Ezra Klein

What would be your relationship to that project?

And more broadly, what do you think of the kind of master planning projects that led to Irvine?

Mr. Becerra, as secretary of HHS, you oversaw one of the federal agencies is most directly involved in homelessness policy.

The Biden administration largely embraced housing first as the dominant federal framework.

California spent something like $24 billion on homelessness from 2018 to 2023, mostly within that framework.

And the unsheltered population has continued to grow.

What went wrong?

Excuse me.

Hold it till the end.

You mentioned seeing much of homelessness as a mental health question.

One of the difficult questions within that conversation is the role of coercion.

What do you do when people are on the street having mental health problems and they don't want to go in for treatment?

They don't want to go into a home.

What would your approach to that be?

When you say that you wanna see, hold the applause.

When you say that you wanna see more accountability in the homelessness programs,

That's not a new thing to hear from leaders, right?

It's not like Governor Newsom doesn't want accountability in the homelessness policies that he puts forward.

When I've talked to mayors of major cities, they talk about this.

So very specifically, what would you do that has not already been done?