San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

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...