For Newsom, visiting China beats facing California workers who can’t afford homes | Opinion

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is choosing to visit the Tesla factory in China next week rather than the one in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here at home, he might have faced a complaint from an assembly line worker that facing a $10,000-a-month mortgage to buy their first home is simply impossible. At the Tesla facility in China, housing is another leader’s problem.

By virtue of California’s economic significance on the world stage, a visit to China by a California governor is perfectly reasonable.

But as Newsom enters the home stretch of his second term, it’s an open question if he can complete his eight years in office on a high note. It could be quite the opposite: These work visits out of state may begin to feel like vacations.

Opinion

The governor seeks to keep the focus next week on climate change.

“California and China hold the keys to solving the climate crisis,” Newsom said upon formally announcing the itinerary of his trip. “As two of the world’s largest economies, our partnership is essential to delivering climate action for our communities and beyond. In Beijing, he and other U.S. officials will sign new “memorandums of understanding” to promote climate collaboration.

Meanwhile, in California, Newsom’s emerging legacy is the two-sided coin of homelessness and housing. For a governor best known for his uncanny ability to fire off statistics on any given issue, the most important numbers on this score are dismal.

When the governor took office in 2016, for example, the state had approximately 118,000 homeless residents, based on the best estimate available at the time.

In his sixth year in office, that number had jumped to more than 170,000.

Homelessness starts when housing becomes unattainable. Housing becomes unattainable when insufficient new housing is constructed and rents go up. This has been the California way of life for many years.

New housing construction has barely budged during Newsom’s years in office. Rental vacancies are at dangerously low levels, a tell-tale pressure on ever-increasing rents. High interest rates are causing countless homeowners to stay put rather than sell, causing low levels of inventories on the market.

The net effect of the California housing disaster:

• California has 30% of all the nation’s homeless residents

• Our median rent of $2,850 a month is nearly $1,000 greater than that in Texas

• Our home ownership rate is among the lowest in the country

• Our population is declining for the first time since the settlement era

When a Californian can no longer afford a roof over the head, life in a car too often turns into life on the streets.

How broken is California’s housing system?

When a contractor is building a beautiful new home for some fortunate resident who can afford it, state laws have no constraints on the wages of laborers other than the minimum wage. Yet, when a contractor tries to build an affordable housing unit to try to keep a Californian out of homelessness, state law requires that same contractor pay union “prevailing” wages if the state is providing some assistance.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t the wealthiest Californians always pay prevailing wages for their homes while we eliminate as many strings as possible to build affordable housing?

It can now cost upwards of $670,000 to build a single affordable housing unit in Sacramento. That’s a symptom of systemic failure. The Legislature and Newsom passed 56 housing bills this year which did little to dramatically reduce the cost of building affordable housing in California. This means that homelessness could get even worse.

Newsom will not have the financial luxury of surpluses going forward like he did for his first five years in office. The Department of Finance is projecting initial budget deficits as high as $14.3 billion in the next three years. He does have a $6.38 billion bond on the March ballot to build more capacity for the state mental health system that would provide spaces for those on the streets in need of help. There are also housing bonds awaiting action in the Legislature.

Stephen Levy, head of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy, offers three housing strategies that Newsom should focus on: “Pass a large state bond for housing. Lower the voter threshold for local housing bond approval as we did for education bonds. Continue prosecuting cities that are delaying compliance.”

It’s true that Newsom inherited all the fundamental causes of California’s housing crisis. It is just as true that he could leave office in a little more than two years without steering the state on a clear path to fewer homeless individuals and a lot more affordable housing construction.

Housing and homelessness will define Newsom’s time in office more than any other issues, which is why a trip to China may look pretty good to him right now.