Pants on Fire: Not Even Politifact Is Buying What Gavin Newsom Is Selling on San Francisco's Homeless Problem

When it comes to addressing serious problems in their own backyards, Democrats typically default to blaming Republicans in an effort to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their own disastrous polices.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is a prime example of this, especially when it comes to issues he has no one to blame for but himself and his fellow left coast Democrats.

Back in June, Newsom told Axios‘s Jim VandeHei in a wide-ranging interview that the dire homeless problem in San Francisco was primarily due to an influx of homeless people coming to the city from … Texas:

Facing what feels like the first real crisis of his new administration — and in the midst of stalled efforts in Sacramento to do something about it — Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken aim at something new when asked about California’s homelessness problem: Texas.

Specifically, Newsom accused the Republican-led state of sending people to San Francisco.

“The vast majority also come in from — and we know this — from Texas. Just interesting fact,” Newsom said in an interview broadcast on Sunday with “Axios on HBO.”

The comment came after interviewer Jim VandeHei asked Newsom why the net size of San Francisco’s homeless population hadn’t changed much during his tenure as the city’s mayor (although a number of people did find shelter during his administration).

The L.A. Times, not exactly a friend to Republicans and Texans, wrote about Newsom’s claims at the time and easily debunked them, noting that it was actually the reverse that was true:

A spokesman first pointed to a 2016 newspaper story that counted the number of homeless people San Francisco officials put on buses to other communities and states. But the article doesn’t cite any inbound deliveries of people. In fact, it reported that Texas was the top out-of-state destination for San Francisco to send away homeless people. As of late Sunday night, there was no additional information provided to back up the governor’s claim.

Newsom conceded in the broadcast that California has an enormous poverty problem. “We’ve got to get our act together,” he said. Nonetheless, he went on to criticize states led by Republicans that he said have an “intentional” policy to ignore those in need.

Nearly two months later, the geniuses at Politifact finally decided to weigh in. And in a genuine shocker of shockers, they rated Newsom’s claims as “Pants on Fire”:

California Gov. @GavinNewsom claimed the "vast majority" of San Francisco’s homeless people come from Texas. That's a ridiculous claim. https://t.co/3igLwthog8 pic.twitter.com/PQXlmQishH

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) August 15, 2019

Politifact isn’t exactly the type of fact checking organization that rushes to defend Republicans or to take Democrats to task, so that they decided to take Newsom to the woodshed is worth mentioning.

They did a detailed analysis of Newsom’s claims, and found them to be sorely lacking. Here’s what they concluded in their ruling:

San Francisco’s own homeless surveys contradict this. They show a large majority reported living in the city before becoming homeless, and just a fraction coming in from out-of-state.

Newsom’s office pointed to data from San Francisco’s bus ticket program for homeless people. But that defense doesn’t hold up. It shows just a small fraction, less than 7 percent, left for Texas, and doesn’t demonstrate that they originally came to San Francisco from that state.

In the end, we found Newsom made a ridiculous claim.

We rated it Pants on Fire.

Just to put an even finer point on how duplicitous, self-serving, and shameless Newsom is on this issue, when asked about comments made by President Trump in early July that the federal government may need to “intercede” in cities with large homeless problems, here’s how Newsom responded:

“If interceding means cutting budgets to support services to get people off the street, (Trump has) been very successful in advancing those provisions,” the governor said. Instead, he argued, the president has been “decreasing the social safety net to address the reasons people are on streets and sidewalks in the first place.”

It’s similar to what he told Axios in June. In other words, Republicans are to blame for this crisis.

It’s baloney. The homeless issues the state of California (and not just in San Francisco but in other big cities like Los Angeles, too) can in large part be laid at the feet of Democrats who have absolutely run the state into the ground, including Newsom.

Newsom was a member of the SF Board of Supervisors from January 8, 1997 to January 8, 2004. He was the Mayor of San Francisco from January 8, 2004 to January 10, 2011. He was the Lt. Gov. from January 10, 2011 to January 7, 2019.

That’s 22 years he alone has had to commit to helping solve the homeless problem that exists in cities like San Francisco and L.A. Him trying to pin the homeless crisis there on Republicans is absurd, and just shows he’d rather conveniently pass the buck rather than take responsibility for his own leadership failures.

(Hat tip: Hot Air’s John Sexton)

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— Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter. –