EDITORIAL: State that limits housing can’t figure out homeless problem

California politicians have given the green light to so many boondoggles, they’re difficult to catalog. A $100 billion train that probably will never be completed, a $3,000 municipal garbage can in San Francisco, pandemic unemployment fraud to the tune of $30 billion … it goes on and on.

And now add the billions in tax money that California officials have spent to alleviate the state’s homeless issue — to virtually no avail.

In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the state would allocate $14 billion — that’s more than the state of Nevada’s entire two-year budget — on programs designed to help the homeless. Yet by most accounts, the money California has already doled out has barely made a dent in a population that now numbers an estimated 161,000 people.

“California pours billions of taxpayer dollars into fighting homelessness each year,” NBC News reported in March, “but has little to show for it.”

Many projects are ensnared in California’s bloated administrative state. San Francisco is failing miserably in an effort to pair homeless residents with unoccupied hotel rooms. Meanwhile, a $1.2 billion L.A. bond measure that is supposed to fund 10,000 housing units is overbudget and way behind schedule.

The fiascoes are perhaps symbolized by the 600-room Cecil Hotel, near Skid Row in Los Angeles. The property became an affordable housing complex last year, with the goal of allowing homeless men and women to obtain vouchers from the city that they could use to pay for rent in the building. Yet the Los Angeles Times reports that two-thirds of the rooms still sit vacant.

Gov. Newsom said last month that he would delay doling out nearly $1 billion to local governments to fight homelessness because he wasn’t certain they had reasonable plans to attack the problem. “At this pace, it would take decades to significantly curb homelessness in California,” Gov. Newsom said in a news release. “Everyone has to do better — cities, counties, and the state included.”

Yet California’s experience has lessons for other jurisdictions, including Southern Nevada. Spending large amounts of other people’s money won’t solve the problem without acknowledging the myriad factors that contribute to homelessness, including mental illness and substance abuse. It is also imperative to eliminate the scores of barriers that governments erect to limit housing construction in the first place. Those barriers drive up housing costs, which exacerbates the problem.

An 2021 audit found California had nine agencies and more than three dozen programs designed to fight homelessness, creating a fragmented approach that hindered efforts at getting people into stable housing. It seems the only ones benefiting from the Golden State homeless problem are the politicians who keep making it worse.