California is the worst-run state in the country. It should serve as no surprise that it is littered with broken promises from its Democratic leaders.
Writing for CalMatters, Manuela Tobias details how Gov. Gavin Newsom has come nowhere near reaching his campaign promise of building 3.5 million homes by 2025. “Just 13% of the 3.5 million homes he campaigned on building have been permitted, let alone built,” Tobias notes. Unsurprisingly, Newsom has lowered his goal to 2.5 million and pushed the timeline back to 2030.
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To illustrate how far off Newsom is from hitting his pledge, his goal of 3.5 million by 2025 would require the state to build around 500,000 homes per year. Instead, California has built 452,000 in four years. Newsom has been on the job for four years and hasn’t even hit the mark he needed to hit in Year 1.
Newsom has nothing to boast about here, but that’s not stopping him.
“The biggest risk in life, however one defines risk, is not that we aim too high and miss it. It’s that we aim too low and reach it,” Newsom said, paraphrasing Michelangelo. “It was always a stretch goal.”
So Newsom is boasting not about results, but about promising voters things he knows he can never reach.
This is not a new strategy for California Democrats either. The most prominent example is the high-speed rail line, which was pitched as going from Los Angeles to San Francisco, costing $33 billion, beginning construction in 2012. It was supposed to be completed in 2020. Instead, the rail has been focused on a shorter track from Merced to Bakersfield that won’t be done until 2030, and its price has ballooned from $33 billion to $98 billion to $113 billion. The project started construction three years late, and it “could not be completed in this century.”
It’s not a new strategy for Newsom either. He is a mediocrity who failed upward to the governor’s mansion. Before that, when he was mayor of San Francisco, he promised to end homelessness in that city within 10 years. That was in 2008. By 2013, the city had 1,200 more homeless people, and it has added another 700 since then. As a state, California has 28% of the nation’s homeless population despite having only 12% of the country’s overall population.
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At the end of the day, most California voters just don’t care that Democrats never intend to live up to their campaign promises. Newsom never ended homelessness, but he went on to become the lieutenant governor and later governor. No one will hold his housing failures against him, just as no one has held the high-speed rail disaster against Democrats either. Democrats will continue to lie to voters and win elections in California, and Californians will be worse off for it.
