The Hot Pursuit of Homeless Policy

A retrospective of Gavin Newsom's 20-year failed effort to fix California's homeless crisis.

For almost two decades, Gavin Newsom has been telling us that housing is the key to ending homelessness. But what if homelessness is government housing policy? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a progressive government knowingly used housing policy as a tool of oppression. What follows is a transcript of my latest video essay.

It is 2023, 19 months before the 2024 national election, and the governor of California is exploring America in search of his presidential potential. Gavin Newsom calls his tour a “Campaign for Democracy,” and he is bringing his ideas to your town. His biggest idea — which he has been working non-stop since his days as a San Francisco County supervisor from 1997 to 2004 — is homelessness.

For almost two decades, Newsom has been telling us that housing is the key to ending homelessness. But what if homelessness is government housing policy? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a progressive government knowingly used housing policy as a tool of oppression.

Hello, my name is Steven W. Aunan. I'm an author, photographer, and retired public sector union worker who has been living in California since 1990. My last video focused on our great socio-sexual divide and whether we should murder each other to protect our communities. Today I’m bringing you a retrospective of Gavin Newsom’s homeless demagoguery and its effects on California. And I’m only doing these videos because I have a pen and a camera, and using them is what I’ve always done.

Newsom was elected to the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors in 1996, elected mayor of San Francisco in 2003, elected Lt. Gov. of California in 2010, and Governor in 2018. He’s been talking about homelessness from the very beginning of his public career, and he doesn’t read his speeches because he’s dyslexic, so we get to enjoy Gavin’s “stream of consciousness” — out of which come profound ideas like “food solves hunger.”

We’re not going back to Newsom’s early days as a county supervisor because, aside from a few unrelated exceptions, there is little online video of Gavin prior to 2008. Newsom entered politics early after a short career as a businessman, and as I watched Newsom’s early performances as mayor, I found them reminiscent of a 1990s politician.

Ross Perot was campaigning for president in 1992. He lost. A decade later, in 2002, Newsom sponsored a ballot measure called Care Not Cash which cut cash payments to the homeless in exchange for shelter, counseling, and other services. According to a 2005 San Francisco Chronicle story, 2,500 homeless people were receiving monthly welfare checks up to $410 when the program launched in 2004. Under Newsom, those checks were reduced to $59.

During his second inaugural address to the city in 2008, Newsom said he was “redoubling” the government’s efforts to solve the “vexing” and “significant” challenge of homelessness, and called his progress a “remarkable” “national model.”

In his 2008 State of the City report, Newsom said “food solves hunger, shelters solve sleep, housing solves homelessness,” that homelessness “defines the best of San Francisco,” and that 2009 was going to be an "exciting year" for housing.

In 2009, there were 1,020 more homeless people in San Francisco than there were in 2007.

In 2010, Angela Alioto, who ran for mayor and lost to Newsom in 2003, said Gavin’s brainchild — Project Homeless Connect — was “the most important program in the United States of America.”

The Project was a one-stop-government-shop that provided “an unbelievable diversity of programs” from state, local, and federal bureaucracies. Held every 6 to 8 weeks, and manned by almost 20,000 bleeding-heart volunteers, the project provided everything from free wheelchair repair to free dental work, free eye exams, free long distance phone calls, free methadone, free podiatry, free acupuncture, free massages, free legal service, and free haircuts.

Yes, you heard that right. A very determined San Francisco held more than 30 Project Homeless Connects, and for six full years utilized the resources of 20,000 volunteers and three gigantic government bureaucracies to “solve” the city’s homeless crisis. In 2011 — the year Newsom was elected Lt. Governor — San Francisco still had 5,700 homeless people.

In 2015, 11 years after adopting a “10-year plan to end chronic homelessness,” San Francisco had increased its homeless population by 1,300 souls.

If Willie Brown was right back when he was mayor, he must have also been right in 2022.

Somehow — and unexpectedly, we may never know why — nothing gets fixed even when big government is working at its best, but somehow there’s always more for government to do, more failure to be redefined as success. I’m old enough to remember when Americans ridiculed the massive, failed, Soviet 5-year plans, and you’re old enough to remember when Americans praised massive, failed, American 10-year plans.

Don’t insult your own intelligence by thinking I’m literally comparing Newsom to Stalin.

I am merely reminding you that Stalin’s 5-year plan was never going to increase industrial production by 100% in 5 years, and that Newsom’s 10-year plan was never going to eradicate homelessness in 10 years.

Under Stalin, Russians who questioned authority went to the gulag. As an American, questioning authority is part of your DNA— you do believe that, right? Well, then you should ask yourself why so many people clap for authority figures when the data shows that the authority figure is lying. Everyone believes in data. You believe in data, too, don’t you?

In 2016, the progressive government of Seattle declared that it believed in sophisticated data, and experts said the city could use it to end most homelessness in three years.

But between 2013 and 2023, Seattle spent $1 billion on the problem and the number of homeless residents increased to the highest on record.

Of course, we’re all told that re-electing people with more work to do will eventually achieve the goal of ending homelessness. But what if that’s not the goal at all?

Since the state already has almost 30% of the nation’s homeless, and is spending gigantic sums of money to “acquire and rehabilitate” motels, multifamily housing buildings, and commercial properties for use by the homeless, you should also ask yourself if the state’s endgame is to be the nation’s leader in high density, transit-adjacent, government housing.

You know, the kind of housing that FDR created in the 1930s.

But let’s go back to that 2010 press conference in San Francisco to find out whose brain conceived Project Homeless Connect, because it wasn’t Gavin Newsom.

That was Gavin Newsom in 2010 praising Alex Tourk. Alex Tourk was Gavin Newsom’s chief campaign advisor in 2007. Alex Tourk resigned that year after finding out that his wife was sleeping with Gavin Newsom.

The program developed by Tourk and acclaimed by Newsom isn’t just a San Francisco failure, though. It’s also failing in Oregon and Australia.

Washington County, Oregon, part of metropolitan Portland, is using Project Homeless Connect. Between 2020 and 2022, the state experienced one of the nation’s largest increases in homelessness, growing nearly 23%. As reported by the Oregonian in April 2023, the state has 18,000 homeless people with only 5,000 year-round shelter beds to serve them. Oregon also had the highest rate of chronic homelessness in the nation.

In Australia, the city of Brisbane also uses Tourk’s program, and the capital of Queensland has experienced a 22% rise in homelessness, or nearly three times the national increase. ABC News reported that “Queensland needs 11,000 affordable and social homes each year for the next 20 years.” The most recent Project Homeless Connect in Brisbane was held on May 18, 2023.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. In 2016, Lt. Gov. Newsom said “the state of California has been nowhere to be found on the issue of homelessness.”

And in 2017, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said “California should do more to address homelessness. Currently, California has more people experiencing homelessness than any other state in the nation, and it does a poor job of sheltering this vulnerable population.”

Also in that year, the Bureau of State Audits reported that California had just over 24% of the nation’s homeless.

Two years later, when Newsom was running to replace Jerry Brown as governor, he said homelessness was “out of control” but that he would never demagogue the problem. If he won the election, he said, he was going to find the “best and brightest” to fix it.

In 2019, Project Homeless Connect was still giving homeless people “an unbelievable diversity of programs.”

By 2021, progressive non-profits were saying the Bay Area’s housing shortage “didn’t happen by accident” but conveniently ignoring the pivotal role that FDR’s New Deal played in creating our modern institutional racism.

By 2022, there were 7,754 people homeless people in San Francisco.

In November 2022, the city accused one homeless non-profit of “criminal activity” and asked the FBI to investigate.

The United Council of Human Services had problems going back to 2017, including “huge red flags” from the IRS for its 2019 tax returns. The San Francisco Standard reported that the CEO of UCHS has “deep connections to some of San Francisco’s most powerful politicians” and that city officials tried desperately to keep the non-profit operating because it received $28 million in grants to manage six different shelter and housing programs.

That CEO is Gwendolyn Westbrook, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to stealing thousands of dollars in parking lot collections from the Port of San Francisco, and was convicted of grand theft and misappropriation of public funds. In 2015, news reports allege, Westbrook operated an illicit bingo hall in Richmond without that city’s knowledge.

UCHS was finally banned in April 2023 from managing the six city contracts, but only after the city discovered that the state Attorney General’s office had revoked the non-profit status of nearly 140 city-funded organizations, making them ineligible to receive public funds.

As we come to the end of my video, there is one more issue to address.

From January to March, 2023, the San Francisco medical examiner recorded 200 accidental overdose deaths, a 40% increase from the same period last year, and one can only hope that Gov. Newsom has hit rock bottom. After years of insisting on a housing first approach, after years of minimizing illegal drugs as a major force in the homeless crisis, and after saying in 2020 that “clean and sober is the biggest damn mistake this country ever made,” the former San Francisco mayor has called up the National Guard.

County supervisor Matt Dorsey said “the cavalry is coming,” while Supervisor Dean Preston said the move was a “publicity stunt” and “a transparent effort to appease national conservative media by declaring war on a diverse, low-income, urban neighborhood,” thus signaling that San Francisco is more determined than ever to pursue a big government solution that has never worked, and will never work.

Now that Gavin Newsom apparently wants to be president of these disunited states, if we want to identify the actual root causes of homelessness and apply the correct policies to end it, we need to submit ourselves to a power higher than Gavin Newsom.

Reporting from my living room, this is Steven W. Aunan. Thanks for watching.