Governor Gavin Newsom told California Cities this week that there were “more apologies” for homeless camps, a message he has often repeated over the years with little success.
Visible signs of homeless people always fuel the sidewalks and the hollows of the Sacramento motorway in Los Angeles, a rooted crisis rooted in a tight and unaffordable housing market which has worsened in January when more than 12,000 houses burned on the ground in the County of Los Angeles.
Newsom, widely considered as a democratic competitor for the 2028 presidential race, seems to harden his position on questions likely to follow him on the campaign track.
His message “no more apologies” included the suggestion that municipalities prohibit camping on public property for More than three nights in a row, one of the many movements perceived In the center that the former mayor of San Francisco recently took.
Wednesday, Newsom unveiled a revised budget that leads to significant reductions in reproductive health services and returns its signature policy to provide free health care to low -income undocumented immigrants.
The declines were intended to help balance the California budget and turn around “Trump collapses,” Newsom told journalists, referring to the economic benefits of the president’s trade war.
When asked if his apparent move to the center is linked to a possible 2028 race, he said: “I have always been a hard -headed pragmatist.”
However, the homeless guidelines that he announced this week did not carry any implementing power. Local leaders can ignore them and continue to pursue their own policies.
But if the situation did not improve before the primaries in 2028, Newsom can be forced to explain to a national public why its state, with the fourth greatest economy in the world, has the largest homeless population in the United States, with around 187,000 people living in the streets, in cars and in the decrepit VR of a given evening.
“It is pure triangulation,” said Democrat Stratege Max Burns, referring to Newsom’s attempt to call on the right and the left. “It is Gavin Newsom who tries to implement this theory that the reason we lost last year was because we were too progressive.”
Newsom call to erase camps and return services for undocumented immigrants And reproductive health care has let many voters wonder where its priorities are.
Carolyn Coleman, CEO of the League of California Cities, said that the housing crisis had deep roots which “will not be resolved without a partnership between the governments of states and local governments”.
“The cities of California are not the obstacle to the reduction and prevention of homelessness,” she said.
Newsom, 57, has tried to fight the homeless crisis since its entry into politics more than two decades. In 2002, as a San Francisco supervisor, he pushed a measure to reduce the budgets of general assistance programs and redirect money to provide more shelters and other services to introduced people.
Quick advance until 2024 when the United States Supreme Court judged that the ban on camps on public goods does not violate the American Constitution. Newsom reacted by telling cities and counties to start getting people out of their streets, but doing so “with compassion”.
He suggested that local leaders establish programs and systems to help housing residents find shelter, mental health services and drug addiction centers.
Some have conformed, others did not do so. In Los Angeles, who has a 45,252-year-old homeless population, the mayor Karen Bass said she would continue to focus on the couple of poorly married people with temporary or transient housing and would not clarify the camps if the shelter was not available.
Several cities, including some from the neighboring Orange County, have suppressed camps and strengthened anti-campaing laws.
Other local leaders, such as the mayor of San Diego, congratulated Newsom for continuing to approach the crisis, but said they had successfully implemented their own policies without its management.
“It is tempting to look at everything that Gavin Newsom does in his presidential aspirations,” said Thad Kousse, professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.
“But this is absolutely in accordance with the direction in which he moved to homelessness throughout his governor, and also adapts to long-term parts of his political career.”
If Newsom confronts the voters in 2028, which coincides with the Los Angeles Olympic Games, it opens up to the attacks on the right and the left, said Burns.
“The problem is that voters don’t know what to believe,” he said. “They have seen him throw as much these values over board that no one can completely tell you what Gavin Newsom represents, and that will be a more important problem for him than anything else.”