San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

Having shared my motivations as well as I understand them myself, it is to the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast that we can now turn.

In 1977, a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors invited reporters to a press conference at a local park. He said he was going to announce legislation essential to improving the quality of life in the city. With a pack of cameras waiting for him, the man walked across the grass toward them before stopping, making a face, and lifting up his foot to look at the bottom of his shoe only to discover, in feigned horror, that he had stepped in dog poop. After pretending to be surprised, and flashing a big smile, the man turned toward the cameras and announced legislation he would introduce, once elected, that required San Franciscans to pick up their dogs’ poop.

Shortly after taking office in 1978, Milk introduced the “Scoop the Poop” Act,3 which by the end of the summer the Board of Supervisors had passed.4 Afterward, a journalist said to Milk, “The police department says it may be hard to enforce this,” to which Milk replied, beaming, “I think it will be easy based on peer pressure. It’s going to be hard to write citations. But when a San Franciscan is walking down the street and sees someone breaking the law you say ‘Hey!’—with a smile—‘You broke the law.’

San Francisco replaced more than three hundred lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.8

Over the last decades there were many visible signs that homelessness was about much more than poverty and housing. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of calls made to San Francisco’s 311 line complaining of used hypodermic needles on sidewalks, in parks, and elsewhere rose from 224 to 6,275.37 In 2018, footage of dozens of people slumped over in an entrance to a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station, many with needles in their arm, went viral.38 “We call it the heroin freeze,” said one local. “They can stay that way for hours.”39 Said another, “It’s like the land of the living dead.”

Utah garnered widespread media attention after state officials claimed a 91 percent decline in chronic homelessness because of its adoption of Housing First.50 The Los Angeles Times declared, “Utah is winning the war on chronic homelessness with ‘Housing First.’”51 Said NBC, “Utah is battling homelessness by giving the needy shelter first and then aiding them with job placement, and it’s working.”52 Housing First provides housing without conditions. There is “no empirical support for the practice of requiring individuals to participate in psychiatric treatment or attain sobriety before being housed,” wrote founder of Housing First Sam Tsemberis.53 Kushel agreed. “You hear people saying things like, ‘You can’t just house people who have addiction problems.’ You can, and you must.”54 The George W. Bush administration made Housing First federal policy. It helped cities and states create plans to end chronic homelessness in ten years through permanent supportive housing, and provided money after they had done so. By 2009, more than two hundred cities and states had done so.

permanent supportive housing provider in the Tenderloin told me, “It’s absolutely undisputed that the homeless crisis in America began after severe cuts to federal affordable housing funds.”62 And an ACLU expert said, “The Reagan administration slashed the budget for our federal affordable housing programs by eighty percent.”63 But public spending on housing barely changed under Reagan, going from $41.8 billion to $40.6 billion between 1981 and 1989, in constant 2019 dollars.64 Reagan did oversee the end of public housing construction, but this was in the context of a shift away from federal housing projects toward rental subsidies which began under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and for good reason.

had been built with the greatest of progressive and liberal intentions: to provide former residents of poor neighbors with modern apartment units. But they became infamous for concentrating poverty, crime, and violence.

occupancy hotels occurred within the broader progressive movement. Democrats until the late 1960s were pro-development, and had led efforts to demolish slums, build public housing, and revitalize the inner city. But starting in the late 1960s, Baby Boomers and the New Left turned against redevelopment. They were inspired by an influential 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, which blamed redevelopment, like that which had occurred in the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco, for destroying neighborhoods with freeways and high-rises, evicting low-income residents, and making them unlivable, as compared to highly walkable neighborhoods like Greenwich Village. But redevelopment occurred in Greenwich Village whereas the city of San Francisco increasingly subsidized housing for the homeless in the Tenderloin’s single resident occupancy hotels, which have for decades been dominated by a culture of heavy substance use and prostitution. “Of the people in supportive housing in San Francisco, 93 percent have a major mental illness that we can name,” said a housing policy maker. “That is very, very high. Eighty percent use cocaine, speed, or heroin every thirty days, or get drunk to the point of unconsciousness.”72

“On one side of the street are people giving you food and clean needles,” Corey told her. “On the other side of the street are all the drug dealers. It’s like getting all the candy and treats that you think you want. You think you’re having fun. But little by little it’s taking away your humanity and turning you into something you were never meant to be, like how the kids start turning into donkeys in Pinocchio, and then end up trapped and in cages.”23 “We watched the movie when he was a boy,” said Jacqui, “and so it totally made sense to me that he felt like one of the poor donkeys trying to break free, with the drug dealers giving them treats and enslaving them and taking away their humanity and they had no way to escape.”

When I asked a major provider of housing for the homeless in the Tenderloin, Randy Shaw, whether people come to San Francisco for the drugs he said, without hesitation, “Yes, one hundred percent. No doubt about it. We have the worst overdose rate of any city in the country.” Matt Haney, the San Francisco supervisor who represents the Tenderloin, told me, “Undoubtedly there are some people who come here because they are sick with addiction. This is a place where you can access drugs more easily.”

When people arrive in San Francisco, they often discover there isn’t room in the shelters for them. “People come from all over the United States, thinking it’s some sort of spa here,” said a homeless man, “some sort of nirvana here. And they find out that it’s very expensive to live here.”26 The same was true in Los Angeles. “For the first time in 13 years, Los Angeles opened its housing voucher wait list last year,” said Dr. Margot Kushel. “The city drew 600,000 applicants for 20,000 slots, highlighting the enormous unmet need.”27 And more services attracted more people to Seattle. “I do think we have a magnet effect,” said Seattle’s former homelessness chief. Nearly one-quarter of the homeless in King County, in which Seattle is the biggest city, said they became homeless outside of Washington State.28

Mayor Breed said she opposed Proposition C because she feared that spending yet more on homelessness services, without any requirement that people get off the street, would backfire. “We are a magnet for people who are looking for help,” she said. “There are a lot of other cities that are not doing their part, and I find that larger cities end up with more than our fair share.”

When I visited the Tenderloin with Tom Wolf, he pointed to the doorway to a building. “I slept here,” he said, “because I was such an addict that I didn’t want to walk the five blocks to the shelter. I wanted to be right near the dealers.”

Even people who would prefer to live in sober environments say they do not want to quit their addictions. “When we surveyed people in supportive housing in New York,” said University of Pennsylvania homelessness researcher Dennis Culhane, “almost everybody wanted their neighbors to be clean and sober but they didn’t want rules for themselves about being clean.”35

“What ends up happening with a lot of progressive liberals in San Francisco,” said Tom, “is they get to go home to their nice house in Noe Valley and six-figure job and kids in private school. They can afford to vote progressively for social justice because they don’t have to walk their kids through the Tenderloin and play hopscotch over the feces and needles.”

really comes from a perspective of, ‘How do we keep the neighbors happy.’ They don’t want to have to look at homeless people anymore. ‘So, let’s shove them into a shelter so we don’t have to look at them.’”44

After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” I was shocked and horrified by what she seemed to be suggesting. “It sounds like you’re worried that I’m going to write something that would cause violence against people who live on the street,” I said. “No,” she said. “It’s just the initial summary of ‘all the misery on the streets of San Francisco’ is aligned—gets used a lot. ‘And in such a progressive city.’ I don’t think even political consultants are trying to increase violence against those people who are unhoused. I don’t think that that’s anyone’s mission. But it is what happens.”50

Said Jacqui, whose son, Corey, compared San Francisco to Pleasure Island, “My son has also been hospitalized twice from being stabbed. One time he almost died. I didn’t even know he was in the hospital until he was well enough to call me. After that I bought him a medic alert bracelet with my info on it. He eventually lost it, of course. So I planned to have my phone number tattooed on his chest—he agreed but because of COVID, tattoo parlors are closed.”

I, like many advocates of harm reduction, compared the death toll from alcohol to deaths from drug overdoses, but the comparison was misleading. Most of the 95,000 people who die from alcohol annually tend to do so after decades of use, while the 93,000 annual drug overdose and poisoning deaths occur within a matter of minutes or hours. Only 2,200 of those annual alcohol deaths occur immediately through acute alcohol poisoning.66

“Being high on meth looks just like bipolar mania,” explained a former psychiatric emergency room doctor. Half of all patients whom he saw at San Francisco General Hospital had both severe mental illness and drug addiction. “Things like methamphetamine and cocaine stimulants will make you psychotic, and so it looks just like bipolar mania,” he said. “I mean, it’s indistinguishable.”93 Said Kruger, “You probably figured out that folks who are substance abusers are folks who have mental illness and they end up in crisis. In the emergency department they’ll say, ‘He’s a speeder.’ He’ll be psychotic but labeled a speeder because he’s doing meth. The Mental Health Department says, ‘We don’t have to deal with him because he’s on meth.’ But you still need to deal with him.” I asked her what speeders are like. “It was always insects, snakes, conspiracy theory, and good or evil,” she said. “One guy came in and he thought a snake was going up his penis. Another guy torched his car because the snakes were trying to go up his pant leg, and he had to torch the snake. And another guy tried to kill his wife because he thought his wife was having sex with the devil.”

meth dealer who had just finished selling to several homeless people in Fresno showed his remaining meth to a reporter while standing on a city sidewalk. He said why he didn’t need to be careful: “If the cops came right now and found that, all these drugs on us right now, none of us would go to jail. They’d give you a ticket and send you on your way. They’d leave you with your meth. They don’t even take it.”95 Though meth’s negative health impacts are sometimes sensationalized by the media, they are real. “I didn’t have any teeth,” said Vicki. “My teeth are only from here, see the bottoms?” We were on Zoom. “All my back teeth on the top and bottom were gone from meth.”

San Francisco has a long tradition of tolerance toward drug use. During the Gold Rush of the 1840s, Chinese immigrants opened rooms for smoking opium. Authorities sometimes broke them up starting in the mid-1860s, but San Francisco’s leaders did not ban opium dens until 1875. Opium smoking in San Francisco continued well into the twentieth century but was gradually supplanted by heroin. “San Francisco had twice as many alcohol outlets per capita compared to the national average going back at least until the late nineteenth century,” said Stanford’s Keith Humphreys.

down as they use drugs,” one pain doctor told New York magazine in 2000. “With pain patients, it improves. They’re entirely different phenomena.”112 Big pharmaceutical companies went far beyond what was medically sound by promoting opioids for chronic, not just acute, pain.113

After the passage of Proposition 47 in 2014, police could no longer keep meth-intoxicated speeders in jail for a few days to come down. “Now we’re not having those be crimes where people can be in jail for a couple of days to take a chill,” said Kruger. “Instead, they’re out breaking into cars and robbing people.”125 “Our guests went from twelve to seventeen percent addicted to fifty percent addicted or higher,” said Bales.126 Said Tom Wolf, “In 2015, when Proposition 47 took effect, there were 115,000 people homeless in the state of California. Today, there are 165,000. I believe that there’s a direct correlation between the two. People that would have maybe cycled through the justice system for committing smaller crimes—like running into Walgreens, filling your backpack full of makeup, and running out, because you’re a drug addict—might actually have found some help.”127 Between 2016 and 2021, Walgreens closed seventeen of its stores in San Francisco due to shoplifting.128 When a reporter in 2020 asked a clerk where all the merchandise from the empty shelves had gone, he said, “Go ask the people in the alleys, they have it all.”129 Said one homeless man recently, “San Francisco needs to stop sending the message out about the Summer of Love because the Summer of Love is over.”130

Around 2013, Adam Mesnick, a chef and restaurant owner in San Francisco, got to know some of the homeless people who hung around his restaurant, the Deli Board. “I was in there because I wasn’t trying to violate their trust or piss them off . . .” he told me. “I was pretty much just hanging out smoking pot with them.” “So when Deli Board closes, you go out, smoke a couple [of pipe] bowls [of marijuana], and they were shooting up and you just chitchat with them and hang out?” I asked. “I had to understand what the heck was going on,” he said. “I didn’t really understand. I didn’t understand it. Now I get it.” “What did you get?” “They just come here to die,” said Adam. “That’s it. They come here to shoot up, nod, and die. That’s it. This is not any other place but to come to die. They’ll all tell you that. They’ve all told me that—” “They say ‘die’?” I asked. “Of course, they do,” Adam said. “You can see it in some of my interviews. [Homeless fentanyl user] Jessica tells me on the camera exactly how it is. She smokes fentanyl. She tells you, ‘Everyone’s here to die.’ She tells you, ‘Everyone ODs.’ She tells you, ‘Everyone boosts.’ She’ll tell you everything.” “But is ‘die’ slang or literal?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “But they say that explicitly?” I pressed. “‘I come here to die’?” “They explicitly say that,” he said. “Look at Jessica’s interviews. Jessica’s telling me about how she died seventeen times from doing fentanyl and then they Narcaned.”

When you ask progressives who remember the 1980s why there are so many people on the street, many blame former California governor and president Ronald Reagan. “In the 1970s we never saw homeless people on the streets,” said Democratic political strategist Bill Zimmerman. “After Reagan shut down the mental hospitals, we saw people. Most of those people appeared to be mentally ill rather than addicted to drugs.”1 Susan Mizner, a senior attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, agreed. “The degradation of our affordable housing and mental health and behavioral health services started in the 1980s with Reagan’s cuts to HUD, decimating the amount of money that was available for subsidized and supported housing.”2 Others point to the fact that Governor Reagan in 1972 signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which aimed to significantly reduce involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill.3 California’s mental hospitals closed and by 2019 there were 93 percent fewer patients in California’s mental institutions than their peak, sixty years earlier, when adjusted for population growth.4 The rest of the United States saw a similar decline.5 If the United States still hospitalized its mentally ill at the same rate it did in 1955, its mental health institutions would house almost 1.1 million people any given day. Instead, they house fewer than 50,000 patients.6 Many of the mentally ill discharged from state hospitals went to live in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, where the...

Foucault argued that the supposedly humanistic treatment of the mad as suffering from mental illness was, in fact, a more insidious form of social control. Before 1500, the mad wandered freely in Europe, Foucault argued. After 1500, Europeans began to medicalize madness, treat it like an illness, as a way not just to control the mad but also to establish what was rational, normal, and healthy for the rest of society. Mental hospitals emerged at a time, Foucault argued, when the state was seeking to impose rational order on societies. And that started with policing the boundary between sane and insane.33 Foucault even criticized a humanistic asylum in England whose pioneering psychiatrist no longer used physical restraints, which the mentally ill today testify are terrifying and even constitute a kind of torture, on his patients. Said the psychiatrist, “these madmen are so intractable only because they have been deprived of air and freedom.”34 Foucault wasn’t alone in his attack on psychiatry and mental hospitals. In 1961, an American sociologist, Erving Goffman, published an influential book, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, which compared mental hospitals to concentration camps. That same year, a psychiatrist named Thomas Szasz published The Myth of Mental Illness, which argued that psychiatrists and others invented the concept of mental illness, with no biological evidence, in order to punish people who were different from the...

One way to think about free will is that it exists only as a belief. The more we believe in free will, the more it exists. The less we believe in it, the less it exists. “If you do call free will an illusion, it’s a useful illusion, right?” said Cory Clark, a professor of social psychology who is doing innovative research into how we think about freedom and responsibility. “Thinking through, ‘If I do X, Y will happen,’ is an important part of the process that leads to making better choices. If people thought they didn’t have to do that, they might not make good choices anymore.”

It is today common, socially acceptable, and even rewarding for progressives to put others, and themselves, down, for being white, male, and straight, and sometimes Asian, while elevating those in supposed victim categories to higher social, moral, and even spiritual status.

Frankl, a victim of biology-based identity politics, attacked the notion of collective guilt after the war. “In 1946,” he said, “I lectured in the French occupation zone of Austria. I spoke against collective guilt in the presence of the commanding general of the French forces.”11 Frankl insisted on individual not group responsibility. We are responsible for our behavior, not the behavior of all black or white people, women or men.

Rene, “you get spoiled people. If you give an addicted person just the carrots you’ll be addicted. But if you treat them both ways, it gives them space to change. It gives them space to recognize their problems and to see that there are ways to solve those problems.”

Progressives also value Liberty, or freedom, differently from conservatives. Many progressives reject the value of Liberty for Big Tobacco and cigarette smokers but embrace the value of Liberty for fentanyl dealers and users. Why? Because progressives view fentanyl dealers and users, who are disproportionately poor, sick, and nonwhite, as victims of a bad system.

The germ of the idea that society should be organized around the downtrodden was developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-nineteenth century. In The Communist Manifesto they argued that it was possible and desirable to build a radically egalitarian society. We would do so from a place of cooperation, not competition. Socialism would take us from our current system of capitalist meritocracy to communist utopia. While Marx and Engels described the worker overthrow of the government in economic and social terms, revolution had a spiritual meaning, too: “the total redemption of humanity.”

The loosening of traditional morality widened the possibilities available to many people, but it also created a moral and spiritual vacuum. Where major religions had viewed humans as having souls that had some continued existence after the death of the body, the new secularism tended toward the view that consciousness was the result of material processes. Humans had no spirit independent of the biological processes inside the physical brain. Once we died, nothing in us lived on. Such hard secularism created anxiety. Whereas people on the political right tend to adhere more closely to traditional religions and moralities, whether Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism, progressives are more secular, atheist, agnostic, and more open to alternative religions. Research suggests that progressives are more existentially anxious, neurotic, and unhappy, which some researchers attribute to lower levels of religiosity.20 One of the long-recognized benefits of religion is that it helps people to cope with their fear of death. If we follow a certain code of conduct, or morality, religions around the globe say, we can transcend death, and live on in a new world, whether heaven or a future world through reincarnation.

Where Christians believe that the kingdom of God is in heaven, communists believed the kingdom of communism was in the future. And where Christians had believed in the ultimate Authority of God, fascists believed in the Authority of the state as the manifestation of the spirit of the nation, or race.21 As these two great ideologies lost legitimacy and power in the twentieth century they split and changed into different moralities and ideologies.

Starting in the 1960s, many on the New Left cast African American prisoners in the role of revolutionary and even spiritual heroes. “For some [New Left] extremists,” noted a historian, radical black prisoners “had become nature spirits, self-actualized, noble, violent, sexual primitives.”23 Said a white attorney for radical prisoners, “They are more loving. They have more creative human potential.”24 Wrote the white left-wing

editor of radical prisoner George Jackson’s books in 1974, “For most middle-class whites like myself, life is a matter of chronic discontent. . . . We say to ourselves that only blacks possess true authenticity.”25 The white attorney’s office in Berkeley had massive posters of the black prison leaders on the walls, and a staff of young white women, noted a sociologist at the time. “All of ’em had picked one of ’em as the one that she was worshipping.”26

If we are to understand why progressives ruin cities, we need to understand how and why compassion, altruism, and love have created a blind spot, and not just in relationship to foreign despots but also to homegrown ones.

poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community.2 Scenes from the era show a remarkably