The latest data shows California is America’s most homeless state. It doesn’t have to be | Opinion

The latest definitive census of the nation’s homeless people affirms a dark truth: America’s homelessness is, to a substantial and growing degree, California’s homelessness.

Between 2020 and 2022, California’s homeless population expanded more than any other state’s, growing by nearly 10,000 souls to over 171,000. During a period when the U.S. homeless population increased only slightly, California’s grew some 20 times faster. For the third consecutive biennial census by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, California accounted for the entire national increase in homelessness and more.

What would it take to make these disturbing numbers go in the right direction for a change? Not as much as one might think based on California’s persistent, nation-beating failure to do so. A recent attempt to answer the question by the Corporation for Supportive Housing concluded that California could house all its homeless people with less than 3% of its budget.

Opinion

It’s not as if this problem has never been solved, after all — or isn’t being effectively addressed in other places right now. In fact, with recent decreases in the homeless populations of New York and Hawaii, previously the only two states with higher per capita homelessness, California claimed the dubious distinction of the nation’s highest homelessness rate, amounting to more than one of every 230 residents. Over the last 15 years, while national homelessness declined 10%, California’s grew over 20%.

California also remains worse than every other state at sheltering its unhoused people, with more than two-thirds sleeping outdoors. That’s roughly the reverse of the nationwide homeless population, a majority of which is sheltered.

As HUD’s recently released report on the so-called point-in-time count notes, California is home to “more than nine times the number of unsheltered people in the state with the next highest number, Washington.” Only eight other states fail to shelter a majority of their homeless people, while three states, including New York, shelter over 95%.

The report also shows that California has the most homelessness nationwide in a major urban area, Los Angeles; the most in a midsize metropolitan area, Sonoma County; and the most in a largely suburban area, Orange County. And the state has three of the five major metropolitan areas with the most unsheltered homeless populations in the country: the San Jose, Oakland and Sacramento regions, all of which leave more than 70% of their homeless people to sleep in cars, tents, parks and other outdoor places.

With less than an eighth of the nation’s overall population and shrinking, California is close to claiming a third of America’s homeless people and half its unsheltered.

The human consequences of this are not easily overstated. As the Biden administration’s accompanying plan to address the crisis notes, homelessness is deadly: The average housed person lives more than 50% longer than a homeless person, who can expect to die by the age of 50. The Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness recently marked the deaths of 93 homeless people over the first seven months of the year, about one every two days.

California’s housing shortage and consequent costs, attributable mainly to state and local overregulation, are chiefly responsible for its disproportionate homelessness. Worse, despite record one-time state spending on homeless services in recent years, California has been remarkably stingy and inconsistent in dedicating funding to the problem on a continuing basis. The recent Corporation for Supportive Housing report estimated that California would have to spend $8.1 billion a year for the next 12 years to house its entire homeless population, nearly eight times projected expenses.

That sounds like more than it is for this huge, rich state, which would need to devote just 2.7% of its budget to the crisis to reach that level. The Legislative Analyst’s Office has arrived at an even lower estimate based on what New York spends to bring most of its homeless people indoors, partly because officials there rely heavily on emergency shelter rather than full-fledged housing.

By any measure, as other states’ relative success suggests, this is a project well within California’s means. As Wallace Richardson, a formerly homeless advocate with the corporation, put it, “The data shows California the facts; the data shows California the falsehoods.”

One datum bandied about the Golden State ad nauseam is that its vast wealth would rank it fifth — maybe even fourth! — among national economies worldwide. What good are such vast resources if they can’t be expended, in relatively small part, to alleviate a cruel and deadly crisis of the state’s own creation?