San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
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Read between September 20 - October 20, 2022
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And it was Democrats, not Republicans, who played the primary role in creating the dominant neoliberal model of government contracting to fragmented and often unaccountable nonprofit service providers that have proven financially, structurally, and legally incapable of addressing the crisis.
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In the early 1990s, a Harvard sociologist who wrote a book on homelessness noted, “those who see the homeless as passive victims of circumstances beyond their control often react to [the evidence of service refusal] with a mixture of fury and disbelief.”
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“We’re asking ourselves, ‘Why so much death when people are getting what they want?’ We have over sixty programs. We’re the largest permanent supportive housing provider of this sort of service in the Bay Area now. We had trouble keeping staff because the people we attract to this sort of job really care deeply and got invested in people’s lives, sort of like a life coach for people with an incredible list of problems. And then they die on you, even when you house them?”
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The problem with Housing First stems from the fact that it doesn’t require that people address their mental illness and substance abuse, which are often the underlying causes of homelessness. Several studies have found that people in Housing First–type housing showed no improvement in drug use from when they were first housed.
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But a closer look at the data reveals that just 3.7 percent of state prisoners are there for nonviolent drug possession, and that 14.1 percent of state prisoners are locked up for any nonviolent drug offense. Forty-seven percent of inmates in federal prisons are in for nonviolent drug convictions, but there are just 172,000 people in federal prisons and 1.3 million in state prisons.7 Over half of all prisoners in state prisons are there for violent offenses like murder, rape, and robbery.
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I asked her what speeders are like. “It was always insects, snakes, conspiracy theory, and good or evil,” she said.
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Ginsberg may have detected that all was not right at the 1967 Be-In. Looking like a “cross between holy man and Jewish mother,” at forty-one years old Ginsberg played the role of wise elder to Baby Boomers half his age. As Ginsberg surveyed from the stage the young people in the crowd all taking LSD, he turned to his friend and asked, “What if we’re wrong?”107
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I eventually got fired, not because I was smoking dope, but because I had those things that also come with being an addict. You have no self-esteem, but you’re also arrogant.”
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“For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said.
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Humphreys agreed. “A lot of people are addicted and don’t want to change until it hurts. It’s hurting now, but it’s going to have to hurt a lot more until they realize this isn’t working. A lot of people are going to suffer and die because the political culture won’t let [policy makers] be like Portugal, and won’t let them try evidence-based tactics that involve using something other than just offering people more services.”
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One concern is that people need internal motivation to stay abstinent and cannot depend on external reinforcements because once the external reinforcements are gone, their self-destructive behaviors will return. But there is evidence that external reinforcements build internal strength over time.32 And even if contingency management only kept people externally motivated, that might be okay, given the high cost to society of addiction and the cost savings from abstinence.
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In other words, for Mizner and the ACLU, the mentally ill are too impaired to be held accountable for breaking the law but not impaired enough to justify the same kind of treatment we provide to other people suffering mental disabilities, such as dementia. Understanding this, and the power of the ACLU in progressive cities and states such as San Francisco and California, goes a long way toward understanding the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homelessness crisis.
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America’s social safety net has expanded dramatically over the last half century. New programs included Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program (1972); the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program (1972); Pell Grants (1972); the Earned Income Tax Credit (1975); the child support program (1975); Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (1981); Children’s Health Insurance Program (1997); Medicare Part D subsidy for low-income Americans (2003); and the Affordable Care Act (2010).
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Words are powerful. The word “homeless” not only makes us think of housing, it also makes us not think of mental illness, drugs, and disaffiliation. The word directs our attention to things perceived as outside of a person’s control, such as the high cost of housing, and away from things perceived as in their control, such as working, parenting, and staying sober.
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Where Freud wanted people to orient toward the past, toward their childhood traumas, Frankl wanted people to orient toward their future, toward their goals.
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Courts ruled that this was not a valid defense, and philosophers including French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre gained worldwide fame in his emphasis on individual responsibility. “Man is condemned to be free,” he writes. “From the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”
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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.
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The anger of many homeless often lies just beneath the surface. “Panhandling? . . . it wasn’t easy,” a homeless man told Gowan. “You get to hate the people marching past. . . . I used to give people this intense look, just say, ‘Please, anything helps.’ I figured people should like that, showing you’re not fussy, you’ll take the pennies. . . . The thing is, after a while, you hate them, you hate everyone, and they feel it, they know.”
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“I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve gotten into with case managers, especially if they’re licensed clinicians, because they’re ‘client-centered, client-driven.’ They say things to me like, ‘Well, you know this person has substance use.’ That’s the end of their sentence. I’m like, ‘Okay. And? What’s next?’ That can’t be the end of the story.”
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“We have an expression,” which he said in Dutch. “It means”—here he paused and looked up—“‘Soft doctors make wounds stink.’ Does that make sense?”
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“The anarchists had always been a cosplay clown joke,” he told me in early 2021. “On May Day they would come and fight the police and break some windows. We’d be like, ‘Okay guys, go back to your mother’s basement.’”2 Then, after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, the anarchists rebranded themselves as anti-fascists, said Young, and that increased their legitimacy in the eyes of Seattle’s progressive voters. “They said, ‘We’re here to fight the racists and fascists.’”
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“The challenge going forward,” said Boudin, “is how do we close a jail?”24 Many believe that most in jail are there for nonviolent offenses but the most recent available data shows that two-thirds of the people in San Francisco’s jail were there for violent crimes or weapons possession, not petty, nonviolent, or “victimless” crime. Just 4 percent are there for drug crime.
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sidewalks, public use of hard drugs,
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One word, “homeless,” entails an entire, insidious discourse that acts unconsciously and subliminally on our hearts and minds, rendering us unable to understand the reality before us.