A Progressive’s Indictment of Progressive Urban Policies

A review of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, by Michael Shellenberger, Harper Publishing, New York, 395 pages.

 

Living in Tucson makes me feel a kinship with Michael Shellenberger, the author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He laments how the progressive wing of his party, the Democrat Party, has ruined his hometown of San Francisco and other one-party cities.

Tucson also suffers from serious governance problems and associated socioeconomic maladies, largely due to being a longtime one-party metropolis without any real political competition. The party in question happens to be the Democrat Party, but given my dislike of what both parties have become, I’d be saying the same if it were the GOP that had the local political monopoly.

My feeling of kinship is heightened because Shellenberger is an environmental activist, as I once was; and is a proponent of reforming drug laws and the criminal justice system, as I am. Both of us are also authors and widely published. Unlike me, however, he was a socialist in his youth and is a rare individual who readily admits where he was wrong in the past.

To the last point, Shellenberger says in the introduction that what he and other progressives had believed about cities, crime, and homelessness was “all wrong.”

The book’s major flaw is its title because it will keep many progressives from reading it. A better title would’ve been, Cities Harmed by Emotions: How Commendable Compassion Has Led to Uncommendable Urban Policies That Hurt People.

The book traces how compassion has led to self-righteousness, which has led to hubris, which has led progressives to be blind to countervailing facts about homelessness, crime, drug decriminalization, and defunding the police. The fundamental belief of progressives who run cities like San Francisco is that lawlessness and other anti-social behaviors should be excused because these are the result of racism, poverty, white privilege, and the inequalities of capitalism—as if all human foibles and the Seven Deadly Sins would magically disappear if they were to run the world.

According to Shellenberger, 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.”

Regarding the nexus between homelessness and drug addiction, the author quotes former U.S. presidents and California governors, legislators, and mayors, such as Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor (and paramour of Kamala Harris). Brown said, “The problem of homelessness is not going to be solved until one major drastic change takes place in public policy: we have to be able to impose help and treatment on people.”

Due to the decriminalization of the use of smaller amounts of illicit drugs and the failure of existing rehabilitation programs, San Francisco has the fourth-highest death rate from drug overdoses among major cities. As Shellenberger writes, “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.” He goes on to make this provocative statement: “People are not dying from drug overdose deaths in San Francisco because they’re being arrested. They’re dying because they aren’t being arrested.” (Shellenberger wants arrestees to be given the option of drug rehabilitation instead of jail.)

Mental illness is also prevalent among the homeless. According to the San Francisco Department of Health, 4,000 of the city’s homeless have a history of both serious mental illness and substance abuse disorder. Shellenberger says that “California has a 30 percent higher rate of mentally ill people in jails, and a 91 percent higher rate of mentally ill people on the streets or in homeless shelters, than the nation as a whole, despite spending $7,300 per patient on mental health services, which is 50% more than the national average.” He also says that California ranks near the bottom in the effectiveness of its spending on such problems, while Arizona, which spends considerably less, ranks near the top in effectiveness.

Not only do statistics abound in the book, but so do chilling anecdotes about what it’s like to live and work in San Francisco, with its open-air drug markets, its homeless encampments, its sidewalks littered with human feces, its citizens being confronted and threatened by deranged people high on drugs and/or suffering from a serious psychosis, and its dominant political and cultural mindset, a mindset that somehow has concluded that it’s better to let the homeless live and die on the street like animals than to infringe on their imaginary civil rights.

The ACLU and other civil rights organizations and advocacy groups have this mindset and use their political power to prevent the mandatory psychiatric treatment of the seriously mentally ill. This so upset psychiatrist Dr. Robert Okin of San Francisco that he said, “Civil rights lawyers were more interested in people’s civil rights than their lives.”

Other advocacy groups believe that a lack of permanent housing is a root cause of homelessness, so their focus is on that instead of the establishment of homeless shelters and effective treatment centers and programs. In any event, for a variety of reasons, permanent housing doesn’t get built.

One of Shellenberger’s solutions will make fiscal conservatives gasp, just as it made me wish I had an oxygen tank in the house. It is to establish a powerful new agency reporting to the governor. Separate from existing state and county health departments and health providers, it would treat addicts and the seriously mentally ill, and provide housing to the homeless on a contingency-based system, as well as purchase psychiatric beds, care facilities, and treatment facilities across the state. Resources would be reallocated from existing agencies and programs. Shellenberger sees this as the only way to put a focus on the problems and establish political accountability for solving them.

The flaw in this solution is the same flaw that exists in the politics of Tucson: as long as one party has control of the government, political accountability is a pipedream.