California has close to a quarter of everyone in America who is homeless, in a state with 11% of the country's population. It is the state's most visible failure, and whoever wins in November inherits it.

So it's worth reading exactly what Steve Hilton proposes to do about it, because his plan begins somewhere specific.

"This is against the law"

Hilton's starting position, told to CalMatters, is that living outside is illegal and the state should treat it that way:

"This is against the law, and the law needs to be enforced."

That's the foundation. Everything else in his plan sits on top of it.

The rest: he calls California's Housing First strategy a "complete disaster" and wants to free up state funding for sober housing instead. He says the state is "way under capacity for mental health beds." And he says of people with severe mental illness ending up incarcerated that it's "completely barbaric," setting this benchmark: "That's going to be the measure of success for me that we are no longer a society where people who need serious and intensive medical support and help are left on the streets or put in our jails."

Some of that is real. California genuinely doesn't have enough treatment capacity, and jails genuinely have become de facto psychiatric wards. Nobody who works on this disagrees.

But look at the order of operations. Enforcement first, capacity later.

What "enforce the law" means without the beds

Here's the problem with leading with illegality.

If it is against the law to sleep outside, and there is nowhere legal to sleep, then the law is not a tool for getting someone indoors. It's a tool for moving them to a different block, or into a jail cell — the exact outcome Hilton himself calls "completely barbaric."

Hilton acknowledges the shortage. He says California is "way under capacity for mental health beds." He is describing, accurately, a state that cannot house the people his first policy would criminalize.

Building treatment capacity takes years — siting, licensing, staffing, funding. Citations can start the day a governor says so. Whichever one comes first is the one that defines the policy, and Hilton has been clear which comes first.

Housing First is not a slogan

Hilton's other move is to tear out Housing First — the approach that puts people into stable housing before requiring sobriety or treatment compliance — and redirect funding to sober housing.

He calls it a "complete disaster." His argument is partly about scale of failure: "The fact that we've had this catastrophic failure that's cost tens of billions of dollars means that we need a complete review," and "I think we've got to be honest that you've got a lot of corruption in the system."

California's spending on homelessness absolutely deserves an audit. That's a fair thing for a candidate to demand.

But "the money was spent badly" and "the underlying approach is wrong" are two different claims, and Hilton is using the first to prove the second. The reason Housing First exists is that requiring sobriety before housing screens out the people in the worst shape — exactly the group CalMatters notes make up a large share of the problem, with more than one-third of homeless Californians regularly using drugs and more than one-quarter having been hospitalized for mental illness.

Move to sober-housing-only and those people don't get sober. They stay outside. And under the first plank of Hilton's plan, being outside is now something the law needs to enforce against.

The part that's missing

Read Hilton's plan and notice what isn't in it: housing supply.

There's enforcement, treatment beds, sober housing, and an audit. There is no plan to build more homes at prices Californians can pay — which is the thing that determines how many people become homeless in the first place, as opposed to what happens to them afterward.

That's a striking gap for a candidate whose whole pitch is affordability, and it's an especially strange one right now. Congress passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act in June 2026 — 85–5 in the Senate, 358–32 in the House — and President Trump canceled the signing ceremony and held it hostage until Congress passes an unrelated voter-ID bill. The most significant federal housing law in decades, backed by homebuilders and the real estate industry, sitting unsigned.

Hilton has spent the summer advertising his "good personal relationships" with Trump's cabinet and arguing that a governor with a constructive relationship to this administration would be good for California. Here is a concrete, enormous thing that relationship could be spent on.

What we're actually being asked to buy

Every part of Hilton's homelessness plan except the enforcement requires money, time, and construction. The enforcement part requires only a decision.

That asymmetry is the whole story of criminalizing homelessness wherever it's been tried. The citations are cheap and immediate and visible. The treatment beds are expensive and slow and invisible. A politician who leads with the first and promises the second is offering something that will look like action long before it produces a single additional place for anyone to live.

"The law needs to be enforced" is not a housing policy. In a state that is short on beds by Hilton's own account, it's a policy of moving people along. We deserve better.

Source

How will California's next governor handle homelessness? — Marisa Kendall, CalMatters, May 6, 2026. Photo: CalMatters.