San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

why did the Seattle police and mayor let them?

it never dawned on me that a major city government would actually participate in its own abolition.

Between 2008 and 2019, eighteen thousand companies, including Toyota, Charles Schwab, and Hewlett-Packard, fled California due to a constellation of problems sometimes summarized as “poor business climate.”

And why, after twenty years of voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, had all three gotten worse?

I discovered in the process was that much of what I and other progressives had believed about cities, crime, and homelessness was all wrong, and that we needed to get it right.

no sane psychiatrist believes that enabling and subsidizing people with schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorders to use fentanyl and meth is good medicine. Yet that is what San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles are, in effect, doing.

question from progressives: what if it’s a form of victimization to try to influence people’s behavior at all?

Milk’s campaign to remove poop from San Francisco’s parks and sidewalks was a resounding success. At least, that is, when it came from dogs.

In 2019, the city spent nearly $100 million on street cleaning—four times more than Chicago, which has 3.5 times as many people and an area that is 4.5 times larger.

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.”

researchers have long understood that such self-reports are unreliable due to the socially undesirable nature of substance abuse, and the lack of insight that often accompanies mental illness.

researchers for decades have documented not just the prevalence of mental illness and substance abuse among the homeless, but also their role in creating homelessness in the first place.

They had been built with the greatest of progressive and liberal intentions: to provide former residents of poor neighbors with modern apartment units. But they became infamous for concentrating poverty, crime, and violence.66

Crack radically reduced the price of cocaine, along with the duration of the high, making it available to the poor and working class. The cost of crack declined from $10 to $3 for a single hit between the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

While some may have doubted that San Francisco would completely solve the problem of chronic homelessness within ten years, few could have predicted just how much worse it would get.

advocates for the homeless were hosting seminars where they taught people how to camp out in the city.

“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.”

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

“Some of the things allowed to happen in San Francisco would never be permitted back home in Boston.”

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 and turning you into something you were never meant to be, like how the kids start turning into donkeys in Pinocchio, and then end up trapped and in cages.”

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

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.”

“They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.”

the leading advocates for the homeless often oppose shelters.

If you don’t deal with the reasons people are losing their housing then the system will never be able to keep up.

Parole violations are less the result of nonviolent possession and failed drug tests, and more the result of reoffending parolees.

we released everyone in prison in 2013 whose top charge was a drug offense,” notes criminologist John Pfaff, “the white percentage would rise by one point (from 35 to 36 percent), the black percentage would fall by one point (from 38 to 37 percent), and the Hispanic percentage wouldn’t change.”

Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove mass incarceration. New York is proof.

those who put many of the stricter drug laws into place did so because they were under pressure to protect African American communities suffering from violence associated with gang warfare over open-air crack markets.

Rising incarceration rates reflected rising rates of violent crime.

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

“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.”

I, like many advocates of harm reduction, compared the death toll from alcohol to deaths from drug overdoses, but the comparison was misleading.

Much of what I had believed about prohibition was wrong.

mostly abused alcohol was that illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine were far too expensive for many of them.

Portugal does not let people addicted to hard drugs with behavioral disorders off the hook like progressive West Coast cities have done.

“Portugal is a conservative culture where drug use is looked down upon,”

“They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature.”

stimulants will make you psychotic, and so it looks just like bipolar mania,” he said. “I mean, it’s indistinguishable.”

Big pharmaceutical companies went far beyond what was medically sound by promoting opioids for chronic, not just acute, pain.

to naïve or unskeptical compassion on the part of doctors and the wider society.

“Addiction is the only disease that I know of that actually tells you to make it worse,”

“They just come here to die,” said Adam. “That’s it. They come here to shoot up, nod, and die.

They’re disconnected from everything, right? Themselves, other people, the world, the environment. Even if they’re around people, there is isolation and disconnection.”4

Today, when San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles firefighters or police rescue someone from overdose with Narcan, the person is often put right back into the open drug scene, and not offered drug treatment. “The way our city is doing harm reduction does not work,” said Vicki Westbrook.

Harm reduction is like life support. It keeps people alive, but it doesn’t give them their life back.”

“If I had walked in off the street to get rehab, there was maybe a twenty percent chance that I could have gotten a detox bed that day and an eighty percent chance that it could take me up to three weeks to actually get into treatment,”

“The Salvation Army has detox beds available,” he said, “but the city actually discourages you from going to the Salvation Army because it’s a faith-based organization. So there’s really nowhere to go for treatment.”

Psychiatrists have long warned against giving money to the mentally ill homeless addicted to drugs, and yet that is what San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other progressive cities do.