Newsom called homelessness California’s calling in 2020. His budget still spends less than 0.5% on it

California’s leaders have repeatedly promised to tackle homelessness. “I know homelessness can be solved,” Gov. Gavin Newsom declared in his 2020 state of the state address. “This is our cause. This is our calling.” But six years later, his state is spending just a small sliver of its budget, less than 0.5%, on helping the state’s estimated 181,934 people who are homeless on any given night by providing them with shelter, rental assistance and supportive housing. That share is essentially the same as in 2020. And yet homelessness is also a big priority for the public. In 2023, for example, 22% of the registered California voters told Quinnipiac University pollsters that it was the most urgent issue facing their state – the biggest share for any challenge. In a 2025 Politico and University of California Berkeley poll, 58% of the state’s voters said state government most needed to improve its performance on homelessness and housing – more than any other policy area. I study what drives homelessness and what reduces it as the director of the University of Southern California’s Homelessness Policy Research Institute. My research team recently analyzed state spending on addressing the needs of homeless people and reducing homelessness to see if state budgets back up that stated political commitment to make the issue a high priority. Same spending levels as 2020 We analyzed California budget documents and legislative analyses, adding up programs specifically targeted at preventing and ending homelessness for every fiscal year from 2020 through 2026. We found that California is spending approximately US$1.5 billion on homelessness programs in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026. This amounts to 0.47% of the state’s $321 billion general fund, the portion of the budget over which state policymakers have the most control. As a share of the general fund, homelessness spending in 2026 is essentially the same as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2020 fiscal year, Cali