Gavin Newsom on Welfare & Poverty S.F. Mayor; former Gov. cand.

Address homelessness with 55,000 new housing units

Nearly $2 billion to create more homeless housing

Now, bringing the same spirit of innovation behind Project Roomkey and Homekey, we're committing nearly $2 billion this year to create more homeless housing, addressing mental health and substance abuse issues, and ending homelessness one person at a time. No one denies this is a huge challenge, but we know what it means to stare down big challenges.

Homelessness must be at the top of our agenda

We are making available 286 state properties--vacant lots, fairgrounds, armories and other state buildings--to be used by local governments, for free, for homelessness solutions. We have lease templates ready to go--and we're ready for partnership.

When we don't build housing for people at all income levels, we worsen the homeless crisis. It's a vicious cycle. And the only sustainable way out of it is to massively increase housing production. Let's match our courage on homelessness with courage on housing supply. This means a commitment--right now, this year--to major reform that will eliminate red tape, and delays for building critically needed housing--like affordable, multifamily homes--especially near transit and downtowns.

Right to Shelter: work with counties on homelessness

California has and will continue to extend its hand of partnership to Washington, seeking to jointly address this issue. Honestly, this partnership should be a given. But empty words and symbolic gestures won't mask a 15 percent across-the-board cut to HUD's budget. I'm old enough to remember when HUD was in the housing business. And I'm hopeful it will be again. After all, homelessness isn't a blue or a red issue. It's an everyone issue--a blight on the soul of America.

Finish welfare reform by moving able recipients into jobs.

Help Working Families Lift Themselves from Poverty
In the 1990s, Americans resolved to end welfare dependency and forge a new social compact on the basis of work and reciprocal responsibility. The results so far are encouraging: The welfare rolls have been cut by more than half since 1992 without the social calamities predicted by defenders of the old welfare entitlement. People are more likely than ever to leave welfare for work, and even those still on welfare are four times more likely to be working. But the job of welfare reform will not be done until we help all who can

work to find and keep jobs -- including absent fathers who must be held responsible for supporting their children.

In the next decade, progressives should embrace an even more ambitious social goal -- helping every working family lift itself from poverty. Our new social compact must reinforce work, responsibility, and family. By expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, increasing the supply of affordable child care, reforming tax policies that hurt working families, making sure absent parents live up to their financial obligations, promoting access to home ownership and other wealth-building assets, and refocusing other social policies on the new goal of rewarding work, we can create a new progressive guarantee: No American family with a full-time worker will live in poverty.

Goals for 2010 Finish the job of welfare reform by moving all recipients who can work into jobs.
• Cut the poverty rate in half.
• Double child support collections and require every father who owes child support to go to work to pay it off.