Gavin Newsom wants to build housing and be president. Here's the problem

The California governor's latest push to produce homes and crack down on homeless people points to a broader difficulty for the Democratic Party.

California’s governor and perpetual presidential aspirant, Gavin Newsom, recently made news by urging the state’s local officials to cruelly and pointlessly roust homeless people from their makeshift camps across one of the nation’s most homeless states. Except that it wasn’t exactly news, because blaming homeless people and cities and counties for his shortcomings have been relentless refrains of Newsom’s more than six years in office.

For a governor seeking the presidency, a grinding housing and homelessness crisis that remains relatively unscathed by his two terms in power could be politely characterized as a political problem. So Newsom is at pains to (1) seem to be doing something about it and (2) not so subtly suggest that it’s not his fault.

This reveals plenty not only about Newsom’s questionable presidential prospects but also about those of his party — on which nothing less than our future as a democratic republic may depend, provided we might still have one. If the Democrats are committed to being the only major party that still takes policy and reality somewhat seriously, winning over a semi-permanently grumpy electorate means credibly offering to improve voters’ lives. And for a Democratic presidential candidate, particularly one who has run a whole state for a substantial period, the best way to make such a promise believable is to be able to point to having already done so.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

I’m old enough to remember when Newsom sailed into the state’s highest office in 2019, propelled by a certain California charisma (if you’re into that kind of thing), a glaring lack of credible Republican opposition, and a penchant for catching on to liberal consensus causes (marriage equality, marijuana legalization) just before they emerge as such. Back then, Newsom seemed to be further ahead of general intraparty agreement than usual on the subject of housing, which was already the state’s most pressing challenge. He vowed to preside over the production of 3.5 million housing units by, well, now — an “audacious” but “achievable” goal, he said at the time — which would have closed one of the nation’s worst housing deficits, addressed the chief cause rather than the plainest symptoms of homelessness, and required the governor to overcome very powerful (and very annoying) anti-development forces within the Democratic political base.

But as it turned out, according to the latest available government data, the state produced fewer than 500,000 homes over the ensuing five years — not quite what it would have had to build every year to meet Newsom’s target.

Not that the governor didn’t see this coming: While running for reelection in 2022, he asserted that his pledge had “always” been a “stretch goal” — by which I think he meant horse hockey — and gave himself another five years to come up with a million fewer units, promising plans for 2.5 million homes by 2030. At the current rate, though, even that looks like a, uh, stretch.

No matter: Around the same time as Newsom’s latest renewal of his vow to eliminate the all too visible evidence of the state’s homelessness crisis, he also reiterated his promise to get housing built. And this time he meant it!

“It’s time to get serious about this issue, period, full stop,” he said, pulling up just one punctuation mark short of an ellipsis. He thereupon re-upped his revised construction target and proclaimed himself on board with proposals by two of the Legislature’s staunchest housing advocates to free urban and suburban development from the much-misused California Environmental Quality Act and other legal and regulatory impediments.

This is a great idea, but given that some seven years and three-quarters of the governor’s maximum tenure have elapsed since he first articulated much the same goal, the timing is, from one perspective, awkward. On the other hand, considering that Newsom is a year and a half away from being a full-time presidential contender, the timing could be, in the governor’s view, ideal. It could also help that more of his party is coalescing around a pro-abundance message that favors putting roofs over more people’s heads — although, as the ensuing backlash and recent California history show, that goal remains remarkably controversial in a party that generally claims to care about basic human needs such as shelter.

Photo by Nebular on Unsplash

In any case, I can’t help wondering what would have happened, all those years and failed housing bills ago, if instead of mitigating political risks by seeming to be addressing a problem, Newsom had taken political risks to actually solve a problem. Maybe Larry Elder or one of the state’s other ridiculous recent Republican standard-bearers would have harnessed the resentment of not-in-my-backyard-ers, self-interested trade unionists and ecoterrorists to oust the governor, but I think he would have weathered any such storm and come out with a much better case for higher office.

Moreover, it would behoove any other national Democratic contender to have tackled a serious problem, like the housing shortage, that is causing so much hardship, misery and squalor for so many Americans in California and, increasingly, beyond.

To be clear, if I ever have to choose between Newsom and Donald Trump Jr. or JD Vance or whichever other unthinkable alternative slinks out of the Republican Party for the (God willing) next election, I won’t have to wrestle with the decision. But I would vote for Newsom less because I expect him to get a lot more done than because I expect he would do relatively little damage.

Make America not so bad again? I couldn’t be more in favor of that. As a political slogan, however, it’s not great.