Opinion | Gavin Newsom’s failure to address homelessness would haunt a 2024 bid

Or at least Sununu thinks it’s a 50-50 proposition, saying there’s a “25 percent chance it’s a health reason and he bows out,” and a 25 percent chance that Biden eventually drops out under a challenge from Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who seems to be itching to get into the race, despite public declarations to the contrary.

The challenge could very well be launched in New Hampshire, Sununu said, where state Democrats intend to defy the national party and still hold their traditional first-in-the-nation primary.

Sununu said: “Gavin just says, ‘The heck with you, I’m coming to New Hampshire, because Biden’s not going to be here. I’m going to get on the ground. I’m going to be a viable candidate on day one. I’m going to charge, and 75 percent of America doesn’t want Biden to run again. Most Democrats don’t want Biden to run again.’ So the door is just too big and too wide open.”

Assume Sununu is right, and Newsom jumps into the 2024 race, and even lands the nomination. How would he fare in the general election? It is hard to see how he would present a better case than any other Democrat, because on the four domestic issue-drivers of this coming election — the open border, skyrocketing crime, the decline in public education and soaring homelessness — Newsom has failed to deliver anything remotely resembling a solution to his state’s woes.

It is arguable that Newsom can duck responsibility for the first three on that list, blaming failure at the local and federal levels. But on the fourth, homelessness, he owns the bad-and-getting-worse news out of California. Because he took the lead. Yet failed to lead.

“Since 2020, California’s overall homeless population has increased about 6%, compared to just 0.4% in the rest of the country,” reports the Public Policy Institute of California. Homelessness refers to anyone without a fixed, physical address, who might live in an emergency shelter or transitory housing, or is “unsheltered,” living in places not meant for habitation — on sidewalks, in cars or parks. The PPIC report, based on federal data, found that more than 115,000 people in California in 2022 were unsheltered — that accounts for half of all the unsheltered people in the entire country.

Los Angeles, city and county, is the epicenter of the state’s tragedy. U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter has been presiding over long-running litigation attempting to force all parties in the proceeding toward something resembling progress.

It isn’t working. The scale of Los Angeles’s disaster is hard to fathom. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s 2022 count found nearly 42,000 unsheltered people in the city, up 1.7 percent from 2020. Los Angeles County had more than 69,000 homeless people, an increase of 4.1 percent in two years.

Carter, who served in the Marine Corps, is a tough, no-nonsense judge. Ever since a federal lawsuit was filed in 2020 by a group of residents and business owners trying to force Los Angeles city and county to address the homelessness crisis, Carter had been trying to wrestle myriad alphabet agencies and billions of budget dollars into something like a serious plan of action.

Two years ago, after Carter tried to take control of the entire mess of bureaucratic meltdowns and vast waste of money amid an ocean of suffering, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the effort as exceeding Carter’s authority. So the litigation continued, and the city and county proposed a settlement last week.

Newsom and his team were not in the courtroom and have stayed far away from settlement talks, even to mediate. This, despite the Golden State’s leader announcing in March that “we are using every tool in our toolbox” to tackle homelessness.

Carter rejected the proposed deal for many reasons, beginning with the defendants’ refusal to provide the court with authority to monitor their attempts to address the disaster. “You give me absolutely no oversight and no enforcement,” Carter said. And he was just warming up, ticking off the ways the offer fell short. “We keep doing the kind of bare minimum along the way,” Carter said, adding dryly: “And then we have a press conference.”

Newsom, too, likes holding news conferences about addressing the homeless crisis. That’s less heavy lifting than trying to help the litigation along toward a workable settlement or even trying to force the city and county to settle. The governor isn’t a party to the suit, but he does have vast emergency powers, which are also in that proverbial toolbox, dusty and unused.

Newsom could easily call Carter and ask to help make a deal among the city, the county, the plaintiffs and other involved parties. Newsom could, in short, help Carter lead Los Angeles to the start of the beginning of a solution and not stay on the sidelines.

If Newsom jumps into the Democratic primaries, he will be hammered with questions like this: How can you have the temerity to offer yourself as a solution for this country when you failed abjectly to address an unprecedented and avoidable disaster in your own state?

Everyone in California would look forward to his answer.