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The Chutzpah of Gavin Newsom

The Governor, whose failed leadership has pushed California’s homelessness crisis past the breaking point, resorts to attacking individual cities for their responses.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has been in full tough guy mode this week. Last month, the city council of Norwalk, a working class city of 102,000 that is 91% non-white, voted to extend a moratorium on new homeless shelters and housing, including emergency shelters. Council approved the original, 45-day moratorium on August 6th and on September 23rd voted to extend it through August 2025.

The Council took these actions in part due to experiences during the pandemic, when the city was host to one of the largest Project Roomkey facilities in Los Angeles County. According to locals, the facility was poorly run, leading to a spike in lawlessness and chaos. The moratorium was intended to give city officials breathing room to figure out how to address the crisis going forward.

The Newsom administration wasted no time in threatening legal action.

After the September vote, the Council released a statement responding to Newsom’s threat, in which they explained their action.

“Norwalk has received no Measure H funding, forcing the city to use its own resources to manage the fallout from abandoned state-mandated programs, which puts both residents’ safety and the city’s finances at risk.”

Tough-guy Gav is having none of it. Following through on one of his threats, yesterday he instructed the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) to revoke its approval of (aka “decertify”) the City’s housing element. Housing elements are complex, elaborate documents that guide new development, zoning, and other fundamentals of city planning. They often take years and thousands of hours to produce. With the stroke of his mighty pen, Newsom undid all that work.

Wagging his finger he declared,

“No more excuses — every city, including Norwalk, must do its part and follow state housing laws.”

The most immediate consequence of Newsom’s and HCD’s action is a giveaway to developers in the form of unrestricted, so-called “builder’s remedy” projects, whereby state law allows developers to build bigger buildings in exchange for a small percentage of low income units. In reality, developers routinely take advantage of this benefit and then ignore the affordable unit requirements, knowing there’s virtually no chance they’ll get caught.

They now will be allowed to build large developments virtually anywhere in the city, whether or not those projects are allowed under the city’s own zoning rules. It’s a private sector giveaway, an unholy alliance of state power and unfettered capitalism.

To be clear, Newsom is punishing a working class city while simultaneously rewarding often unscrupulous developers. Ironically — or perhaps perversely — another consequence is that Norwalk will no longer be eligible for certain state funds for homelessness.

Newsom certainly has gall. He’s been in leadership positions in California for a quarter of a century, including eight years as Lieutenant Governor and six and counting as Governor. In that span of time, the state’s homelessness crisis spiraled from an emergency to a historic humanitarian crisis.

Newsom bears as much responsibility as any single figure for the catastrophe.

For example, during the pandemic, he oversaw Project Roomkey and Project Homekey, through which the state awarded more than $3 billion in federal emergency COVID funds to cities and counties to purchase motels, hotels, and apartment buildings and convert them into interim (Roomkey) and permanent (Homekey) homeless housing.

Over the last three months, my partner Jamie Paige, Editor in Chief of the Westside Current, and I exposed the many failures of those programs here in Los Angeles. As of today, at least 2,738 of the total 4,910 units purchased by the City and County of Los Angeles stand empty, including 70% of the County’s. Many have been empty for years.

L.A. has plenty of company. Other outlets have exposed similar situations in Ventura, San Jose, and elsewhere. State oversight is nowhere to be found. Newsom flooded the zone with cash and moved on to his next photo op.

Homekey is just one of myriad failures under Newsom’s stewardship. In April, a scathing independent audit concluded that the state consistently fails to track its own spending, which may be as much as $50,000 per year per homeless person, more than 120% of the state’s individual median income.

In May, Democratic and Republican members of the state legislature grilled Newsom’s top homeless official, Meghan Marshall, who weakly defended the administration by saying their data administration system was undergoing “a transformation.”

Lawmakers rightly told her that sounded like “an excuse.”

Despite these failures, last week Newsom vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have increased accountability over state homelessness spending. In one of his typical word salads, on September 19 the Governor said,

“We’re strengthening and we’re tightening up our efforts around the accountability frame.”

Well then, none of this comes as a surprise. Newsom’s lack of leadership and character have been hallmarks of his political career.

During his tenure as Mayor of San Francisco, as the homelessness crisis in that city began to spiral out of control, he spent time accusing the city’s beloved cable car operators of stealing fares, showing up drunk in a hospital emergency room where a SFPD officer was dying of a gunshot wound, and having an affair with his best friend and campaign manager’s wife. Oh, he also briefly dated a 19-year-old cocktail waitress with whom he was spotted drinking wine at an official city event.

The girl’s name was – you can’t make this stuff up – Brittanie Mountz.

Now, rather than get his own house in order, he’s attacking a minority working class city for trying to wrangle a crisis that is largely of his making. His tough guy routine won’t get anyone housed (or, better yet, bused back to where they came from).

It won’t get any addicts treated. It won’t help any neighborhoods recover from the scourge of violent, illegal encampments. It will, however, pay handsome dividends to unsavory developers who have mastered the art of lining their pockets by exploiting state housing laws Newsom has vehemently supported.

Again, you just can’t make this stuff up.

The good news, such as it is, is that Newsom’s tenure is rapidly drawing to a close. He’ll likely make a quixotic run for the presidency in 2028 or 2032, but he won’t get within shouting distance of the Oval Office except as an occasional visitor (depending on who occupies it, maybe not even that).

Meantime, it will be many years before Californians fully comprehend the full scope of harm Newsom inflicted on the Golden State in his career. His tough guy assault on Norwalk only adds to the shameful litany.

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This article was originally published in "the all aspect report."

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