Over the weekend, I had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle considering California’s homelessness crisis in light of its similarities to the climate crisis. Here’s a little teaser:
Like climate change, homelessness is the product of mistakes that we made long after we knew better. Much as we failed to begin decarbonizing even when the likely consequences of that failure were widely understood, California has spent decades underbuilding housing, even after the effect of supply constraints on prices—and, by extension, on homelessness—became apparent.
The scale of the problem, and the level of investment it will take to fix it, are incommensurate with how we normally think about the “biggest” of policy issues. As a result of decades of procrastination, California’s homeless population has reached staggering proportions. As of the last point-in-time count, taken in January 2020, more than 160,000 people were estimated to be homeless on a single night in this state. Even the record $12 billion for fighting homelessness that the state included in its recent budget does not represent much more than a first step toward a durable solution.
It will take years to adequately address the crisis, even under the most optimistic scenarios. The $12 billion mostly took the form of one-time cash infusions. But to end mass homelessness, we need to think in terms of multiyear investments. And, as with climate change, we will need federal assistance to scale up our response to the necessary level.
One theme in this piece is the need for federal intervention. California has long been a leader among U.S. states on climate policy, and in recent years it has started to make significant progress in developing effective programs to prevent and end homelessness. (Politico recently published an in-depth report on Project Homekey, one of the more exciting and high profile of these programs.) But even America’s wealthiest and most populous state can’t end homelessness all on its lonesome any more than it can single-handedly halt climate change.
Part of the issue is that homelessness, like climate change, is a national concern—even, to some extent, a planetary one. While California is facing the most severe housing crunch of any U.S. state, rents are skyrocketing nationwide; and though the international picture is a little complicated, many other countries are also facing severe housing shortages. National crises necessitate national responses.
But even if the homelessness crisis were specific to one state, we would still need federal assistance to end it. Unlike the federal government, states cannot run deficits; they need to balance their budgets every year, and that limits its ability to spend money on housing people at the necessary scale. Even in California’s most recent budget, when the governor and legislature allocated a record $12 billion to preventing and ending homelessness, the vast majority of those billions were directed toward explicitly one-time programs.
From a budgeting perspective, that makes perfect sense. Large surpluses are rare, and the administration understandably does not want to create ongoing commitments in one year that it may need to cut in the next. But one-time expenditures aren’t going to end California’s homelessness crisis, any more than a year-long spending spree would solve climate change. As I wrote of homelessness in the Chronicle piece, “It will take years to adequately address the crisis, even under the most optimistic scenarios.”
The federal government, on the other hand, is under no obligation to balance its budget every year, which means it could support Sacramento in developing a long-term plan to end homelessness. Most importantly, Washington could absorb some of the ongoing costs that are a prerequisite for tackling the problem head-on: maintenance and the sort of routine repairs that are necessary to keep any type of housing habitable, staffing for the wraparound services and supports that accompany permanent supportive housing, and so on.
Whether the federal government will actually assume that role is another matter. Last week, Congress passed the long-debated $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which includes billions in climate sustainability investments for California. It may soon pass the accompanying Build Back Better Act, which includes significant investments in housing affordability—albeit smaller investments than were originally proposed.
I wrote in my Chronicle piece that “[t]he biggest obstacles to addressing the crisis are not technical but political.” In a sense, that is good news. This country has the capacity, resources, and technical know-how necessary to effectively end mass homelessness. But I don’t want to downplay the political barriers to doing so. They are daunting, and they will only grow more daunting the longer we wait.
Read the rest of the Chronicle piece here.