Gavin Christopher Newsom is an American politician and businessman serving since 2019 as the 40th governor of California. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the 49th lieutenant governor of California from 2011 to 2019 and the 42nd mayor of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011.
In the United States, the number of homeless people on a given night in January 2023 was more than 650,000 according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Homelessness has increased in recent years, in large part due to an increasingly severe housing shortage and rising home prices in the United States.
Arthur Christ Agnos is an American politician. He served as the 39th mayor of San Francisco, California from 1988 to 1992 and as the Regional Head of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1993 to 2001.
General Assistance is a term used in the United States to denote welfare programs that benefit adults without dependents as opposed to families with children, who receive assistance from the federal program formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and, since 1996, officially known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Supportive housing is a combination of housing and services intended as a cost-effective way to help people live more stable, productive lives, and is an active "community services and funding" stream across the United States. It was developed by different professional academics and US governmental departments that supported housing. Supportive housing is widely believed to work well for those who face the most complex challenges—individuals and families confronted with homelessness and who also have very low incomes and/or serious, persistent issues that may include substance use disorders, mental health, HIV/AIDS, chronic illness, diverse disabilities or other serious challenges to stable housing.
Out of 10,000 female individuals 13 are homeless. Although studies reflect that there are many differences among women suffering homelessness and there is no universal experience, the average homeless woman is 35 years old, has children, is a member of a minority community, and has experienced homelessness more than once in their lifetime.
Housing First is a policy that offers unconditional, permanent housing as quickly as possible to homeless people, and other supportive services afterward. It was first discussed in the 1990s, and in the following decades became government policy in certain locations within the Western world. There is a substantial base of evidence showing that Housing First is both an effective solution to homelessness and a form of cost savings, as it also reduces the use of public services like hospitals, jails, and emergency shelters. Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta.
The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) is a type of United States federal assistance provided by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to states in order to provide a daily subsidized food service for an estimated 3.3 million children and 120,000 elderly or mentally or physically impaired adults in non-residential, day-care settings. It is a branch within the Policy and Program Development Division of the Child nutrition programs, along with the School Programs Branch, which runs the National School Lunch Program. The program is commonly referred to as the Child Care, Child Care Food, Adult Care, or Adult Care Food Program, and is often operating in conjunction with other child and adult day-care programs, such as the Head Start. Its federal identification number, or CFDA number, is 10.558. Section 17 of the National School Lunch Act, and USDA issues the program regulations under 7 CFR part 226.
Homelessness or houselessness – also known as a state of being unhoused or unsheltered – is the condition of lacking stable, safe, and functional housing. The general category includes disparate situations, such as living on the streets, moving between temporary accommodation such as family or friends, living in boarding houses with no security of tenure, and people who leave their domiciles because of civil conflict and are refugees within their country.
The mayoralty of Gavin Newsom began when Democrat Gavin Newsom was elected Mayor of San Francisco in 2003, succeeding Willie Brown. Newsom, who was 36 when he took office, became San Francisco's youngest mayor in over a century.
The United States spends approximately $2.3 trillion on federal and state social programs including cash assistance, health insurance, food assistance, housing subsidies, energy and utilities subsidies, and education and childcare assistance. Similar benefits are sometimes provided by the private sector either through policy mandates or on a voluntary basis. Employer-sponsored health insurance is an example of this.
Conard House is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in the SoMa arts district of San Francisco, working to support adults living with serious mental health and medical conditions. The organization's restated mission is "to empower people who live and work on the margins of society."
Welfare in California consists of federal welfare programs—which are often at least partially administered by state and county agencies—and several independent programs, which are usually administered by counties.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
Homelessness in the United States has occurred to varying degrees across the country. The total number of homeless people in the United States fluctuates and constantly changes hence a comprehensive figure encompassing the entire nation is not issued since counts from independent shelter providers and statistics managed by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development vary greatly. Federal HUD counts hover annually at around 500,000 people. Point-in-time counts are also vague measures of homeless populations and are not a precise and definitive indicator for the total number of cases, which may differ in both directions up or down. The most recent figure for the year 2019 that was given was at 567,715 individuals across the country that have experienced homelessness at a point in time during this period.
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that more than 181,399 people were experiencing homelessness in California in January 2023. This represents more than 27% of the homeless population of the United States even though California has slightly less than 12% of the country's total population, and is one of the highest per capita rates in the nation, with 0.46% of residents being homeless. More than two-thirds of homeless people in California are unsheltered, which is the highest percentage of any state in the United States. 49% of the unsheltered homeless people in the United States live in California: about 123,423 people, which is eight times as many as the state with the second highest total. Even those who are sheltered are so insecurely, with 90% of homeless adults in California reporting that they spent at least one night unsheltered in the past six months.
California state elections in 2018 were held on Tuesday, November 6, 2018, with the primary elections being held on June 5, 2018. Voters elected one member to the United States Senate, 53 members to the United States House of Representatives, all eight state constitutional offices, all four members to the Board of Equalization, 20 members to the California State Senate, and all 80 members to the California State Assembly, among other elected offices.
Philip F. Mangano is the President and CEO of The American Round Table to Abolish Homelessness, and former Executive Director of the White House United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.
Proposition 1, titled Bonds for Mental Health Treatment Facilities, was a California ballot proposition and state bond measure that was voted on in the 2024 primary election on March 5. Passing with just 50.18 percent of the vote, the proposition will provide additional behavioral health services and issue up to $6.38 billion in bonds to fund housing for veterans and homeless individuals. It will also move about $140 million of annual existing tax revenue for mental health care and addiction care to the state from the counties.
