A cynical observer of California politics might say that Gavin Newsom, early on in his career, shrewdly figured out that Homelessness is the perfect campaign issue: 1. Always a visible problem, will never go away 2. Creates an industry of services that depend on gov spending and will reliably vote for it 3. This industry can absorb any amount of money 4. People will feel bad about spending less on it, if ever proposed This apparatus now consumes several billion dollars a year, produces very unclear results -- it is really not clear to me if any homeless people are being *helped* by any of this spending -- while building a political, emotional, and financially dependent voting bloc that gets larger every year. Is he bad at public policy? Is he good at political gamesmanship? Perhaps both.