California Asks Trump for Housing Vouchers to Aid Homeless

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Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday asked President Trump to approve more housing vouchers, as the Trump administration weighs in on the state's massive homelessness problem.

Members of the administration visited Los Angeles last week to view the city's sprawling homeless encampments after Trump told his staff to develop policy options to address the national crisis of people living on the streets.

Trump is also planning to attend a fundraising event in the Bay Area on Tuesday, his first presidential visit to the area, in which he will reportedly discuss the issue of homelessness, joined by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

The Democratic governor and officials representing California cities and counties sent the Republican president a letter asserting that "shelter solves sleep, but only housing solves homelessness."

Their letter asks Trump to provide 50,000 more housing vouchers through two existing programs and to increase the value of the vouchers to account for high rents. That would help "a significant proportion of our unsheltered population," including thousands of military veterans, they wrote.

Newsom's office could not immediately say how much more the voucher proposal would cost.

State officials also asked Trump to work with Congress to increase funding for 300,000 new housing vouchers nationwide and create a program to encourage landlords to work better with voucher holders.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, invited Trump in July to tour the city's streets. Garcetti estimated that 36,000 people in the city are homeless on any given night, while thousands more sleep on streets in other California cities.

"Pairing more vouchers with an increase in the fair market rent value of the vouchers, you have the ability to make a meaningful difference in the lives of so many who suffer on our streets," the officials wrote.

They defended California's attempts to deal with poverty while contrasting the administration's "significant cuts" to public housing and community grant programs.

The delegation that Trump dispatched last week to survey Los Angeles' homeless came about two months after the Republican president called the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other big cities disgraceful and faulted the "liberal establishment" for the problem.

According to reporting by The Washington Post, administration officials have floated the idea of taking homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles and other cities, razing their encampments and placing them in new federally operated facilities. But it remains unclear how they would accomplish that goal and what legal authority they would have to do so, particularly in light of imminent opposition from local and state leaders.

The effort, the Post notes, is part of Trump's broader push in recent months to highlight major problems in California and a number of other liberal states and major cities, blaming years of failed Democratic leadership that have resulted in entrenched poverty and crime.