Over the past couple of years and as rumors have swirled about whether Joe Biden would be on the 2024 presidential ticket, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been purposely positioning himself as a viable alternative, traveling across the country and world, trolling red state governors (including debating one of them), and just generally doing things one would expect from a candidate for president.

But Newsom hasn't and says he won't declare, deferring to Biden and claiming that he's all in for the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, even though his every move suggests the opposite.

And yet as Newsom continues to prop himself up as the backup plan, touting all his supposed accomplishments in the Golden State, one of California's most enduring issues persists: homelessness. It's a problem Newsom has on occasion acknowledged, although he's laughably blamed Republicans for the situation that has gotten worse over the years under the watch of supposedly solutions-based Democrats like himself in the deep-blue state.

As an embarrassing reminder of that, this month is the 20th anniversary of Newsom's 10-year pledge to end homelessness, something he vowed to do as mayor of San Francisco in 2003:

As Newsom took over following the 2003 San Francisco mayoral election, the then-mayor-elect said that December he intended to "aggressively" make ending homelessness in his city his administration's top priority.

The plan involved a 10-year strategy to end chronic homelessness with "tens of millions" of federal dollars in funding to create 550 "supportive housing" units for the troubled homeless, SFGate reported at the time.

Fast-forward to December of this year and the announcement of that strategy is now two decades old. San Francisco, along with the rest of California, is far from solving the problem.

In fact, the growing homeless population has become a central issue in California's political debate.

So central, in fact, that Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed took a significant amount of heat even from the liberal press in the state during their rush to clean up San Fran's streets and hide the growing homeless population in November ahead of the all-important APEC gathering, where Biden and China's President Xi Jinping held a high stakes meeting.

Newsom even shockingly admitted at the time that the extra effort and expense the city put into sprucing up roadways and sidewalks, something you rarely see unless someone important is visiting, was intentional:

"We're cleaning up this state!" said California Governor Gavin Newsom as he touted Clean California. He spoke during the unveiling of a street tree nursery in San Francisco.

"I know folks are saying, 'Oh they're just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming to town.' That's true because it's true, but it's also true for months and months and months prior to APEC we've been having conversations," said Newsom.

As expected, things are back to normal in San Francisco now that the APEC conference is over, with yet another sobering reminder of how Democrats like Newsom are bad news coming courtesy of new statistics on the state of homelessness in California:

California's homeless population grew by 5.8 percent to 181,399 this year. This increase, reported in the federal government's latest count, comes as the state spends billions on the crisis, including more than $1 billion this year on housing and prevention programs.

Of California's 181,399 homeless, nearly 70 percent sleep outside—marking the highest unsheltered rate of all states, including those with mild climates such as Hawaii, Arizona, and Nevada. In California, more than 123,000 lack shelter on a given night, according to a Friday report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Let's see. Biden's been president for three years now, and Newsom has been governor of California for four, with a state legislature that is overwhelmingly Democratic. One wonders who he'll blame the homeless crisis for next, although he will undoubtedly figure out a way to weave former POTUS Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis into his answer somehow.

As the saying goes, though, facts don't care about your feelings, and in this case, the facts about California's homeless crisis definitely do not care about Gov. Hair Gel's feelings.

Flashback: In the Wake of Gavin Newsom's China Visit, Chinese Media Relentlessly Mock 'Garbage City' San Francisco