California Homelessness Spending Reaches $24 Billion With Accountability Mechanisms Absent
State audit finds 41 programmes across 12 agencies with no coordinated outcome measurement and homelessness up 22 percent
Reporting from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The Audit and Its Findings
SACRAMENTO — The California State Auditor’s report on homelessness spending documents that California has allocated approximately $24 billion to homelessness programmes since 2019, across 41 programmes administered by 12 state agencies with varying eligibility requirements, reporting standards, and outcome metrics, and that the homelessness population has increased by approximately 22 percent over the same period. The audit’s central finding is not that the money was stolen — most reached the services it was intended to fund — but that the absence of coordinated outcome measurement makes it impossible to determine which programmes are effective, which are not, and whether the aggregate spending is producing value proportionate to its cost.
The accountability failure is structural: each of the 41 programmes was designed and funded by a different legislative process, with different constituencies and different data collection requirements. No single agency is responsible for measuring whether California is making progress on homelessness overall. The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research coordinates information across agencies but does not have authority to evaluate or redirect programme spending. The result is a $24 billion system that produces outputs without a mechanism to confirm whether those outputs produce the outcome that justified the spending.
The Libertarian Analysis
The libertarian critique of California’s homelessness spending is not that the money was wasted in the moral sense but that the government mechanism for spending it produces exactly the inefficiency that diffuse public spending typically produces: each programme’s administrators have incentives to protect their programme’s budget, generate reports that justify continued funding, and avoid reforms that would require acknowledging inadequate results.
The Cato Institute‘s social spending research argues for outcome-based contracting — paying service providers for verified reductions in homelessness rather than for services delivered — as the mechanism to restore accountability to public spending. The Foundation for Economic Education has published analysis of California’s homelessness spending pattern as a case study in public choice theory, in which the political interests of service providers and programme administrators consistently prevail over the interests of the homeless individuals the spending is meant to serve.
The Supply-Side Dimension
The homelessness audit is a demand-side critique — it addresses how the money is spent on services for people who are already homeless. The equally important supply-side analysis asks why so many people are homeless in California, whose housing market has been generating homelessness for forty years through the same regulatory constraints that the Coastal Commission review and Prop 13 analysis above describe. The $24 billion in homelessness spending is, in significant part, the public cost of California’s housing supply failure: the state pays for emergency services for people who are homeless because it failed to build the housing that would have kept them housed. The libertarian analysis that is most useful here is not the critique of the $24 billion but the critique of the regulatory and tax barriers that made the $24 billion necessary.
The libertarian critique of California’s homelessness spending is most constructive when it identifies specific programme inefficiencies rather than dismissing the spending category wholesale, because the wholesale dismissal ignores the human cost of the alternative: the 340,000 homeless Californians who are not a policy abstraction but people sleeping in their cars, in shelters, in tents on sidewalks, in conditions that affect their health, their safety, and their ability to participate in the economy that the libertarian framework values. The critique of the spending mechanism — 41 programmes, 12 agencies, no coordinated accountability — is correct and useful. The implied conclusion that the solution is less spending rather than better spending is not supported by the evidence from jurisdictions that have achieved significant reductions in homelessness: Houston’s Housing First programme achieved a 63 percent reduction in chronic homelessness through coordinated, outcome-focused spending that is the opposite of California’s fragmented approach, and whose success demonstrates that accountable public spending on homelessness works when it is designed to produce measured outcomes.
The surf community’s political engagement with these issues — regulatory reform, transportation funding, housing access, water rights — is more sophisticated than its public image suggests, because people who spend significant time in natural environments develop a practical understanding of how policy decisions translate into physical conditions. A surfer who has watched a favourite break close due to sewage contamination, a sand bar change due to upstream damming, or a coastal road deteriorate due to underfunding has a concrete stake in the policy decisions that produced those conditions. That concreteness is a political asset: the surf community can speak about the physical consequences of policy failure in terms that are more direct and memorable than the abstractions that most policy debates produce. The challenge is translating that practical knowledge into the specific policy demands and political coalitions that produce reform, which requires exactly the engagement with regulatory details, budget processes, and legislative procedure that the surf community has not traditionally prioritised. The shower is still pending. The road is still deteriorating. The break is still there. The policy is still negotiable.
Further reading at https://www.private-eye.co.uk.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
