Homeless numbers drop

California’s homeless numbers drop in boost for Gavin Newsom

The governor on Thursday will tout this sign of progress on an issue that has long bedeviled California politicians.

By Jeremy B. White

Gavin Newsom will use his annual address Thursday to tout a dip in the state’s homeless population — for the first time since before Newsom took office in 2019 — as evidence that California is making progress on one of its most intractable problems.

The number of people estimated to be sleeping on California’s streets declined by nine percent between 2024 and 2025, according to the Newsom administration. The administration did not offer an estimate of the overall homelessness count, of which the unsheltered population is part.

Both the state’s overall homeless population and its ranks of unsheltered people had risen steadily throughout the governor’s tenure even as he overhauled California’s behavioral health laws, made it easier to compel people into treatment, and pushed local governments to do more to build shelter and move people off of sidewalks.

Still, the latest release marks a bright spot for Newsom on an issue where he had previously struggled to make concrete headway despite years of effort and billions of dollars spent on treatment, dwellings, and encampment clearing.

The numbers released are not from an annual snapshot from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The federal government mandates local estimates of homeless people, taken on a single night early in the year — a “point-in-time” count — and then compiles and releases the data, but it has not done so yet for 2025.

That lack of movement over the governor’s almost two terms could be a real liability for Newsom if he runs for president in 2028. California voters consistently tell pollsters homelessness is one of the paramount issues facing the state — though those numbers have softened recently — and images of people living in urban squalor offer a powerful symbolic rebuke to California’s overwhelmingly Democratic governance.

Newsom has said often that voters are right to be frustrated with their leaders, himself included, for a lack of progress. But he has also trumpeted the work his administration has done and contrasted it with what he calls a lack of engagement from previous governors — increasing the onus for him to produce demonstrable gains.

“This is a disgrace, what’s happening in California for decades and decades,” Newsom said in a recent interview with the San Francisco Standard, but “we are seeing significant declines in some of the big cities in terms of encampments. We’re seeing declines in overall homelessness.”

His administration has emphasized its work clearing thousands of encampments off of state land and prodded cities and counties to move people off the street more aggressively, particularly after the Supreme Court made it easier to do so — a ruling that Newsom had sought.

Newsom will double down on that message during his speech later Thursday morning, according to previewed remarks.

“No more excuses — it’s time to bring people off the streets, out of encampments, into housing, into treatment,” Newsom plans to say.

Democratic officials across the state have had to contend with pervasive homelessness. In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass made moving people from street encampments into housing her top priority when she took office three years ago. Street homelessness in Los Angeles and throughout the county has dropped in each of the last two years.

But California’s overall numbers did not trend downwards until this year, although last year its homeless population increased at a smaller rate than those in other states and the nation as a whole.