San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

“drug overdose deaths increased from about seventeen thousand to over seventy thousand in the last twenty years.”

Fryer found no evidence of higher rates of police shootings of African Americans than white people, when the suspect is stopped by police.31 “When using the simple statistical framework that economists have used for more than a half century to analyze racial differences on myriad dimensions—from wages to incarceration to teen pregnancy,” wrote Fryer, “the evidence for [racial] bias disappears.”32

in 2020, some pointed to higher gun sales, which rose in March, at the beginning of the pandemic. But homicides in 2020 only started to rise in June, not March. In truth, young men, street gangs, and large numbers of handguns have existed in American society for hundreds of years, and over periods where homicides declined, such as in the early 1990s. And there was little evidence to suggest that any of those variables had changed suddenly or dramatically enough in 2015 or 2020 to account for the homicide spikes.

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!”3

Research suggests that progressives are more existentially anxious, neurotic, and unhappy, which some researchers attribute to lower levels of religiosity.

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.