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      Are Trump’s Followers Too Gullible?

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      More from our inbox:The Illogic of the Big LieSalary Negotiations for WomenThe Costs of Homelessness for Society  Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“An Assault on the Truth,” by Rebecca Solnit (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Jan. 9), masks the political reality our country faces. I object to Ms. Solnit’s focus on gullibility as a factor in the right’s disavowal of facts.Donald Trump does not change people’s minds. The beliefs of people on the right are immutable. They are the opposite of gullible.Mr. Trump and others simply create convenient tales readily acceptable to an existing psyche. It’s easy enough to do. Focus on white privilege and the demonization of “others,” and espouse individual rights to the exclusion of all else. You will then have a very serviceable electorate at the ready to hand you power.Any thought that the right’s psyche is in any way malleable needs to be abandoned. Outvoting the right is the only way forward to preserve democracy — and, of course, that may not be enough.Ned GardnerApex, N.C.To the Editor:Rebecca Solnit does not discuss the role of the media in spreading lies among Republicans. There is Fox News, which has become a propaganda front for Donald Trump, before, during and since his presidency. And there is the plethora of right-wing internet sites, whose most outrageous lies are often repeated and brought into the mainstream of political opinion by Republican office holders.The stream of misinformation is pervasive. Democrats have participated in this, too, even if not to the extent that Republicans have. It takes motivation and effort to sort fact from fiction, and for many people that is too hard.Michael E. MahlerLos AngelesTo the Editor:As a clinical therapist who worked in addiction treatment facilities, I was reminded each day of the basic human need for approval and acceptance. We all seek to feel a part of our community, our family and our country. This promotes interdependence and solidarity, and generally strengthens our social bonds.The need for approval, however, can be so great (even desperate) that we surrender ourselves to the group in exchange for the validation it offers. The group embrace is very reassuring — particularly if one’s self-image is a little shaky — and eliminates the need for the thought and self-reflection that take time and effort, and insist that, sometimes, we stand alone in our ideals and beliefs.An integral part of the addictive personality, the need for approval further explains the gullibility and cynicism that Rebecca Solnit describes so accurately.Gary GolioBriarcliff Manor, N.Y.To the Editor:I thought this was an excellent opinion piece, along with other similar pieces you have published. At this point, however, the point has been more than adequately made. The logical next question: What do we do about it? I for one would welcome some commentary on that issue.I am myself completely flummoxed. How do you reason with, and reach out to, someone who believes only what they want to believe, no matter how cuckoo?Douglas ReevesRaleigh, N.C.The Illogic of the Big LieTo the Editor:The gaping hole in Big Lie logic is this: If Democrats were sufficiently corrupt and crafty to throw the election to Joe Biden, why didn’t they “steal” four or five additional Senate seats? Or House seats? Were they too dumb to see that there were other boxes to check below the one for president?The answer, plainly, is that they didn’t because there was no fraud, there was no organized conspiracy. (To true believers: Where are the incriminating emails or evidence of phone calls between corrupt parties?)Republicans, long the party of personal responsibility, have turned into petulant sore losers.Michael H. HodgesAnn Arbor, Mich.Salary Negotiations for WomenJordan Sale’s company aims to help job candidates navigate salary negotiations.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “What Do You Think You Should Be Paid?” (Sunday Business, Jan. 2):Massachusetts was the first state to prohibit prospective employers from asking about applicants’ compensation history before making a job offer. In response, we began asking possible employees about compensation expectations. We were initially surprised that this created new problems.Some women voiced lower expectations than men for the same job. Others proposed salaries lower than average market value and awkwardly tried to revise them later. But declining to engage in salary discussions is also not an optimal strategy, as prospective employers want to make offers that are likely to be accepted and match relatively closely to expectations.First, be prepared for this question. If you are caught by surprise, there are several options: Applicants can ask the salary range of the position, defer until they have completed their research or cite the market percentile they are aiming for.For equal pay legislation to have the desired effect, education and resources are also required to help women learn how to expect and deftly handle these salary conversations.Alexa B. KimballBostonThe writer is president and chief executive of Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School.The Costs of Homelessness for SocietyLori Teresa Yearwood’s journey into homelessness was traumatic and incredibly expensive.Niki Chan Wylie for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000,” by Lori Teresa Yearwood (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Jan. 2):Yes, homelessness causes profound problems for homeless people with regard to trauma, debt, mental health and so much more. But the costs are not limited to the homeless. Society pays a huge amount for homelessness.According to the Innovation for Justice Program at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, the cost of homelessness to Pima County (where Tucson is located) in 2018 was $64,740,105 for 9,984 families evicted that year. The costs of homelessness include increased child welfare cases, medical and emergency room visits, shelter fees, involvement in the juvenile and adult criminal justice system, mental health crises and more.Clearly, assisting the homeless with housing, work and clearing debt so that they can be productive and happier members of society is far cheaper. It is time for all of us to work toward ending this scourge.Nancy Fahey SmithTucson, Ariz.The writer works on social justice issues for Pima County Interfaith, a nonprofit. More

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      Candidates Spar Over Homelessness in N.Y.C.

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      Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, Times Video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world.Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, Times Video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world. More

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      No, California Isn’t Doomed

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      California has been struggling. It has stumbled through the Covid-19 pandemic and recession, afflicted by wildfires, an epidemic of homelessness and stratospheric housing prices. Last year it experienced its first population decline in records going back to 1900. Its latest mess was a costly and unsuccessful campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.The state’s problems are real. Nevertheless, there are positive signs. The first step toward fixing problems is recognizing them, and on that score, Californians have grown increasingly aware of what’s wrong. California is also blessed with abundant resources that enable it to fix problems that would be daunting for less endowed states.Housing is a good example. Prices are crazy: On Sept. 16, the California Association of Realtors announced that the median sale price in the state in August was $827,940, up 17 percent from a year earlier. Only 23 percent of California households could afford to buy a median-priced home in the second quarter, down from one-third a year earlier, the association announced in August.To make ends meet, many Californians scrimp and save and commute long distances from exurbs; others give up and move to cheaper states. Employers struggle to lure out-of-state recruits. Homeowners can swap one high-priced house for another, but renters can’t buy starter homes because they have no housing equity to use for a down payment. And California’s epidemic of homelessness can be traced in part to a lack of affordable housing.The upside is that almost everyone in California understands that building more housing is essential. More homes are being built in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin combined than in the entire state of California, says Dan Dunmoyer, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Association.One of Newsom’s first acts after surviving the recall attempt was to sign three bills to increase housing supply. Senate Bill No. 8 extends a 2019 law that accelerates approval of housing projects. Senate Bill No. 9 allows homeowners to build up to three additional housing units on their land. And Senate Bill No. 10 allows environmental review to be sped up for multiunit projects near transit hubs or in urban developments. Those are the latest of dozens of housing bills signed by Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown.The California Environmental Quality Act, signed into law in 1970 by Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor, is valuable on the whole but enables people to use environmental pretexts to resist housing developments in their neighborhoods that they could not as easily oppose otherwise. There’s widespread agreement that this needs to change.Progress, though, is halting. The pace of issuance of permits for housing construction in California is slower now than in 1975, according to data compiled by the state’s Department of Finance and the U.S. Census Bureau. Environmentalists fight efforts to circumscribe the environmental quality act, worrying that legitimate environmental concerns about new projects will be neglected. And local elected officials continue to push back against efforts to increase density, which they perceive as reducing the value of existing homes. In Palo Alto, the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard and Tesla, Mayor Tom DuBois expressed opposition to Senate Bill No. 10, writing that “such legislation echoes more of Russia than of California.”Up against such forces, Dunmoyer, the president of the building industry association, told me that he’s impressed by the “courage” shown by Newsom and the California State Legislature in enacting senate bills 8, 9 and 10. But, he added, “This is a marathon, and we’re still in the first quarter of the marathon race.”Other problems in California should be fixable with effort and good will. As I wrote in my Sept. 8 newsletter, the state’s water shortages could be alleviated by diverting a little water from agriculture to other purposes. Farms account for only 0.8 percent of the state’s gross domestic product but more than 80 percent of the water used by people (that is, not counting water that stays in streams, deltas and so on).Homelessness is caused partly by a lack of housing, but also by inadequate treatment of people experiencing mental illness and drug addiction. Many conservatives argue that the state has focused too much on low-income housing as the solution to homelessness. “Focus on treatment first rather than housing first,” says Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in business and economics at the right-of-center Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. “Otherwise all we’re doing is taking the problem from the street to the hotel room.”Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-of-center California Budget and Policy Center, disagrees with Winegarden, and calls for more spending on Homekey, the state’s program for housing the homeless. Social services should be “wrapped around,” or integrated with, a home, Hoene says. It’s unfortunate, he says, that “people on different sides of strategies pit the potential solutions against each other.”One advantage that California has in dealing with these and other challenges — fixing K-12 education, lowering the tax burden on families and businesses and so on — is that the state’s finances have improved. The state raised taxes and trimmed spending to brace for the Covid-19 recession, but tax revenues came in unexpectedly high because higher-income workers kept working and the financial markets did well, generating taxable capital gains. The $100 billion California Comeback Plan, which Newsom signed in July, is a Christmas tree of Democratic priorities, including stimulus checks for two out of every three Californians, renter assistance, housing for the homeless, tax relief and grants to small businesses, universal pre-K, college savings accounts for low-income students and investments in infrastructure and wildfire resilience.I bounced this optimistic line of thought off Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who is an expert on cities. He was more pessimistic. “The way our economy is structured, there’s an incredible amount of wealth being minted for a small number of people,” he said. “We have the worst overcrowding. The schools are terrible and they’re going to get worse.” He added, “Used to be a young, ambitious person went to California. I don’t think that’s happening anymore.”It’s hard to argue with a veteran observer of California like Kotkin, who began writing about Silicon Valley in 1975. On the other hand, the bearishness can be overdone. Matthew A. Winkler, editor in chief emeritus of Bloomberg News, observed earlier this year that people love to declare California “doomed.” It ain’t.The readers writeHow you describe a bill depends upon what you are talking about. If you are concerned about too much fiscal stimulus, then taking note of the tax increases and spending cuts makes sense. If you are concerned with the size of government, taking note of spending cuts makes sense, but it does not make sense to reduce the size of the bill by the amount of the tax increases. Same way with a Republican tax cut. If they cut taxes by $1.5 trillion and fully offset it with $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, that is a $1.5 trillion tax cut and that is how it should be described. Only offsetting tax increases should be taken into account.Paul PecorinoTuscaloosa, Ala.The writer is a professor of economics at the University of Alabama.Quote of the day“According to Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability, the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” (2004)Have feedback? Send a note to coy-newsletter@nytimes.com. More

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      Turn Empty N.Y.C. Hotels Into Permanent Housing for Homeless, Adams Says

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      Hotels in New York City that have been left empty by the pandemic would be converted into “supportive housing” that provides a wide range of assistance to people struggling with mental illness or substance abuse and to people leaving the prison system, under a plan proposed on Monday by Eric Adams, who is likely to be the city’s next mayor.More than 20 percent of the city’s hotels are now closed, a trade association says. At the same time, the city faces a homelessness crisis, growing sentiment against warehousing homeless people in barrackslike shelters and a lot of severely mentally ill people living in the streets.“The combination of Covid-19, the economic downturn and the problems we’re having with housing is presenting us with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mr. Adams, who won the Democratic primary for mayor in June, said as he stood outside a boarded-up hotel in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “Use these hotels not to be an eyesore, but a place where people can lay their eyes on good, affordable, quality housing.”Details of the plan were thin. Mr. Adams mentioned the possibility of 25,000 converted hotel rooms, but he said that he would focus on boroughs outside Manhattan, where the number of rooms in closed hotels is much smaller than that.He was not clear about whether there was any overlap between his plan and those that the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the former governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, have already launched to build 25,000 supportive housing units in the city by about 2030. A spokesman for Mr. Adams’s campaign said that Mr. Adams was also considering converting rooms in former hotels that have already become homeless shelters into permanent supportive-housing apartments, something that Mr. de Blasio has also discussed.The nexus of hotels and homelessness has been a contested one during the pandemic. Early in the lockdown imposed to stem the spread of the coronavirus, thousands of people who had been living in dorm-style shelters were moved to hotel rooms, mostly in Manhattan where their presence led to complaints from some residents about harassment and sometimes violence. The city has since moved most of those people back to group shelters.Several advocates for homeless people and for supportive housing endorsed Mr. Adams’s plan and stood with him at the news conference. “Adams can be the mayor who uses this inflection moment to change the trajectory on homelessness,” Laura Mascuch, executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, said in an interview. “We look forward to working with Adams to implement the strongest supportive housing program in the nation.” More

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      California’s Housing Crisis Looms Large for Gavin Newsom

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      Having survived a recall vote, the governor is free to focus on the state’s homeless population and housing shortage. He has more room to maneuver than he did when he first took office.The median home price in California has eclipsed $800,000. Tenants in the state are among the most cost-burdened in the country. Each night more than 100,000 residents sleep outside or in their cars. A crisis, a disaster, the religion of sorrow, a disgrace — whatever journalists and politicians call it, people across the state, including all the major candidates for governor in the recall vote this week, agree that the situation is untenable.The question is what, if anything, the governor can do about it. It’s something that Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent the past three years talking about. And now that he has won a decisive victory in the recall election, which cost close to $300 million and consumed the state’s and governor’s attention for several months, Mr. Newsom is turning his attention back to problems like housing.In many ways the answer there is different from what it was when he took office in 2019.Right now the focus is Senate Bill 9, which would allow duplexes in neighborhoods throughout the state and is one of the hundreds of unsigned bills that piled up on Mr. Newsom’s desk during the recall campaign. But even if Mr. Newsom signs it, which he is widely expected to do in the coming days, his legacy on housing is likely to be less about laws passed on his watch than his administration’s ability to enforce them. That’s because the executive branch has gained much more power over state housing policy than it had even a few years ago, after years of state frustration with how difficult the local governments make it to build housing in California.Mr. Newsom’s administration has come to embrace the role, taking action like suing cities for not building enough to keep up with population growth and creating a team to ensure that cities approve new housing. The moves are part of a nationwide shift in power — away from city councils and toward statehouses — over the $1 trillion annual residential construction market.“It used to be that housing was run by the local planning departments and California governors didn’t really pay attention,” said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “That has changed.”Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, has tried to get through the pandemic emergency by extending the state’s eviction moratorium even as the federal one lapsed, and pouring money from the state’s budget surplus and various coronavirus relief packages into homeless funding and programs like an effort to turn hotels into supportive housing.But California remains one of the most difficult places in America to build housing, causing a supply-and-demand imbalance. It is the leading edge of a nationwide problem that is pricing middle-income families out of ownership and has one in four rental households paying more than half its pretax income on rent.A polling site in El Centro, Calif., on Tuesday, when a statewide vote kept Gov. Gavin Newsom in office.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesPlanners, economists and both political parties have long called for states to use their power to ease the housing shortage by breaking local logjams. They point out that suburban governments have little incentive to fix the problem since they are accountable to homeowners who prefer that prices only go up. That conundrum has vexed would-be housing reformers since at least the 1970s, and emerged during California’s recall campaign in the Republican debates, where candidates talked a lot about adding more housing but shied away from discussions of where that housing would go.These often contradictory comments were a perfect encapsulation of Californians’ mood: They are universally unhappy with the state’s cost of living and the tent cities that have appeared along freeways, in parks and on beaches. But homeowners remain fiercely protective of their power to say what gets built near them. Kevin Faulconer, a former San Diego mayor and a Republican candidate in the recall election, all but ran away from his own pro-density policies in California’s second-largest city by saying, “When we see some of these pieces of legislation that want to eliminate single-family zoning in California, that’s wrong.”Mr. Newsom has tried to walk this same line. In 2018, he campaigned on a “Marshall Plan for housing” that had a goal of delivering 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. He came to regret the figure once he was in the governor’s chair, and it became fodder for his leading recall opponent, the talk show host Larry Elder, who seized on it as an example of broken promises. Mr. Elder did not need sophisticated research to find fault with the number: In a state that permits around 100,000 housing units a year, delivering 3.5 million — 35 years of housing at the current pace — is close to a physical impossibility.Mr. Newsom has been mostly quiet about big zoning legislation ever since. He did not take a position on Senate Bill 50, a contentious measure that would have allowed apartment buildings in neighborhoods across the state. And he was largely quiet about Senate Bill 9 as it passed through both houses of the State Legislature and lingered on his desk.Mr. Newsom, at a rally on Monday in Long Beach, Calif., has emphasized enforcement of existing housing laws.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhat he has done instead is enforce existing laws more aggressively than his predecessors did. Two weeks after Mr. Newsom assumed office, California’s attorney general sued Huntington Beach for failing to plan for sufficient new housing. Since then, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development has sent hundreds of letters telling cities to change or simplify their planning codes to comply with state law.The governor’s most recent budget allocated $4.3 million to staff a “housing accountability unit” made up of planners and lawyers who will monitor local governments’ housing decisions and intervene when they’re not following state law.Zoning defines a neighborhood’s physical character and who might be living next door, so it has captured most of the attention in California’s housing debate. But over the past few years, the Legislature quietly passed a slew of smaller measures that when strung together have radically changed the relationship between state and local government. The new rules change how much housing cities have to plan for, make it harder for them to stop developers from building and ultimately deprive them of funding and local control if they drift too far from state mandates.Because they transfer more oversight of housing from localities to Sacramento, the question of how aggressively those laws are enforced has fallen to the executive branch. It’s one thing for the state to pass laws to desegregate neighborhoods, set aside more land for subsidized housing and require cities to permit backyard cottages. If enforcing them isn’t a priority — which has long been the case with housing laws — they are bound to be ignored.In an interview after the recall vote, Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Mr. Newsom who works on housing policy, rattled off a series of bill numbers and the esoteric text of planning codes to point out dozens of housing regulations that remain mostly unused. Environmental measures that support increasing density to reduce car trips. Various laws allowing backyard units. A way for developers to sue cities that don’t follow their own zoning rules. These are the types of statutes the new housing accountability unit will try to enforce.“I’m never going to say we’re done passing laws and we can’t do more,” Mr. Elliott said. “But what we really need to do if we want to see units spring up is get several dozen people thinking about this and only this, and empower them to reach out to cities.”Will Mr. Newsom ever get anywhere near 3.5 million new units? No. Even if it were politically possible, it would strain lumber and labor supplies.It took California several decades to get into a housing crisis this bad. Lofty rhetoric and promises for millions of units make do for a campaign slogan, but the reality looks more like a process of slowly digging out. More

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      California Could Throw Away What It’s Won

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      If you live in California and haven’t yet voted or made plans to vote on the proposed recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, please wake up. This is a situation in which apathy could have awesome consequences: California, which isn’t as liberal a state as you may imagine but is nonetheless considerably more liberal than the nation as a whole, may be about to absent-mindedly acquire a Trumpist governor who could never win a normal election.This would happen at a moment when control of statehouses is especially crucial because it shapes the response to the coronavirus. MAGA governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida aren’t just refusing to impose mask or vaccination requirements themselves; they’re trying to prevent others from taking precautions by issuing executive orders and backing legislation banning the imposition of such requirements by local governments and even private businesses. And that’s the kind of governor California will probably find itself with if the recall succeeds.How is something like this even possible? Because the recall process is crazy. Voters answer two questions: Should Newsom be recalled? And who should replace him? If a majority vote “yes” on recall, whoever is chosen by the largest number of people on the second question becomes governor, even if that person receives far fewer than the number of votes to keep Newsom in office.And the most likely outcome if Newsom is ousted is that Larry Elder, a right-wing talk-radio host who is vehemently opposed to mask and vaccine mandates, will end up in the governor’s office despite receiving only a small fraction of the total vote.What would make this outcome especially galling is that California is in many ways — with the glaring exception of housing, which I’ll get to — a progressive success story.The Golden State took a sharp left turn in 2010, with the election of Jerry Brown as governor. Two years later, Democrats gained a supermajority in the Legislature, giving them the power to enact many progressive priorities. California soon raised taxes on the rich, increased social spending and increased its minimum wage. It also enthusiastically implemented the Affordable Care Act.Conservatives predicted disaster, with some saying that the state was committing economic “suicide.” And California gets a lot of negative coverage in the business press, where one constantly finds assertions that business is moving en masse out of the state to lower-tax, less-regulated states, like Texas.The data, however, say otherwise. Given all the trash-talking of California and trumpeting of Texas’ prospects one reads, it’s a bit startling to look at trends in real G.D.P. and employment between 2010 and the eve of the pandemic and discover that California and Texas had essentially the same growth rates. It’s also startling, given all the talk about people fleeing high taxes, to learn that highly educated, high-income workers — who do indeed pay higher taxes in California than in most other parts of the U.S. — were continuing to migrate into the state.California’s experience, in other words, gives the lie to conservative claims that taxing the rich and spending more on social programs destroys prosperity. And the state didn’t just achieve rapid economic growth; its effective implementation of Obamacare helped it reduce the number of its residents without health insurance much more rapidly than the rest of the country.OK, there are some important shadows on this picture. Even as affluent workers continued to move to California, lower-income workers — who actually pay lower taxes in California than they do in Texas — were moving out. This was surely in large part because of the high price of housing, which has become a huge problem.Despite overall economic success, California has the nation’s highest poverty rate (when you measure it properly), largely because of high housing costs: The median apartment in San Francisco rents for more than twice as much as an apartment in any Texas city. California also has a lot of homelessness, for the same reason.What’s behind California’s housing nightmare? Runaway NIMBYism, which has blocked new housing construction. California’s economic performance matched that of Texas in the 2010s, but it issued far fewer building permits despite having a larger population. California gained three million jobs between 2010 and 2019 but added fewer than 700,000 housing units.NIMBYism, however, happens to be one of the few major issues that cut right across party lines. Conservatives are as likely as liberals to oppose housing construction; some progressives — among them Governor Newsom — are strong advocates of housing expansion. So California’s big policy failure shouldn’t be an issue in this recall election. What’s on the line are its policy successes.If Californians choose to turn their backs on these successes, well, that’s their right. The danger now is that the state won’t choose — that it will stumble into MAGAland via a bizarre recall process and lack of attention.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      California’s Homelessness Crisis Threatens Democracy

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      Even if you don’t live in California, you’ve probably seen the pictures of tents lining Venice Beach. Or maybe you’ve seen photographs of Oakland’s sprawling homeless encampments, or the crowds of people living on the street in Los Angeles’s Skid Row neighborhood. Those images, while stark, do not come close to capturing the scope of the state’s homelessness crisis.Numbers come a little closer. California is home to nearly 12 percent of the country’s total population but, as of January 2020, 28 percent of its unhoused population, according to federal statistics. More than half of the country’s unsheltered homeless population resides in California. All told, the federal government’s most recent point-in-time count tells us that roughly 161,548 Californians were homeless as of just one night in early 2020, 113,660 of whom were unsheltered — and this was before Covid-19 plunged the United States into crisis.The political implications of mass homelessness cut deep, cut to the very foundations of our democratic system, in fact. Widespread homelessness is both a symptom of democratic decline and a harbinger of worse to come.It should never have gotten this bad. Homelessness is solvable. Its primary driver is housing unaffordability (not a sudden recent increase in mental illness or substance use disorder, despite claims to the contrary), and so the solution has always been more housing, particularly for those who don’t currently have it. But California has allowed homelessness to metastasize over the past few decades. As the humanitarian crisis has gotten worse, it has become a political crisis. Homelessness is one of the major themes in this year’s campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a growing number of commentators have cited it as evidence that the “California dream” is dying.But to eulogize the California dream or fret over the governor’s electoral prospects is to miss the larger picture.The structural factors that threaten U.S. democracy have directly contributed to homelessness in California. Take structural racism. In his landmark book “The Color of Law,” Richard Rothstein outlined how the government spent decades segregating neighborhoods as a matter of public policy, stifling Black homeownership and pushing Black Americans and other people of color into zones of concentrated urban poverty.California was an early innovator in racist housing policies: Berkeley was most likely the birthplace of single-family zoning, which constricts housing supply and pushes up the cost of housing. This policy puts it out of reach for low-income households, in particular the people of color it was intended to keep out.More than a century after it was first enacted, Berkeley is now in the process of undoing single-family zoning. But at both the city and the state level, other racist policies remain on the books. Some of them are baked into the state’s Constitution, which the voters amended in 1950 to restrict development of low-income public housing. And California’s decades-long effort to keep low-income Black residents out of adequate housing continues to bear fruit: today, Black people make up 6.5 percent of the state’s overall population, but 40 percent of its homeless population.Similarly, as economic inequality has threatened the nation’s political system, it has most likely exacerbated homelessness in California. In a recent paper, researchers presented evidence that income inequality may fuel homelessness in regions where housing supply fails to keep up with demand. The authors theorized that this may be because the wealthiest households in an unequal city bid up the cost of housing for everyone else, making it increasingly unaffordable to lower-income residents. This appears to be exactly what happened in the Bay Area, where the unfathomable wealth generated by the tech boom has been mostly captured by those at the top of the income distribution.Because Bay Area cities have failed to produce enough supply to keep up with population increases, lower and middle-income residents now have to compete for housing with the super-wealthy, whose ability to outbid everyone else continually forces prices up. As a result, homes in Berkeley sold for about 19 percent above asking price on average in the first three months of this year, the highest citywide average in the nation.Building more housing would break this dynamic. But much like federal efforts to expand voting rights, California’s fight to expand housing supply has been stymied by what I consider vetocracy. I alluded to one example of this vetocracy earlier: Article 34 of the state Constitution, which requires voter approval for any low-income public housing project to be built in a community. Another oft-cited example is the state’s California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, which, generally, requires environmental impact assessments of new developments. “Not In My Back Yarders” have capitalized on this prima facie reasonable requirement, burying proposed developments in CEQA litigation that can slow projects to a crawl, or kill them entirely.Even as the homelessness crisis has grown out of the same factors as the crisis of democracy, it has directly contributed to democratic decay. California’s continual failure to make inroads against widespread homelessness risks fomenting anger, cynicism and disaffection with the state’s political system. A state that appears powerless to address fundamental problems does not make a very persuasive case for its own survival. As such, state and local policymakers need to take homelessness seriously as not only a humanitarian disaster, but a threat to liberal democracy.Taking the threat seriously does not mean doubling down on cruel and ineffective policies, such as the criminalizing of homelessness or relying on temporary shelters to keep the unhoused out of sight. It means spending political capital to ensure that, long term, California can dramatically increase its housing supply. And it means offering immediate Housing First services to those who have already been pushed into homelessness.Housing First policies start with the premise — validated by a wealth of empirical research (including from my employer, University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative) — that people who are homeless need stable housing in order to benefit from the other services, such as behavioral health care and substance use treatment, that will put them on a path to full recovery.This month, California took an important step in the right direction. The most recent budget signed by Governor Newsom includes $12 billion earmarked for combating homelessness, primarily through Housing First-aligned efforts. This amount, while significant, still represents only an initial step. Homelessness has become so dire in large part because the state allowed it to fester for years. It will require years more work, planning, public investment and legal reform, to undo the results. The cost will be high, but the cost of inaction is far higher.Ned Resnikoff is policy manager for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Eric Adams Has Plans for New York, Beyond Public Safety

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      Mr. Adams, the Democratic mayoral nominee, has stances on policing, transportation and education that suggest a shift from Mayor Bill de Blasio.In the afterglow of winning the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, Eric Adams began to set out his mission if elected in November.“Safety, safety, safety,” Mr. Adams said in one interview. “Making our city safe,” he said in another.On Thursday, as a torrential storm flooded the city’s subway stations, Mr. Adams offered another priority: Fast-track the city’s congestion pricing plan, which would charge fees to motorists entering Manhattan’s core, so that the money could be used to make critical improvements to the aging system.The two initiatives encapsulate Mr. Adams’s self-characterization as a blue-collar candidate: Make the streets and the subway safe and reliable for New York’s working-class residents.But they also hint at the challenges that await the city’s next mayor.To increase public safety, Mr. Adams has said he would bring back a contentious plainclothes anti-crime unit that focused on getting guns off the streets. The unit was effective, but it was disbanded last year amid criticism of its reputation for using excessive force, and for its negative impact on the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve.Congestion pricing was opposed by some state lawmakers, who wanted to protect the interests of constituents who needed to drive into Manhattan. But even though state officials approved the plan two years ago, it has yet to be introduced: A key review board that would guide the tolling structure has yet to be named; its six members are to be appointed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is controlled by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.Mr. Adams, who would be the city’s second Black mayor, would face other steep challenges: steering the city out of the pandemic; navigating the possibility of a new City Council trying to push him to the left; grappling with significant budget deficits once federal recovery aid is spent.How he intends to accomplish it all is still somewhat theoretical, but he has offered a few concrete proposals — some costly, and with no set ways to pay for them — mixed in with broader ideas.Some of New York City’s mayoral transitions have reflected wild swings from one ideology to another. The current mayor, Bill de Blasio, ran on a promise to end the city’s vast inequities, which he said had worsened under his billionaire predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg. The gentle and consensus-building David N. Dinkins was succeeded by Rudolph W. Giuliani, a hard-charging former federal prosecutor.Privately, Mr. de Blasio supported Mr. Adams in the competitive primary, believing that he was the person best suited to carry on Mr. de Blasio’s progressive legacy, and if Mr. Adams defeats the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, an abrupt change in the city’s direction is unlikely.But in some ways, Mr. Adams has staked out positions on issues like affordable housing, transportation and education that suggest a shift from Mr. de Blasio’s approach.On policing, Mr. Adams, who has pledged to name the city’s first female police commissioner, has already spoken to three potential candidates, and is believed to favor Juanita Holmes, a top official who was lured out of retirement by the current police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea. Mr. Adams has also vowed to work with federal officials to crack down on the flow of handguns into the city, and he has expressed concerns about how bail reform laws, approved by state lawmakers in 2019, may be contributing to a recent rise in violent crime.On education, Mr. Adams is viewed as friendly toward charter schools and he does not want to get rid of the specialized admissions test that has kept many Black and Latino students out of the city’s elite high schools, a departure from Mr. de Blasio’s stance. He has also proposed opening schools year-round and expanding the universal prekindergarten program by offering reduced-cost child care for children under 3.Transportation and safety advocates hope that Mr. Adams, an avid cyclist, will have a more intuitive understanding of their calls for better infrastructure. He has promised to build 150 new miles of bus lanes and busways in his first term, and 300 new miles of protected bike lanes, a significant expansion of Mr. de Blasio’s efforts.Increasing the supply of affordable housing was a central goal of Mr. de Blasio’s administration, and Mr. Adams supports the mayor’s highly debated plan to rezone Manhattan’s trendy SoHo neighborhood to allow for hundreds of affordable units.Mr. Adams has said he supports selling the air rights to New York City Housing Authority properties to help finance improvements to authority buildings.  Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMr. Adams also supports a proposal to convert hotels and some of the city’s own office buildings to affordable housing units. The proposal originated with real estate industry leaders, who have watched their office buildings empty out during the pandemic.Mr. Adams favors selling the air rights above New York City Housing Authority properties to developers, an idea the de Blasio administration floated in 2018. Mr. Adams has said the sales might yield $8 billion, which the authority could use to pay for improvements at the more than 315 buildings it manages.Mr. Adams is viewed as pro-development — he supported a deal for an Amazon headquarters in Queens and a rezoning of Industry City in Brooklyn, both abandoned after criticism from progressive activists — and he was supported in the primary by real estate executives and wealthy donors.During his campaign, Mr. Adams met three times with the Partnership for New York City, a Wall Street-backed business nonprofit, according to Kathryn Wylde, the group’s president. Ms. Wylde expressed appreciation for Mr. Adams’s focus on public safety — a matter of great importance to her members — and confidence that he would be more of a check on the City Council, which she said was constantly interfering with business operations.“I think with Adams, we’ll have a shot that he will provide some discipline,” Ms. Wylde said. “Why? Because he’s not afraid of the political left.”Some of Mr. Adams’s stances have drawn criticism from progressive leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Maya Wiley in the Democratic primary.Alyssa Aguilera, an executive director of VOCAL-NY Action Fund, said that “having a former N.Y.P.D. captain in Gracie Mansion” only means “further protections and funding for failed law enforcement tactics.”“With that framework, it’s hard to believe he’s going to make any substantial changes to the size and scope of the N.Y.P.D. and that’s what many of us are hoping for,” Ms. Aguilera said.Mr. Adams, a former police officer, has expressed confidence that, under him, the Police Department could use stop-and-frisk tactics without violating people’s rights. Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesMr. Adams insists that even though he has been characterized as a centrist, he views himself as a true progressive who can meld left-leaning concepts with practical policies.To address poverty, for example, Mr. Adams has proposed $3,000 tax credits for poor families — an idea he said was superior to his primary rival Andrew Yang’s local version of universal basic income.“There’s a permanent group of people that are living in systemic poverty,” Mr. Adams said recently on “CBS This Morning.” “You and I, we go to the restaurant, we eat well, we take our Uber, but that’s not the reality for America and New York. And so when we turn this city around, we’re going to end those inequalities.”To deal with the homelessness crisis, Mr. Adams has proposed integrating housing assistance into hospital stays for indigent and homeless people, and increasing the number of facilities for mentally ill homeless people, especially those who are not sick enough to stay in a hospital but are too unwell for a shelter.Mr. Adams did not emphasize climate change or environmental issues on the campaign trail. But in his Twitter post about the subway flooding on Thursday, he called for using congestion pricing funds to “add green infrastructure to absorb flash storm runoff.”His campaign has pointed to initiatives from his tenure as borough president: helping to expand the Brooklyn Greenway, a coastal bike and walking corridor, not only for recreation but for flood mitigation; and improving accountability for the post-Hurricane Sandy reconstruction process. Those actions are dwarfed by the sweeping change he will be called on to oversee as mayor — particularly by a City Council with many new members who campaigned on a commitment to mitigate and prepare for the effects of rising seas and extreme weather on a port city with a 520-mile coastline.Mr. Adams expresses confidence that he can reinstate the plainclothes police squad and use stop-and-frisk tactics without violating people’s rights, contending that his administration can effectively monitor data related to police interactions in real time, and intervene if there are abuses.“We are not going back to the days where you are going to stop, frisk, search and abuse every person based on their ethnicity and based on the demographics or based on the communities they’re in,” Mr. Adams said on MSNBC last week. “You can have precision policing without heavy-handed abusive policing.”When some subway stations flooded on Thursday, Mr. Adams called for using money raised through a congestion pricing plan to make the system more resilient against bad storms. Fiona Dhrimaj, via ReutersMr. Adams seems most likely to differ from Mr. de Blasio on matters of tone and governing style.He is known for working round-the-clock, while Mr. de Blasio has been pilloried for arriving late to work and appearing apathetic about his job. Mr. de Blasio is a Red Sox fan who grew up in the Boston area and lives in brownstone Brooklyn; Mr. Adams, a lifelong New Yorker, was raised in Jamaica, Queens, by a single mother who cleaned homes. He roots for the Mets. Mr. Adams will come into office in a powerful position because of the diverse coalition he assembled of Black, Latino and white voters outside Manhattan.“De Blasio spoke about those communities; Eric speaks to the communities,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University. “There’s a real difference. De Blasio was talented as a campaigner. Eric is going to be a doer.”Where Mr. de Blasio rode into City Hall as a critic of the police and a proponent of reform, he will end his term buried in criticism that he ultimately pandered to the department — a shift that many attribute to a moment, early in his tenure, when members of the Police Department turned their backs on him at an officer’s funeral.Officers were upset that Mr. de Blasio spoke about talking to his biracial son about how to safely interact with the police, a conversation that the parents of most Black children have. As mayor, Mr. Adams said he would gather with officers around the city for a different version of “the conversation.”“I’m your mayor,” Mr. Adams said he would tell officers. “What you feel in those cruisers, I felt. I’ve been there. But let me tell you something else. I also know how it feels to be arrested and lying on the floor of the precinct and have someone kick you in your groin over and over again and urinate blood for a week.”Mr. Adams will most likely be different from Mr. de Blasio in another way: He mischievously told reporters last week that he would be fun to cover. Indeed, he was photographed on Wednesday getting an ear pierced; the next day, he was seen dining at Rao’s, an exclusive Italian restaurant in Harlem, with the billionaire Republican John Catsimatidis.“He got his ear pierced and went to Rao’s,” Mr. Moss said. “He’s going to enjoy being a public personality.”Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard, Matthew Haag, Winnie Hu, Andy Newman and Ali Watkins. More