California’s homelessness crisis didn’t start with Gavin Newsom, but it has reached a breaking point on his watch. The state has spent tens of billions of dollars on “housing first” and “harm reduction” programs, and the results have been disastrous. One factor largely outside his control is that, since the 1960s, state mental health facilities have been shut down, and new laws have made it practically impossible to involuntarily commit people with severe mental illness—even when their families agree. Add in the “Summer of Love” drug culture, postmodern theories that blurred the line between illness and identity, and decades of throwing money at the problem, and you get what we see today: a mental health collapse playing out on the streets of California.