Newsom Scrambles to Clear Homeless Encampments After Years of Failure

After years of ignoring the spiraling homelessness crisis, California Governor Gavin Newsom is now frantically trying to rewrite the narrative with a new multibillion-dollar initiative aimed at clearing the tent cities that have overtaken the Golden State.

On Monday, Newsom unveiled a so-called “model ordinance” urging cities and counties to “immediately address dangerous and unhealthy encampments” while promising $3.3 billion in voter-approved funding to back it up. But this sudden urgency feels more like political survival than sincere reform.

“There’s nothing compassionate about letting people die on the streets,” Newsom declared, as if he hadn’t spent years enabling exactly that.

The announcement comes after the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which gave local governments the legal green light to enforce commonsense bans on public camping, finally knocking down the absurd judicial blockades Newsom once defended.

Now, conveniently, he’s “encouraging” local leaders to use the same authority he once tiptoed around. And why? Because California voters are fed up and Newsom knows it.

Let’s break it down:

• The new residency clearing push is backed by $3.3 billion from Prop 1, aimed at expanding mental health treatment beds and outpatient services.

• The state claims it has cleared over 16,000 encampments since 2021, yet California remains home to nearly a third of the nation’s homeless population.

• Despite these so-called "wins," homelessness in the state increased again last year, albeit slightly less than in other blue states.

While Newsom talks tough now, he was nowhere to be found when crime-ridden encampments overtook once-pristine neighborhoods, turning parks and sidewalks into drug dens and open-air mental institutions. He even sued local governments like Norwalk for attempting to ban homeless shelters in residential areas a move he’s now pretending to support.

Here’s the truth this is too little, too late. Californians don’t need another press release. They need action and they’ve been demanding it for years while Sacramento catered to activists, decriminalized vagrancy, and threw billions into black-hole “housing-first” programs with no accountability.

And while the plan promotes “respectful treatment” and local flexibility, it fails to answer the obvious: Will there be real enforcement? Will cities finally have the power to remove violent squatters and drug dealers from public spaces or just shuffle them around with state-sanctioned lip service?

Newsom’s office insists this is a “generational investment,” boasting plans for:

• 6,800 new residential treatment beds

• 26,700 outpatient behavioral health slots

• Up to $2 billion in permanent supportive housing for veterans and those battling addiction or mental illness

It all sounds great on paper. But after years of watching California’s homelessness epidemic grow worse despite repeated billion-dollar “solutions,” residents have every right to be skeptical.

This isn’t leadership. This is political damage control in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling Newsom once opposed, followed by years of failed progressive policies that enabled chaos on the streets.

California didn’t get here overnight, and it won't be fixed with another taxpayer-funded PR campaign. If Newsom really wants to clean up this mess, he should start by owning the failure not pretending it just began.

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