Gavin Newsom Faces Backlash for Solution to Homeless Crisis

California Governor Gavin Newsom is facing backlash from mental health advocates over his proposed solution to the state's homelessness crisis.

Newsom is urging voters to pass Proposition 1 on the March 5 ballot. The ballot measure would approve major changes to the state's decades-long Mental Health Services Act, which imposed a tax on millionaires in California to finance mental health services in the state.

While that annual $2 billion to $3 billion had mostly allowed counties to fund programs as they saw fit, the governor wants to change those broad guidelines so that counties spend 60 percent of those funds on housing and programs for homeless people with serious mental illness problems.

However, several mental health advocacy groups have opposed the plan, arguing that it is too costly and that it would reduce local funding for existing services.

"Everyone agrees that we need more resources for housing," Joe Wilson, who runs Hospitality House in San Francisco, told KTLA. "Is this the best way to do it? We don't believe so."

Newsweek reached out to Newsom's office via email for comment.

California accounts for nearly a third of the nation's homeless population. About 181,000 people in the state are homeless with as many as 75,000 people homeless in Los Angeles County alone, according to 2023 counts. A recent survey by UC San Francisco found that roughly two-thirds of homeless people in California suffer from a mental health disorder, but that only 18 percent received treatment.

Newsom, who crafted the measure last year, argues that Proposition 1 would help get the most vulnerable homeless Californians into care and would increase access to mental health services. The governor has raised $10 million to support the ballot measure and has touted the proposition as the final piece of his efforts to build more supportive housing for the state's homeless population.

Critics, however, argue that Proposition 1 would divert large amounts of funding from existing programs that rely on state funding to operate. They warn that the changes proposed by the ballot measure would only provide additional housing and beds at the expense of other programs for homeless people.

"Prop. 1 wipes out what this community has fought for and accomplished over the last 20 years," Clare Cortright, the policy director at Cal Voices, an organization that provides mental health services, wrote in a Monday op-ed for Cal Matters.

Citing an August letter from several California county officials opposing Newsom's reforms, Cortright said, Proposition 1 "will force counties to cut basic mental health services, including outpatient treatment, crisis services and peer support services that maintain stability for high-risk clients and save lives."

Opponents of the ballot measure have also warned that the proposition could add beds to locked psychiatric facilities, which could force people into involuntary treatment and lead to adverse consequences for those individuals.

"My concern is that it means locking people up or cohering them into staying," Shaya French, an organizer with the San Francisco Senior & Disability Action, told ABC7. "Treatment doesn't work if people are not ready for it. If people don't want to get sober they are not going to get sober. It's a really bad experience being having your freedom taken away."

Mark Salazar, executive director of Mental Health Association of San Francisco, also told KTLA that he "vehemently oppose[s]" the measure because "There are studies that show over and over that coercing treatment just doesn't end well for the individual."

Proposition 1 has also faced pushback from fiscal policy organizations, like think tank the Hoover Institution, which cautioned that Newsom's proposal could make the state's debt significantly worse.

"The state needs to significantly increase treatment facilities for those with mental illness and drug addiction. But Proposition 1 is not the way to do it," Lee Ohanian, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote in a Tuesday post.

"The state needs to require that the beneficiaries work toward the goal of becoming responsible for themselves, that building costs for these facilities are substantially reduced, and that local government has input into these decisions," he said. "There is adequate funding within the state's $300 billion budget to deal with these issues. There is no need to push California further into debt."