San Fransicko

Why Progressives Ruin Cities

Michael Shellenberger

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063093638
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

National bestselling author of APOCALYPSE NEVER skewers progressives for the mishandling of America's faltering cities.

Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, progressives made those problems worse.

Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison. But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the problem.

What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies. San Francisco and other West Coast cities — Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland — had gone beyond merely tolerating homelessness, drug dealing, and crime to actively enabling them.

San Fransicko reveals that the underlying problem isn't a lack of housing or money for social programs. The real problem is an ideology that designates some people, by identity or experience, as victims entitled to destructive behaviors. The result is an undermining of the values that make cities, and civilization itself, possible.

1
“I Just Want to Clean Up the Mess”

In 1977, a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors invited reporters to a press conference at a local park. He said he was going to announce legislation essential to improving the quality of life in the city. With a pack of cameras waiting for him, the man walked across the grass toward them before stopping, making a face, and lifting up his foot to look at the bottom of his shoe only to discover, in feigned horror, that he had stepped in dog poop. After pretending to be surprised, and flashing a big smile, the man turned toward the cameras and announced legislation he would introduce, once elected, that required San Franciscans to pick up their dogs’ poop.1

It was a savvy and ultimately successful move for the handsome forty-something-year-old candidate. The number one quality-of-life issue for San Franciscans had become the large amount of uncollected dog feces on sidewalks and in parks. The man had run for supervisor twice before, coming in tenth the first time and seventh the second time. But he never connected with a majority of voters. This time, having identified an issue that people cared about, he was elected to the Board of Supervisors.2 His name was Harvey Milk.

Today we remember Milk as perhaps the most significant gay rights leader of all time. He is the person who unlocked the secret to reducing prejudice against same-sex relationships, by people disclosing to friends and family that they were gay. Sean Penn won an Oscar after immortalizing Milk’s life in a 2008 film. But Milk owed his political career to dog poop.

Shortly after taking office in 1978, Milk introduced the “Scoop the Poop” Act,3 which by the end of the summer the Board of Supervisors had passed.4 Afterward, 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. But when a San Franciscan is walking down the street and sees someone breaking the law you say ‘Hey!’—with a smile—‘You broke the law.’ And after a while, when enough people do that, the message will be clear. It will be an education process. I really hope not one single citation is ever issued. . . . I don’t want to put anybody in jail. I don’t want to fine anyone. I just want to clean up the mess.”5

People overwhelmingly complied. It’s true that dog owners still sometimes fail to pick up after their dogs. But dog owner behavior has changed drastically, and for exactly the reason Milk predicted it would: peer pressure. Dog owners felt, and feel, a moral obligation to take responsibility for their pets. As such, 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 2018, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow. “I will say that there’s more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen,” said Breed. “Growing up here, that was something that wasn’t the norm.”

“Than you’ve ever seen?” asked the reporter.

“Than I’ve ever seen, for sure,” she said. “And we’re not just talking about from dogs. We’re talking about from humans.”6

Complaints about human waste on San Francisco’s sidewalks and streets were rising. Calls about human feces increased from 10,692 to 20,933 between 2014 and 2018.7 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. Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than three hundred lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.8

The underlying problem was homelessness. Between 2013 and 2016, complaints of homeless encampments to the city’s 311 line rose from 2 per day to 63 per day.9 In 2018, a major medical association decided to host its annual convention, worth about $40 million for the local economy, elsewhere, after decades of holding events in San Francisco.10 The condition of the homeless in San Francisco is internationally recognized as inhumane. 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.”11

Many of San Francisco’s homeless live in densely populated, centrally located areas. The most infamous of these is the Tenderloin, a downtown neighborhood that borders government buildings including City Hall, a major shopping district with several large tourist hotels, and many of the city’s concert venues and museums.

Some argue that the homelessness situation in San Francisco isn’t worse than other cities. “New York City has a worse per-capita homelessness problem than San Francisco,” wrote a New Yorker reporter in 2020. “California’s proportion of homeless residents trails that of New York; Washington, D.C.; and Hawaii.”12 The difference is that San Francisco has a far higher number who are unsheltered, sleeping on the streets or in tents rather than in homeless shelters.

Many studies show that warmer climates and more expensive housing are major factors behind higher rates of homelessness, both sheltered and unsheltered, in San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles.13 In much of California, one can sleep outside for most of the year without freezing. Half of the unsheltered homeless population in the United States is in California and Florida alone, even though the two states are home to just 19 percent of the population.14 High-tech companies like Salesforce, Twitter, and Stripe, progressives noted, had attracted thousands of employees who had driven up rents, resulting in tenant evictions.15

In 2016, representatives from San Francisco’s business, philanthropic, and media communities committed to halve the city’s chronic homeless population in five years. They created a media initiative called the SF Homeless Project, and raised over $130 million in the first year, with $100 million raised by an organization called Tipping Point and another $30 million coming from Marc Benioff, the billionaire CEO and founder of Salesforce, the customer relations software giant.16

The San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, a nonprofit organization, led a campaign to fund housing and services with a special tax on San Francisco businesses that gross more than $50 million annually.17 At first, few believed the measure, put before voters in the form of Proposition C, could pass. CEOs of other high-revenue tech companies in San Francisco, including Patrick Collison of Stripe and Jack Dorsey of Twitter, opposed Prop C, as did Mayor Breed. And the Coalition on Homelessness didn’t have the money to pay for large-scale advertising and other costs of a citywide campaign.

But then Benioff donated millions of dollars to the campaign for Proposition C. “What I see is a crisis of inequality in San Francisco,” he said. “We have 1,200 homeless families, each with two kids. . . . We have 70 billionaires here in our city. That’s incredible.”18

Benioff criticized the high-tech companies opposing Prop C. “Square [is] worth $30 billion,” he said. “Twitter [is] worth $20 billion. Stripe, $20 billion. . . . These are immaterial amounts to us. $10 million doesn’t mean anything. That’s less than the private plane that [Twitter founder and CEO] Jack Dorsey is going to fly around on.”19 Benioff added, “You’re either for the homeless and for the kids and for the hospitals or you’re for yourself.”20

Benioff gave a $30 million grant to Dr. Margot Kushel at the University of California, San Francisco to study homelessness.21 “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 hom...