San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

Soft doctors make wounds stink.’

The underlying drivers of homicide are related to subjective conditions like ideology and politics, says Roth.

Social conditions like poverty, oppression, and unemployment do not drive violent acts, as people suffering from these conditions have varied rates of violence throughout history. Homicide is irrational and emotional, not a natural and predetermined response to personal setbacks.10

As trust in government fell in the late sixties and early seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the fifties and mid-nineties, homicides decreased.12

The New York success is supported by research that finds that greater police visibility decreases crime. It does so by convincing would-be criminals that they are more likely to get caught, known as deterrence.63 The same research into deterrence also finds that longer sentences do not deter crime and may in fact increase it. Probation is also shown to prevent crime and decrease recidivism, while imprisonment is not.

By the end of 2020, two hundred police officers had left the Seattle police force. “I refuse to work for this socialist City Council and their political agenda,” said one officer. “It ultimately will destroy the fabric of this once fine city.” Another said the city’s progressive City Council “will be the downfall of the city of Seattle.”

The number of San Francisco police officers leaving their job grew from 12 officers in 2018 to 26 in 2019 to 31 in 2020. “That might be hard to make up,” noted the Chronicle, “as the last police academy had only 19 cadets. Most classes are budgeted for 55 people.” The head of San Francisco’s police officer’s union warned, “This is just the beginning. Dozens are actively in the hiring process with other agencies.”76

San Francisco, everyone was mad,” a former officer told the Chronicle. “The homeowners would get mad because you didn’t move the homeless who were sleeping in front of their house. Then, when you tried to help the homeless, someone would start yelling about police brutality. And everyone had a cell phone camera on you.”79

“homeless industrial complex”

California spent at least $13 billion on homelessness between 2018 and 2020.4 San Francisco alone will spend $1.1 billion on homelessness over the next two fiscal years.

“liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering, compared to conservatives, and especially to libertarians.”9 But in the process of valuing care so much, progressives abandoned other important values,

Conservatives and moderates tend to define Fairness around equal treatment, including enforcement of the law. They tend to believe we should enforce the law against the homeless man who is sleeping and urinating on BART even if he is a victim. Progressives disagree.

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 dark side of victimology is how it moralizes power. Victimology takes the truth that it is wrong for people to be victimized and distorts it by going a step further. Victimology asserts that victims are inherently good because they have been victimized. It robs victims of their moral agency and creates double standards that frustrate any attempt to criticize their behavior, even if they’re behaving in self-destructive, antisocial ways like smoking fentanyl and living in a tent on the sidewalk. Such reasoning is obviously faulty. It purifies victims of all badness. But by appealing to emotion, victimology overrides reason and logic.

A secular religion like victimology is powerful because it meets the contemporary psychological, social, and spiritual needs of its believers, but also because it appears obvious, not ideological, to them. Advocates of “centering” victims, giving them special rights, and allowing them to behave in ways that undermine city life, don’t believe, in my experience, that they are adherents to a new religion, but rather that they are more compassionate and more moral than those who hold more traditional views.

“The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them.”54

How and why do progressives ruin cities? So far we have explored six reasons. They divert funding from homeless shelters to permanent supportive housing, resulting in insufficient shelter space. They defend the right of people they characterize as Victims to camp on sidewalks, in parks, and along highways, as well as to break other laws, including against public drug use and defecation. They intimidate experts, policy makers, and journalists by attacking them as being motivated by a hatred of the poor, people of color, and the sick, and as causing violence against them. They reduce penalties for shoplifting, drug dealing, and public drug use. They prefer homelessness and incarceration to involuntary hospitalization for the mentally ill and addicted. And their ideology blinds them to the harms of harm reduction, Housing First, and camp-anywhere policies, leading them to misattribute the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homeless crisis to poverty and to policies and politicians dating back to the 1980s.

They needed to value more things. Wrote Haidt, “self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for out-group” are values necessary to the functioning of civilization.

Cities are sacred and thus there must be rules for behavior in them. It is simply not okay to allow people to sleep on sidewalks, in parks, and on the sides of highways. Nor is it okay for people to sit on the sidewalk and shout threats and profanity at people who walk by, nor for people to defecate in front of retail offices and stores. If restaurants and other businesses want to serve their customers at tables and chairs on sidewalks, they must apply for special permits. That was still the case even during the pandemic. People must not be exempted from this because we feel sorry for them and label them Victims.

My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’”13

The ACLU has, in the past, done much good to protect rights, but they have taken an extreme position against conservatorship such that they are actively contributing to the current crisis.

valuing freedom as a state of affiliation, not disaffiliation, and of responsibility to, not freedom from, one another as fellow Americans.