Welcome.
I’m Scott Syphax, host of Studio Sacramento.
Ballots are arriving in mailboxes across California for the June primary election.
The top two vote getters in the governor’s race move on to November.
The eventual winner will lead the largest, most complex state in the nation.
Of the many issues the next governor will face, two stand out for their human cost and political difficulty.
Homelessness and mental health.
So we at PBS KVIE, in partnership with the Steinberg Institute and CalMatters, invited the top polling candidates to join us for one on one, focused, 20 minute conversations on those two issues.
Some candidates either did not respond to our interview requests or declined them.
You’ll hear from Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Each candidate was asked the same core questions in the same order.
Each session was moderated either by me or my colleague Marisa Kendall from CalMatters.
Candidates answers varied in length, and follow up questions were asked based on their answers.
The interviews are being presented back to back in their entirety and will appear alphabetically by the candidate’s last names.
We’ll start with Marisa’s interview with Sheriff Chad Bianco.
Thanks so much, sheriff, for being with us today.
We appreciate it.
All right, let’s jump right in.
So my first question for you is, in 1969, Governor Reagan signed the Lanterman Act creating a cradle-to-grave entitlement for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities, now serving roughly 500,000 Californians at a cost of about $20 billion a year.
There’s no equivalent entitlement for people with severe mental illness.
Do you believe California should create such an entitlement for serious mental illness?
And if so, what specific revenue or budget trade-offs would you use to pay for it?
– Yeah, we absolutely do.
And we are never going to end the homeless situation that we see on our streets if we don’t start calling it what it is and addressing it for what it is.
It is a drug and alcohol-induced psychosis comboed with a mental health issue that could be made exacerbated by drug and alcohol use.
And we absolutely have to get to the realization and the admission that when you are voluntarily asking for someone suffering from a mental health crisis, if they would like to go into a treatment center, you are never going to get them to agree.
We absolutely must get to a point that if we’re going to be compassionate for the fight that they are in, and if we are going to actually want to help them, we are going to have to force them into treatment, so we can get them stabilized, get them back to where they were before they succumbed to the deep parts of this mental addiction or mental health issues that they have, and we can get them back to where they’re productive and back to the families and the homes that they once had.
– And just to follow up on that, you know, you mentioned the driving factor being a drug and alcohol-induced psychosis as a driving factor of homelessness.
You know, a recent study from the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative found that only about a third of homeless Californians that they surveyed were regularly using drugs and only about 12% experienced hallucinations.
What what do you make of that?
What about the rest of homeless Californians who do not have those problems?
– Okay, we need to start being real and start being honest.
If you’re not going to ask the experts who are dealing with this what we have and what we see on the streets, if you’re not going to ask us what these people are suffering for and whether or not they’re under the influence of drugs, then we are never going to solve this.
When you ask an academia to go out and ask someone if they’re under the influence of drugs and they tell them no, so they walk away, that’s why we’re in this position.
That is an absolute, absolute travesty that we are going toward academia doing research with no expertise in really determining this, and then that drives the solution?
You wanna wonder why we make homeless worse every single year, despite the billions and billions and billions of dollars that we’re wasting is because we’re not being honest with the issue.
It is more like 95% of the people that we see on the street are suffering from drug and alcohol addiction, which contributes to a mental health condition.
It’s drug and alcohol-induced psychosis.
This is an absolute fact.
And until we start addressing it for such, we are never, ever, ever going to get through this.
– And that 95%, what does that come from?
What data does that come from?
Is that just anecdotal experience in your department or- – It is law enforcement as a whole.
We meet sheriffs in this state.
There are 58 counties.
It’s absolutely bizarre to me that we’re having this conversation, because academia and government wants to just keep the problems going so they can act like they’re doing something.
And do you know who they never ask?
Law enforcement.
Do you know who is never at the table?
Law enforcement.
And we are the ones that deal with this on a daily basis.
There are 58 sheriffs in this state who meet every two months and discuss the issues that we are experiencing all across the state.
We all know the exact same thing.
Our deputies, our firemen are the first responders to every single one of these calls for service.
And every single one of these people that we deal with on the streets, it is extremely rare that we find a person, truly just a victim of homelessness that truly is looking for help.
And when we find them, we jump for joy because now we can finally input them into the system where there are tons of resources for those people.
The ones who are suffering from drug and alcohol abuse, there is absolutely nothing for us to do for them.
They don’t want the help.
It has to be voluntary.
And those are the ones that we’re seeing on an absolute daily basis.
There’s no sense that you and I arguing with it, academia and politicians have created this to cycle money into a homeless industrial complex.
And until we are going to be honest about what it is, we will never, ever, ever fix it.
– Well, let’s talk about the people who are suffering from severe mental illness.
So for the next question, the current governor has invested over $16 billion towards behavioral health transformation.
What is one major structural outcome that you believe must be in place at the end of your first term for those investments to be considered a success?
And how would you measure progress toward that outcome?
– Well, progress is actually going to be progress.
I’m so sick and tired of him just saying, “Look how much money I’ve dumped into absolutely nothing.
And I have no success for anything.”
Homeless is getting worse every single year.
And then we have politicians that come out and we have groups and we have academia that go out and say, “Oh look, we have 2% less.”
Well, that equates to about four people.
So the percentages mean absolutely nothing.
The entire state of California knows that homelessness is getting worse.
We know that mental illness is getting worse and the government just says, “Look at all the money that we’re putting toward it.”
And it does absolutely nothing.
When are we actually going to start directing the money to the people where it actually matters?
The people that need it are getting absolutely nothing.
The nonprofits and the NGOs get all the money.
The government agencies, they employ a whole bunch of people to do absolutely nothing, and nothing is working because none of the money goes to the people that matter.
If we don’t start actually being compassionate human beings and caring about the people to get them healthy, to make them healthy, nothing is ever going to change.
Just keep voting the same way.
We’ll keep wasting all of our money, stealing all our taxpayer money.
We can increase more taxes so we can say we’re giving more people to more money to it, and we will still suffer from the same issues over and over and over.
We are going to have to get to a point where we all agree that we have to force the treatment, of mental health treatment onto individuals, whether they want it or not.
We have to make sure that they’re healthy, that they’re stabilized, back to the families, that they have the homes that they had.
And we have to put these into the treatment centers.
It’s not about NGOs and nonprofits.
That’s all going away.
No NGO and nonprofit is gonna get money with me as the governor.
There will be some that come and say, “Look at what you’re doing to us.
These people are gonna be put back on the street.”
We’ll take a good look at it and if it’s true, we will give them their money back.
But there’s going to be thousands and thousands of NGOs and nonprofits that say absolutely nothing because those are the ones that are stealing our money because they aren’t helping anyone.
And that’s what has to be fixed.
The waste, fraud and the abuse of government saying, “Let’s just throw more money on it” has to absolutely stop.
I actually care about other people and we are going to make sure that California government actually cares about the people suffering from the situations that they find themselves in.
– Let’s delve a little bit more into what your homelessness policy would be as governor.
I know it sounds like you don’t put much stock in some of the statistics that are coming out, and though California does still have the largest homeless population, the latest data does show that last year saw a 9% drop in unsheltered homelessness, breaking a 15-year trend of growth.
– Do you know what a scam that is?
That is an absolute scam.
So they were sheltered before, but it was called a tent.
So because they put them in something with a hard roof, they call it unsheltered.
We have been abused by words, that words in a psychological warfare type of an attitude were words are used against us and then we use that for better statistics.
Unhoused homeless means absolutely nothing compared to sheltered homeless.
They’re the same homeless, they’re the same drug addicted, the same mental illness.
Let’s stop with this.
If you can honestly tell me that you can walk outside and think that homeless is getting better, I want you to tell me where you live so I can move there.
Because no one in this state believes that homeless is getting better.
It is worse every place across the state.
We need to stop this.
– So what would you do?
It sounds like you’re talking about the tiny homes.
You don’t see tiny homes as a solution and you wouldn’t give any money to non-profits or the NGOs?
– It’s not the solution.
It’s not the solution.
I’ve said it, let me be very, very specific, ’cause I said it already.
This is not about homes.
Stop calling it homes.
Homeless was used because psychologically we feel sorry for somebody that doesn’t have a home and we believe they’re forced to live on the street.
That is absolutely false.
This is not about homes.
Stop calling it homeless.
It is drug and alcohol abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, a combination of both, and psychosis.
And we have to start addressing it for what it is.
Every single bit of money that is going to the homeless industrial complex of NGOs and nonprofits is going to stop.
A small portion of that money will go to in-home care for drug and alcohol abuse, mental health care, and here’s the biggie, the combination of both.
Did you know that before California made drugs legal in 2014 that caused the spike in the homeless and the mental health issues that we have?
Did you know that they passed another law that made it illegal to treat mental health and drug addiction at the same time?
This is government-created, it is government-imposed and law enforcement has been saying this for 14 years and no one listens because they wanted this to happen.
This is about cycling taxpayer money into a homeless industrial complex.
And these people living and dying on the street are pawns in this little scheme to launder our tax money, to make people rich, and then foster some of that money back into the election cycles to keep these people in office.
Californians are absolutely sick of this.
We’re actually sick of reporters.
We’re sick of liberal reporters that just keep sob-storying us with absolute fake statistics and lies.
We are so over this.
We are absolutely over it.
That’s why I’m leading in the polls.
That’s why people are sick of politicians, because we’re sick of being lied to.
We actually want people to care.
We want leadership in this state, and we want someone to actually make a difference.
And the career politicians that lie to us every two years and every four years, we’re over them.
The homeless industrial complex can be ended within two years max, if we actually cared about them.
All you have to do is go to Los Angeles and see that not only the state money that’s being dumped into them, but the $2 billion per year that’s being dumped into Skid Row is only meant to keep those people there victimized by their drug and alcohol addiction.
We give them money, we give them drugs, we take away the crimes, this has to end.
We can enforce laws, we can enforce, keep them in jail.
It has to go back to the consequence for crime.
AB 109 has to be absolutely repealed.
State prison inmates have to go back to state prison.
Then our county jails can actually house people for misdemeanors and low level felonies, which they can’t do now.
So these people who are stealing from us, the people who are using drugs, the people who are selling drugs, all of them can be put into jail And then like before Prop 47, before 2014, we could tell them, “You’re either going to go to rehab or you’re going to go to jail and prison.
You pick.”
They always picked rehab.
That’s what we want.
We don’t want them in jail.
We don’t want them in prison.
Take the rehab, take the live-in rehab and we can get you sober, we can get you clean, we can address your mental health issues and we can get you back to the families that you all once had and everything was fine.
2014, Prop 47 changed everything for the negative.
And we all know it.
We have to stop acting like it didn’t happen.
Prop 36 would have solved a lot of our problems because we would’ve been able to force these people, the same way, go to jail or prison or into rehab.
But our current government, Democrats, and our current Democrat governor will not implement or fund the resources to make Prop 36 work.
Why?
Because they know it’s going to work.
And then the entire state of California is gonna know that their policy for the last 12 years has been a dismal failure.
It’s a social experiment that has failed.
They’ve doubled down, tripled down, quadruple down.
Democrats in our state legislature, not Democrats in California, Democrats in our state legislature and our Democrat governor couldn’t care less about anyone in California, particularly the people who are living and dying on our streets.
And it has to stop.
– Well, since you mentioned Prop 36, I know it hasn’t been that long since it’s been implemented, but- – It’s been over a year.
– The early reports so far, so it’s been over a year, but the early reports so far are showing a lot of the people who are arrested under Prop 36 for these drug felonies are not choosing treatment.
And even those who are choosing treatment only- – So again.
– Very small handful have graduated.
So do you think that’s just a funding problem?
– It’s both.
It’s absolutely a twist of fact.
We have absolute, absolute horrific, horrific political activist judges who are refusing to sentence under the 36 guidelines.
So they go back to Prop 47 guidelines because they don’t agree.
They don’t care what the voters in California want.
They don’t care about the our constitution.
They don’t care about any of that.
They care about their political agenda.
And that is it.
It is an ideological agenda, social experiment that has radically, radically failed in California, and we’re over it.
We’re tired of it.
We want the radical judges gone.
We want the funding so we can help these people.
They are not, they are not going to willingly get themselves help, especially with mental health issues.
We have to be able to force them.
You still haven’t changed the Prop 57.
You still haven’t changed the AB 109.
So when you put these people in county jail, I can’t keep them for these low crimes because I’m housing state prison inmates.
The system has been set up for failure by… And it’s not by dumb people.
They did it on purpose, and we’re suffering the consequences.
And until you put somebody in place that’s actually going to right all of these wrongs and inform Californians of the truth instead of the garbage statistics, the garbage things that they think we want to hear, nothing is going to get better.
It’s gotten worse every single year.
And as long as we keep voting the same way, it’s going to get worse next year too.
– Let’s go back to your homelessness policy briefly.
You know, speaking of funding, I know you mentioned diverting a lot of funding away from nonprofits and NGOs.
What about cities and counties?
What would you do with the Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention, or HHAP funds?
Would you- – You’re not- – You keep that going?
– Yeah, I don’t think you’re listening.
I don’t, I really don’t think you’re listening.
Stop calling it homeless.
I watch what they do in my county.
This is not about homes.
Stop calling it homes.
– I mean that’s the name of the government funding source.
So I’m just asking you about this specific program that is called it’s- – It’s for homeless.
Why do they call it that?
It’s to psychologically affect you.
So you feel sorry for people and you don’t care where all this is money going, where all the money’s going.
And then when I stop it, you’re gonna get all emotionally affected and triggered because I’m stopping the money for people with homes.
And the reality is- – So you would stop HHAP funding.
– The reality is it has nothing to do with homes.
We have to get over this, get over the home part.
They need treatment, they need in-home treatment care at drug and alcohol facilities and mental health facilities.
And unless you’re going to just listen and agree that that’s going to happen in four more years, you can be talking to the next governor about the same thing and wonder why we still have homeless on the street.
– So you would stop HHAP funding?
– I’m stopping every bit of funding that has been wasted for the last 20 years on this thing you keep calling homeless because that’s not what it is.
– Okay, and it sounds like you would really be pushing for involuntary care.
So let’s get into a few more details about how exactly you would do that.
How would you change the current standards that now require someone to be gravely disabled or a danger to themselves or others to be committed into involuntary care?
How would you change that framework?
– The law for mental health in the involuntary care is going to have to be changed.
And this is how it’s going to work.
I don’t know where you live, I don’t know who the people you talk and this confirmation bias that you might be in, but the rest of Californians are absolutely sick of this.
We are absolutely sick of what we see on the streets.
We’re absolutely sick of being confronted by mentally deranged, drug-induced psychotic people when we go to the grocery store or the gas station or even a business to try and eat or go into to buy clothes, we’re absolutely sick of it.
And we want someone who’s actually going to make it better.
– What do you think about CARE court?
Would you keep that program?
Would you change it?
– CARE court was a way for Newsom to say that he was doing something and it doesn’t work.
We are going to absolutely remove Prop 47 and here’s what’s going to happen.
When I tell people the entire state, every week on the steps of the capitol, when I tell people who are the lawmakers there that are not working to make California better, then when they come up for election again in two years, none of them are going to get elected.
Absolutely none of them.
The only thing that those people in Sacramento fear are an informed voter because all of us believe that they’re doing the right thing and none of them are.
So when the public is informed that they’re not doing the right thing, that they’re doing nothing to fix our homeless issue, doing nothing to get people mental health care, then they’re not going to get voted in again.
So my worst case scenario as your governor is I’ll have two years of fighting with them trying to do the right thing.
Then they’re never going to get elected again.
And people that actually care about Californians will and then we’ll be able to save our state.
– Let’s talk more about structural barriers to getting people the mental health care help that you’re talking about.
The Medi-Cal system is a key safety net for people who are poor and at risk of homelessness.
Right now, Medi-Cal patients often get primary care in one place, mental health care in another and substance use treatment in a third.
With county carve outs creating constant handoffs and gaps, what specific structural reforms will you commit to in your first term to end or significantly shrink this fragmentation?
And who should ultimately be held accountable for a person’s care across these systems?
– So every single bit of that is going to be changed because you said exactly what I told you was broken.
The state government set this up for failure to create this homeless industrial complex so they could get elected every single year.
We already know this is happening.
We already know that the billions of dollars wasted on homeless, a portion of that is going back into these election coffers to keep them getting elected.
Why are you not talking about that?
Why aren’t we doing interviews about that?
Why is DOJ not arresting the people taking that money?
Because they’re getting that money too.
This is nuts that we’re even having this conversation Because it is so common sense.
The doctors know it, the social workers know it, but the system has been set up to keep the money flowing, to just keep people in government employed or nonprofits with their funding, and the people who are actually needing the treatment get absolutely nothing.
The entire system was set up by California lawmakers, California regulatory boards and commissions, and it was set up for failure.
And we have to demolish it and rebuild it, actually caring about the people that need help.
We have to get to a point where the legislature passes a law that we can actually force people into mental health treatment, whether they want it or not.
Because if you ask someone if they want help who’s suffering from a crisis, mental health crisis, their answer is going to be no.
They don’t think anything’s wrong.
They think you are the one that needs the help.
They think they’re okay.
They’re never going to say yes.
We have to force them in to get them treatment, to get them stabilized, to get them to where they can make rational decisions, to accept their own care and move on.
– Well I think that’s all we have time for.
Thanks so much for joining us.
We appreciate your time.
– Of course.
Thank you.
Up next, my interview with Steve Hilton.
– Mr Hilton, welcome.
– Great to be with you.
– Wonderful.
Let’s get started.
In 1969, Governor Reagan signed the Lanterman Act, creating a cradle to grave entitlement for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities.
It now serves over 500,000 Californians at a cost of about 20 billion a year.
There is no equivalent entitlement for people with severe mental illness.
Do you believe that California should create such an entitlement for serious mental illness?
And if so, what specific revenue or budget trade-offs would you use to pay for it?
– Well, I think that the question is something that we need to discuss with advocates for people in that situation.
I don’t know whether… I mean, first of all, let me just address the budget question.
If we concluded that that was a necessary move, there’s no question that we have the money to pay for it in California.
I understand when we look at these different priorities that people say, well, how you pay for this, how you pay for that?
We’ve doubled the budget of the state of California nearly in the last 10 years.
In the last five years, it’s gone up by 75%.
There’s plenty of money in the budget, and it’s not going to priorities.
Obviously, people with severe mental health problems is a huge priority.
And one of the things that I’ve focused on with mental health is the lack of provision, the lack of facility, the vastly inadequate care that we have in our state.
And so to me, that’s not such so much a question of funding or legislative guarantees, although I’m very open to hearing about that from those who advocate for that.
For me, the most important priority and the most immediate thing is actually quite a straightforward thing that we need to do when it comes to mental health care is to look at something that’s really restricting our ability to provide it in a cost effective manner.
And that is the IMD rule, the Institutions for Mental Disease rule, which was instituted right at the outset of Medicaid.
Remember that for a lot, it doesn’t apply to all mental health care, of course, or people who need it in California.
But for those who are in the Medicaid system in that whole world, then there’s a very, very problematic feature of Medicaid in respect of this, which is the IMD rule, which is right at the initiation of Medicaid, the whole Medicare Medicaid system, which was this at the time a sense that we wanted to move away from large scale institutionalized mental health care in favor of smaller community-based care facilities.
And so you, you have what’s called the 16 bed rule, which means that there’s no Medicaid reimbursement for any mental health care that happens in a facility with more than 16 beds.
And while we can understand the impulse for that at the time, I think we all know that we’ve learned a lot since then, and that we can absolutely find ways to provide compassionate, thoughtful, decent humane mental health care in larger scale, more efficient facilities so that we use the money that as I said is there much more effectively.
So that’s been my priority in this issue.
But I’m very open to conversations about what further steps we need to take.
– Mr.
Hilton, you talk about the 16 bed requirement and the ceiling that puts on potentially looking at some of the options that you’re most interested in.
And we talk about the money that it’s going to take in order to invest to that.
And it is sizable, given the fact that right now, I believe it is that we’ve got 22 beds per hundred thousand people that are afflicted with the types of conditions that this would be an option for versus the 50 per a hundred thousand that the WHO says would be the appropriate standard.
But let’s tie that to some other investment.
The current governor has invested over 16 billion toward behavioral health transformation.
What is the one major structural outcome that you believe must be in place by the end of your first term for those investments, much like the one you just discussed and others to be considered as success?
And how will you measure progress toward that outcome?
– I think the simplest thing, but it’s profound in terms of progress, is I don’t wanna see a single person with severe mental health conditions in our jails or on the streets and that’s where we are right now in California.
And you talk to sheriffs up and down the state, they will tell you that I’ve heard, I mean, these are the proportions that you hear.
I say, well, ’cause it’s well known that because of this inadequate provision, that’s where people who need the help, this serious, thoughtful, compassionate, professional help are in jail.
It is completely barbaric.
You’ve heard people say that the largest mental health facility in America is Los Angeles Central Jail.
This is unacceptable.
That’s gonna 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.
That’s the standard that I think we need to hit.
In terms of the structural change, I do think that we’ve got to be clear about where that money’s going.
And all too often, the money that we spend that taxpayers provide is lost in really, you know, deeply problematic aspects of the bureaucratic management of the system.
You’ve got a lot of special interests that suck up a lot of this money.
You’ve got a lot of lobbying that goes on for certain providers to get support and others not to.
It’s a real mess.
And that’s why when you hear these big numbers, 16 billion, whatever, and the problem doesn’t get better, just as we’ve seen with homelessness, I think we’ve gotta be honest that you’ve got a lot of corruption in the system.
And part of that is the role of the politics of the thing.
And I think that’s what we need in terms of political donations to candidates running for office who then do favors for the people that put them there.
There’s a lot of that that goes on, including with unions, by the way.
Government unions in particular.
That means that the money isn’t going to where it needs to go.
We’ve gotta clear all that out.
But the goal should be that people who need mental health care get the care and are not just discarded in the criminal justice system or on the streets.
– It’s interesting you talk about the current state of homelessness.
I’d like you to react to something because California still has the largest homeless population in the country, but in 2025, there was a 9% drop in unsheltered homelessness, breaking a 15 year trend of growth and suggesting that Housing First and supportive services may be starting to work.
What do you see as the core drivers of homelessness in California beyond what you’ve already described?
And how would you prioritize whatever it is that we are doing today to keep unsheltered homelessness declining?
– Well, first of all, I’m not sure that there’s agreement on the 9% number.
In fact, recently, I heard an NPR report that did a fact check on that.
There was a claim that Gavin Newsom made in his State of the State speech back in January, and it was pointed out that that’s a partial number based on about half of the county’s reporting.
So I think it’s too early to say that that’s a legitimate decline in the overall population in the state.
But apart from that, 9%, it’s completely unacceptable.
Even if that number turns out to be true or even a little bit higher, it’s unacceptable because the fact that this problem has been allowed to metastasize for so long at such a scale where we have, you know, what is it 11% or so of the United States population, but nearly 50% of the unsheltered homeless population.
It’s just completely outrageous.
And you don’t see this in other states.
You don’t see it in other countries.
It’s not acceptable.
And so I think we need to be honest about what’s been going on and the lack of real commitment to seriously ending the crisis rather than managing the crisis.
And I think you’ve got three parts to that process.
And Housing First, I would put in the category of the second step that we need to take, but let me go through it.
Number one, we have to acknowledge that living on the streets, these homeless encampments are illegal.
And of course, we want to act with compassion, with respect to people who are in that awful dire, stressful situation.
Of course we do.
But we also have to think about the public as well.
We have to think about the parent walking their… I heard just recently walking their child to school, to having to step over a dead body in the street and all the problems that are associated with that.
That kind of, the way that we’ve allowed this to happen across the state, we’ve got to be real.
This is against the law, and the law needs to be enforced.
And there’s no excuse for it.
They say politicians at the local level used to hide behind a court ruling, the Boise ruling, you know, many years now, which actually I always considered to be a pretext because in fact, if you read that ruling, the ruling purportedly says that you’re not allowed to remove someone from the streets unless you have sufficient shelter available for the entire homeless population in your area.
But actually, it doesn’t specify what shelter looks like and costs.
It’s been interpreted as meaning permanent supportive housing at a massively inflated cost because of all these other policy failures that have made the cost of that kind of housing rise to sometimes in the Bay Area, a million dollars a unit, which is ridiculous.
But even that pretext has been taken away by the Supreme Court ruling in 2024, Grants Pass versus Oregon which overturned the Boise ruling.
So there’s now no excuse.
So step one is we have to take people out of that condition.
You’re not gonna get anyone’s life back on track if they are still there in that toxic situation, vulnerable to criminals and predators and drug dealers and all the rest of it.
You gotta take people out of that situation, then you have to triage and say, well, what services do people need?
And it’s a combination of drug and alcohol addiction and mental health as we’ve been discussing.
And I’m afraid the Housing First philosophy, I think has been a complete disaster, far from actually leading to an improvement in the situation.
I think it’s the main driver of it.
The fact that you haven’t been able to actually really use any kind of incentive to help people get their lives back on track because since the 2016 law that became known as Housing First, it’s actually against the law for organizations providing services to the homeless with state funding to require sobriety.
Now, last year the legislature passed the Sober Housing Act, which as its name suggests, takes, well, I mean it’s not in the name, but 10% of the budget was to be able to be allocated for housing or shelter that was conditioned upon sobriety.
Newsom vetoed that.
I just think that’s ridiculous.
And in fact, the budget should be a hundred percent.
We are never gonna solve the problem if people aren’t being taken down a path and sometimes that necessarily will be involuntary towards getting their life back on track.
And then the third component is mental health, which we’ve already discussed.
But I really think that one of the keys to making progress on homelessness is actually abandoning the Housing First philosophy.
– Well, you talk about the Housing First philosophy, but many mayors are calling the Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention program called HHAP, they’re saying that that’s a success and that the funding should be ongoing and guaranteed.
Do you support locking in ongoing state homelessness funding to local governments?
And given your pronouncements about this continuum of these three pillars that you’ve discussed, what performance or accountability conditions, if you are in support of the HHAP program, what conditions would you attach in order to move more toward the standard of the solutions you just described?
– Well, we’ve gotta accept that everything… Look, homelessness policy in California is a total catastrophic failure.
Obviously, we can see it with our own eyes.
We see it.
– So you categorically reject the 9% reduction numbers that- – We see the danger.
No.
Well, first of all, if 9% is an accurate number, it’s vastly inadequate.
This problem should have been solved completely.
The number should be 100%.
We are way off target, especially considering the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money that’s been spent on it.
As you know, the state auditor estimated that $24 billion of state spending on homelessness couldn’t be accounted for at all.
In LA, through a separate process, through a court case, the judge ordered an audit there, and then LA, it was interestingly similar number 2.4 billion that couldn’t be audited.
Then when the city controller is actually elected as a democrat socialist wanted to do a detailed audit, the mayor blocked it.
In fact- – Speaking of mayors- – Hang on a second.
– And going back to the HHAP program.
– I wanna go back to the 9%.
I wanna go back to the 9% and just repeat it.
– Alright, but I would ask you to answer whether or not you support the HHAP program.
– What I’m saying is, first of all, the 9% figure is disputed and was disputed by NPR in a fact check of the governor’s speech.
That’s what I’m referring to.
– Okay, point taken.
Point taken.
– Now, in terms of the current spending, I think that the fact that we’ve had this catastrophic failure that’s cost tens of billions of dollars, means that we need a complete review of everything that’s been going on because it’s clearly not working.
Now, of course, it’s possible that within that there are certain projects, or certain initiatives, certain places where you see success.
I mean, of course, we’re a very big state and there’s lots of diversity and approaches around the state, different municipalities.
I’ll absolutely be the first to say that, but overall it’s obvious that we need a completely different approach.
– Okay.
Now let me go back to something that we talked about a few minutes ago.
You were talking about a parent with a child having to step over a deceased person on the street.
This goes to that issue.
While many Californians are frustrated by the visible encampments, the public disorder caused by people who are too sick to voluntarily accept help, some civil liberties group warned that expanding civil commitment and court ordered treatment approaches like the CARE court risk coercing people with mental illness.
Give two specific examples to illustrate where you personally draw the line between an individual’s right to refuse treatment and the public’s interest in safety and order.
And explain and share with us any legal changes that you concretely would propose to move that line.
– Well, I think that it’s common sense really, which is that you don’t have a right to… It’s illegal.
It’s against the law to live on the streets.
I mean, that’s it.
It’s against the law.
I don’t understand how we’ve got ourselves into a situation where we pick and choose which laws are okay to ignore and which we wanna enforce.
I think that’s a recipe for a collapse of trust in society.
It’s corrosive of society when we do that.
And so it’s not a question of my opinion or my judgment, it’s the law.
So let’s enforce the law.
That’s step number one.
– So, okay, so you find the law sufficient.
There’s nothing you’d change, that we’ve already got it on the books, so there’s nothing we need to do in order to change the law in order to be more accurate, more deliberate, more decisive in making the judgment call between when someone needs to be involuntarily committed or allowed to sort of act on their own agency.
– Well, there’s three steps to the process.
The first step is the law enforcement aspect of it is just the beginning of the process where you have to take people off the streets.
If you are on the streets, you have no chance of getting your life back on track.
I’ll put the point this way.
We would never accept someone we love, someone close to us, a family member or friend living in those conditions.
We’d want to get them out of there immediately.
So I don’t understand why we suspend that kind of compassion with respect to people we don’t know.
So that’s the first step is you’ve got to get people out of that terrible, toxic, stressful, dangerous situation of living on the streets.
There, it’s very clear, the law must be enforced, but then you get to the question you are asking about how you get people into the help that they need, whether that’s mental health treatment- – Well actually, Mr.
Hilton, respectfully, let me just enter and say this.
I want to hear about the second, but I do want to hear if there is something in the current law that needs to be changed in order to give the government or families more tools when someone is at a point, where it is that they can’t, they’re not in a place to accept care and someone has to make the decision for them.
Do you have an answer to that?
– I’m not sure but I think I’ve been very clear that we can’t allow people to continue to live on the street.
It’s against the law.
– Alright, let me try it a different way.
– It’s not about the law itself.
It’s about enforcing it.
– Let me try a different way.
Under current involuntary commitment standards, they rely on danger to self or others or being gravely disabled.
And as I just stated, many families and providers feel that these thresholds are both too vague and too high.
Would you change the legal standard for involuntary commitment in California?
– Excuse me.
What you’re describing there is the enforcement standard, not the actual law that it’s not the case that you can legally camp on the street if you happen not to be a danger or if you don’t have the risk of self harm.
That’s not true.
It’s illegal regardless of that.
And so that’s the standard.
It’s very clear.
And so, I’ll just repeat that we have to enforce the law.
Get people out of that situation then you come to the decision as to where they go next but they can’t be on the street.
– Okay.
– Or in the park or in the freeway underpass or all the other places we see homeless encampments.
All of it is illegal.
– Okay.
– Every single one, anywhere in the state is illegal – And we’re gonna have to leave it there.
Our time has come to an end.
Mr.
Hilton, thank you very much for joining us today.
– Of course, great to be with you.
Thank you.
– Alright.
Next, my interview with Matt Mahan.
– Welcome, Mayor Mahan.
Good to see you today.
– Likewise.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
– Alright, let’s get started.
In 1969, Governor Reagan signed the Lanterman Act, creating a cradle-to-grave entitlement for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities.
Now serving roughly half a million Californians at a cost of about 20 billion a year, there are no equivalent entitlements for people with severe mental illness.
Do you believe California should create such an entitlement for serious mental illness?
And if so, what specific revenue or budget trade-offs would you use to pay for it?
– It’s a great question.
I think that we absolutely need to increase our commitment to safe inpatient and indoor environment supportive environments for those suffering from mental health disorders.
We see a crisis on our streets.
Far too many vulnerable neighbors who are literally dying out there because of lack of a safety net don’t know that the state can completely take this on for everyone.
As long as families can support their loved ones, the state should play a supporting role.
But for those who don’t have family members who are there to support them, or can’t anymore, the state has a responsibility to step in and not leave some of our most vulnerable neighbors to live and die on our streets.
I, as a mayor of a big city, seen the impacts, the devastating impacts of untreated, unsupported addiction, mental health care.
And I think that it’s cruel, frankly, to leave people out there.
So I’ve been a real advocate for expanding inpatient treatment.
I think the state needs to add state mental health hospitals.
I think at the county level, we need accountability for adding beds at all levels of acuity.
And I think cities have a role to play from a land use perspective, outreach, and supporting our mental health courts.
– And so from your statement, does that imply, or is that your way of saying that you do support an entitlement?
– I do, I think that the word entitlement implies a potential breadth of applicability and costs that I need to see the model.
I wanna see the mathematical model on how we do it.
Where we are today is, we are so far behind that I wanna start by fully implementing Prop 1 and adding the 10,000 treatment beds, including residential treatment.
I would hold Sacramento accountable for adding hundreds of state mental health hospital beds to provide relief for our counties in the most severe cases where people need long-term custodial care.
I want to implement Prop 36, CARE Courts, SB 43, and really get that system working.
These ideas are all heading in the right direction, but in implementation, we haven’t seen the positive impact that we should be able to see.
On Prop 36, we’ve seen San Diego County, the DA there took it upon herself to connect with behavioral health and the judicial bench bring people together.
She has, in her first year of implementation, 1000 people in a treatment pathway.
96% of people are choosing treatment, and overdose deaths for homeless residents in San Diego County are down 25% in one year.
So these tools can work if we adequately fund and implement them and stitch together our systems.
So working toward an entitlement, yes.
But in a state that has over 100,000 people living outdoors, many of whom now have serious behavioral health challenges, I think the truth is, we’re gonna have to move toward that system.
I don’t think it’s something we can just do overnight.
– Okay, well, the current governor has invested over 16 billion toward behavioral health transformation.
Share with us, what is the one major structural outcome that you believe must be in place at the end of your first term for those investments to be considered a success?
And further, if you could explain to us how will you measure progress toward that outcome?
– Absolutely.
The bottom line is we have made it too slow and too expensive to build in California.
I stood with the governor in support of Prop 1, because we need the 10,000 treatment beds that the measure promises.
But land use and local control and slow approval processes have led to far too beds even getting under construction, or taking existing buildings that need to be remodeled.
We have to be able to move faster in California.
And just as an aside, it isn’t just our deployment of capital investments to expand our healthcare system that’s at stake.
It’s the transformation of our schools.
It’s home building, which is a linchpin of economic opportunity.
It’s upgrading our energy grid to hit our climate goals.
It’s being able to build new infrastructure like high speed rail.
The current regulatory environment isn’t working for us.
So at the end of my first term, I will pursue CEQA streamlining that will make it much easier and faster to site, and build, or if appropriate, remodel structures to be able to provide the outcomes we need.
And those outcomes are reductions in unsheltered homelessness, people in an appropriate setting with case management, with a connection to care and with data around graduation rates.
Some folks may need to be in an institutional setting for the rest of their lives, but for the vast majority of people, that’s not the case.
Our goal should be to stabilize people, help them to get healthier, and really get to as much self-sufficiency as possible on a per-client basis.
And I want to track all of those real world or hard outcomes in people’s lives, and then optimize our system to keep increasing those over time.
But today, whether it’s CEQA, permitting, licensing, we take years to get through the red tape and bureaucracy to deliver the outcomes that we need.
And I’ll be laser focused on being more efficient and getting to those outcomes faster.
– Okay.
Well, California still, you’ll have plenty to work on, ’cause California still has the largest homeless population in the country.
But in 2025, we did see a 9% drop in unsheltered homelessness, breaking a 15-year trend of growth, and suggesting that Housing First and supportive services may be starting to work.
What do you see as the core drivers of homelessness in California, and what would you prioritize to keep unsheltered homelessness declining?
– Well, San Jose and Santa Clara County have really built the model for this.
We’ve reduced unsheltered homelessness in San Jose by nearly one-third over the last four years.
We’ve added more interim housing and transitional housing than any other city in the state.
We’ve taken an all-of-the-above approach.
It isn’t Housing First or something else.
It isn’t just brand new apartments or just prevention.
We’ve really taken an entire continuum of solutions that work together, and I’ll just briefly outline them.
In partnership with our county, we’ve built the nation’s leading prevention model.
Notre Dame University did a randomized control trial and showed the efficacy of our prevention interventions.
We pair a short-term rental subsidy with intensive case management and help people to bridge through an unexpected health issue, or job loss, or messy divorce, or whatever that triggering event might be.
And we keep people indoors, stably housed.
In the middle of this continuum is our commitment to ensuring that none of our vulnerable neighbors are forced to live out in a tent encampment in misery at risk of, you know, exposure to the elements, overdose death, violence, and all the rest.
We’ve built a very robust interim and transitional housing system and moved thousands of people indoors, over 30% of whom have already graduated to permanent housing.
And that gets to the last part of the continuum, which is building affordable housing.
And in San Jose, under my leadership as mayor, we have continued to put hundreds of millions of dollars into affordable housing.
We’ve also given permit approvals, entitlements, and permits to a number of affordable housing projects that only needed tax credits to get under construction.
And so I think it’s really this all-of-the-above approach of preventing homelessness, ensuring no one is left to suffer out on our streets, because we know the immense human suffering, the impacts on the broader community.
The fact that once someone’s been out there for years, it’s harder and harder to help them turn their lives around, and more expensive, and they’ve suffered more.
And then it’s saying yes to housing.
In San Jose, I’m proud that we’ve led the state in adoption of ADUs.
We were the first city to condoize ADUs.
We’ve had a very robust program of funding affordable housing, but not just with local subsidy.
We also say yes to every affordable housing project that uses tax credits from the state and federal government.
And we’ve removed barriers to building market rate housing, because we need all housing types to meet demand.
We broke the housing market and really, our high housing costs and homelessness are a public policy failure, first and foremost, around a lack of housing supply.
– Well, many mayors are calling the homeless housing assistance and prevention funding to be ongoing and guaranteed as one potential solution.
Do you support locking in ongoing state homeless funding to local governments?
And if so, what performance or accountability conditions would you attach?
– It’s a great question.
You’re talking about the HHAP program that the state has funded.
I’ve been one of the leading advocates in the state for ensuring that we have a billion-dollar a year commitment.
I was the first, maybe the only gubernatorial candidate still in this race who committed to keep HHAP funding at $1 billion a year every year as an ongoing commitment.
But paired with that is the other part of your question, which is so important.
We have to be outcome-focused in government, particularly when we’re investing in third parties.
And with HHAP dollars, you have money going to cities, to counties, and to COCs, continuums of care, which are often boards made up of local elected officials, nonprofit leaders, and individuals with lived experience and others.
The outcome that we need is not going to be achieved by simply dividing the pie equally.
It needs to be based on performance.
We need to work with cities, counties, and COCs.
And maybe in some cases, their efforts need to be merged, and they need to be incentivized to integrate their approaches.
That’s what we’ve been doing in our city and county.
We said the city can take the lead on interim.
The county has taken the lead on implementing prevention and building affordable housing.
The county has behavioral health services that we need in our interim system.
And so we’re integrating our city and county approach into a single-service delivery model.
So I think the funding is a carrot, hopefully more than a stick, but is a way to incentivize at the local level the best practices that lead to the outcomes we need.
And what are those outcomes?
It’s the things we’ve been talking about.
First and foremost, nobody should be living outside on the streets.
It’s awful for those individuals.
Their situation deteriorates.
They’re more likely to be at risk of violence and death and the ability to help them, it becomes harder and harder to help people turn their lives around.
And the impacts on everybody else are so significant and the fiscal cost, so everybody should be indoors.
That’s gotta be priority number one.
We should be reducing the inflow of homelessness by investing heavily in prevention that works to have fewer and fewer people become homeless every year.
We need to, when we get someone indoors, quickly connect them to case management, stabilize them, and help them turn their lives around.
And the long game is we have to hold every city and county accountable for building its fair share of housing at all levels of income.
And we shouldn’t be pitting one type of housing against another.
Market rate housing adds to the housing supply, and over time, it ages into affordability and takes less, and takes pressure off the rest of the system.
So let’s, and it’s worth noting, when we build affordable housing through government, we often spend 30% more per unit than the market spends to build market rates.
So I’m not for demonizing anybody, but I just think we need all of the above, all of these different approaches to increasing housing supply, to bring it in better balance with job and population growth.
– It’s interesting you say that, because without that all-of-above, many Californians are frustrated by the visible encampments and public disorder caused by people who are too sick to voluntarily accept help.
And some civil liberties groups are warning that expanding civil commitment and court order treatment approaches like the CARE Court, risk coercing people with mental illness.
Give two specific examples that illustrate where you are personally, and would draw the line between an individual’s right to refuse treatment and the public’s interest in safety and order, and explain any legal changes that you might make if you would propose to move that line.
– Yeah, it’s one of the toughest issues facing California, because we pride ourselves on our individuality, our difference in diversity and free expression.
And we really believe deeply in civil liberties.
And at the same time, we see immense suffering on our streets.
And we see thousands of people who have died.
In fact, in the last 10 years in California, we’ve had nearly 50,000 people die on our streets, nearly half from overdose and suicide.
And I don’t think that that’s compassionate.
I don’t think it’s progressive.
I’ve had personal experience with these issues.
I have a cousin who spent a couple of years on the streets due to severe addiction.
I remember stories of my aunt and uncle just being devastated and looking for him on the streets.
I have a very close friend of mine who, when we were about 20 years old, was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder.
And I spent quite a few weeks in a mental health hospital with him on the East Coast, where we were going to college.
So I’ve seen that when people are deep in the throes of addiction to something as addictive as meth or fentanyl, or the combination of the two, or have a serious behavioral health, mental health disorder, the compassionate thing to do is to intervene.
And yes, that may look like it may, in fact, be a temporary suspension of certain civil liberties.
Now I think when that happens, there have to be very strict protocols.
There have to be checks and balances.
There has to be oversight.
You know, if somebody is in a drug court, you need a clinical, or if somebody’s in a mental health court, you need a clinical opinion.
And so there has to be a level of professionalism and oversight and accountability.
And I don’t believe for the vast majority, vast 99-plus percent of people that long-term institutionalization in a, say, a state mental health hospital is ever necessary.
But our failure to intervene more aggressively immediately and for a short duration is actually leading to more long-term issues and more suffering and more death.
And so the model I would like California to experiment with is one in which we make our drug and mental health courts more robust for mandating treatment, including involuntary treatment for short periods of time.
I think the duration matters.
I think if you catch it early, and get somebody stabilized for 30 days in a supportive environment, and then have residential treatment where you have transitional housing, the person’s totally free to come and go.
But they’re not back in a tent encampment, and not that everybody who’s in this situation is homeless, to be clear.
Neither my cousin nor my close friend started out homeless, at least.
But without that intervention early and for a reasonable duration of time and having a slightly higher bar for re-releasing someone, we’re letting people deteriorate and die.
And so the current 5150 hold doesn’t really work for many people.
You talk to police officers, firefighters, nurses, the people in the emergency psychiatric service, they see the same people endlessly who come in, get hydrated, get in a slightly better position, answer the three questions, and they’re back out in 24 hours and then eventually become so severe, they’re back in the emergency room, they’re back at EPS, they’re in the county jail, or they’ve just died of an overdose.
Surely we can do better.
– Exactly, and but one of those things in terms of the interventions you’re talking about, that getting that type of help to those individuals is that current involuntary commitment standards rely on a danger to self and/or others, or being gravely disabled.
And many families and providers say these thresholds are both too vague and too high.
What would you- – I completely agree.
– Okay, so the question for you is this, what would you change in terms of the legal standard for involuntary commitment in California?
And if so, how exactly would you change them?
– Well, I think you’ve hit on the core legal issue here, and I worked with Senator Susan Eggman when she was serving in Sacramento, in the legislature on this very issue.
This is what SB 43 was about.
And I don’t think we did enough there, frankly.
I think that the interpretation of danger to self and gravely disabled is too narrow.
And I will say right now, what I would do as governor is create, and I don’t want this to drag on forever or be a thousand-page report, but I would create a diverse stakeholder group that includes people with lived experience, clinicians, and physicians, and psychiatrists, lawyers.
And even though I know they’re very resistant, representative from the ACLU, but I would task that commission with giving us a durable legal theory for where the line should be, and a clearer definition that’s informed by science, but has, as its North Star, saving lives by intervening earlier and more pragmatically to help people get on a different path.
And I just, I think the data at the population level in California is very clear, and that it’s not working.
When you have tens of thousands of people in a decade die on your street of overdose and suicide, the pendulum has gone too far, meaning the definition of danger to self or gravely disabled is too narrow.
But I think what’s important is, as we expand that, again, clear definition that expands it, because I think if you’re cycling through these systems, and you’re out on the streets passed out, and you’re refusing help, and you’re endlessly cycling, you are a danger to yourself.
Whether it’s of overdose or getting hit by a car at some point, living outside and refusing help repeatedly, and ultimately ending up in emergency rooms and county jail, at some point, there’s gotta be a threshold where you’re a danger to yourself.
That’s at least a common sense definition.
But we need a clearer clinical and legal definition.
I totally get that.
That has to then come with oversight, with accountability, with the ability to kind of scrutinize, have we gotten it right or not?
Because I don’t think you ever just make a change and it’s fixed.
There’s always unintended consequences.
We gotta really look closely at it.
We’re talking about human beings and their freedom and their lives here.
And it’s important to me.
I think that it’s really important that we start with that whatever expansion of definition comes with a commitment, that any involuntary commitment is short, short-ish term, long enough to provide stability and care, 30, 60 days, but short enough that we haven’t done irreparable harm by restricting someone’s freedom.
– And I think we will leave it there.
(Mayor Mahan laughs) – Thank you so much, Scott.
– Mayor Mahan, pleasure to meet you.
– Likewise, pleasure to meet you.
Thank you so much.
And now, Marisa’s interview with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
– All right.
And thanks again so much for being with us today.
Let’s get started.
So in 1969, Governor Reagan signed the Lanterman Act, creating a cradle to grave entitlement for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities, now serving roughly 500,000 Californians at a cost of about $20 billion a year.
There is no equivalent entitlement for people with severe mental illness.
Do you believe California should create such an entitlement for serious mental illness?
And if so, what specific revenue or budget trade offs would you use to pay for it?
– Well, first of all, thank you for having me on.
Let me just say this.
The Lanterman Act was a great piece of legislation, but it should have included mental health and behavioral health.
It didn’t.
I’ve been arguing that we need a lot more money for mental health parity.
I supported the MCO tax because I believe that one of the reasons we don’t have enough mental health professionals is because we don’t have mental health parity.
Where would we get the money?
Well, as you know, we had two propositions for mental health and behavioral health.
I think one was by Steinberg, and I don’t recall who was the author of the other one, theyre state monies that we have to invest here with respect to mental and behavioral health.
But as I said, you could have all the money in the world and if you don’t have the mental health professionals, you don’t have the appropriate reimbursement rate for mental health as you do for physical health, we’re gonna continue to go through this crisis.
And right now, let’s be clear, since COVID, you know, we’re social animals, we live in communities, people are alone.
And you’ve seen a mental health crisis of, you know, enormous proportions, not just here in California, but around the country.
And particularly with young people.
Young people, currently, it’s a public health crisis when it’s the number one killer of young people right now.
So I think we have mechanisms in state to do this, but we’ve gotta do it with intention.
And the problem with Sacramento right now, we create a lot of laws, we set a lot of goals, and then we don’t work on meeting them.
The next governor’s gotta work on meeting them.
And I will, I have a record of doing that both as mayor and as speaker.
– Yeah, to follow up on that, you know, the current governor has invested over $16 billion towards behavioral health transformation.
What is one major structural outcome that you believe must be in place at the end of your first term for those investments to be considered a success?
And how would you measure progress toward that outcome?
– Well, I think you just said it.
We have to measure progress.
One of the things I did was had dashboards across the board, dashboards for housing, for affordable housing, for market rate, for homeless housing.
I actually built more homeless housing in eight years than the 12 years before that.
And four of those years, I was in a recession, you know, really tightening the belt.
So I think the goal has to be that we have to increase the number of mental health professionals, that we have to make sure, as an example, the CARE courts, which I supported, are actually working.
Currently, they’re not.
I know with the initiative that was passed, I think in 2025 or 2024, we were supposed to build 10 projects.
None of them are off the ground right now.
So projects like that need to be on a dashboard with people and metrics associated with them.
That’s how you get to go and that’s what I’ll do.
A chief executive, and you know, when you’re mayor of LA, I was speaker of the assembly, as you know, and I balanced two budgets with a surplus, with a Republican governor and a Democratic one.
But when you’re been mayor of LA, that’s the job closest to being a chief executive.
And what I understood, the council passed the laws.
I had to implement them.
And that’s what the governor’s office has gotta focus on, and the agency’s gotta focus on.
Let’s start driving results on CARE courts, on housing, on services that work.
I believe that that is what job number one for the next governor is.
– You mentioned CARE courts not working.
How would you fix it?
– Look, I think we gotta hold counties accountable.
They were supposed to implement them.
It’s been a very spotty record throughout the state.
Virtually no county is really exemplary in terms of fulfilling that mission.
There are a couple I’ve heard, but most of them aren’t.
And what you do when youre governor is, you say you won’t get money, you’ll be held accountable if you don’t start the implementation process.
You mentioned Ronald Reagan.
You know, Sacramento loves to talk about, Marisa, that Ronald Reagan got rid of mental health units, you know, mental health hospitals and the like.
Well, we’ve been in office for 28 years.
Why haven’t we opened them?
We need locked mental institutions for people.
That’s what the CARE courts provide us an opportunity to do.
There are people who are a threat to themselves and others whose family members wanna commit them because they don’t want them on the street.
That’s not compassionate.
They want ’em getting the care, the services they need, Marisa.
But if we’re not utilizing those CARE courts to be able to do that, if we’re not building the locked facilities, then what you have on the streets is chaos.
I’ve made it really clear, Marisa, I’m not for criminalizing homeless.
I am for compassion, but I’m not for chaos.
I’ve seen as I go up and down the state, people are calling for draconian responses to homelessness, which I don’t support.
But I’ll tell you something.
People will start to support them.
And what is chaos?
Selling drugs in front of cops, you know, defecating on the street when there’s an outhouse right next to where you’re at, you know, encampments in front of schools and parks.
We know what neighborhoods they’ll be in.
People find that is chaotic.
So the next governor’s gotta hold the line on CARE courts on projects that are supposed to, that have been funded, that need to be built on the mental health parity issue on the career technical, you know, education, so that we’re getting those mental health professionals working with community colleges, the CSU’s, the UC’s for the workforce development.
Right now, people don’t wanna get in that profession ’cause there aren’t enough jobs, even though there’s a big need.
And when there are jobs, they’re not getting paid what they need to get paid to be able to survive.
Affordability is a big challenge facing us in this state and a challenge that I’ve spoken to and have a plan to address.
– Yeah, thank you for that.
And we’ll return to mental health funding, but let’s also talk a little bit about homelessness.
So for the next question, California still has the largest homeless population in the country, but 2025 saw a 9% drop in unsheltered homelessness, which broke a 15 year trend of growth and suggests that housing first and supportive services may be starting to work.
What do you see as the core drivers of homelessness in California and what would you prioritize to keep unsheltered homelessness declining?
– I think the high cost of housing and rent is driving a lot of the homeless problem or challenge in this state.
I think you said the state has done a lot, but we spent $24 billion on homelessness and homelessness went up during that period.
The LAO did a study, they could only determine the two programs out of the dozens of programs that were being funded actually work.
Rental Assistance and Homekey, which I think down here in LA, they call Inside Safe, which is, you know, temporary housing, The average unit costs $850,000.
That’s not sustainable.
In Santa Monica, it was $1.2 million.
Tiny homes, and I just visited City of the Hope mission rather in the San Fernando Valley, the largest provider of homeless housing in the state.
They’re in Bakersfield, Fresno, San Diego, and Los Angeles.
And they’re building tiny homes for 30 and 40,000.
And they say that we can build them for a hundred thousand, but instead we’re focusing on things that aren’t sustainable.
And $850,000 units are not sustainable when the number of people that are on the streets.
So I think housing is definitely the first and most important issue.
But we have a drug problem in this state on the streets of California, and we have a mental health crisis, a behavioral health crisis.
And that’s why CARE courts are important and that’s why providing the support for these people is essential, the permanent supportive services.
I mentioned I did more housing in eight years, than the 12 years before me.
We had a fraction of the homeless that we have today, but we paired it with the county who provided the permanent supportive housing.
But even back then, we didn’t realize there are opportunities like, you know, tiny homes that we can invest in that we also have to look at.
– Thank you.
And to follow up on that, you know, many mayors are calling for the homeless housing assistance and prevention or HHAP funding to be ongoing and guaranteed.
Do you support locking in ongoing state homelessness funding for local governments?
And if so, what performance or accountability conditions would you attach?
– You said it.
The answer is yes, but only if there’s accountability.
The only way we can move away from a $24 billion expenditure in the part of the state that solved well during that period, no progress.
It actually went in the other direction.
There has been some progress in some cities, including my city under Mayor Bass.
But we need to see broader and deeper progress throughout the state.
And so yes, I will set accountability metrics on each city and county.
We will work with them and collaborate with ’em.
I’ve been a mayor and I’ve been a speaker, so I’m the only one with that kind of experience.
I balance both the city budget and a state budget.
So I know this, you can’t throw money at programs that don’t work.
And so far, the LAO, I’m not saying it, the LAO has said it, we spent a lot of money and we don’t know where it went.
There could be fraud and abuse.
We don’t know where it went, but we know this, it didn’t work.
So yes, more housing, yes, more services for, you know, permanent supportive services for mentally ill and drug rehab.
But yes, those programs, there’s gotta be accountability to make sure they work.
So won’t just be money, there will be metrics and results at the end of the rainbow or there won’t be money.
– Thank you.
And let’s talk more about something else you mentioned earlier, which is involuntary treatment.
While many Californians are frustrated by visible encampments and public disorder caused by people who are too sick to voluntarily accept help, some civil liberties groups warn that expanding civil commitment and court ordered treatment approaches such as CARE court risks coercing people with mental illness.
Give two specific examples that illustrate where you personally draw the line between an individual’s right to refuse treatment and the public’s interest in safety and order and explain any legal changes you had proposed to move that line.
– The reason why I supported the governor in the establishment of CARE courts, and I’m a former president of the ACLU of Southern California, I believe in civil liberties.
I watched with horror “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” where in the 1950s it was too easy to put people in a mental institution.
Now it’s virtually impossible, Marisa.
And while I’ve heard from those advocates, and I agree with them, we’ve gotta protect civil liberties, civil rights.
We can’t just commit people because they’re acting out as an example.
But where they’re a threat to themselves and others, where they’ve engaged in violence and particularly, where family members have argued they need compassionate care.
Then we can’t afraid be afraid to make the tough calls.
So I don’t have two examples per se, but I do know this, the notion that there’s a slippery slope.
The same people that say we shouldn’t have CARE courts are the first to criticize Ronald Reagan for closing them the locked mental institutions.
You know that, I know that.
When you’re a governor, you’re not looking for the perfect, you’re looking for the good, what’s good for most of us.
What scares me about the chaos that we see and the public disorder is you’re starting to see people say really draconian things about the homeless.
And I’m not that guy, you know, but there for the grace of God go so many of us.
We’re one paycheck from homelessness.
So I believe in compassion.
But I think it is compassionate to commit people who are a threat to themselves and others who are clearly mentally ill to those locked institutions.
Now we won’t do it like they did in the 1950s, but this notion of slippery slope, while a slippery slope is something you always gotta care against, you can’t use that as an excuse for doing nothing.
And too many of those people wanna do nothing.
When I say I’m for compassion, not chaos, I’m for common sense, not chaos.
– Yeah.
Let’s dig a little bit more deeply into that.
Like you mentioned, the current involuntary commitment standards rely on the quote unquote “danger to self for others” or being quote unquote, “gravely disabled.”
And like you said, many families and providers say these thresholds are both too vague and too high.
How would you change that legal standard?
– Well, I’d work with, you know, therapists, experts in the field with a broad cross section of stakeholders, but people who wanna look at the science and not the emotion, who understand that you can set standards that work.
They won’t be perfect again.
But they work, they work better than what we have right now.
Right now, as you said, those standards are too broad.
But, you know, we’re intelligent people.
You know, if we can send somebody to the moon, we could figure that out.
And not everybody will agree with those standards for sure, but we’ll have standards.
So I won’t hide behind the notion that they’re not perfect, What we want is things that work for more people than are currently being served.
So I do believe we need locked mental facilities.
I think they should be more community focused.
They should have compassionate care and quality therapy associated with them.
But I don’t believe that people have, as some do that, you know, because it’s hard to come up with a standard that we shouldn’t try and that we shouldn’t have a standard.
Why is it Marisa, that you go around the world and I know you’ve traveled to other places, you go around the world and you don’t see the number of homeless you see here, and they’re democratic countries that, you know, are compassionate that follow the science?
We can do that too, but that’s leadership.
You know, if you’re looking to be the most popular person, if you’re looking for everyone to love you… I like dogs.
I say go get a dog.
These are jobs where you’re gotta make tough calls.
These are jobs where you gotta say, “We’ve got a big problem here.
We’ve gotta work together to solve it.”
But I intend to work with the science, with the experts who can, you know, help me come up, help us come up with the right mix of programs, the right standards.
But I know this, there are too many mentally ill people who are threat to themselves and others on the streets of California cities.
You seen it and I’ve seen it.
If you write enough articles, you’ve seen it.
– Yeah, absolutely.
We have about one minute left.
So just quickly, I’ll ask one more question.
The Medi-Cal system is a key safety net for people who are poor and at risk of homelessness.
Right now, Medi-Cal patients often get primary care in one place, mental health care in another, and substance use treatment in a third with county carve-outs creating constant handoffs and gaps.
What specific structural reforms will you commit to in your first term to end or significantly shrink this fragmentation?
And who should ultimately be accountable for a person’s care across these systems?
– I think for the unhoused, it has to be counties and it has to be one stop, you know, a place where they can deal with all three issues where they’re working together, the providers are working together and know the specific situation in all three of those buckets or those areas.
I think that’s how you do it.
That’s how I’ve done it in the past.
You know, when we were building permanent supportive housing, you bring the different agencies that approve ’em all in one place.
– Gotcha.
Well, that’s all we have time for.
Thank you so much for joining us, – Marisa, thank you.
And I’ve read some of your articles, really appreciate your work.
– Oh, thanks so much.
You heard different theories of the problem.
Different instincts about the role of government in addressing homelessness and its related mental health issues.
And different visions of what success would even look like.
The choice of who advances to November and who governs California through the next chapter of the state’s efforts regarding homelessness and mental illness, is in the voters hands.
Our thanks to the candidates who accepted our invitation and to our partners, the Steinberg Institute and CalMatters.
For Abridged by PBS KVIE, I’m Scott Syphax, remember to vote.