Perusing the press release from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office about California municipalities being awarded $130 million in “Encampment Resolution Funds” — in other words, efforts to clear homeless encampments, as part of the governor’s new focus on doing so, rather than just letting them be in all their blue-tarped tragic infamy — I noticed that Pasadena was the only San Gabriel Valley or Whittier-area city to get new money.

I also noted that of the 18 cities and counties that will be getting the money, Pasadena will be getting the smallest amount.

Hey, where’s the love? Our sad encampments, the shame of the supposedly civilized world, the likes of which I have never seen in recent travels to two other continents and even to Mexico City, are at least as terrible as other cities’, right?

Pasadena was given $2.7 million, which sounds like a lot of scratch. But similarly sized Berkeley, with a similar homelessness crisis, got $5.3 million. Smaller Antioch got $6.8 million. Palm Springs, at about a third Pasadena’s size with 45,000 residents, got $5.1 million. Really big places like the city of Los Angeles and San Bernardino County, the nation’s largest in square miles, got $11 million each.

But then I did note some discrepancies insofar as a strict size-to-grant amount goes. Huge San Jose, the largest city in Northern California at about 1 million people, got “just” $4.8 million. And another thing is that the local grant is to Pasadena’s Continuum of Care, a public-private partnership fighting homelessness, not to the city or county governments themselves, as in most of the other cases except for Humboldt County, whose CofC also got its also-smallish award.

Bill Huang, Pasadena’s first and quite exemplary housing director, who just announced his retirement this week after 15 years of competent and smart service, confirmed that in a brief recent note written before I’d realized he was stepping down.

“Pasadena’s CoC is the smallest in the state (small but mighty),” he wrote.

And Huang is rightly proud of the fact that, while far too many people are still living rough on the streets of the Crown City, the homeless population here has dropped by 50% since 2011.

“I have been blessed to have been able to work together with many others to increase the availability of affordable housing in Pasadena and to decrease the overall homeless population at the same time,” Bill told our Teresa Liu in a statement. But he knows things are still bad: “I am certain the homeless and affordable housing crisis will remain a top priority for the city in the years to come.”

I am certain of that, too. And I am fairly certain as well that some of the bigger awards may have been given to California cities with more of a commitment to rousting homeless encampments for rousting’s sake than the Pasadena City Council has been ever since the governor announced his new get-tough approach, without necessarily pointing the way toward any places for people without homes to live.

The organization that manages the Continuum of Care looks at the tragedy this practical way: “The Pasadena Partnership believes that as a community, we can end homelessness. The solution is surprisingly simple — housing.”

Couldn’t be more correct. Thanks so much, Bill, for your own continuum of care for the underhoused in the community.

Wednesday at random

It’s still 11 months away, but where are the local huzzahs for the Rose Bowl landing one of the biggest rock concert tours of recent years, the September 2025 Britpop invasion that is the return of the quarreling Gallagher brothers and their band Oasis? Take that, SoFi! And as soon as the Saturday night Sept. 5 event was announced, the giant stadium was sold out, and they added Sunday night as well. ... Before the selection of the new Tournament of Roses Royal Court, you might recall I mused in this space about what widening the geographical area of eligibility for the first time in over a century might do. I imagined more bohemian, kohl-eyed types from Eagle Rock and Highland Park becoming princesses and a queen, with attendant Goth tattoos. Nope. In the event, the seven new members are all from Pasadena, La Cañada Flintridge and Arcadia schools, as ever. And I’m sure they’re all great kids, as ever.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com