Newsom says California homelessness is down. Beware of his numbers | Opinion
Sacramento County, like many communities across the state, hasn’t attempted to physically count the number of homeless people since January 2024, per federal guidelines. Yet on Thursday from Sacramento’s state Capitol, in his farewell State of the State address, Gov. Gavin Newsom wanted us to believe that California homelessness in 2025 was down from the previous year.
Newsom loves and memorizes numbers, perhaps better than any card counter in Las Vegas. As an orator, he would be lost without his numbers. But this time, his limited numbers can’t be added up.
This was simply a presidential candidate trying to apply some statistical lipstick to California’s signature chronic problem. Homelessness, due to Newsom’s own actions in 2025, is likely going to get worse in the future because he is starving the one tool California can bring to the statewide homelessness response – money.
“California, 2025, unsheltered homeless, 9% reduction,” Newsom said Thursday morning in the chambers of the California Asssembly. “First time in almost two decades.”
Yet Newsom appeared to be relying on the relatively modest percentage of California communities that tried to count the homeless last year. A comprehensive, accurate number for 2025 will never exist because communities like Sacramento won’t start searching to quantify the local number of homeless people until later this month.
And the official counting process is so limited – searching for the unhoused on a single day in January – it is a dubious data point at best. Its only value is to compare current bad numbers to previous and equally bad totals.
Never mind, says Newsom. Homelessness is down as the presidential election cycle fast approaches.
A misuse of a bad number
The federal Housing and Urban Development Department has long required local governments to conduct a single-night Point-in-Time count in even-numbered years. It serves a narrow, but important, federal purpose.
Basically, if all local communities throughout the country tally up their homeless counts in this imperfect and imprecise manner, looking for them one day in the middle of winter, the results, hopefully, are uniformly wrong. And that doesn’t matter. This provides an apples-to-apples way for Washington to distribute throughout the nation any available federal funds in an equitable, proportionate manner.
Here in Sacramento, the nonprofit organization that is in charge of this count makes no bones about how this is not a comprehensive count of the homeless, particularly the unsheltered.
“PIT Counts are widely recognized nationwide as an undercount of homelessness,” Lisa Bates, chief executive officer of Sacramento Steps Forward, recently wrote in The Bee. “No single-night survey — especially one conducted outdoors in January — can capture every unhoused person. Volunteers can only count those they see.”
California also uses this number to distribute available state homeless dollars to local governments. The foundational state program to help fund local homeless shelters is known as the Homeless, Housing and Assistance Prevention Program.
What Newsom and Trump have in common
In Thursday’s address, Newsom left out how he and the California Legislature dropped the additional funding for this program from $1 billion to zero in the 2025-26 fiscal budget, with plans to reinstate half the funding next year. It’s as if he has given cities like Sacramento everything they need to have solved the homeless problem by now.
“So I say this with love and respect to the counties, no more excuses,” Newsom said. “It’s time to bring people off the streets and out of encampments and into housing and treatment.”
Newsom shares his increasing stinginess in providing annual state dollars for homeless relief with his favorite nemesis, President Donald Trump. The federal administration is threatening to curtail funding for permanent supportive housing for some of the nation’s most vulnerable residents who have crawled out of homelessness.
Both Newsom and Trump may make this problem worse. We can only guess which one Newsom will blame when he hits the presidential primary campaign trail. Thursday, he portrayed a California whose problems are fading into our sunset, with numbers to back it up.
Here’s one last homeless number: In Sacramento County, this same nonprofit, Sacramento Steps Forward maintains a database of every known homeless person known to exist and seeking services. Its imperfect as well, for homeless come and go. But it was up 50% from June 2025 to September, according to The Bee’s Theresa Clift.
Curious whether homelessness is up or down in California? We’ll have another bad set of numbers some time next year. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t listen to Newsom. The best guess is achieved by simply opening your eyes.
This story was originally published January 8, 2026 at 11:52 AM with the headline "Newsom says California homelessness is down. Beware of his numbers | Opinion."