Poors, watch out! Gavin Newsom’s on a homeless hunt with a trash bag and TV crew | Opinion

If I were California Gov. Gavin Newsom right now, I’d fire my comms staff for giving me the stupidest PR advice possible.

What bizarro world are Newsom’s advisors living in to so willingly promote the image of a governor — a man with a personal fortune estimated at around $20 million — actively moving poor people’s belongings on the streets of Los Angeles County?

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Because that’s where dear ol’ Gavie was on Thursday morning, at a homeless camp in the San Fernando Valley, for the benefit of television cameras invited to document the governor’s ill-advised sojourn.

He took his frustrations out on a homeless camp where the governor’s grabby hands and toothy smile delivered a politician’s promise to strip state funding from counties that don’t do more to alleviate homelessness.

“I want to see results,” Newsom told reporters at a news conference, after issuing an edict to state agencies last month to start removing homeless encampments on state land.

“I don’t want to read about them. I don’t want to see the data,” he said, “I want to see it.”

Newsom is not wrong for going after county governments like the one in Sacramento. For years, the Sacramento County Supervisors and the bureaucrats they oversee have been shamefully slow to react as the homeless crisis has gotten worse.

Newsom could be using the force of his office to pressure county governments like Sacramento’s to do more to house homeless people or connect them with services. But simply moving homeless people around when they have no place to go solves nothing.

The state has a crisis that has only grown worse for everyone under Newsom’s watch. Posing for pictures with a black trash bag helps no one and could harm the very people who most deserve the governor’s support if the governments Newsom is targeting follow his lead, roust some homeless camps and do little else.

.Never mind that sweeps kill, especially in extreme weather conditions such as California’s summer heat and wintertime floods. A study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “encampment sweeps, bans, move-along-orders and cleanups that forcibly relocate individuals away from essential services (leads to) substantial increases in overdose deaths, life-threatening infections and hospitalizations.”

And never mind that — once swept — where are homeless people going to go?

Gavie. Baby. Do you think homeless people can be made to disappear like your credibility did after that party at the French Laundry? That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Why can’t Newsom go harass the wealthy neighborhoods that refuse to build their fair share of affordable housing, like San Francisco’s Portola Valley, LA’s La Canada Flintridge, or the cities of Redondo Beach, Carson, Torrance, Whittier and Del Mar? Those latter five successfully challenged Senate Bill 9 earlier this year, a landmark state law designed to ensure access to affordable housing by ending single-family zoning. It was struck down by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge in April.

Instead, Newsom’s PR team would have us believe that his blatant posturing on Thursday was about “compassion,” but I see little compassion in having the governor use the only belongings some people have in this world for a photo op.

Thankfully, this stunt was met by the public on social media with the same level of seriousness Newsom put into the effort: One person wrote online that it was appalling to see the governor “personally harassing homeless people who have nothing. I think God is making sure he is going straight to Hell.”

Another speculated that it was likely “more manual labor than (Newsom’s) ever done before.” We can only pray his manicure wasn’t damaged.

In truth, the only thing Newsom’s posturing in Mission Hills accomplished was to set an egregious example of how not to frame California’s long overdue homeless response.

It was still somehow less egregious than the 181,000 homeless people living in desperate poverty — and then publicly shamed for it by their gormless leaders.