Looming, however, was the inevitable drop.

For all the wealth and all the leadership the state shows in fighting climate change, Mr. Newsom said, California cannot ignore that it is also home to a housing crisis that has led to hundreds of thousands of people living on the streets or in their cars.

“Let’s call it what it is,” the governor said. “A disgrace.”

Mr. Newsom took the rare step of devoting almost all of his address to housing and homelessness. (He didn’t mention, for instance, high-speed rail or the slow-moving war over the future of PG&E, the state’s biggest utility.)

But Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles, told me he found that locking into one issue was an effective approach for Mr. Newsom, who’s been accused in the past of trying to do too much.

“It allowed him to use his detail skill and focus it,” Mr. Sonenshein said. “Whether the policies get carried out or not is something else.”

Here’s what else stood out in the speech:

Mr. Newsom wove in a history lesson about the roots of the housing crisis.

This included a direct acknowledgment of the role of racism in shaping the state as we know it.