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January 23 - January 30, 2022
In 2018, the United Nations’ special rapporteur visited San Francisco and said, “There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen, and I’ve done outreach on every continent.”
“We’ve always known that most homelessness is a result, pure and simple, of poverty,” she said.22 One of the biggest myths is that it is “caused by mental health and substance use problems,” Kushel explained. “We know that most homelessness is driven by economic forces.”23
far more homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area are adults without families than in other parts of the United States.
Homelessness and affordability are correlated only in the context of certain “local policy efforts [and] social attitudes,” concluded researchers.35
“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.”42
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.”
San Francisco’s leaders have thus deliberately chosen to leave a significant portion of the homeless unsheltered rather than sheltered, viewing shelters as a diversion of resources that could and should go to permanent supportive housing.
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.”
In other words, the reason that there are so many homeless people on the streets in San Francisco is that both progressive and moderate Democratic elected officials, and the city’s most influential homelessness experts and advocates, have for two decades opposed building sufficient shelters. And that is unlikely to change even after San Francisco starts spending hundreds of millions more per year on the problem and might even get worse.28
abstinence-contingent housing had better housing and employment outcomes than participants assigned housing for whom abstinence was not required.
the United States is home to less than 5 percent of the world’s population but has 25 percent of its prisoners.
And about two-thirds of the time of hospital emergency departments in San Francisco is spent serving the homeless.46
Today, drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for non-elderly San Franciscans, accounting for 29 percent of deaths of residents under sixty-five in 2019.99
I couldn’t explain this away, or become numb to it, in the sense that you’re not the primary traumatic. You’re not the one who is directly experiencing the trauma. But that proximity really wears on you.”6
“It is not only clinically incorrect,” said the director of psychiatric services at San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, “but almost sadistic to give money on a regular basis to people who have a demonstrated inability to handle cash funds.”31
The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration.2
to hard drugs won’t quit unless they are required to. “The problem of homelessness is not going to be solved,” wrote former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, “until one major drastic change takes place in public policy: we have to be able to impose help and treatment on people.”
“And then, when they’re let out of the jails, they’re let out with fifty bucks in their pocket and no place to go,” said San Francisco psychiatrist Dr. Robert Okin. “It’s like these institutions of government are conspiring to create homelessness at the same time that they’re trying to eradicate it.”63
What’s causing the shortage? “Money,” said Kruger. “It’s always money.”73 John Snook, a researcher and advocate for the mentally ill, agreed. Snook is in his mid-forties and speaks in a measured, almost pastoral tone, even when frustrated. “Homeless guys are not where the money is,” he said. “The spine center pays more.”
California insurance providers pay a lower-than-average reimbursement rate to psychiatrists.75
San Francisco in 2019 spent record amounts on mental illness and substance abuse, $370 million, of which about two-thirds was spent on the homeless, and half on homeless who suffer both mental illness and substance addiction.
But reformers increasingly believed that addressing mental health required much broader societal changes. Many reform leaders viewed mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as the result of class, racial, and other forms of inequality and oppression, and not the result of biology.
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.
Insel said he felt the people of California would come around once they understood the problem. “I started from a civil libertarian perspective,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t want to see people die with their rights on. That’s not the solution.”
Just 2 percent of Americans who graduate from high school, live in a family with at least one full-time worker, and wait to have children until after turning twenty-one and marrying, in what is known as the “success sequence,” are in poverty.
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).
Scholars call such excessive compassion “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.”
A team of Harvard University researchers found in 2020 that police were 53 percent more likely to use nonlethal physical force on an African American than on a white American. They analyzed 5 million police encounters with civilians in New York City and a database of 1,316 police shootings of civilians between 2000 and 2015 in localities in California, Texas, Florida, and Colorado.12 But since that number was based on police reports alone, the actual number could be higher.
Roth finds little evidence to support the claim that “root causes,” like poverty and structural racism, cause crime rates to rise and fall.
By 1956, 90 percent of San Quentin prisoners were reading books from the library as compared to just 18 percent of the American people.
“When the proletariat takes power,” said Foucault, it may “exert toward the classes over which it has triumphed a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this.”37 The problems created by the new nihilism weren’t academic. “We had the means of terrorism,” recalled another French radical left leader. “Some of us were on the way to that kind of action.
A Princeton professor used statistical methods to find that cities that qualified for the grant had increased policing by 3.2 percent and experienced a 3.5 percent decline in crime. The effect of more police was statistically significant for “robbery, larceny, and auto theft,” he noted, “with suggestive evidence that police reduce murders as well.” And the investments were cost-effective, with every $95,000 spent on police salary preventing $350,000 in crime.46
In a 2019 paper a scholar concluded that crime rose by 7 percent when police patrols in Houston declined by 10 percent.49
University of California, Berkeley criminologist Frank Zimring attributes much of the decline to the hiring in 1994 of William Bratton as commissioner of the New York Police Department. Bratton introduced the CompStat process, which changed the police’s central performance measure from arrest count to crime reduction.57 He made removing guns from the street a high priority. Bratton made officers more accountable for their performance.58 And Bratton prioritized breaking up open-air drug scenes, just like European cities had. That included breaking up the large and infamous one in New York
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Counter to the claims of those who advocate defunding the police as a way to reduce violence, the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Research has found that fatigue predicts a rise in public complaints against cops: a thirteen-hour rather than ten-hour shift significantly boosts their prevalence, while back-to-back shifts quadruple their odds.80
Victimology asserts that victims are inherently good because they have been victimized.
The problem is when compassion acts as cover for darker motivations. Throughout history people who appear to have the Dark Triad personality traits of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, most famously Stalin and Mao, have successfully manipulated compassionate, idealistic people to support them, even after evidence of their barbarism came to light.
Cult recruiters have sometimes used “love bombing,” the showering of affection on the newcomer, as a recruitment strategy on college campuses, even waiting outside counseling centers to target troubled students.
In 2021, fewer than 50 percent of Americans belonged to a house of worship.40 The decline of traditional religion has allowed for the rise of untraditional ones.
A big part of the reason for the failure of the homeless industrial complex has had to do with perverse incentives, progressive resistance to mandatory treatment, and the insistence on permanent supportive housing over shelters. But it also has to do with the neoliberal model of outsourcing services. Instead of governments providing such services directly, they give grants to nonprofit service providers who are unaccountable for their performance.
‘You’re going to have to change the constitution because the way that we got to where we are was through a series of ballot measures.’”
The question is, ‘What should we be spending?’ and ‘What should it be on?’ And I think the right, if it’s really going to rebuild itself, needs to have definitive answers to those questions.”43
Californians over the age of 55 are one-third of the adult population but nearly half of voters. Young people aged 18–34 are one-third of adults but 22 percent of likely voters. Just one out of five likely voters has no college education. And two-thirds of likely voters are homeowners, while just one-third are renters.67 “It’s the worst possible opponent because it’s Big Voter,” said the pro-housing advocate, laughing. “Big Voter doesn’t want you to succeed.”68
The pursuit of allegedly individual freedom ends up ultimately killing the person, and does enormous damage to everybody else.
It is notable that while Friedenbach, Kushel, and Tsemberis are the most influential individuals in shaping homeless policy in San Francisco and Los Angeles, they are also the least accountable. As the problem has worsened, their cultural and political power has grown, while voters understandably blame their local elected leaders for the crisis.
One of the most important discoveries of sociologists in the late twentieth century, as they sought to understand rising crime rates, was that most people obey the law not because they are afraid of being caught violating it but because they believe in the law, and that it’s being administered fairly.
