Saturday, January 4, 2020

THE REAL ECONOMY - CALIFORNIA HOUSING PRICES WILL COLLAPSE


Migrant enclaves already are at the top of the U.S. lists for bad places to live - 10 of the 50 worst places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of them are famous for their illegal populations. MONICA SHOWALTER




California—not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four Californians is poor. Kerry Jackson

California’s de facto status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California to its golden years. Kerry Jackson

As Breitbart News reported, if chain migration is not ended — as President Donald Trump has demanded — the U.S. electorate will forever be changed, with between seven to eight million new foreign-born individuals being eligible to vote because of chain migration, and overall, an additional 15 million new foreign-born voters.

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskillhas identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.

No Justice for Taxpaying Americans 
By Howie Carr 
But the real double standard kicks in when the undocumented Democrat gets to the courtroom. A taxpaying American can only dream of the kid-gloves treatment these Third World fiends get. 


Illegal aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety for all citizens. Arthur Schaper


The costs of illegal immigration are being carefully hidden by Democrats. MONICA SHOWALTER

The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.  STEVEN BALDWIN


Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. 
CALIFORNIA HAS NEARLY THE HIGEST STATE TAX RATES TO SUPPORT THE MASSIVE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE ON LEGALS’ BACKS
4) California home prices are going to take a huge tumble. Median values will drop by 25 to 50%. The culprit? Stagflation (high inflation and slow growth).

CALIFORNIA HAS NEARLY THE HIGEST STATE TAX RATES TO SUPPORT THE MASSIVE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE ON LEGALS’ BACKS
4) California home prices are going to take a huge tumble. Median values will drop by 25 to 50%. The culprit? Stagflation (high inflation and slow growth).


Prediction: Home values will drop by 25% to 50% in decade ahead
The culprit? Stagflation (high inflation and slow growth).

Mortgage broker Jeff Lazerson predicts California will be especially vulnerable to a regional home price collapse because of the state’s extraordinary price gains as well as high state and local taxes. The median southern California price will be nearly $900,000 before all of this comes crashing down. (Brandon Thibodeaux/The New York Times)

By JEFF LAZERSON | jlazerson@mortgagegrader.com | MortgageGrader.com

PUBLISHED: January 2, 2020 at 11:37 am | UPDATED: January 3, 2020 at 8:34 am

What’s up with mortgage rates? Jeff Lazerson of MortgageGrader.com gives us his take.
Rate news summary
From Freddie Mac’s weekly survey: The 30-year, fixed-rate averaged 3.72%, two basis points lower than last week. The 15-year, fixed-rate averaged 3.16%, three basis points down from last week.
The Mortgage Bankers Association was closed over the holidays and did not report loan application volume.
Bottom line: Assuming a borrower gets the average 30-year fixed rate on a conforming $510,400 loan, last year’s payment was $234 higher than this week’s payment of $2,355.
What I see: Locally, well-qualified borrowers can get the following fixed-rate mortgages with 1 point: A 30-year FHA (up to $442,750 in the Inland Empire, up to $510,400 in Los Angeles and Orange counties) at 2.875%; a 15-year conventional at 3%, a 30-year conventional at 3.375%; a 30-year conventional high-balance ($510,401 to $765,600) at 3.625%; a 30-year jumbo (over $765,600) at 3.625%.
        Key downtown San Jose lot owned by Pacific Bell is bought by veteran developer
Eye catcher loan program of the week: A 30-year conventional fixed-rate refinance mortgage can be had without closing costs at 3.75%. The lender provides you with a rebate that pays for all lender charges, escrow fees, title insurance, recording and notary fees.
What I think: One loyal column reader inquired last week about what the decade ahead holds for California real estate and mortgage matters.
Here it goes:
1) Real estate agents and mortgage brokers will experience a compensation squeeze as much of their need for labor-intensive research will be disintermediated. Blame it on automation — mass scale machine learning in the artificial intelligence age.
Necessity is the mother of invention. California will be ground zero for a new trade association, combining the work and political interests of real estate agents and mortgage brokers named the California Association of Realty and Mortgage Practitioners (or something similar).
2) Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will get some competition with the inception of new government-sponsored enterprises. In order to compete in the mortgage marketplace, these new entrants will offer things like a “build-your-own mortgage.”
For example, the first two years is no payment. Then, interest-only payments for the next five years. The third leg requires the loan to be fully amortized and paid off within seven years.
Or, they’ll implement an idea that Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide fame raised some 20 odd years ago — creating a mortgage line-of-credit that follows you from property to property-never having to apply for a mortgage again.
3) With the skyrocketing cost of electricity, more than 50% of California homes will become self-contained, never to rely on PG&E, SCE or San Diego Gas and Electric again. It won’t be just solar power. Rather, it will be a new generation of home energy.
4) California home prices are going to take

a huge tumble. Median values will drop by 

25 to 50%. The culprit? Stagflation (high 

inflation and slow growth).

The U.S. public debt is about $23 trillion dollars and the political classes keep kicking the can down the road. California will be especially vulnerable to a regional home price collapse because of our extraordinary price gains as well as our high state and local taxes. The median southern California price will be nearly $900,000 before all of this comes crashing down.
5) Roughly one-third of adult children live with their parents. With the desperate lack of affordable housing and the new California granny flat opportunities, the number of California kids who don’t leave their folks’ homes will grow to 45%. And we’ll see 15% of California households as tri-generation households.
6) California mortgage shoppers will land better deals on their mortgages because mortgage-loan originator compensation will be deregulated by the feds.
Dodd-Frank’s mortgage loan originator compensation intent was equal access and equal treatment for all borrowers, regardless of loan size, type of mortgage or credit quality. Too bad it didn’t turn out that way.
Many depository institutions with California branches provide mortgage rate pricing discounts that are incremental to the savings the borrower moves over. Then there are the mortgage brokers.
To my knowledge, more than half of the mortgage brokers have disparate compensation plans that hit consumers in their wallets. For example, broker Billy arranges to get paid 1% of the loan amount if the borrowers’ mortgage is brokered to lender X. When brokering to lender Y, Billy sets compensation at 2% of the loan amount. The game is to send the loan to lender Y when you can get away with making more money. Fair lending enforcement? What enforcement?
Jeff Lazerson at mortgagegrader.com is a mortgage broker and adjunct professor at Saddleback College. He can be reached at 949-334-2424 or jlazerson@mortgagegrader.com.

Pessimism seeping into Bay Area home market for 2020
Slower growth than U.S. market expected

PALO ALTO, CA – SEPTEMBER 12: People walk around a Victorian home during an open house for DeLeon Realty at 1023 Forest Ave in Palo Alto, Calif., on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

By LOUIS HANSEN | lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: January 4, 2020 at 6:00 am | UPDATED: January 4, 2020 at 9:25 am

Housing economists and real estate professionals are pessimistic about the Bay Area in 2020 — but don’t expect a crash to bring saner prices or slower sales.
A survey of more than 100 economists and industry insiders by Zillow found that the majority think Bay Area median home values will rise more slowly than the national average. After years of soaring prices, gains of less than three percent could be the norm in 2020.
“Pessimism is one way to put it,” said Zillow senior economist Cheryl Young, noting that local home prices have been flat or dropping for about 18 months. The nearly decade-long, record-breaking escalation in prices, she said, “really wasn’t sustainable any more.”
The Bay Area saw hints of buyer fatigue in 2019, with falling sales and prices in core Silicon Valley counties. In 2020, the soft market could be influenced up or down by several forces, including low interest and unemployment rates and what’s likely to be a destabilizing presidential election, economists say.
The Zillow survey of economists and real estate professionals found about 6 in 10 expected Bay Area home values to grow slower than the anticipated 2.8 percent national rate. Just 1 in 4 felt more bullish about the region than the U.S. market as a whole.
In fact, the housing economists are sour on 

the state, with low expectations for the 

Sacramento, Los Angeles, Riverside and San

Diego metro areas.

Housing market watchers are bearish on California because high prices have pushed home buying out of reach for many residents, Young said. But low-interest rates and strong employment in the Bay Area stokes demand, and Young sees little chance the market will drop dramatically.
Expectations are high for several spots popular with ex-Californians: Austin and Dallas, Texas, and Phoenix. Also showing signs of strong growth in home values: Charlotte, N.C., Atlanta, and Nashville, Tenn.
In a marked contrast to the Bay Area, Young said, “in the Texas market, we’ve actually seen a good amount of home building in the last few years.”
Frank Nothaft, chief economist at real estate data firm CoreLogic, said the national outlook is good — low-interest rates and unemployment numbers are fueling a strong U.S. economy. The U.S. has not had interest and unemployment rates both slip to current levels — below 4 percent — since World War II, he said.
For the Bay Area, Nothaft also sees slower growth in home prices after years of record-setting sales. A significant slowing in home price growth is “good and important” to make homes affordable to buyers, he said. The San Jose, East Bay and San Francisco markets have seen housing costs far outpace wage growth in recent years.
Steam has been leaking out of the Bay Area housing engine during the last 12 months. Year-over-year prices in the Bay Area grew about 8 percent in October 2018, while they dropped nearly one percent in October 2019, according to CoreLogic. “That’s a big swing,” Nothaft said.
Still, local agents report strong demand, as Silicon Valley continues to add jobs at a fast pace. But buyers are more reluctant to jump into bidding wars and have raised their standards on amenities, locations and school districts.
Median prices in more affordable counties have inched upwards, with Alameda and Contra Costa prices gaining about one percent in November from the previous year.
But sales data show Santa Clara County has been especially hard hit in the last year. After home sales in the county raced up more than 10 percent, year-over-year, through much of 2017 and 2018, buyers have become more cautious, and median sale prices have dropped steadily. In November, the county’s median prices fell nearly 2 percent from the previous year, the 11th straight month of year-over-year declines, according to Zillow.
Ramesh Rao, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Cupertino, said he’s encouraging clients to put their homes on the market in the first few months of 2020. The number of houses for sale in the region has dropped from the previous year, and Rao expects home shoppers to be active in the new year.
“The pent-up demand” Rao said, “has not gone away.”


"The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas."


On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.

California Preening

The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
December 20, 2019
California
Economy, finance, and budgets
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-

feudal kingdom, with 
the nation’s widest 

gap between middle and upper incomes—72 

percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 

percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly 

half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles 

or 
San Francisco, which now has the highest 

property crime rate among major cities. California

hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of 

course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.

This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context.

State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has 

sued the administration numerous times over 

immigration policy while he helps ensure 

California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal 

immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal 

residents have received driver’s licenses, and 

they qualify for free health care, too. 


San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants 
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to 

help them move up. But today’s educators appear more 

interested in political indoctrination than results. Among the 

50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-

income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, 

that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who 

leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, 

rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and 

proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk

about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate 

Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably TexasTennesseeNevadaColorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe NationU.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of UsHis book on the return to feudalism will be released next year.


Report: California ‘Entirely’ Responsible for Nation’s Rise in Homelessness

Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty
20 Dec 20192,076
2:41
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported Friday that the nation’s homeless population rose 2.7% as of January 2019, an increase it said was “entirely” driven by a rise of 16.4% in the state of California.
The Associated Press reported:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is reporting its third consecutive increase in its homelessness projection, based on a summary of its annual report obtained by the Associated Press.
President Trump has been highly critical of the homeless problem in California, and HUD said the increase seen in its January snapshot was caused “entirely” by a 16.4% increase in the state’s homeless population.
“As we look across our nation, we see great progress, but we’re also seeing a continued increase in street homelessness along our West Coast where the cost of housing is extremely high,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said. “In fact, homelessness in California is at a crisis level and needs to be addressed by local and state leaders with crisis-like urgency.”
In the January 2018 count, almost 553,000 people were counted as homeless. That number rose to about 568,000 this year.
The number of homeless veterans, and the number of homeless families with children, dropped.
It is not clear whether the rise in California is wholly California’s fault. Homeless people from other states often relocate to California, partly because the winter weather is more tolerable (though also because of generous welfare benefits).
President Donald Trump has proposed federal intervention in California to help solve the problem. HUD Secretary Ben Carson recently visited the state to assess the problem.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Breitbart News on Thursday evening that the homeless crisis is “an embarrassment, it is unacceptable. And we’ve got to own it, we’ve got to own up and solve it.”
Volume 90%

However, he has pushed back against federal intervention, saying more federal money is needed, but not federal control.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.