlords being much more aggressive in evicting tenants.”

The ballot measure has come at a time when Unlawful Detainers, notices asking tenants to vacate homes within days, doubled, Preston said. More than 2,800 such notices were sent in the fiscal year 2023, up from 1,428 the previous year, according to city data, after a statewide moratorium on evicting residents for non payment of rent during the pandemic period ended. These were expected to rise further in 2024.

“We had set off an alarm to say that the health pandemic should not become a housing crisis,” Preston said in an interview at his San Francisco City Hall office. The city began a large rental assistance programme. “But we did see a wave of evictions.”

Susie Shannon, the policy director for Housing is A Human Right, the group that has sponsored the ballot measure to repeal Costa-Hawkins, told Al Jazeera the group sponsored it again because “wages have been stagnant for a while and rents have been going up. People are struggling. Some are couch surfing and others are homeless.”

Her campaign to support Proposition 33 raised a little more than $50m, funded largely by the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF). The Foundation works in healthcare worldwide, including selling low-cost drugs, which are sourced through government discounts and sold at its pharmacies. It has also expanded into housing, buying single-room occupancy hotels to rent out to the unhoused. However, the Los Angeles Times has reported that these homes often have faulty plumbing, heating and electricity.

The battle over rent control has led to large landlords and real estate companies backing and funding a proposition requiring AHF to spend its revenues from discounted drug sales on patient care rather than funding rent-control measures. The California Apartment Association Issues Committee gave more than $40m to support this proposition to curb the AHF.

Evictions a tool to ‘raise rents’

One night, when Aguilar was sleeping in the backseat of her car near Dolores Park, she was awakened by policemen shining flashlights into her face. They searched her car and checked her papers. They left after finding her to be above board and unable to make rent.

After nearly a year of living in her car, Aguilar’s car was towed for illegal parking and she began living on a street by the park. She stayed up all night to keep an eye on her belongings and made sure to stay out of fights and more police trouble. “I was so scared,” she said, recalling those months.

Three months later, in January 2023, she found a shared room in South Francisco’s Daly City. It cost her twice as much as her old apartment had.

Aguilar regretted leaving her apartment in San Francisco City, thinking she should have suffered for a roof over her head.

“Some landlords have made it a business practice of evictions to raise rents,” Preston said about the Costa-Hawkins provision allowing landlords to charge higher rents from new tenants. Aguilar later believed this had led to her being forced out of her house.

The California Apartment Association, which opposes Proposition 33, says in its pamphlets that not allowing rents to rise when a new tenant comes “would dramatically reduce the flexibility to adjust rents between tenancies. Imagine never being able to bring your rents to market rates.”

But tenant activists believe allowing landlords to charge higher rents from new tenants encourages them to push out older ones, such as Aguilar.

“If people are evicted, all they have left is sidewalks and underpasses,” said Carol Fife, a city supervisor in Oakland. Fife had received an Unlawful Detainer notice, threatening to evict her within days for not paying one month’s rent. While she was able to fight against the notice and stay on, not all tenants are able to do so.

Alexander Ferrer, a researcher with Debt Collective, an organisation that created the Tenant Power Toolkit to help tenants fight eviction cases in court, found that such notices were being issued with less than two months rent due, threatening to force many residents out of their homes.

Living under a battery light

It has also meant that tenants cling to rent-controlled homes when they have them, as Aguilar wishes she had.

Valente Casas was out one December night last year when he heard that there had been a fire in the home below his in Oakland. The electrical fire in the double-storied house led to the power and gas going out in both storeys, never to return.

Casas works as a cleaner for businesses, but many of the offices he used to clean have shut down as employees work from home, cutting his income and hurting his ability to rent a new home. So, Casas has stayed in his unit, devising an elaborate system to live without power or gas. He has one battery-powered light he charges at work, buys small amounts of groceries every day since the fridge does not work, cooks on a camping stove, accumulates gas cans to light his stove, and watches shows on his mobile phone for as long as the battery holds out.

Then he sits on his bed in the dark until he can fall asleep.

At these times, “I think about what a stressful life this is,” Casas told Al Jazeera. He has lived in the apartment for 15 years. “But if I leave and look for a new place, my rent will go up at least 100 percent.”

Christian Dominguez, who lived in the apartment that caught fire, slept in his car for nearly three months after the fire. With the light of his mobile phone, he walks through the burned unit his family moved into the day he was born, two and half decades ago. The house had a beautiful fireplace, his father had fixed new flooring and cabinets, and Dominguez received his own bedroom. The fire gutted it all.

Dominguez and his father Narciso, who sells hot dogs at the Oakland Coliseum, have rented another place while this one stays ruined, even as Dominguez continues to spend time there. The landlord offered them no help other than to encourage them to move out, Dominguez and Valente said. They believe if they do, the landlord can fix the place and get a new tenant at a higher rent, making the repair worth the money. They have not had any interaction with city inspectors either.

Not far from Dominguez’s and Casas’s home, Marco Cajas’s apartment block also had a fire one January evening. The power did not come back for a month and a half, during which time Cajas showered at a relative’s place and shared meals with them. While power has now returned to his unit, it still is not back in some of the others, which get electricity through a generator parked in the compound. It spews smoke that has made the children sick.

Cajas and other residents have sued their landlord but stayed in the building because they know an affordable new place would be hard to find.

Aguilar, meanwhile, has begun volunteering for tenants’ rights groups, including the South East Tenants Association and Housing Rights Committee, to support tenants such as herself. She visits low-income tenants in San Francisco and helps organise them into unions. She photographs their broken windows, doorbells, faucets with no running water, and elevators that do not work. She sends them to building managers, asking for them to be fixed.

She is also part of a volunteer army that tenants’ rights organisations hope will help reach voters to counter the other sides’ extensive funding in the fight to repeal Costa-Hawkins.

Aguilar thinks it is possible that many people with decision-making power do not know about the Costa-Hawkins rule and how it hurts people. “I wish the authorities knew about Costa-Hawkins,” she said. “It would reduce families having to live on the street. Police treat them so badly, like criminals.”

Fiduciary responsibility

CEPR’s Appelbaum, who has written a book called Private Equity At Work, said there is not much pension funds can say to influence the investments of the private equity funds in which they are invested.

“Pension funds are told they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximise returns for retirees. Doing anything else would hurt that,” she said.

However, in 2018, state law was amended to expand the meaning of fiduciary duty of Calpers, the state’s largest public pension fund, allowing it to “take into account harmful external factors when determining the overall return of an investment”. In other words, pension funds had to keep in mind harmful factors and not just returns.

Jordan Ash, the housing director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, said an earlier analysis by the group had found that aside from California’s public employees and teachers’ pension funds, several city utilities’ pension funds – including the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water Employees Pension Fund and San Diego and Santa Barbara county employees retirement systems – have also invested in Blackstone funds that contributed to opposing the repeal of rent control in previous years.

Since then, several cities across the state, including Pasadena, have voted to expand rent control.

Shanti Singh, the legislative director for Tenants Together, a statewide tenants’ rights group, said more cities would look to expand rent control because she believes having volunteers such as Aguilar in communities helps reach out to voters, even without as much money as the opposition.

Aguilar lived in her shared room in Daly City for more than a year, commuting to organise tenants in city apartments and working as a cleaner in a city gym. She struggled to find a place in the city she could afford and still be able to send money to her children, whom she had not seen since she left home 18 years ago. They were children when she left, she said. Now, they have their own children.

“I came here to support my children in their careers,” Aguilar, who almost only speaks Spanish, said. The thought of them had kept her going through her hardest times. “That is what it is to love as a mother.”

Earlier this year, Aguilar had an accident that restricted how much she could work and made the long commute into the city harder. Recently, she moved back to the city but pays more in rent than she earns every month, leaving her in a growing pool of debt as well as the constant worry of being evicted again.

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The rest of the state, however, is being destroyed by rampant crime, sweeping homelessness and unauthorized immigrants — and it’s spurring a mass exodus, Trump said at a press conference today.

“The state of California is a mess,” said Trump. 

“We cannot allow Comrade Kamala Harris and the communist left to do to America what they did to California,” said the former president, who had held a fundraiser in Los Angeles on Thursday night and plans one later today in the Bay Area community of Woodside to cash in on California’s lucrative trove of donors.

Attacking California is something Trump didn’t even do once in his first — and he says only — presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday night in Philadelphia. Political experts perceived it as a missed opportunity: After all, his allies have for decades decried California as too liberal for the rest of the nation — partly why there has never been a California Democrat elected president. 

The jury is still out on how much Harris’ California ties could hurt her chance among undecided voters. For most Michigan and Arizona voters who spoke to CalMatters last month, Harris’ record in the White House mattered more than her California brand. 

Trump, who repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s first name, also blamed Harris for federal economic and border policies and insisted he outperformed her during the debate.

The Harris campaign’s rapid response team posted about some of Trump’s statements, but has not directly responded to what he said about her record or her home state. 

How much of the many, many things Trump said about California and Harris’ record is accurate? Here’s our fact check on some notable claims:

State of the state

What Trump said:
“California has the highest inflation, highest taxes, the highest gas prices, the most illegal aliens, the most regulations, the most expensive utilities, and it ranks as the third worst state to start a business.”

Facts:

• Inflation: Inflation rates fluctuate month to month. Florida had the highest inflation at 4% as of March, while California had the seventh highest, at 3.6%, according to an analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Moody’s Analytics. Even according to U.S. Senate Republicans’ own inflation tracker, as of August, California ranked 5th for increased monthly inflation costs since January 2021 and had a cumulative inflation rate lower than Florida and other states in the West region.
• Taxes: California does have the highest state sales tax at 7.25%, but ranks 8th in total state and local sales tax rates this year, according to the Tax Foundation. California’s property tax rate is at 0.75%, the 34th highest of all 50 states. The state also has a progressive income tax rate while other states have a flat rate for all. 
• Gas prices: It is true. California does have the highest gas price of all states, at $4.76 a gallon as of today, according to the AAA. The national average is $3.23. 
• Unauthorized immigrants: California is estimated to have the largest population of undocumented immigrants, at 1.8 million, based on a Pew Research Center estimate of 2022 Census figures. But California is also the only state where that population decreased from 2019 to 2022, while the populations in Republican-led Florida and Texas grew the most. 
• Utility rates: As of June, Hawaii — not California — had the highest electricity rates, averaging 42.4 cents per kilowatt hour for residential customers, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In California, residential customers paid an average of 33.0 cents per kilowatt hour. A Forbes analysis of monthly utility bills by state ranked Alaska the most expensive, followed by Hawaii, Connecticut, West Virginia and Georgia.
• Worst state to start a business: It depends which ranking you look at, but according to Forbes, California is the 37th best state to start a business this year.   

Crime in California

What Trump said: Trump blamed the “destruction” of San Francisco on Gov. Gavin Newsom and Harris. He said murders rose “significantly” and car thefts “went through the roof” while Harris was state attorney general. He argued that Harris was lenient in prosecuting several cases, that she had endorsed defunding the police and that “the police don’t endorse her.”

Facts:

• Crime stats: When Harris was California attorney general between 2011 and 2017, homicide rates fluctuated, with an average of 1,819 homicides per 100,000 people each year, according to the state Department of Justice. Vehicle thefts ebbed and flowed, averaging 164,000 per 100,000 people. Both rates were far lower than during the 1990s.
• Leniency: Despite claims she’s soft on crime, Harris has a mixed record. As a local prosecutor, Harris did not pursue the death penalty against a cop killer — a case Trump used during the press conference to justify his claim. But years later, Harris prosecuted a woman with mental illness for assaulting police officers. As California’s attorney general, Harris defended the state’s death penalty even though she personally opposed it. Harris remained neutral on various ballot measures about reducing penalties for low-level offenses and allowing earlier release for more offenders.
• Defund the police: It is true that Harris expressed support for redirecting some money and “reimagining” public safety during her 2020 presidential campaign, weeks after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, sparking waves of protests against law enforcement. “This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she said at the time. After President Joe Biden tapped her as his running mate, however, she denounced the “defund” movement.
• Police endorsements: More than 100 law enforcement officials — including sheriffs, former and current police chiefs and FBI agents — endorsed Harris last week.

Immigration and the border

What Trump said: He lambasted Harris for supporting “sanctuary cities” for undocumented immigrants while she was San Francisco’s district attorney, claiming she shielded “illegal aliens” who committed murders and refused to deport them. 

Facts: 

• Sanctuary city policy: The San Francisco city ordinance — which prevented officials from handing over unauthorized migrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement even if they committed a felony — dates to 1985. It was originally aimed at protecting asylum seekers from El Salvador and Guatemala, but was extended in 1989 to cover all immigrants. Harris — who was district attorney from 2004 to 2011 — supported changing the policy to report undocumented immigrants arrested on suspicion of a felony in 2008. 
• Prosecuting unauthorized immigrants: Trump said Harris offered sanctuary in 2008 to Edwin Ramos, a Salvadoran migrant who was charged with three counts of murder and who had prior convictions for assault and attempted robbery. Similarly, Trump mentioned the case of Rony Aguilera, a Honduran immigrant who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 2008. It is true city officials did not turn him over to federal agents at the time — under the sanctuary city policy that Harris helped change that year. Ramos was sentenced to life in prison in 2014, and Aguilera was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison in 2013.

Homelessness  

What Trump said: “After Kamala Harris and Gavin Newscum took charge of San Francisco, homelessness increased by over 200%.” 

Facts: Homelessness has grown in California, but not by that much. From 2007 to 2023, the number of people experiencing homelessness grew by 30.5%, according to a report to Congress. In San Francisco, the point-in-time count of homeless people this year reached the lowest level since 2015, according to the city. Nearly 186,000 Californians live on the streets or homeless shelters, up 8% from 2022, according to a new CalMatters analysis. As of last year, California accounted for nearly 30% of the nation’s homeless population and roughly half of the unsheltered population.

California exodus

What Trump said: He claimed the state has the most number of people leaving. 

Facts: It is true that California shed the most people last year — 75,423, according to the Census Bureau. But it’s not just a California problem: New York lost the most population between 2020 and 2022, losing 2.6% of its population, according to Census data. The reasons for California’s shrinking population are complicated: Some died, some moved to other states due to the high cost of living, and some left the country altogether. 

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Proponents, including law enforcement organizations and major retailers, say the law would help reduce rampant retail theft and tackle homelessness. But opponents point out that not only does the measure lack funding for drug treatment and shelter efforts, it actually could end up taking money away from those services in order to fund increased prison and judicial costs.

The measure, dubbed the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, on Tuesday was cleared by state officials to appear on the Nov. 5 ballot after organizers gathered the required number of signatures.

If approved by voters, the measure would roll back some of the changes made by Proposition 47, which reclassified certain felonies as misdemeanors. Most notably, the 2014 law made theft and other property crimes under $950, as well as the personal use of most illegal drugs misdemeanors.

While violent and property crimes have increased statewide since 2020, they remain relatively low compared other the 1980s and 1990s, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Critics of Prop. 47 blame the measure for increasing crime and a host of other issues, despite a lack of conclusive data proving that correlation.

“Our homelessness problem is directly connected to these unintended consequences of Proposition 47, which the voters now desire to correct,” reads the new measure.

The measure would allow for felony charges to be filed against those who commit thefts under $950 as well as for possessing certain drugs, including fentanyl, in cases where the suspect has two prior drug or two prior theft convictions.

Currently, such cases can only be prosecuted as misdemeanors.

Defendants who plead guilty to felony drug possession and complete treatment could have their charges dismissed under the measure.

The measure has earned strong support from the state’s top retailers, including Walmart, Target, Home Depot and 7-Eleven, who are among the campaign’s major funders, Bloomberg reported.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and the state associations of police chiefs and prosecutors are also among the effort’s backers.

“The Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act will make targeted but impactful changes to our laws around fentanyl and help us tackle the chronic retail theft that hurts our retailers, our workers, and our cities. I fully support this measure and know it will make a meaningful difference for cities across California,” reads a quote from Breed on the campaign’s website.

But critics say the bill’s targeting of Prop. 47 is overly simplistic at best.

“We have to dispense with this simplistic narrative that reforms are what caused the crime and the crime is what causes all of the retail problems that the retail establishments are reporting,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor of Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine told the Sacramento Bee.

Additionally, an analysis of the measure by state officials found that increased sentences and incarceration may cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. And to pay for it, the state might have to reduce spending on mental health and substance abuse services, truancy and dropout prevention and victim services, based on requirements in current law.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and other lawmakers oppose the measure in favor of their own competing bill package, arguing that concerns about retail theft can be addressed without altering Prop. 47,the Bee reported.

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Two new bills would allow state funding to support sober housing — a significant departure from current law, which requires providers to accept people regardless of their drug and alcohol use. 

“If people want to get off of drugs and away from drugs, we should give them that option,” said Assemblymember Matt Haney, a Democrat from San Francisco who wrote Assembly Bill 2479. “They shouldn’t be forced to live next to people who are using drugs.”

There are at least 12,000 sober living beds in the state, but more than twice that many Californians who would qualify for those services, according to data from the California Research Bureau quoted in the Assembly Health Committee’s analysis of the second bill, AB 2893.

As state law prohibits spending housing funding on sobriety-focused programs, many are funded by private donations. 

The lawmakers behind the two bills say they aren’t trying to alter the key idea that everyone deserves immediate housing, even people struggling with addictions. Instead, they’re attempting to give more choices to people who want to be sober. But some experts worry that, because California has a shortage of homeless housing, people who relapse in sober housing or who don’t want to stay sober would have nowhere to go but back to the street. 

The bills come as California’s homelessness population is skyrocketing, having increased from about 118,000 in 2016 to more than 181,000 last year. Some critics blame and want to overturn the state’s inclusive housing policy. At the same time, as public fears about crime soar, voters in some liberal cities are putting limits on who can receive public assistance.

San Francisco voters this year passed an initiative mandating drug screenings for welfare recipients. In San Diego County, Vista Mayor John Franklin recently introduced a measure pledging not to support “any program that enables continued drug use” and criticizing housing first for precluding sober housing.

“I think we are seeing a cultural shift,” said Christopher Calton, a research fellow who studies housing and homelessness for libertarian think-tank the Independent Institute. “People are starting to say these permissive policies aren’t working.”

California’s ‘housing first’ homelessness policy

At issue is the state’s adherence to “housing first,” a framework where homeless residents are offered housing immediately and with minimal caveats or requirements, regardless of sobriety. The housing should be “low-barrier,” meaning residents are not required to participate in recovery or other programs. After someone is housed, providers are then supposed to offer voluntary substance use and mental health treatment, job training, or other services. The idea is that if people don’t have to focus all their energy on simply surviving on the streets, they’re better equipped to work on their other issues.

Housing first became law of the land in California in 2016 when the state required all state-funded programs to adopt the model. 

The federal government also uses that framework. But in 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said requiring sobriety is not necessarily anti-housing first. California did not follow suit.

Some Republicans and conservative-leaning groups now are pushing to overturn California’s housing first framework, saying it hasn’t successfully reduced homelessness. Assemblymember Josh Hoover, from Folsom, is trying to completely repeal housing first with AB 2417. That bill has yet to be heard by a committee, and likely won’t advance this year.

But with more than 180,000 Californians lacking a home, even Democrats want to see changes. The bills by Haney and Assemblymember Chris Ward of San Diego would allow up to 25% of state funds in each county to go toward sober housing. 

Neither Democrat wants to upend housing first. Instead, they want sober housing facilities to operate under a housing first framework. Haney’s bill would require counties to make sure sober facilities kept people housed at rates similar to facilities without sobriety requirements.

Both bills specify that tenants should not be kicked out of their sober housing just because they relapse, and instead they should get support to help them recover. If a resident is no longer interested in being sober, the program should help them move into another housing program. 

Having a sober living option for people who want it would be a good thing — but it would have to be their choice, said Sharon Rapport, director of California state policy for The Corporation for Supportive Housing. But homeless housing is so scarce in California, that it’s unlikely participants would be given a true choice, she said. And, these bills would divert already limited state money away from low-barrier housing.

“My worry is that we have one pie of funding for housing,” she said. “So it’s not like we’re saying, ‘Let’s add extra money and try this other approach.’ We’d be saying, ‘Let’s spend less money on harm-reduction housing.’”

Her organization has not taken an official position on the bills. 

To make sure people don’t end up back on the street after a relapse, counties would have to keep spaces in low-barrier housing free, in case someone needs to move out of sober housing, Haney said. But that’s not explicitly mandated in the bill. 

One key motivation for Haney to draft his sober housing bill is the surge of deaths caused by the opioid fentanyl. 

“Our housing first policies in California do not reflect the realities of fentanyl and the need to provide pathways to get off of and away from such a deadly drug,” he said.

Overdose deaths are rampant inside San Francisco’s homeless housing, a 2022 San Francisco Chronicle investigation found. But the state doesn’t track those deaths in public housing, meaning if Haney’s sober housing bill passes, it will be all but impossible to tell whether it saves lives.

The state should track those deaths, Haney said, adding, “maybe I’ll do that bill next year.”

Does housing first work?

The argument against housing first is simple: Since California adopted the policy, the state’s homeless population has grown by more than half. 

But experts say that’s because high housing costs are pushing people onto the streets faster than the state’s overburdened supportive housing system can pull them back inside.

Under immense pressure to do something about the crisis, politicians are pointing to housing first as a scapegoat, said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. But that’s like blaming the emergency room for the number of COVID patients coming in during the pandemic, she said. 

Multiple studies have shown housing first to be successful. The Department of Veterans Affairs in 2010 found adopting housing first reduced the time it took to place people in housing from 223 days to 35 days. A two-year study in five Canadian cities found housing first participants spent 73% of their time in stable housing, compared with 32% for participants in non-housing first programs. 

People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), which operates housing first programs in Southern California and the Bay Area, reported 94% of people who moved in were still housed a year later. Destination: Home in Santa Clara County, which spearheads the county’s housing first efforts, reported similar results.

“That is as much evidence as I think would be necessary to show that this model works really well,” said CEO Jennifer Loving, “and the problem is we haven’t been able to do enough of it.”

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I walked the wooded banks of the rivers that converge in the capital and found just a few dozen spots where men had bedded down on simple mats of cardboard or newspaper. There were no tents or camps.

The word “homeless” was rarely used then. It didn’t appear in my article for the Sacramento Bee.

By 1982, amid a recession, newcomers who had lost their jobs began to appear in the weeds. In 1985, after three years of reporting on the subject, I co-authored one of the first books on contemporary homelessness. In 1988, I spent a week walking 10 miles of Sacramento riverbank and found 125 elaborate camps. This was new.

I returned to Sacramento more recently amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the tent cities in the woods along the rivers stretched as far as the eye could see, rivaling those photographed by Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression. The most recent federally mandated survey found more than 5,000 unsheltered homeless people in the city.

I can trace several of our modern “doom loops” to the 1980s. The roots of our continuing struggles with police brutality and sexual violence were present in stories I covered then. Meaningful gun control measures could have prevented the proliferation of mass shootings over the past four decades. And pro-housing policies could have negated the presence of today’s tent cities.

I’ve long despaired about the homelessness crisis in particular. In the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election, I blamed conservatives for abandoning the poor. I thought my journalism and others’ could change policy, perhaps even inspire a New Deal-style response equal to the challenge. Such was my naiveté.

The blame, I eventually realized, also belongs to people we might call “good liberals.”

By 1980, baby boomers were in their first decade of homeownership in places such as Silicon Valley and the New York City suburbs of Westchester County. They rapidly became NIMBYs, vehemently opposing affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Many were Clinton Democrats. They went on to plant “Black Lives Matter” signs in their lawns. The message was hollow: We support you; just don’t live near us.

Boomers, especially if they were white, got to buy houses, and then they zoned everyone else out. They watched their lawns and home equity grow. I was one of them.

In 1981, at 24, I bought my first house. At a price of $70,000, it cost less than three times my annual salary of $25,000, which was roughly the median income in Sacramento County. If adjusted for inflation alone, the home’s value would be $218,000 four decades later, and my salary $78,000.

The median household income in the county today is about $84,000, not far from what inflation would predict. But Zillow estimates that my former home is now worth $578,000, more than double what can be attributed to inflation. My annual wages would need to be more than $190,000 to afford the house as easily as I did then. This is what the children and grandchildren of boomers face.

Much was made of the more than 60 housing bills passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year. The legislation will streamline approval of housing in cities that aren’t meeting their goals, limit the use of environmental laws to block affordable housing, allow developers to build more densely when they include affordable units and let faith-based organizations build housing on their land, among other measures.

But it’s not nearly enough. Politicians have to get more aggressive in wresting control of zoning from cities.

Starting in 2018, state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) repeatedly tried to advance bills that would have overridden local zoning to allow taller, denser apartment buildings near public transit and job centers. His fellow Democrats blocked them.

Even less ambitious housing-friendly bills often face a similar fate in Sacramento. Last year, state Sen. Anna Caballero (D-Salinas) proposed legislation that would have eased approval of small “starter homes” in areas restricted to single-family housing. That provision was stripped out of the bill.

It’s the same story on the East Coast. Last year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed legislation to override local opposition to housing. Fierce blowback came from largely white, relatively affluent “good liberals” in places such as Westchester County, where Joe Biden got 67.6% of the vote in 2020. As in California, Democrats opposed to the plan used code language: “local control,” “overcrowding,” “traffic.”

New York state Assemblyman Phil Ramos cut through the euphemisms: “It doesn’t matter what kind of incentive you give them,” he said at a rally. “A wealthy community, before they allow Black and brown people in, they’ll walk away from any amount of money.” Hochul’s plan was defeated in the Democratic-dominated Legislature.

Republicans, for their part, haven’t gotten any better on these issues. A podcast by the right-wing Cicero Institute suggested that instead of calling people “homeless,” we revert to words like “vagrants,” “bums” and “tramps.”

Such vilification is proved off the mark by the fact that poverty-stricken Mississippi has relatively few homeless people. Los Angeles County has six times as many unhoused people per capita as metropolitan Jackson. Why? An average apartment in the Mississippi capital rents for around $900, compared with $2,750 in L.A.

The Biden administration recently released a report calling for more housing, but the feds have limited power here. “Ultimately,” the report stated, “meaningful change will require State and local governments to reevaluate the land-use regulations that reduce the housing supply.” That largely means undoing single-family zoning.

Sen. Wiener’s push for apartment buildings in transit corridors had it right. Would this make parts of Los Angeles a little more like Manhattan? We can only hope so. If New York City is any guide, it would mean more vibrant neighborhoods and higher property values.

As the struggle over housing continues, tent cities have been normalized in California and beyond. Last year, a student of mine looked puzzled when I explained that homelessness of this kind hasn’t always existed. I couldn’t be frustrated with her, though: This crisis has lingered — and worsened — for more than twice as long as she’s been alive. It didn’t have to.

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