San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

When I first heard last June that a group of people had taken over a neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ostensibly in response to the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis, I couldn’t understand what had happened. It wasn’t like a bunch of heavily armed anarchists had erected traffic barricades and kicked the police out of their precinct building, I thought, and went back to whatever it was I was doing. It was only after I had learned of the killing of two black teenagers in the occupied area that I came to understand that the anarchists had, in fact, done exactly that. But why? And why did the Seattle police and mayor let them?

Ah yes, our neighbors...

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.

Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than three hundred lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.

What?

While the homeless are poor, few poor people live on the street. Nearly 90,000 people in San Francisco live in poverty but just over 8,000 are homeless. The vast majority of people, including very poor people who are priced out of San Francisco’s expensive rental markets, move out of the city or move in with friends or family. Vanishingly few decide to pitch a tent on the filthiest sidewalks in America.

For decades researchers have documented much higher levels of mental illness and substance abuse among the homeless than in the rest of the population. It’s true that just 8 and 18 percent of homeless people point to mental illness and substance abuse, respectively, as the primary cause of their homelessness, but researchers have long understood that such self-reports are unreliable

From 2005 to 2020, San Francisco experienced an astonishing 95 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness as the number of permanent supportive housing units offered by the city rose from 6,487 to 10,051.57 Today, San Francisco has the greatest quantity of permanent supportive housing units per capita of any major city in the United States. It has 11 permanent supportive housing units per 1,000 people, which is nearly three times as much as New York City (4 per 1,000 people) and Chicago (4 per 1,000), and over six times as much as Miami-Dade County (1.7 per 1,000).58 All of that, and yet the unsheltered homeless population of New York City, Chicago, and Miami fell 11, 10, and 50 percent, respectively, between 2005 and 2020, while San Francisco’s rose 95 percent.59 Why was that?

“Don’t be a louse! Give me a house!”

Ah yes, free houses that grow on trees...

For example, San Francisco’s maximum General Assistance cash welfare monthly benefit for the poor is $588, as compared to $449, $221, and $183 for individuals in San Diego, Los Angeles, and New York City, respectively.10 While New York City, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Diego spend 3.5, 1.1, 0.9, and 2.5 percent of their budget on homelessness services, San Francisco spends 6 percent.

“I got $581 a month in General Assistance and $192 in food stamps,” he said. “I could get a free breakfast at Glide [Memorial Church] and a free lunch at St. Anthony’s, which allowed me to use all of my General Assistance money for heroin and then sell my food stamp card to a merchant in Chinatown who would pay me 60 cents on the dollar for it.”

But the biggest reason many people come to San Francisco is for the cheap and abundant drugs and the lax law enforcement.

some penguins live a life of crime

a mother whose son, Corey, is homeless and addicted to fentanyl and living on the streets of the Bay Area. “My son tells me San Francisco is where he most readily gets what he needs. He calls it ‘Hell,’ and compared it to Pleasure Island in the Disney film Pinocchio.

“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

While some homeless are attracted to San Francisco for housing and services, many of San Francisco’s most visible homeless people don’t use them. 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.”33 In the context of cities with permissive attitudes toward drugs, like San Francisco, many homeless people stay in encampments to use illegal substances more freely and easily than they can in the shelters. Many policy makers understand this. “I went out with a team twice to have conversations with people to get an understanding of what they’re dealing with,” said Mayor Breed in 2020. “It was absolutely insane. Most of the people did not take us up on the offer [of shelter and services].”

“almost everybody wanted their neighbors to be clean and sober but they didn’t want rules for themselves about being clean.”

“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.”

But there is no evidence for what Kim claimed. In fact, the number of reported attacks on the homeless declined nationwide between 2008 and 2017 from 106 to 29, according to a study by a homelessness advocacy organization, even as concern over homelessness rose from 38 to 47 percent.51 The main perpetrators of violence against the homeless tend to be other homeless people, or drug dealers, according to people who have lived on the streets.

“In the [Los Angeles] bond measure we passed in 2016 to build housing for the homeless, each unit was projected to cost $140,000,” noted Maher. “And now that we’re actually building these apartments, the cost for each unit has risen to $531,000. . . . About 40 percent of that cost goes to something the city calls ‘soft costs’ and I call ‘bullshit costs.’”

“[Housing First] is a dogmatic philosophy,” said Bales. “I’ve lost friends. One of my closest friends is attacking me for pushing for housing that costs $11,000 instead of $527,000 per person. He can’t get that we can’t provide a $527,000 to $700,000 apartment for each person on the street. I’ve been in planning meetings where people said, ‘Everybody deserves a granite countertop.’ But that isn’t going to work for 44,000 people.”

Why the fuck is this so expensive? Even the 14000 shelter...

The Housing First intervention did not reduce the rate of deaths. There were 37 deaths out of 199 participants in the control group and 33 deaths out of 224 in the experimental group. Though the samples weren’t large, it was still a surprising, and sad, finding. “It was deeply traumatic for the team that was directly working with the folks that were dying, for sure,” said Jennifer Loving, the San Jose homelessness leader who advocates for permanent supportive housing. “You want to believe that there’s a happy ending.”34 The high death rate was demoralizing to permanent supportive housing staff. “Theoretically [if] people are getting housing and wraparound services, you should have a major decrease in death,”

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.

Researchers have found ways to use housing to reduce addiction. Between 1990 and 2006, researchers in Birmingham, Alabama, conducted clinical trials of abstinence-contingent housing with 644 homeless people with crack cocaine addictions. Two-thirds of participants remained abstinent after six months, a very high rate of abstinence, compared to other treatment programs. Other studies found that around 40 percent of homeless in abstinence-contingent housing maintained their abstinence, housing, and jobs.

the United States is home to less than 5 percent of the world’s population but has 25 percent of its prisoners.

The reason, according to Michelle Alexander in her bestselling 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, was drugs. “In less than thirty years, the US penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.”4 Between 1980 and 2012, there were an astonishing 43 million drug arrests.5 The “uncomfortable reality,” writes Alexander, “is that arrests and convictions for drug offenses—not violent crime—are the single most important cause of the prison boom in the United States.”6 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.8

During the 1990s and 2000s, an estimated 50 percent of the increase in state prisoners came from those convicted of violent offenses.9 Twenty percent of those serving time for drug charges said they had used a firearm in a previous crime, and 24 percent had a prior conviction for a violent crime, found a 1997 national survey of state prisons.10 It’s true that the share of drug offenders in prison rose from 6.5 to 22 percent between 1980 and 1990, growing from 20,000 in 1980 to nearly 250,000 by 2010.11 And nonviolent drug offenses were as responsible for prison growth in the 1980s as violent offenses.12 But only 20 percent of prisoners in all jails and prisons are there for drugs.13 Today, incarceration rates in the United States are at a thirty-year low.

And while 43 million drug arrests between 1980 and 2012 sounds like a lot, over the same period there were 445 million total arrests, making drugs less than 10 percent of all arrests.

Two-thirds of those sent back to prison for violating parole had committed a new crime, 60 percent of which were violent or property crimes, not nonviolent drug crimes.

“[H]ow racist can a law be which the Congressional Black Caucus vigorously supported and even considered too weak?” asked Columbia University professor John McWhorter. “If we had asked these black congresspeople in 1986 why they supported these laws, they would have said that they were aimed at breaking the horror of the crack culture, which had turned inner cities into war zones by the mid-1980s.”29

Tracey Helton Mitchell, who moved from the Midwest to San Francisco to, in part, maintain her addiction. “There was crack on one street, people high on meth on another. . . . People slept anywhere and everywhere on the street.”37 Like many women addicted to hard drugs, Mitchell turned to prostitution. “I never thought I would have sex with anyone for money. Heroin made it so easy.”

The number of people combining opioids and stimulants has grown. “I did crack and heroin both,” said Tom Wolf. “The amount of people using meth and fentanyl at the same time is growing.”40 The combination is known as a “goofball.”41 Indeed, the number of opioid-using Americans who also used methamphetamine rose 83 percent between 2011 and 2017, from 18.8 percent to 34.2 percent.42

these people must be seeing stuff...

And about two-thirds of the time of hospital emergency departments in San Francisco is spent serving the homeless.

Wait, what? that's too much.

“Once I started to heal myself,” said a formerly homeless man, “I knew I had to work with this so-called homelessness problem, to get some of those people suffering out there into treatment and help them turn their heads around.” “So-called?” asked Gowan. “Ain’t no homelessness problem in my opinion,” the man replied. “The problem is addiction, period. Even those people that have schizophrenia or something else like that, generally you find they have a big problem with addiction as well.”

The price of meth fell from $10,000 per pound in 2010 to $1,200 to $1,400 per pound in 2019. Meth users in the Central Valley can buy two doses for as little as $2.50 to $5.50.55

cheaper than I would expect

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.

The fact that the United States has about four times as many alcohol abusers as abusers of all illicit drugs put together is further evidence that liberalization increases use.70 One reason the homeless until the 1980s mostly abused alcohol was that illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine were far too expensive for many of them.

As for Portugal, it never legalized drugs. It only decriminalized them, reducing criminal penalties but maintaining prohibition. Drug dealers were still sent to prison even after the 2001 decriminalization. And Portugal does not let people addicted to hard drugs with behavioral disorders off the hook

Portugal massively expanded drug treatment, but people are still arrested and fined for possession of heroin, meth, and other hard drugs. And drug users are typically sent to a regionally administer...

People are not dying from drug overdose deaths in San Francisco because they’re being arrested. They’re dying because they aren’t being arrested. Decriminalization reduces prices by lowering production and distribution costs, which increases use.74 This was also the case for alcohol

83As for heroin maintenance, it is only recommended by experts as a last resort for the tiny subset of heroin addicts for whom methadone or Suboxone does not work.84

From 2008 to 2020, meth overdose deaths rose 500 percent in San Francisco, and half of psychiatric visits to San Francisco General Hospital are related to meth.91 In 2019, meth was the most common drug in California overdose deaths.

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.”

Tom’s wife gave him an ultimatum to either get drug treatment or leave the family. He decided to abandon his family and become homeless. “Addiction is the only disease that I know of that actually tells you to make it worse,” he told me. “I remember sitting in my garage after I had bought a bunch of OxyContin and thinking, ‘Fuck it, I’m just going to be an addict.’”1

“I had a very good friend,” a meth dealer told a reporter. “I knew her husband and I knew her kids. Her kids were still small at the time. I smoked her out [with meth] and smoked her out and smoked her out and she started buying it from me here and there. About seven months later she gives her kids to her mom and starts hauling her pussy out on the street. . . . I know people say ‘God forgives you’ and ‘Time heals all,’ but I know I’m [going to] have to answer for that one.”2

When I asked homelessness advocate Paul Boden whether he thought it was okay for taxpayers to subsidize meth pipes, he suggested I was being hypocritical for not questioning the tax deduction that corporations claim for providing health care to their employees. “It sounds like you’re suggesting that providing meth pipes for people is the same as providing health care,” I said. “Providing meth pipes is the same as providing health care,” he said. “I think people are killing themselves with these drugs and anything that we can try, anything that we can do. . . . And if it doesn’t work, do something else, try something else. But I’m not going to sit there and throw rocks at a group.”

Yikes

Gong discovered something surprising: the Malibu drug treatment program was far harder on its elite clientele than the Skid Row program was on the downtrodden. On Skid Row, wrote Gong, “the public providers offer some ‘difficult’ clients a surprising level of freedom to refuse medication, continue substance use, or act in socially deviant ways.”28 Gong found fatalism at the Skid Row treatment “characterized by an acceptance that rehabilitation is unlikely.”

“I don’t recommend it as a way to get your life together,” said Vicki, “but getting indicted by the feds worked for me. I wouldn’t have done this without them. I didn’t go to treatment to get clean. I went to treatment to get out of Santa Rita [jail].”33

Research finds that many addicts need mandatory treatment, and that it works nearly as well as voluntary treatment. Noted a team of researchers, “patients who have been forced to enter a substance abuse treatment have shown during and posttreatment results that are quite similar to those shown by supposedly ‘internally motivated’ patients.”37

“we’re not going to get beyond the opioid deaths until we get to safe consumption sites. There’s really no downside, except for people who see it as a moral failing and they’re morally outraged.”41 But the people who have recovered from addiction aren’t so sure. “How compassionate is it to let somebody just shoot dope the rest of their life?” asked Vicki. “If you hold people accountable, but you don’t give them an opportunity to change their life, that’s just punitive. But if you give them opportunities without holding them accountable, which is what we do now, that’s not going to work, either.”42

Yep, this ain't it chief

“If it is really true that the problem is contaminants,” said Humphreys, “that opioids are not being made and distributed under tight regulation by legal manufacturers, then no one would ever have died from OxyContin. It is weird to me to hear people who think of themselves as leftists slinging a line that the most shameless corporate attorney for Purdue Pharma would be embarrassed to raise in court. Because that was what they said, right? ‘OxyContin’s not dangerous.’ ‘Give it as much as you want.’ ‘There’s no risk of addiction or overdose’ That is just the same rhetoric over again!”

Rene says, Dutch police officers are sometimes too soft. “Sometimes they say, ‘Please don’t punish them, you have to help them.’ And I have to make sure that they do punish them, because otherwise it can’t help. I have to motivate those police officers to stick to the program. If you only do it with care it’s not going to succeed. It’s about carrots and sticks. At some point there are some people who do not want to or are not able to listen. For them there are psychiatric examinations. And some people are just bad. Those people go to jail. Not forever. But if they do bad things they go to jail and they have to know that they go to jail.”