Billions spent, no accountability

Addressing homelessness has obviously been California’s biggest challenge, and now the results of a state audit show that we have no way to track the effectiveness of a massive amount of money spent fighting the issue.

The results of this audit were released Tuesday, and apparently no one can tell how programs in Los Angeles, San Diego or San Jose are performing, because no money was set aside to track the results of any of the spending on three of the five programs the audit was analyzing.

In a year when California is staring down a budget deficit, some politicians want to stop spending until some bills are drafted aimed at enforcing rules around data collection. (This is a terrible idea, when the number of unhoused people in the state has increased from 150,000 to 180,000, with two-thirds of those people living on the street.)

LA’s mayor ran on accountability for the homelessness crisis, against a guy who wanted to build camps to intern the unhoused.

Pressure to further criminalize homelessness will only increase if we can’t gauge any results and determine whether current policies are having an effect or not.

There are those who love to portray California as a liberal hellscape, and throwing money at this problem without tracking any progress leaves us open to the possibility of leadership coming in and implementing extreme measures to move people off the street to a place where they are out of sight, and out of mind of the general public. This does not bode well for the people we serve every week.

Bug your councilperson. Call the mayor’s office. We need transparency and accountability now.