Police Can’t House Californians. Cash Can.

Weeks after encouraging officials to forcibly remove unhoused people from the streets, California Governor Gavin Newsom got in on the action himself this month, proudly lending a hand at an encampment sweep to dispose of tents, clothes, and cherished personal belongings.

The stunt was just the latest escalation in Newsom’s war against the unhoused, which has taken on a more aggressive tone following the June U.S. Supreme Court ruling granting jurisdictions broad authority to arrest and punish people simply because they cannot afford shelter.

The setting of Newsom’s expertly captured photo op—staged beneath a Los Angeles underpass—was no coincidence. L.A. County has become a sort of ground zero for the U.S. homelessness crisis. With an annual budget of over $45 billion, it is home to the nation’s largest unhoused population of roughly 75,000 people. An average of over six unhoused people die there each day, more than triple the number from a decade ago. The county’s failure to meaningfully address the problem has sparked controversy and even a searing Human Rights Watch investigation.

With this recent campaign, the governor has endorsed a police-first approach to the crisis. This stance defies a wealth of research showing that housing-first—an approach that voluntarily provides housing to people without programming, treatment, or sobriety requirements—is the most effective intervention for homelessness. It also ignores the fact that L.A. County taxpayers have gotten very little return on the hundreds of millions of dollars they already invest each year in policing, displacing, and incarcerating unhoused residents.

The massive amount of public resources directed toward homelessness—however ineffectively—has helped turn an intractable issue into an industry. As a result, too many efforts now focus on shuffling people around without ever giving them housing or the financial autonomy to live more stable lives.

Evidence supports the opposite approach. The most comprehensive survey of unhoused people in California found that 82 percent of respondents said they could have stayed housed if they had access to a one-time payment of $5,000-$10,000. While this may seem like a significant amount of money, the city of L.A.’s homelessness program, Inside Safe, has spent more than $100,000 per client served—for a total of $341 million—even though less than a third have found permanent housing. So far, 46 of the program’s participants have died. While banishment is politically expedient and profitable for corporate vendors that automate it, we cannot accept the economic, human, and moral costs.

Beyond Banishment: Towards a Housing-First Welfare System

There are various federal programs designed to help people secure housing, but their strict requirements and unrealistic stipulations make them exceedingly difficult to utilize. This gives the impression that these tools “don’t work” to address homelessness, even though they are some of the best possible solutions. 

The Housing Choice Voucher system, also known as Section 8, is the nation’s largest housing assistance program. Recipients pay 30 percent of their income towards rent, while the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) contracts with landlords to cover the rest. Section 8 helps lift 3 million people, including nearly 1 million children, above the poverty line each year. But many more fall through the cracks due to a burdensome administrative structure that disadvantages voucher holders at every step of the process.

On average, families in the Section 8 program spend 2.5 years on a waitlist before accessing a voucher. Once the voucher comes through, Section 8 rules give families as little as 60 days to secure housing in a competitive and deeply unforgiving market.

Prospective Section 8 tenants must find a landlord willing to complete nearly a dozen application forms as they vie for a unit that must remain vacant while the local housing authority evaluates the proposed lease agreement and conducts a physical unit inspection—a process that can take months.

As a result, around 2 in 5 families that receive a Section 8 voucher end up losing it because they cannot secure a lease before it expires. In the city of Los Angeles, more than 8,000 available vouchers went unused last year. If every available housing voucher was used to secure a lease nationwide, we could make a substantial dent in America’s homeless population.

Re-imagining the Housing Bureaucracy

The Fund for Guaranteed Income: Housing Pledge will provide direct cash payments to new Section 8 recipients, helping them bridge the gap between receiving and using a voucher to sign a lease. By giving money directly to renters, landlords are spared from the administrative burden of complex application and inspection processes. This more streamlined approach allows renters to access housing they might otherwise miss out on. After a year at their new apartment, participants will be able to more easily use their traditional Section 8 voucher to subsidize their rent. 

The initiative follows a series of 150 guaranteed income pilots in California and across the country, which have demonstrated the value of direct, recurring income to reduce poverty, increase stability, and improve mental and physical health. 

With the Housing Pledge, a coalition of local and national nonprofits is working with the Long Beach Housing Authority to apply the principles of guaranteed income to re-imagine the housing bureaucracy. The program responds to HUD’s recent call for local housing authorities to explore how direct rental assistance can empower voucher tenants. 

In the face of California’s brutal housing market, it’s inconceivable to think we can rely on policing and enforcement to compel people to find a place to live—and stay there. A minimum wage earner in Los Angeles would have to work 116 hours a week just to cover rent on a 1-bedroom apartment. This is unsustainable. But early results from a guaranteed income pilot in L.A. involving people experiencing homelessness show that direct cash assistance can give people a meaningful leg up. After six months, 30 percent of participants were actually able to move inside safely. Participants found housing at two times the rate of those without income support.

When we see public officials, whether they be police officers or the governor himself, sweeping a homeless encampment, we must ask: How much did this cost? Who pays, and who profits? And what difference could that money have made if it went instead to housing—or, better yet, the people themselves?