Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom are sympatico on the homeless problem: the government owes street people safe dwellings.
In order to achieve that, California has spent approximately 30 billion dollars over the past five years to house people. It has not worked. Around 200,000 individuals remain on the streets, almost all of them substance abusers or mentally ill, often both.
While in San Francisco over Super Bowl weekend, I found out exactly what’s going on by talking to the addicts themselves. Often, state housing is too dangerous for destitute folks to even consider. There is no drug testing to get a place, little security in the buildings, and that allows violent pushers to run the facilities.
A California audit reached this conclusion: there is no reliable data to track expenditures on free housing.
Politicians almost always exaggerate reality, especially when policies fail. Governor Newsom says homelessness in California is down 9 percent. But how would he know? The situation is chaotic. People go where the drugs are. And there is no shortage of narcotics on the streets of San Francisco, I can tell you that.
30 billion dollars is a colossal amount of taxpayer money. Most of that has been stolen or wasted because of a lack of state supervision. You can howl at the moon all night about homelessness. But nothing good will happen if there’s no accountability.
See you this evening for the No Spin News.
