Bramson: The fiscal blind spot concerning homelessness

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Every year, Sacramento produces another round of homelessness legislation. This year is no different.

Lawmakers have introduced bills to strengthen prevention programs, improve behavioral health services, regulate sober living environments and give local governments additional tools to respond to homelessness.

Some of these proposals are thoughtful. Many deserve support. None are unreasonable.

But after years of working alongside cities and counties trying to reduce homelessness, I’ve come to believe that California keeps asking the wrong question.

We ask whether a bill will improve our response to homelessness. We should be asking whether it changes the economics that are driving homelessness in the first place. Those are very different conversations.

From where I sit, homelessness is no longer just a housing challenge or a social services challenge. It is increasingly a fiscal challenge. Every local government in California is trying to solve the same equation with fewer resources than the problem demands.

Cities and counties are facing mounting financial pressure. Construction costs remain high. Insurance costs continue to climb. Labor is more expensive. Pension obligations continue to grow. Federal funding has become increasingly uncertain. At the same time, communities expect investments in public safety, parks, transportation, libraries, behavioral health and infrastructure.

Homelessness competes for those same dollars. There is no separate budget. That reality rarely finds its way into the legislative debate.

It’s easy to pass a bill creating a new program or expanding an existing one. It is much harder to explain where the long-term funding will come from to operate that program year after year, especially when local governments are already making impossible choices.

Supportive housing illustrates the challenge perfectly. Building it is expensive. Financing it is complicated. Operating it requires permanent funding for property management, case management, behavioral health services, maintenance and security. Even when communities successfully build new housing, they inherit decades of operating costs that cannot be paid with one-time grants.

None of that suggests we shouldn’t make those investments. It simply means we should be honest about what they require.

The same is true across the homelessness response system. Shelters require operating dollars. Outreach teams require operating dollars. Crisis response requires operating dollars. Behavioral health requires operating dollars. Every successful intervention eventually becomes an ongoing commitment that local governments must somehow sustain.

Meanwhile, the economic forces feeding homelessness continue to accelerate.

California simply does not have enough housing. Too many families spend unsustainable portions of their income on rent. One job loss, one medical emergency or one unexpected financial setback can quickly become a housing crisis. As long as those conditions persist, communities will continue welcoming new people into a homelessness response system that is already stretched beyond capacity.

That is why one recent action from Sacramento deserves particular attention.

The Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026 recognizes something that many homelessness bills overlook. Lasting progress requires investments that change the underlying housing market itself. Expanding affordable housing and increasing homeownership opportunities will not produce immediate headlines, but over time those investments reshape the conditions that determine whether families remain housed in the first place.

The bond is not a solution by itself. Housing developments take years to complete, and Californians struggling today need help today. But it reflects something that has too often been missing from our public conversation: long-term thinking.

California has become increasingly skilled at refining programs that respond to homelessness. We have learned a great deal over the past decade about outreach, coordination, interim housing, behavioral health and supportive services. Those lessons matter, and they have improved countless lives.

What we have not matched is an equally ambitious conversation about the long-term investments required to make homelessness less common in the future.

Housing supply. Local government finance. Stable operating revenue. Capital investment. Economic mobility.

These aren’t the subjects that generate the loudest headlines in Sacramento. They are, however, the forces that determine whether the next generation inherits the same crisis we are trying to solve today. Legislation matters. But legislation cannot substitute for economics.

If California wants to make lasting progress on homelessness, we need to spend less time debating individual programs and more time confronting the financial realities that shape them. Until we align public policy with public finance, we will continue expecting local governments to solve a problem whose underlying economics remain fundamentally unchanged.