Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Calif. Gov. @GavinNewsom

- blaming others for homelessness crisis he helped create

- proposes housing vouchers he knows won't work

- claimed Texas created SF homeless problem

- more focused on being elected president in 2024 than saving Calif. in 2019

environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2019/…

@GavinNewsom Unwilling to take responsibility for the homelessness crisis he helped create, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is now attempting to shift the blame to the federal government.

“We can all agree that homelessness is a national crisis,” begins the open letter that Newsom sent to President Trump late in the day on Monday, September 16.

National crisis? Really?

Consider:

- California is home to 12% of the American people and half of all unsheltered homeless;

- New York shelters 95% of its homeless while California shelters just 25%;

- While 1,000 homeless will die on the streets of LA this year, fewer than 300 will die in New York City, even though it has twice as many people.

- More homeless die of hypothermia in Los Angeles than in New York City.

It gets worse.

“With 50,000 additional [federal government] housing vouchers, California could address a significant proportion of our unsheltered population, including thousands of Veterans,” Newsom writes.

That claim is totally bananas — and deeply cynical.

Newsom knows perfectly well that housing vouchers would do absolutely nothing to create more houses or apartment buildings to address California’s extreme housing shortage.

And he knows the majority of Calif.’s landlords refuse to rent to tenants with vouchers. In Los Angeles, San Francisco, & other big cities just 1% of rental postings accept vouchers. In LA, up to 90% of people who receive vouchers fail to find housing within 4 months.

Newsom betrays awareness of how outlandish his solution is. He urges Trump to “create a program based on best practices to incentivize landlords to work with voucher holders to find stable housing”

But if such “best practices” exist, why has Newsom failed to apply them?

Worse, Newsom is suggesting that the homelessness crisis is simply a problem of high rents and poverty. And yet he must know that it is not.

People who work with the homeless say that approximately 100% of the people who live on the streets are abusing drugs — usually hard ones like meth and heroin — or mentally ill, and often both.

A significant percentage are schizophrenic or severely bipolar. And many have been devastated by trauma including rape and assault.

It’s hard to believe that Newsom is naive. After all, he has held office in California for most of his adult life. He was on SF Board of Superv. from 1997 to 2003 and Mayor from 2004 to 2011. During his time as mayor, San Francisco’s homeless population grew from 6,248 to 6,455.

As Lt Gov. 2012-19, Newsom did nothing to address either the homelessness or housing crisis.

Rather than take responsibility, Newsom has repeatedly sought to blame others. In June Newsom told HBO that when he ended his tenure as mayor, most homeless weren’t from Calif.

"Vast majority (of SF homeless) also come in from — and we know this — from Texas. Just (an) interesting fact," Newsom said.

Politifact called Newsom’s claim “ridiculous,” noting that “Newsom’s statement is contradicted by San Francisco’s own point in time homeless counts.”

"The data shows (Newsom’s statement) is completely and totally incorrect," said Jennifer Friedenback, the executive director of San Francisco’s Coalition of Homelessness. "Newsom knows better, by the way."

And now, in its press release attempting to blame the Trump administration for the homelessness crisis, the governor’s office claims that the letter to Trump was signed by a “bipartisan coalition.” In reality, just four people signed the letter, and all of them are Democrats.

One of them is the man who was supposed to be homelessness czar, Sac. Mayor Darrell Steinberg

Last week I praised Steinberg for proposing that while Calif. must create sufficient housing, people must also use it. People should not be allowed to sleep and defecate on the street

But when we spoke by phone, I was struck by how much Steinberg blamed others for the crisis. “I agree with 90% of what you wrote,” he said at the beginning of our interview last week, “but the problem is not Gavin.”

Who then is to blame for the inaction? “There is fighting between the stakeholders," said Steinberg. "There is a fight between housing advocates and those advocating for bridges and those advocating for low-barrier triage shelters.”

But isn’t it the job of the governor to knock heads and bring people together?

“If we’re talking 3 years from now and there’s no change...” said Steinberg, before adding, “He’s dedicated unprecedented resources. He’s serious about real change.”

Wait, what? Three years? Do the people of California really have to wait three years before they can expect to see significant change? Was 22 years in power in San Francisco and California really insufficient time for Newsom to do anything?

Since publishing my articles, several people who live in San Francisco told me that have been chased and attacked near their homes recently by mentally ill or drug-altered homeless people.

One of my employees was chased by a mentally ill man last week. Alarmed, I asked her if she carried mace. “I do,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s legal, but I carry it anyway.”

Homelessness was a problem when I first moved to San Francisco after college in 1993. People lolled off outside of 16th and Mission Bart after shooting heroin. They defecated on the streets. But it’s at a whole other level today.

Last Thursday, just minutes after I published an analysis explaining why California keeps making homelessness worse, NBC Los Angeles reported that the 28th homeless person was killed in LA this year.

The homeless man’s “burned body was found Tuesday morning smoldering in a shopping cart along the bike path at Lake Balboa Park in Van Nuys.”

At a gathering of young tech entrepreneurs I heard story after story about how the homeless crisis was affecting them personally. One person told me they had started seeing homeless men sitting on sidewalks use needles to shoot heroin and/or meth directly into their penises.

Many said they were afraid to raise the alarm for fear of being accused of “blaming the victim.” This is understandable. After all, tech workers significantly contributed to higher rents, and feel guilty about homelessness. But the victims are victimizing themselves & others.

My late aunt was schizophrenic and homeless at times. Like many schizophrenic people, she sometimes resisted taking her medications and put herself in dangerous situations. She was hard for my even my father and his sisters, who are psychologists and counselors, to deal with.

California’s leaders are wedded to debunked 1960s dogma. Nobody hesitates to get Alzheimer's sufferers off the street and yet we hesitate to do the same for people with schizophrenia and meth addicts, even when they are defecating on sidewalks and shooting drugs.

“There’s a provision that says Medicaid will now pay for beds in psychiatric hospitals,” said @JohnSnookTAC President of the Treatment Advocacy Center and an expert on how different states address mentally ill homeless people.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Snook explained, “but California is hemming and hawing. They don’t want to involuntarily incarcerate, but it’s self-defeating because you end up with mentally ill in jail because a bed isn’t available.”

Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign slogan was “Courage for a Change.” Does anybody think he’s displaying courage in his approach to homelessness?

Consider that Newsom has spent far more time attacking President Trump on Twitter for issues that have little impact on California than he has spent rallying the state to address the housing and homelessness crisis.

Since taking office, Newsom has tweeted 85 times about immigration, 77 times about gun control, and 35 times about climate change. By contrast, he has tweeted just 16 times about housing and just five times about homelessness.

Homelessness is the biggest humanitarian, public health, and environmental crisis in the state. It is resulting in three deaths per day in LA alone. And yet Newsom is tweeting seven times more frequently about climate change.

Everybody knows that what Newsom really wants is to be president. “Three months after the gubernatorial election,” reported SF Chron, "Newsom is still running Facebook ads against President Trump’s wall."

Newsom was running his post-election Facebook ads in “key swing states such as Ohio,” reported the Chronicle.

A well-known political operative said Newsom “is definitely boosting his profile and his donor list so that he can run in the future.”

The homelessness crisis is more than a public health & safety disaster. It is an affront to human dignity. All of us who live in Calif. should feel ashamed of our state’s failure to serve the most vulnerable: not just the extremely poor but also the mentally ill and drug-addicted

A governor who cared deeply about the people of California and had the “Courage for a Change” that Newsom promised during his election campaign would act decisively.

He would declare a state of emergency that would allow the rapid building of temporary and permanent housing across California. He would call on the people of California to make a commitment to expanding housing, quickly, and share the burden equally and fairly.

A governor with "Courage for a Change" would appoint homelessness czar to centralize authority for treating mental illness & addiction & stand up to dogmatic interest groups. And he would restore the lost balance between carrots and sticks and get more people into treatment.

Achieving these reforms may require radical measures like creating safe places for heroin & meth addicts to shoot drugs, pass out, & use toilet without endangering themselves & others. We Californians are, for the most part, not moralizers. We are hungry for realistic solutions

But what's needed more than anything is a governor with vision, courage, and a relentless focus on saving California in 2019, not being elected president in 2024.

Newsom needs to find another gear. He needs to get out of his comfort zone. Most of all, he needs to stop deflecting responsibility for California’s homelessness crisis onto others and accept that, so long as he is governor, it belongs to him.

/END

@GavinNewsom As homelessness became a public safety emergency, @GavinNewsom tweeted about

ISSUE # OF TIMES

Immigrants 85
Guns 77
Trump 57
Health care 56
Climate 35
Rep Rts 19
Death pen. 18
Housing 16
Homeless 5

@GavinNewsom I will be on @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews tonight at 8:30 pm eastern to discuss the homelessness emergency in California. Please tune in!