California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton makes ambitious homelessness pledge: ‘every encampment will be cleared’

Background. California has the largest homeless population of any U.S. state, a condition shaped by decades of intersecting housing, mental health, and substance-abuse policy decisions. The deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and 1970s — accelerated in California under Governor Ronald Reagan's 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act — dramatically reduced the number of state psychiatric hospital beds, shifting many people with severe mental illness out of institutional care and, over time, into homelessness. Simultaneously, California's housing market became among the most expensive in the nation, driven by restrictive local zoning, limited construction, and population growth, making affordable housing increasingly scarce for low-income residents.

Federal policy has also shaped the landscape. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) conducts annual point-in-time counts of the homeless population; California has consistently accounted for roughly 28–30% of the national total despite holding about 12% of the U.S. population. The federal government's primary homelessness funding mechanism, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (1987), established the framework of competitive grants to local continuums of care that still governs most federal homelessness spending.

At the state level, California has passed multiple major funding measures. Proposition 63 (2004), the Mental Health Services Act, created a dedicated tax on high incomes to fund community mental health programs. Governor Gavin Newsom's CARE Court program (2022) created a civil court process to compel treatment for people with severe mental illness. The state has also faced repeated legal constraints on encampment enforcement: the Ninth Circuit's 2018 ruling in Martin v. City of Boise held that cities could not criminally penalize people for sleeping outdoors if no adequate shelter was available, a precedent that shaped California municipal policy until the U.S. Supreme Court's 2024 ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which overturned Martin v. Boise and gave local governments broader authority to enforce anti-camping ordinances regardless of shelter availability.

State audits have repeatedly found that California's homelessness spending — spread across dozens of programs and agencies — lacks consistent outcome tracking, a finding that has drawn bipartisan criticism.