San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

In the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, known as the “Wal-Mart of heroin,”

yo por eso voy a target

that San Franciscans were just too liberal. “What’s happening is not even liberal,” he said. “It’s not realistic. It’s fantasy land. This is a severe drug addiction crisis that needs greater intervention or everyone’s just going to die from fentanyl.”

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

While it is true that, as California’s governor, Reagan oversaw the closure of mental hospitals, he didn’t start deinstitutionalization. It began nationally in the 1930s, mostly to save money.10 The closure of California’s mental hospitals began in earnest in the 1950s, more than a decade before Reagan became governor.11 The emptying of state mental hospitals continued at the same rate between 1959 and 1967 under a Democratic governor as it did under Reagan. By the time Reagan took office in 1967, nearly half of the patients in California’s state mental hospitals had already been released.12

As for the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, it was a creation of civil libertarians, mental health professionals, and anti-psychiatry activists, sponsored by two Democrats, and passed in a 77–1 vote. It would have passed even had Reagan vetoed it.13 And while Reagan, as president, cut over 300,000 workers from Social Security Insurance and Social Security Disability Insurance, he reversed his cuts just a year and a half later, and by the end of his presidency, nearly 200,000 had won back their benefits.

reality, it was a Democrat who got the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals rolling. President John F. Kennedy proposed and successfully advocated a crucial 1963 reform that required the federal government to fund community mental health centers but leave it to the states to fund mental hospitals.15 In 1963 President Kennedy argued that medical advances would enable “most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and returned to a useful place in society.”16 The Kennedy White House recommended shifting funding away from mental hospitals to community-based treatment. Experts argued that hospitals were “superfluous” institutions, sites of “therapeutic tyranny,” and “merely a symptom of an outdated system

Seventy-eight percent of homeless inmates of the San Francisco County Jail system who suffered serious mental illness also suffered from addiction to alcohol or drugs,

This may have been how people viewed thirteenth-century Catholic Saint Francis of Assisi, after whom San Francisco is named. Francis is known for renouncing his family’s wealth and caring for lepers. But he also preached to birds and animals in a state we might today call psychotic, and suffered from what some scholars believe was mental illness.3 When his parents intervened, possibly by trying to appoint a legal guardian to manage Francis’s finances, the local bishop ruled that Francis could have his freedom as an “ecclesiastical person” if he renounced his family and inheritance.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It revolves around a socially deviant but nonetheless sane man who feigns mental illness so he can go to a mental hospital rather than prison. He is drugged, electro-shocked, and eventually lobotomized.

But, I always worry, as the line goes in The King and I, ‘Might they not protect me out of everything I own?’”

sounds like the SEC to me

As such, the criminalization rather than hospitalization of the mentally ill represents a triumph of the anti-psychiatrists. “Recall that US thinkers like Szasz,” writes Gong, “advocated a radical libertarianism that saw criminal trial as fairer than hospitalization, and in some sense the American criminalization and social abandonment of mad people resembles this model.”22

Operant conditioning was called “behaviorism” in the sixties and seventies. It gained a bad reputation when some people took it too far and viewed humans purely as animals driven by instinct. But, since then, psychologists have demonstrated that humans are significantly motivated by tangible, real-world rewards, and that operant conditioning can be used humanely.

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.

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.

Even Paul Boden, who was once homeless himself, grudgingly admits that the unsheltered homeless have some amount of choice. “Well, if your only other option is a gospel mission,” he said, “fuck yeah, I’m there by choice.”

In 2020 a Seattle city councilor introduced legislation to order the district attorney to stop enforcing laws if they are committed by the poor, the mentally ill, or people with substance use disorders. “Stalking, harassment, vehicle prowls, sexual exploitation, property destruction, hit-and-run, threatening someone with a gun,” noted the Seattle Times, “would be minimized and easily defensible.”

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.”1

people appear to behave far better when they take responsibility for their actions than when they don’t.

Subjects primed to disbelieve in free will are, for example, more likely to engage in aggressive behaviors.2 Disbelief in free will even seems to impair some cognitive processes.

“pathological altruism,” defined as “behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.”

The problem is that creating a good life for one’s self, one’s family, and one’s community requires denying or delaying gratification. Getting an education and maintaining a job mean setting aside pursuing immediate happiness in favor of investing in satisfaction later.

“Losing faith in your own willfulness and capacity to act, you eventually lose freedom,” noted an early critic of victim culture. “That was one lesson of totalitarianism, which succeeded by organizing masses of the disaffected, politically inactive, self-centered people who felt helpless and victimized, believed that they didn’t matter and sought ‘self-abandonment’ in the state.”

Soft doctors make wounds stink.’

that’s where the growth is. Get excited. That’s where the growth is.’

“The problem isn’t setting the bar too high and not meeting it,” said Vicki. “It’s setting it too low and meeting it.

Upon taking office in January 2020, Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019.23 If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money?

Why would you think this is a good idea?

In 2004, a man named Joel John Roberts published a plaintive book called How to Increase Homelessness. In it he pointed out that, for more than thirty years, a large and financially motivated lobby of homeless service providers, homeless housing developers, labor unions, for-profit consultants, and advocacy groups have lobbied at the federal, state, and local level to increase funding for themselves. During that time, homelessness only grew worse. “I do not know of any community plan that actually details how to dismantle the existing homeless service system after homelessness has ended,” wrote Roberts.1 “Maybe, just maybe, we don’t really want to end homelessness.”

Roberts was saying something similar to HBO’s Bill Maher, who described the homeless industrial complex as “Layer upon layer of middle men, inspectors, contractors, lawyers, lobbyists, and—oh, yes—labor unions, too. And until those $531,000 apartments are built, we are putting special porta-potties near the homeless camps, which cost $320,000 each! For porta-potties! That’s some good shit!”

And yet most influential homelessness advocacy organizations are not service providers, and have small budgets. The annual revenue of Jennifer Friedenbach’s Coalition on Homelessness, the most influential homelessness advocacy organization in San Francisco, was just $656,892, according to its most recently available tax filing.7 To put that number in context, consider that the annual revenues of the Nature Conservancy and the National Rifle Association were $1.2 billion and $353 million, respectively, in 2018.8 As such, advocates for the homeless would not be so successful in passing ballot measures, raising taxes, and increasing funding for homelessness programs if voters didn’t support spending more money on the problem. If voters thought the homelessness industrial complex was causing more harm than good—enabling addiction and overdoses, for example, rather than preventing them—they would not have voted to keep giving them more money over the past thirty years. The problem, in other words, isn’t coming from within the homeless industrial complex. It’s coming from within ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century predicted that rising disbelief in God, and life after death, would result in new moralities and religions. Some would try to turn science into a religion, he believed, which is today known as scientism.

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

Jim Jones Jr. described his father “manipulating black people” by giving him special treatment compared to Jones’s other adopted and biological children.3 Jim Jones Sr. sometimes referred to himself as “mixed,” “Indian,” or “black,” and appeared to have believed he was a reincarnation of an African American spiritual leader who himself claimed to be Jesus Christ reborn.

“I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.”11 Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission.12

In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others.29 A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”30

What the actual firetruck am I reading?

But cults are much more common in progressive, secular places like the West Coast than in more traditional and conservative religious places. Researchers find that secularization “stimulates the growth of cults where the conventional churches are weakest,”

“measures of religiosity can help explain significant variation in unsheltered homelessness in warm places.”

The decline of traditional religion has allowed for the rise of untraditional ones. Unlike traditional religions, many untraditional religions are largely invisible to the people who hold them most strongly.

Never did like those 'I'm not religious, I'm spiritual bumble profiles

Consider the power mechanisms at work in the discourses of homelessness and victimology. The demand that we not enforce laws against people defined as victims is an attack on a foundational principle of our democracy, equal justice under the law. What is being proposed is, fundamentally, unequal justice, or perhaps a kind of revenge, something that sociologists detect in the sacralization of victims. “Holding the victim of an offense in higher regard can be a way of reversing the harmful effects of the offense, and even a way of punishing the offender, since one is rewarding the person the offender wanted to harm or punish,” wrote two scholars. “And, if victimhood is a virtue, privilege is a vice.”

yet all are categorized as “homeless” or as “unhoused.” But, as we have seen, such labeling stemmed from an advocacy effort aimed at convincing us that the problem is poverty and the solution is spending more money on housing and services for the homeless and not, say, shelter and abstinence-contingent housing. 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.

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

It’s not a matter of whether we will shame but what we will shame. Progressives preaching the gospel of victimology have nothing against shame. They just shame, and value, different behaviors than others.

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.

why they have been able to maintain and increase their political control of them, over the last thirty years, despite the reality on the ground.

libertarian

Not exactly the word I wold use...

‘Do your own thing’ is not so different than ‘every man for himself.’”4

progressive advocates for the homeless continue to engage in the same sleight of hand by using the single term “homeless,” tricking journalists, policy makers, and the public into mixing together groups of people who require different kinds of help. Progressives justify their discourse and agenda in the name of preventing dehumanization, but the effect has been the opposite. In defending the humanity of addicts, progressives ended up defending the inhumane conditions of street addiction.

The demand that we give Victims special political authority is thus really a demand to give special political authority to those who claim to represent the supposed Victims, namely homelessness advocates.

lack of accountability, which is itself a kind of power.

When we allow for the chronic violation of laws and social norms, we erode the foundation of our cities and civilization.

Cities around the world, from Tokyo to Atlanta, become more dense and grow outward at the same time. Some pro-density advocates have pointed to Tokyo as a city that grew its population without taking up more land, but Tokyo’s area increased 54 percent from 1990 to 2010. Its rate of expansion doubled during this time and it became less dense overall.