San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

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.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Economics, Society, Cultural

416 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2021

About the author

Michael Shellenberger is an American author and former public relations professional. His writing has focused on the intersection of climate change, the environment, nuclear power, and politics.
He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, co-founder of the California Peace Coalition, and the founder of Environmental Progress.

Reviews

[Amora · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reason why San Francisco is the focus of the author is because most homeless people in San Francisco are unsheltered and because San Francisco has been the sandbox for new progressive ideas. Proposals by harm reduction advocates and progressives haven’t been shown to be productive and, in many cases, cause more harm. Cutting police funding, permanent supportive housing, decriminalization, and getting rid of asylums aren’t the answer.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is an avowed liberal progressive, so I was utterly surprised by the history and current failings of west-coast progressives about homelessness, addiction, and mental illness that he meticulously researched. Tragic, but wholly correct about how progressives are ruining cities with the constant victimization of people while spending billions of dollars without solving anything to unaccountable NGOs. Eye-opening read!

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

San Fransicko : Why Progressives Ruin Cities (2021) by Michael Shellenberger is a fascinating take on what is wrong with San Francisco and other West Coast American Cities. Shellenberger is an activist, mainly on environmental causes but who also campaigned for drug legalisation in the 1990s. It’s remarkable how The Bay Area, Seattle and Los Angeles, places that generate such incredible wealth have such a large problem with homeless people. Shellenberger tackles the issue head on. The book is full of figures and references.

Joe Rogan has an interview with Shellenberger about the book and The Economist magazine also has a good review of the book.

Along with Dignity by Chris Arnade and The Least of Us by Sam Quinones San Fransicko provides a dramatic view of things that have gone badly wrong in America.


San Fransicko starts by talking about a campaign against dog poo and the person who lead it – Harvey Milk. Then it cuts to how in current day San Fransisco (SF) a new kind of excrement on the street is causing problems, this time it’s human excrement. This leads into a description of the current serious problems with mental illness and drug abuse and how they mix with the current day homeless population in SF. Early on Shellenberger also contrasts the homeless problem in SF with that of New York City (NYC). NYC and Washington DC both have more homeless people per capita that SF but don’t have the same problem with an area like SF does with the Tenderloin.

Shellenberger describes how a mentality for dealing with homelessness has taken hold on the US West Coast that is different to that in other places. He confronts issues with homelessness and drug addiction. He looks at how Amsterdam changed the way they dealt with drug use from greater tolerance to getting addicts to undertake treatment and shutting down open air drug markets that made it easy to get opiods and meth. Note that tolerance was fine for pot, it was harder drugs that caused the issues. He talks with people in SF who got addicted and then cleaned themselves up after living on the streets.

In a chapter on untreated mental illness and how that is part of the homelessness problem Shellenberger makes an interesting point that the de-institutionalisation of mental illness that in the US is blamed on Reagan occurred gradually over a long time frame. He points out that there was chronic awful treatment of inmates. He misses the role of neuroleptics and other anti-psychotics that are essentially short term chemical lobotomies that enables substantial numbers of seriously mentally ill people to function outside of asylums. Shellenberger describes how a study done in the 1970s where graduate students got themselves admitted to mental hospitals and allegedly weren’t released is highly suspect and possibly outright fraudulent.

The housing first movement that believes that housing for homeless people where the housing is given without constraints such as staying sober has not worked. In high housing cost areas like the US West Coast it’s very hard. He also makes the point that the housing first movement is often opposed to short term accommodation with shared facilities. He describes that the use of this sort of short term accommodation can be a way to alleviate homelessness and help people get back on their feet.

The way in which many crimes have been allowed to happen in Seattle, SF and LA is remarkable. SFs decision to allow substantial low level property crime is something that Shellenberger sees as something that enables this sort of crime to be used for getting money to buy drugs.

Shellenberger’s thesis is that a theory of homeless people being victims who should be allowed to do as they please is a disaster. He points out that in the US places that don’t take this approach, including left leaning NYC and Washington DC have handled their homeless populations much better than SF and other West Coast cities. He calls for a California wide agency to be set up to deal with drug addiction and mental illness and to clean up the streets.

San Fransicko is really well worth a read. Shellenberger is a long time resident of the city and clearly someone who cares deeply about what he’s been witnessing and what has happened to San Francisco. It will be interesting to see if SF and some of the other cities turn the homeless issues around as NYC and Boston and many other US cities did with crime in the 1990s.

[Susan Tunis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having lived in San Francisco longer than anywhere else, it's probably no surprise that I'm pretty progressive. But I actively seek out differing voices; it's good to get my head out of my liberal bubble on a regular basis.

Mr. Shellenberger lives in Berkeley, and the first thing I'll note is that he doesn't come across like an alt-right lunatic. In this book, he talks about major urban issues like homelessness, mental health, addiction, crime, policing, the social safety net, housing, wealth inequality, etc. And while there are asides and references to other major cities, the book largely uses San Francisco and the Bay Area as it's prime example, making it feel very much a part of my life. It got even weirder when people I know IRL started showing up or being quoted in the book. It's definitely not the first time time that's happened, but it's always weird.

So, the author throws a lot of statistics around and references a lot of studies about, say, the outcomes of incarceration vs. treatment for addicts--and a million other things. And some of it can definitely give you food for thought. But I'd also have to do a lot more research before I take his word on any of it.

You know the old saying about there being "lies, damned lies, and statistics"? It's kind of like that. Data can be manipulated and twisted. For instance, at one point he talks about how the social safety net is more robust than it's ever been, and he proceeds to list about a dozen different programs as if anyone who needs help can just ask for it and receive it. And probably a lot of the successful, well-educated readers of this book will think it's true. When the reality is that the available help can't even touch the levels of need, and actually gaining access to the help offered by any of those programs is nigh on impossible. Especially for those most in need of aid. So, everything isn't exactly as presented, which makes me suspicious of the things he says that I don't know about.

But, it's an interesting and provocative book. I may spur me and other readers to check his premise further. And it was definitely food for thought--just take it in with a healthy dose of skepticism.

[Jim Cullison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mixed bag. Started strong, then plunged off the rails. The most powerful and persuasive chapters of the book appear early on, contending that cities' homeless problems are actually utterly anarchic drug use crises that collide and commingle with mental illness to steadily erode civilization by the hour. Shellenberger will convince you that strong government action is necessary to curtail this ever multiplying chaos and squalor, and that attitudes of permissiveness and empathy have only served to translate Dante's Inferno from the page to a city street near you.

THAT SAID...his book lost me with a weird foray into free will and the thought of Viktor Frankl that was neither useful or clear as to where it was going or what thematic purpose it was serving. I'd wait to check this book out of the library.

[Martin Silbiger · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rather than crafting a compelling narrative, Shellenberger just overwhelms the reader with facts and figures. It seems to me like he's got a viewpoint and went out to collect facts to support his argument, rather than truly exploring the issues at hand.

As a Seattle resident, I found his characterization of my city to be ridiculous. His depiction of CHAZ/CHOP is right out of the pages of the Seattle Times (considered to be a conservative paper) and the national coverage we got for "ceding control to anarchists". He interviews Carmen Best (chief of police) and a detective to cover this topic - no discussions with activists - no wonder his depiction of this event is totally one-sided. We residents have mixed feelings about CHAZ and its failures, but Shellenberger just pulls this event to make the argument that progressives are "soft on crime" or to paint progressives as being in league with anarchists.

He also characterizes "The Blade" as an open-air drug market akin to Hamsterdam in The Wire, but it's less scary when you know you can grab a burrito at Chipotle on that same corner. He also keeps mentioning Capitol Hill as being a historically black neighborhood (to score debate points I guess?!), but there's actually a history of redlining keeping the black population out of Capitol Hill.

I admit, he makes a compelling argument that more policing for hard drug offenses (a carrot-and-stick approach) might "clean up" our cities - but it's hard to trust what I'm reading. I flipped from "maybe there are some good points" to "this is BS" when he starts talking about "participation trophies" as an example of soft parenting, that of course leads us to the downfall of urban civilization.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fortunate to get an advance copy of this important story - Don't be turned off by the title, the argument is strong on what we're doing wrong in SF and other cities, and Michael and his team detail a great plan to help get our addicts off the streets, helping the addicts, their loved ones, and our communities. Looking forward to having this plan unfurl over the next months and seeing important, needed change be made.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How and why to progressives ruin cities? [.] 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, policymakers, 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." -- on page 245

Author Shellenberger is quite the educated and accomplished man, and from what I've read about his background it would appear his views / interests would be aligned with the progressive liberal crowd. However, with his San Fransicko he astutely points out the issues that have turned cities like San Francisco (where he has lived and worked), as well as Seattle and Los Angeles, into urban regions teeming with the homeless in the 21st century. (Side note - I have visited L.A. four times between 2008 and 2023, and the dramatic increase in its homeless population - especially along the freeway system - was very evident by the most recent trip.) Per his research, said issues seem to originate with the bastion of progressive liberal politicians and officials who dig in their heels and keep using the same policies, or are reluctant to make the necessary changes, and mishandle funding . . . which, just in the case of San Francisco, is leaps and bounds beyond what is allocated in larger metropolises like New York and Phoenix. Pleasingly and especially most fairly, he does not simply resort to cheap shots to make all conservatives the bad guys (such as correcting the popular but erroneous belief that President Reagan was solely responsible for the closing of asylums), or advocate for inane notions like defunding the police or that district attorneys should not be prosecuting crimes, and he often seems to operate from a strong common sense angle - such as solid arguments and ideas for enhancing mental health aid and programs in our increasingly troubled nation - which is bolstered by his myriad of interviews and a thorough investigation.

[Jon-Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anyone who is interested in empirically driven policy making should not be too offended to give this book a chance. For me, the book is not saying anything too radical. It's saying something evident, that a lot of people have an interest in not admitting. It's self-evident that whatever California has been doing about homelessness (and the evidence mounts that we are making mistakes in crime as well) isn't working. That a series of policies and programs adopted by political leaders have failed makes it likewise extremely likely that a lot of people will have an interest in defending it.

It's not just the non-profits and the activists. A lot of the political class made these choices and they never, ever like to admit mistakes. Tribalism goes not just for national party ID, but smaller very local political tribes exist as well.

The shortfall of the book is when he goes beyond diagnosing the problem and tries to shrink the heads of the far left, as if it has some sort of essential hivemind high on Foucault and Mao and Gramsci. He also seems to take as proven sociology some recent discoveries that may or may not stand the test of time and seems just as confident about his big government Cal-Psych proposal as the proponents of Prop 63 and numerous other silver bullets were.

That what we are doing now isn't working is clear; that there is a simple solution we just are refusing to do isn't. It's possible he's right. It's possible that looking to European solutions holds the key. It's also possible that European style solutions just aren't politically obtainable in the United States, even in California.

At least since George W. Bush was elected, the California left has overcome objections by more pragmatic Democrats by criticizing them for not "moving the Overton window" while allowing the right to do the same. In other words, if the other side is taking a maximalist position, you must too or you lose. The problem with this is that this contradicts with the proposition that solving problems is the best politics, racking up approval from your tribe is. There is a very strong sense of mistrust among the activists of those who express any kind of desire to poll test things. But the same thing goes on the right.

Shellenberger doesn't get that. He doesn't get that it's not just progressives or the far left that politically resists things it doesn't like. Most political groups do this now, many with no regard for its effect on their electoral prospects. In other words, democracy is an inconvenience. You win some, you lose some, but when you win you do what you want, and when you lose you fuel people with enough outrage to win again. Simply enacting big policies just because they might work is a naive view of politics. The constituency for that type of thing is small.

Did Shellenberger really think the activists he worked with in the 90s lost their way, or that he was duped? If so, how do we know he isn't duped now? A convert should be humble about his certainties. This points to the largest omission from this book: is any analysis of the effect that non-progressives have had on this issue. Like Shellenberger's work on nuclear power, it was he that was fooled by the activists in the first place, not the policy expert community. Activists duped him, not the people who studied energy policy, as I did. My super liberal professors thought nuclear and hydrogen was the most likely solution to carbon emissions, but because it allows the economy to continue with little disruption it doesn't matter if it works, if your real goal is something else.

But forgetting that it was the right, funded by fossil fuel companies, that denied and largely continues to deny that global warming is a problem. The fact that we can't persuade the far left because they haven't had an epiphany like Shellenberger has is not a change in the status quo. The far left refused to vote for Al Gore. The far left foisted Henry Wallace on FDR and let Nixon win twice. The far left found every pretext it could to turn against the Clinton presidency and the Obama presidency, and now the Biden presidency. It has always been such. The only reason they hold as much power right now is because there's no partner on the other side to hold the middle.

Republicans could have nuclear power in every town if they'd vote with Democrats to do it in a climate bill. They won't. So now we have to bargain with political people on the other side. Why does it surprise him that their demands are ideological too?

California's state and local governments are all almost impossible to govern due to the scattershot ballot initiatives, complex constitutional provisions, and expansive network of local government agencies doing overlapping work (I was elected to one such government agency in 2014).

Citizens have no idea who is supposed to solve what problem. Is it the water district? Oh, the cops are the County, but the schools aren't run by the county. But it's not the state?

This too makes hyperlocal issues trump cards against certainly higher-level needs, for example the NIMBYism Shellenberger cites. But the far left was full NIMBY and "No Growth" for decades, using the environment as a pretext; now it's their identity politics that dominates their thought, and so building lots of housing is OK.

In my town when our electeds tried to deal with a growing homeless population, the locals (median house price: $775,000) lectured us for being insensitive to the poor, but our only intersection with the issue was increased emergency services, so even if we wanted to pass a "right to camp" rule, we didn't have the authority.

In order to understand any policy failure in California, you have to understand how broken our constitution is, something that has more to direct impact that Shellenberger's attempt at comparing the left to a Jim Jones cult or using fancy new psychological concepts, something he doesn't appear to be an expert in.

[Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The videos are everywhere. People nonchalantly walk into a California store, remove its contents, and casually walk out with no fear of punishment; and indeed, no punishment comes. In return, once fully emptied or nearly so, those same stores close down. Though California comprises some 12 percent of the nation's population, it includes massive numbers of homeless people. Despite the billions that legislators pour into the problem, it grows.

He rejects the idea that homelessness is a poverty problem, providing statistics that indicate that it is a mental illness and drug abuse problem first. In fact, there are so many fascinating statistics here as to be almost dizzying. The audio narration is excellent, but I would have gotten more out of this had I been able to digest the braille edition so I could mark pages and return to them as needed.

He questions the viability of the housing first believers. He points out systems in Holland and Portugal where abusers are first sent to shelters where they are later rewarded with better housing depending on their ability to work at getting clean and sober. He'll doubtless take a lot of heat from the group who insist that the house is the most important part. I'm no sociologist, but I see a lot of merit in the premise of providing shelter initially then helping someone move up as they take some personal responsibility.

I enjoyed the author's ability to build bridges between those progressives who see homeless people as victims who should never be blamed for any wrongdoing they commit because of their victimhood and those who would take far more draconian measures. He writes that demands to defund the police will result in greater police misconduct because those who are left will be forced to work longer hours under far worse conditions. Defunding the cops and holding everyone blameless because they are victims isn't the answer, he asserts.

Those ideologues who are molecularly bound to their specific position will find much about which to grumble here. But those who realize that current projects aren't working, those who wonder whether other solutions might work better will find much for thought here. Clearly, a status quo approach will bring about the end of civilization as we know it if that's allowed to expand to other cities throughout the country.

[John Devlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best to just grab some great facts and a few comments

“California banned the sale of flavored tobacco, because it appeals to children, and the use of smokeless tobacco in the state’s five professional baseball stadiums. It prohibited the use of e-cigarettes in government and private workplaces, restaurants,”

But shooting fentanyl on a city street is A-okay

“Research finds that many addicts need mandatory treatment, and that it works nearly as well as voluntary treatment. Noted a team of researchers,”

But progressives are for bodily autonomy - unless you aren’t sure about a vax.

“But if poverty, trauma, and structural racism cause addiction, why did addiction worsen over the same period that poverty, trauma, and racism declined?”

Good point

“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. According to research by the Brookings Institution, 70 percent of those who follow the success sequence enjoy middle-class”


“The dark side of victimology is how it moralizes power. Victimology takes the truth that it is wrong for people to be victimized and distorts it by going a step further. Victimology asserts that victims are inherently good because they have been victimized. It robs victims of their moral agency and creates double standards that frustrate any attempt to criticize their behavior, even if they’re behaving in self-destructive”

“A secular religion like victimology is powerful because it meets the contemporary psychological, social, and spiritual needs of its believers, but also because it appears obvious, not ideological, to them. Advocates of “centering” victims, giving them special rights, and allowing them to behave in ways that undermine city life, don’t believe, in my experience, that they are adherents to a new religion, but rather that they are more compassionate and more moral than those who hold more traditional views”

“the homeless could pitch tents to social distance. The city spent $ 61,000 per tent, which is 2.5 times the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city. The program served 262 homeless people.”

Govt efficiency.

[Bryce · Rating 2 out of 5]

A compelling argument, crippled by incoherent centrism and dubious statistics.

I really wanted to like this book. It starts strong, and is at its best when discussing the sociology and data surrounding homelessness; I especially appreciated the perspectives of social workers and recovered homeless. I gave it 2 stars because there are tidbits that challenged my preconceptions and legitimately expanded my understanding of a nuanced issue, but there’s maybe a blog-post worth of that content and the rest is simply not worth reading.

There was the potential to be phenomenal had the book stayed within the scope of homelessness, but the latter half takes a bizarre and scatterbrained detour to justify the book’s inflammatory title by explaining how progressives “ruin cities.” Shellenberger reaches so hard to make causal connections that it becomes difficult to take seriously. The bombastic talk of anarchists, George Soros, cults, and the “radical left” makes the book read like a teleprompter for Fox News.

To make matters worse, Shellenberger structures his argument as a stream of statistics, one after the other, without any cohesive narrative or thesis to tie things together. You’re constantly left guessing what point he’s building towards, and when you think you’ve caught the scent he throws you off the trail with another statistic to contradict an earlier one… or a gross misinterpretation of the facts… or just straight nonsense.

Here’s a taste of how bad it gets:

“The annual revenue of Jennifer Friedenbach’s Coalition on Homelessness, the most influential homelessness advocacy organization in San Francisco, was just $656,892, according to its most recently available tax filing. To put that number in context, consider that the annual revenues of the Nature Conservancy and the National Rifle Association were $1.2 billion and $353 million, respectively, in 2018.”

Hang on… what the fuck? He’s comparing the revenue of a municipal social service against a national environmental fund and the gun lobby, as if these three wildly different organizations having wildly different budgets means something.

Eventually, finally, we learn how Shellenberger proposes solving the homelessness problem. Essentially: eliminate the nonprofits and redirect funding towards a monolithic governmental agency. After reading the book it’s not an entirely outlandish proposal, but he devotes only a few pages to the idea and we don’t learn how it would bring more accountability (a major theme throughout the book) other than the do-everything agency reporting to the governor. In the end, he gives us the same unsubstantiated, wishful thinking that he’s spent the book criticizing progressives for.

P.S.: Some of Shellenberger’s sources are so problematic they deserve to be called out explicitly.

Opioids: Shellenberger argues opioid overdoses were enabled or exasperated by progressive cities decriminalizing hard drugs. His claims are based on a paper by Sally Satel from the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI is funded by Purdue Pharma, the company behind the opioid epidemic. This is akin to arguing cigarettes aren’t bad because the Philip Morris said so.

Cults: Shellenberger claims the west coast is more secular, and its lack of religion explains why we’ve seen so many cults like Jonestown. Setting the factual issues with Jonestown aside, the primary source is a 1986 survey of sociology opinions which includes no data whatsoever to support Shellenberger’s claims.

Black Lives Matter: Shellenberger includes some rather remarkable claims that police don’t use disproportionately more lethal force against African Americans. I was unfamiliar with this study, and after a superficial skim I learned the author of the paper, Roland Fryer Jr., has been embroiled in sexual harassment scandals and that the study had a long list of critiques of its methodology. All of these caveats must have been known to Shellenberger at the time of writing, but were clearly omitted to make a weak argument appear more convincing.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4+ stars

The author introduces the book by noting that while this book focuses on how progressive policies ruin cities, that doesn’t mean that libertarian or conservative or socialist policies can’t also ruin cities.



The focus is mostly on San Francisco, as that’s where the author has lived for much of his life (as have I) but also applies to Seattle and Portland and other cities. New York City escaped the fates of these cities until very recently, after the book’s publication. The author is critical of the San Francisco school board and DA, both of which were recalled in elections shortly after publication.

The book mostly focuses on the homeless crisis and its related issues of crime, mental illness, addiction, and affordable housing. Progressives from the 50s to the 70s successfully closed down mental institutions, as there were many abuses there. But these were not replaced, and so the patients ended up homeless with nowhere to go, and addicted as they turned to self-medication. Some ended up in jail, which is not well equipped to treat them. Policies today enable these behaviors at the cost of public safety in the name of civil rights. Voters fight tooth and nail against new housing developments, driving up costs. But very few homeless are there because of only poverty and housing—the vast majority suffer mental illness or addiction or both.

Is it humane to let people do drugs and live (and die) on the streets in the name of freedom? Or is it better to force people into rehab and mental health hospitals? Can freedom exist without personal responsibility? These are the questions before us.



Mr. Shellenberger explores the topic thoroughly, examining what works and what doesn’t, always searching for the most compassionate response. He manages to make the whole book interesting. I highlighted tons of stuff. Most agree that homelessness is a problem to be solved, yet there is a lot of disagreement on how to solve it. Progressive policies have only made it worse. The book’s arguments come across as reasonable and thoroughly researched.

Language: Occasional strong language, in quotes
Sexual Content: None
Violence/Gore: Some mentions of assassination and violence by mentally ill people. Not graphic.
Harm to Animals: None
Harm to Children: None
Other (Triggers): Homelessness, drug addiction and overdose, classism, injustice

=============================================

Progressives give homeless people the equipment they need to live on sidewalks. … There is a provision in Care Not Cash that allows recipients to get full payment if they agree to work for a nonprofit homeless service provider. “If you identify as homeless, you only get $60 per month plus food stamps because of Care Not Cash,” noted [former homeless addict] Tom Wolf. “But if you volunteer at a non-profit for twelve hours per month, you get full General Assistance payment. You collect three months before they kick you off and you never volunteered.”
That’s what Tom did. The homeless nonprofits’ “whole intention is to keep more people in this cycle,” he said, “because they’re getting money for it.”

Jacqui Berlinn is a mother whose son, Corey, is homeless and addicted to fentanyl and living on the streets of the Bay Area. “My son tells me San Francisco is where he most readily gets what he needs. He calls it ‘Hell,’ and 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.”

The problem with Housing First stems from the fact that it doesn’t require that people address their mental illness and substance abuse, which are often the underlying causes of homelessness. Several studies have found that people in Housing First-type housing showed no improvement in drug use from when they were first housed. …
Housing First may even increase addiction and overdose deaths and make quitting drugs more difficult. Warned a multiauthor review in 2009, “One potential risk [of Housing First’s harm reduction approach] would be worsening the addiction itself, as the federal collaborative initiative preliminary evaluation seemed to suggest.” The authors pointed to an experiment that had to be stopped and reorganized after the homeless individuals in the abstinence control group complained of being housed with people in the control group, who didn’t stop their drug and alcohol use. “They claimed that they preferred to return to homelessness rather than live near drug users.”
There is evidence that privacy and solitude created by Housing First make substance abuse worse. A study in Ottawa found that, while the Housing First group kept people in housing longer, the comparison group saw greater reductions in alcohol consumption and problematic drug use, and greater improvements to mental health, after two years.

Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove mass incarceration. … And 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. From 1990 to 2010, two-thirds of in the increase in inmates nationwide came from people convicted of violent offenses. Some of those convicted of nonviolent offenses may also have committed violent acts, or been with others committing violent acts, but had the charge plea-bargained away.

Heavy drug and alcohol use degrades the health of homeless people. Drug overdose is the leading cause of death among the homeless. Skin infections and disease are more common due to injecting drugs like heroin and meth. Respiratory diseases are common due to smoking tobacco, crack, heroin, fentanyl, and meth. And about two-thirds of the time of hospital emergency departments in San Francisco is spent serving the homeless.

I, like many advocates of harm reduction, compared the death toll from alcohol to deaths from drug overdoses, but the comparison was misleading. Most of the 95,000 people who die from alcohol annually tend to do so after decades of use, while the 93,000 annual drug overdose and poisoning deaths occur within a matter of minutes or hours. Only 2,200 of those annual alcohol deaths occur immediately through acute alcohol poisoning.

Much of what I had believed about Prohibition was wrong. There is little evidence that it increased the murder rate because the rise in gang violence was offset by fewer non-gang drunken murders. Plus, there were one-third fewer deaths from cirrhosis of the liver during Prohibition, and probably less domestic violence. Urbanization increased violent crime for reasons having nothing to do with Prohibition. And, during Prohibition, more cities and counties starting reporting homicides for the first time. The fact that the United States has about four times as many alcohol abusers as abusers of all illicit drugs put together is further evidence that liberalization increases use.

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. Decriminalization reduces prices by lowering production and distribution costs, which increases use. This was also the case for alcohol consumption. It increased after Prohibition in the United States.

Today, many progressives advocate for the decriminalization of al drugs, including heroin, meth, and fentanyl. They propose that cities build special facilities where people can inject or smoke heroin, meth, and fentanyl. Said Glide’s director of harm reduction, “we’re not going to get beyond the opioid deaths until we get to safe consumption sites. There’s really no downside, except for people who see it as a moral failing and they’re morally outraged.”
But the people who have recovered from addiction aren’t so sure. “How compassionate is it to let somebody just shoot dope the rest of their life?” asked [former homeless addict] Vicki. “If you hold people accountable, but you don’t give them an opportunity to change their life, that’s just punitive. But if you give them opportunities without holding them accountable, which is what we do now, that’s not going to work, either.”
Legalization, they fear, would result in even more overdose deaths.

“As long as he’s on the street, he can’t think straight. Some people do, but many can’t think straight because they are constantly under the influence, or sick. For some people there needs to be a level of ‘you need to be forced to do this.’” [parent Jacqui Berlinn]
Some former addicts, and advocates for the homeless, agree. “Addicts cannot get clean,” notes Tracey Helton Mitchell, the former heroin addict, “if they are dead.”

Part of the problem is that patients outside of institutions stop taking their medications, become psychotic, disaffiliate from their support systems, and end up on the street. It is similar to the process of disaffiliation that occurs in people suffering from drug or alcohol addiction. Some are sent back to prison, which is often the only way the seriously mentally ill get the medical care they need.
“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.”

For [ACLU attorney Susan] 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. Understanding this, and the power of the ACLU in progressive cities and states such as San Francisco and California, goes a long way toward understanding the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homeless crisis.

While it’s true that people on the street suffer higher rates of eviction, trauma, and abuse than people who don’t live on the street, it’s also true that the vast majority of people who lose their housing, get traumatized, live with over-policing, and come from generations of poverty aren’t living on the street, or addicted to heroin, fentanyl, and meth. The choices that evicted, traumatized, and over-policed people make must matter, otherwise the number of homeless would be far higher.

The problem with this line of thinking [Foucault philosophy] is that people appear to behave far better when they take responsibility for their actions than when they don’t. Subjects primed to disbelieve in free will, are, for example, more likely to engage in aggressive behaviors. Disbelief in free will even seems to impair some cognitive processes.

The lesson for anyone who cares about expanding human freedom, as opposed to trying to control others, is that we should be communicating to people that they have far more freedom, not less freedom, than they realize. The more you play the victim, the more of a victim you’ll become.

Playing the victim, or what researchers call victim signaling, appears to be working better than ever. Society’s definition of trauma and victimization is broadening, researchers find. As a result, there are more people who identify as victims today, even as actual trauma and victimization are declining. Researchers find that people are increasingly “moral typecasting,” or creating highly polarized categories of “victim” and “perpetrator.” And they find that people who portray themselves as “victims” believe they will be better protected from accusations of wrongdoing.

The culture of coddling contributed to the opioid epidemic, some believe. Patients suffering pain felt more confidence demanding opioids while refusing to accept responsibility. Noted one author, “patients were getting used to demanding drugs for treatment. They did not, however, have to accept the idea that they might, say, eat better and exercise more, and that this might help them lose weight and feel better. Doctors, of course, couldn’t insist … [and] patients didn’t have to take accountability for their own behavior.”

Police killings of African Americans declined dramatically from 217 per year in the 1970s to 157 per year in the 2010s in the 58 largest U.S. cities. Police killings of all races in New York City declined dramatically, from an average of 59 per year between 1970 and 1975, to an average of 12 per year between 2015 and 2020, even as its population increased.

Why then did so many of us come to believe that police killings were rising and that racism was the main motivation behind them? Smartphones and the Internet, combined with the fact that videos of white police officers and black victims are more likely to be shared than ones of black officers and white victims, appear to be a big part of the reason.

Many believe that most in jail are there for nonviolent offense but the most recent available data shows that two-thirds of the people in San Francisco’s jail were there for violent crimes or weapons possessions, not petty, nonviolent, or “victimless” crimes. Just 4 percent are there for drug crime.

The New York success is supported by research that finds that greater police visibility decreases crime. It does so by convincing would-be criminals that they are more likely to get caught, known as deterrence. The same research into deterrence also finds that longer sentences do not deter crime and may in fact increase it. Probation is also shown to prevent crime and decrease recidivism, while imprisonment is not. This suggests that an effective way to reduce crime and mass incarceration would be shorter, swifter, and more certain prison sentences, with the money saved redirected to more and improved policing, including policing capable of handling the severely mentally ill. … There is evidence that probation programs that are “swift, certain, and fair” reduce arrests, recidivism, and drug use in probationers, in contrast to traditional programs, which tend to be arbitrary and slow with punishments.

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. The public supports improving, not defunding, the police.

In the process of valuing care so much, progressives abandoned other important values, argue Haidt and other researchers in a field called Moral Foundations Theory. Researchers point to surveys of over 11,000 people over the last twenty years to suggest the existence of six universal values: Caring, Fairness, Liberty, Sanctity, Authority, and Loyalty. Haidt and others note that while progressives (“liberal” and “very liberal” people) hold the values of Caring, Fairness, and Liberty, they tend to reject Sanctity, Authority, and Loyalty as wrong. Because these values are so deeply held, often subconsciously, Moral Foundations Theory explains well why so many progressives and conservatives today view each other as not merely uninformed but immoral.

Progressives don’t trade away Fairness for victims, only for those they see as privileged. Progressives still value Fairness, but more for victims, and their progressive allies, than for everyone equally, and particularly not for people progressives view as the oppressors and victimizers. Conservatives and moderates tend to define Fairness around equal treatment, including enforcement of the law. They tend to believe we should enforce the law against the homeless man who is sleeping and urinating on BART even if he is a victim. Progressives disagree. They demand we take into account that the man is a victim in deciding whether to arrest and how to sentence whole classes of people including the homeless, mentally ill, and addicts.

The dark side of victimology is how it moralizes power. Victimology takes the truth that is wrong for people to be victimized and distorts it by going a step further. Victimology asserts that victims are inherently good because they have been victimized. It robs victims of their moral agency and creates double standards that frustrate any attempt to criticize their behavior, even if they’re behaving in self-destructive, antisocial ways like smoking fentanyl and living in a tent on the sidewalk. Such reasoning is obviously faulty. It purifies victims of all badness. But by appealing to emotion, victimology overrides reason and logic.
This is not a phenomenon of ignorant people but rather of highly educated ones. It was philosophers, university professors, and journalists after World War II who decided that because the mentally ill had been so badly mistreated they needed to be freed immediately, even though that meant becoming homeless and often incarcerated. The same kinds of people in the 1990s felt that because America had gone overboard with drug prohibition, punishment, and mass incarceration we should not pressure addicts, as they do in Portugal and the Netherlands, to get sober. And it is educated progressives in West Coast cities today who point to centuries of racism as reason for stopping enforcing the laws that make city life possible, including laws against armed gangs taking over whole neighborhoods.

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

[Alex Gruenenfelder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for progressive Democrats such as myself. Written by a former progressive and extensively-sourced, this book puts forward a new comprehensive approach to homelessness and public safety that doesn't quite align with Democrats or Republicans. Even when I don't agree with Shellenberger, I appreciate his intellect, his devil's advocate tendencies, and his genuine drive to make his community better.

This book's goal is to put forward heterodox arguments to problems that groups in the "homeless industrial complex" have not been able to solve. A contrarian at heart, Shellenberger even defends the legacy of alcohol prohibition, but everything he writes is evidence-based. Shellenberger is no stranger to shock-and-awe bold statements like the book's very subtitle, but he emphasizes that he doesn't believe progressives always ruin cities. As he writes early on, "I am saying that when progressives do ruin cities, they do so in similar ways, and for similar reasons."

This book answers important questions many of us have about the homeless, such as why so many don't have a place to turn to when they become unhoused. The answer is, all too often, about addiction. He also asks "How did we go from the nightmare of mental institutions to the nightmare of homeless encampments?" These kinds of questions, and the questions of why progressive solutions have been failing, motivates this book.

The book is not perfect. As the New York Times has noted, Shellenberger is not at all times above dogma, at various points attacking "woke" social thinking. His quotes from anecdotal law enforcement stories are fairly easily criticized too, as are his attacks on participation trophies. It is in these moments that he appears to be writing for a more conservative audience, and gets fairly tangential. However, even in his tangents, Shellenberger always cites his sources.

I am still a progressive after reading Shellenberger's book, but I recognize more of the specifics of what we've been doing wrong. It's all well and good to be philosophically correct, but we need practical solutions to our problems. Shellenberger points to many solutions that are out there, which aren't progressive or conservative: Hawaii's "swift, certain, and fair," an end to NIMBYism, and the creation of a department called CalPsych, as examples. If you're stuck wondering what we can do, read this book now.

[Avid · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was a little statistics-heavy, from a readability standpoint. I’d be reading along, then hit a wall of statistics that i’d have to slog through to get back to the narrative. It was disruptive to the reading experience, for sure. The arguments were well-supported and i was able to see the homeless and mental health issues from new perspectives, so i’m glad i read it. But it’s sort of hard to recommend as a book. Probably an essay format would be more effective

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modern cities (and making them a better place to live for people) is one of my favorite topics. Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but well, that's what I enjoy. "San Fransicko" is a VERY good book with a focus directed in a slightly different area than I expected. To be precise - I've expected a broader analysis of various policies and their implications, while the author has focused on a specific, narrow list of the topic he has found most crucial (impactful) when it comes to SF's demise (like: drug use and the policy of decriminalization, treatment of mental illnesses, approach to the problem of homelessness).

In fact, he may be completely RIGHT here. I mean - these may be the major factors that have influenced the current situation. But I haven't seen any effort to confirm that it's the case. In fact, there are so many other aspects of municipal policies that could have an impact but haven't been touched at all, that it (IMHO) seriously affects the book's credibility. E.g. the problem of housing control is barely mentioned, BUT even this short interlude shows that it's super-interesting and has certain effects.

Anyway, back to what the book actually covers: there are so, so many interesting examples of particular decisions and their effects. It feels almost like a log of laboratory experiments with documented outcomes. I strongly recommend it to everyone regardless of the political standpoint - it's a great food for thought.

4.5 stars, but unfortunately rounded down to 4 (just to show clearly that it's not that close to perfection).

[Chris Boutté · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a progressive and a recovering drug addict who does a lot of work to advocate for policy change when it comes to mental health and addiction issues in our country. So, when I read the title of this book, I instantly went into it on the defense. But once I started reading it, I agreed with probably about 90% of everything Shellenberger argues in this book. Basically, Shellenberger discusses how San Francisco is enabling addicts rather than helping them, which just increases addiction rates, crime, and homelessness. If you listen to criticisms of this book without reading it, you’d think Shellenberger hates homeless people or drug addicts, but it’s the exact opposite. You can tell that he’s passionate about this subject and wants people to get the help and dignity that they deserve, but he points out how areas like San Francisco are doing it all wrong. Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can read this book and not see how San Francisco and our country as a whole is failing addict, the mentally ill, and the homeless. I do believe there’s a conversation to be had about the tough love approach and realistic punishment and accountability, but the research shows that Shellenberger is absolutely correct. I highly recommend this book and just hope people can go into it with an open mind, because I can tell you that as a recovering addict who has worked with thousands of addicts, Shellenberger has the right solutions for a problem that’s killing tens of thousands of people each year and destroying families.

[Mark Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Demonstrates how theology cashes out in real life. It seems—and this book is evidence—that a bipartisan consensus is building that the West Coast's approaches to homelessness are clearly not working, and throwing more money at investing in the same "solutions" is unwise. Agreement on the problems may be longer in coming. But I am grateful for what I can get, and I really do want to see people helped.

[Carolyn Kost · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfect encapsulation: "San Francisco is a city where tolerance deteriorates into license. A town without a norm" (224). Exhibit A: "There are about 25,000 injection drug users in San Francisco, a number 50% larger than the number of students in the city's 15 public high schools" (43). That is one bracing data point among the many in this book.

Journalist, moderate Democrat, and erstwhile candidate for Governor Shellenberger takes pains to state, "I am not suggesting that progressives only ruin cities, nor that they never save them" (nor that conservatives don't), but that when progressives do, "they do so in similar ways and for similar reasons." The focus here is on the ways progressives deal with mental illness, addiction and housing. There are so plenty of statistics, but also compelling interviews, [grim and horrifying] personal anecdotes, and forays into rich asides from philosophy and social science and the city's history. There's something for everyone in this engaging book.

Shelly (after 300 pages, I claim the right to have a nickname for him) focuses on San Francisco, the city where he resides, one that he knows well, to warn others "what not to do" and present "a positive proposal for how to restore human dignity, not just law and order," to what is beyond any doubt "the breakdown of civilization on America's West Coast..." Unfortunately, Shelly, what works in one city doesn't always work in another; the history, culture and demographics matter, but it's a start and your insight may give you a step up in the next election.

So what do progressives do to ruin cities? It's laid out on p. 247: "They divert funding from homeless shelters to permanent supportive housing, resulting in insufficient shelter space. They defend the rights 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, policymakers, 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 for 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 to policies and politicians dating back to the 1980s." And they give anarchism too much traction.

SF has looked the other way regarding illicit drug use since the Chinese opium dens and had "twice as many alcohol outlets as the national average" since the Gold Rush era, then cannabis with the Beat generation, then LSD and cocaine with the 1960's and Summer of Love. That might lead to a temptation to think the current situation is nothing new, but overdose deaths rose 536% from 2000 to 2020. Compare the 93,330 overdoses with the number who die of homicide (13,927) or car accidents (36,096) for perspective (43). In SF, the increase was 263% from just 2015 to 2020. There is no question; this is different from times past.

I used to live not far from the San Francisco Bay area, and the last time I visited, I could not understand why responsible parents would send their kids to study at a university there. Mentally ill and addicted people were injecting drugs in broad daylight. Human feces, garbage, needles and homeless encampments lined the main street, which reeked of urine and funk. The homeless population in San Francisco increased 95% from 2005 to 2020. And yet two people whose decisions are directly responsible for this nightmare, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, have risen to VPOTUS and Governor. In the name of all that is rational, they should be roundly rejected and booted out of office, not promoted. Shellenberger is tough on Newsom, but barely mentions Harris, even though as SF's DA from 2003, and CA's Attorney General in 2010, re-elected in 2014, and junior United States senator from California from 2017 to 2021, she sure had plenty of responsibility for this mess. Partisan solidarity counts for something, after all.

It is evident that throwing money at the problem as we do, in this case billions of dollars, has not helped; the problems of untreated mental illness, addiction, and homelessness have nearly doubled in the past fifteen years or so. Before this book, the author and I shared many of the same ideas about what went wrong, why, and how to fix them. His research revealed the errors in our assumptions.

Lets start with the fact that it's not the poor who live on the street; it's the mentally ill and addicts, often co-morbid categories.

In the same way that addicts living with their families cannot regain their footing, it does not solve or even effectively treat the problem to provide addicts with housing and drugs; it enables them to persist in their addiction. Naturally, housing addicts in California has become a very big business. Gavin Newsom and others before him and after him made the decision to divert funding to permanent housing instead of emergency shelters, so other cities have considerably more shelter beds per homeless person than SF. The heroin/meth/crack addiction problem transcends the "disaffiliation and spiritual alienation" targeted by AA. A psychotherapist friend had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor and was put on opioids. She said she immediately understood how people could be hooked and made sure to get off them in less than a week. It's also a mistake to imagine addiction results primarily from trauma. "I was at a party and I had a beer and it changed how I felt and who I am, and then it became an addiction" (134). Or, consider the case of Jabari Jackson, solidly upper middle class and Catholic school educated, who idolized the gangbangers and pimps who sold drugs and had girls, cars, and gold chains; he ran with a crowd that sold and used and became an addict (Ch 10) and a criminal.

With the real life stories and commentary of Tom Wolf and Vicki Westbrook throughout the book, it is abundantly clear that even the wealthy are just one accident or surgery, followed by tragic choices, from being on the street. "The number of adults who had ever used heroin rose fivefold from 2001/2- 2012/3" (50).

Were overly harsh penalties for dealing cannabis responsible for mass incarceration? No an increase in violence was (41). By 1971, African Americans were 2/3 of all people arrested for homicide and robbery, despite being less than 10% of the population. Welp, that rate has held steady; see FBI Table 41. Is decriminalization the answer? Nope. "The fact that the US has 4x as many alcohol abusers as abusers of all illicit drugs put together is further evidence that liberalization increases use" (48).

"Approximately 121,000 mentally ill people are conservatively estimated to be living on the streets. In 2012, an estimated 35,000 were in state hospitals, while an estimated 356,000 people with serious mental illnesses were in jail and state prisons at any given time" (89). Thus, Reagan's deinstitutionalization was merely "trans-institutionalization" (91) and essentially resulted in the criminalization rather than the hospitalization of the mentally ill (113), yet the State of CA spends around $11 billion a year on mental health and $13 billion on homelessness.

There are so many layers of organizations and people who profit from homelessness and addiction that there seems to be no clear way out from this profligate waste of misdirected money. Poverty is an industry.

What does work? Contingency management, rewards for good behavior; (you remember operant conditioning from Psych 101) and holding people accountable. And while there is a long history of the self-help genre in CA, progressives "condemn similar self-help thinking in political life as 'blaming the victim'. Why is that?" (140). Ay, there's the rub.

The "intellectual architect of their policies" and the Father of Postmodernism (and avowed pedophile and rapist, which may well be redundant) Michel Foucault, wrote unreasonably influential works, one arguing that the treatment of the mentally ill was merely a form of social control (which he vehemently opposed, of course), and that the insane were merely different and should be allowed to roam freely and spread their sunshine. It resonated with civil libertarians and stoked the fires of the war on psychiatry, and the widespread argument in favor of the right of the homeless right to be on the street and do everything they do "no matter how harmful to themselves or the rest of the citizenry" (114). Throughout the book, Shelly adds some jaw dropping conversations with social workers, who state unabashedly that the laws (public defecation, drug use, etc.) should not apply to mentally ill or addicts, that you have to be in your right mind to commit a crime. Whaaaat? "But there's a truth in the need to remove from some people the right to do whatever the hell they want when they have absolutely no control of themselves" (121). It's pretty clear we can't talk to each other from completely different universes.

Which brings us to the skewing of stats in Ch. 12, where he lost me. It reminds me of when I worked with native Californians (like Alicia H, now a teacher in Santa Barbara) who insisted that Black criminals are never to be held responsible for their actions because they were victimized by society. That's infantilizing with a paternalistic and patronizing worldview that purports to be compassionate. For example, Shellenberger cites statistics about Black men being killed by police, but does not tell the reader that Black men, while just 6% of the U.S. population commit over 53% of the homicides (See FBI Table 43) and over 40% of the violent crime, nor does he state that, out of 37,000,000 Black Americans, just 15 were shot dead by police while unarmed in 2020, according to The Washington Post. Everything else he wants to say about this issue is disingenuous at best and utter bullshit, frankly, like his assertion that "higher rates of police killing cannot be explained by higher rates of violent crime by African-Americans" (165). Of course they can; come on, Shelly. And that there are fewer solved homicides of Blacks. Well, Shelly, now you and I both know that's because Black witnesses don't want to come forward to cooperate, so just stop it.

And Chapter 13 isn't much better. Far more plausible is Thomas Sowell's rationale for Black crime rate:

"black criminal violence was the product of the southern-male honor culture that, among black men of lower socioeconomic status, manifested as a violent response to petty insults, sexual rivalries, etc. Since African Americans interacted socially with other persons of color much more than with whites, the victims of such honor-culture assaults were overwhelmingly black. This violence continued when African Americans migrated to the North. Indeed, it escalated in the northern cities, where there was greater freedom and less oppression."

And we are back to all roads leading to the influence of Foucault, this time regarding incarceration. Apart from "encouraging his readers to deliberately limit their political engagement to negative, critical, and destructive actions, namely, attacking social norms and civic institutions" (236), he believed, among other things, that there is no right or wrong, no moral absolutes, so there is no guilt or innocence; the state is illegitimate as a source of authority and seeks to create "docile bodies," while enabling the powerful; ergo 'the existence of crime happily manifests an irrepressibility of human nature...a striking protestation of human individuality' and an entirely "rational response to the high levels of inequality created by capitalism" (183). Egads. Remember, this is the Father of Postmodernism, which gave rise to Critical Race/Gender/Postcolonial Theory and progressive political ideology supported in part by George Soros in Prop 36.

Shellenberger doesn't say it, but the whole Californian way of governing through plebiscites enables ignorant, completely ill-informed people to decide complex issues is insane with horrible far-reaching consequences. It is all too often the most articulate demagogues who convincingly persuades others to adopt their perspectives based on little more than charisma, opinion, and anecdotes, nary a solid research study in sight (see also culturally responsive teaching and other fatally flawed education studies with crappy methodology, sample sizes and conclusions that nevertheless are applied to millions of students). Democracy has its limits; mathematicians do not vote on the validity of a theorem. The adoption of that which is the best course based on empirical evidence should not be a decision subject to a majority vote, especially by the ill-informed, those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, or éminences grises like Soros.

Not so fun fact: the nation's largest cities experienced a 17% increase in homicide between 2014 and 2015 (196), which scholars attribute to the Ferguson Effect: when people lose faith in the "system" and its institutions like the police, "'they are less likely to obey the law.'" More police and their visible presence make for safer communities and serve as deterrents. Study after study shows that Blacks want more police in their neighborhoods; Whites paternalistically and patronizingly want to defund and decrease police on Blacks' behalf (206).

Shelly gets me back on board with Chapter 15, where he ventures into the different values systems between progressives and conservatives. We can't speak effectively with each other because of six universal values: caring fairness liberty sanctity authority loyalty, progressives embrace the first three, but only for those they regard as victims not the privileged, and reject the latter three. "Compassion, altruism, and love have created a blind spot" (218).

Chapter 18 is a prescription for what needs to be done, namely, return to the social norms of civilization, restore order and enforce laws that allow the majority of citizens to flourish and enjoy freedom, mandate long-term residential psychiatric care and outpatient treatment, reduce the number of rent-controlled housing to 1/3 and increase the housing stock. And finally, we need to "balance the American notion of freedom as self-reliance and rugged individualism… with solidarity and reciprocity" (284). We need to grow up.

[Ama · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Saturday, I was discussing with a friend about the potential of moving to Texas. Her reply to me was "Yeah, Texas is interesting but it's turning blue so it won't be that bad soon."

Although the title and font of this book is very brash and comes off as some 100% conservative title, it is far from it. When my friend made that statement, I internally laughed. I have lived in some of the most liberal cities in the country my entire laugh, and on very few occasions been in a non-liberal area for more than a few hours. As we walked through countless tents and people with no clue where they were, in what is commonly held to be the wealthiest as well as picture-perfect city in the United States, I don't know what her statement could have meant. California and Oregon are fully controlled by progressives, not even a moderate Democrat has a chance at this point.

My family is from Nigeria and although I see more widespread poverty during my visits, not a single visit has led me to encounter some of the things I see daily in Los Angeles. The underpasses are filled with people openly shooting up, trash surrounding them, often arguing/talking to themselves or doing who knows what. Progressives often view themselves as more compassionate, which I agree with, but how in the world can you allow someone to live in these kind of conditions is beyond me.

The main argument on how progressives ruin cities are the following:
-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 public drug use and defecation.
-They intimidate experts, journalists, and others by attacking them as being motivated by a hatred of the poor, people of color, and the sick, and causing violence against them
-They reduce penalties for shoplifting, drug dealing, and public drug use
-They prefer homelessness and incarceration to involuntary hospitalizations
-Their ideology blinds them to the harms of harm reduction

I will address these points in order. To the first, I agree with heavily. In an city, the city is sacred because it is a place for possibility, freedom, and flourish. It's bound together by laws and social norms, which when violated should be shamed and at times punished. There is a reason no one is arrested for not picking up dog poop, but people do: societal pressure. When city trust is eroded so that the few can overtake parks, free spaces, and live or do drugs and cause others to live in fear at all times, that is not beneficial for any society. I am tired of Progressives saying "They are a victim!!" Yes this is true, but we are based on equal laws here. If a frat boy was to take a shit in your yard, he should face the same judgement even if he were a Black homeless person. Although the homeless person has a higher likelihood of suffering from addiction and should have his punishment be moreso treatment, he can not go UNpunished.

To the second point, I am tired of being pinned to a wall in any West Coast city if you disagree with the status quo. No one in LA enjoys seeing the homeless anywhere, but the minute you speak up you'll be called racist, homophobic, or whatever awful term they want. Discourse isn't healthy if you go around calling people racist (one of the worst things you can call someone). There is a reason California has 12% of the US population but over 50% of the homeless. It's not like Florida and other Southern states have terrible weather...

On the third point, I couldn't agree more. Here in California, I don't think GTA is very different from real life. As a result of this victomhood mentality, nothing is punished. People openly walk into CVS or Walgreens and steal everything knowing they won't be stopped. In no other place in America will that happen. When you stop punishing "Victims" they manipulate you and take what they want because there are no barriers.

Lastly, I truly believe like the author says, there needs to be a switch from this "Do nothing" mindset, to forced treatment. Only 4% of people in prisons are due to any drug-related reason, most are there for violent crime. There needs to be societally pressure and a switch to the Portugal model. Yes you can decriminalize drugs, but when you are caught committing crimes, or are addicted, you either clean up or you go to jail. Doing nothing does not help the addict or the greater society. I will be purchasing this book as I learned a lot from it.

[Debby HuntingtonDelgado · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best read this year!

I am a staunch California conservative. Rare, I know. I saw Mr Shellenberger interviewed about hos book on an Spicy Times podcast and downloaded the book immediately. That was about a week ago and I just finished it. I couldn't believe so many of the things he said were things I've been saying for years! From MLKs commandment to how to solve the drug and mental illness issues.
So.....let's get started! You have my vote!

[Artur · Rating 5 out of 5]

A data driven and convincing indictment of the most vocal progressive policies put forward to fight crime, poverty and addiction, help mentally ill and support the norms of civilised living in the cities.

It goes over a lot of topics from enablement of drug abuse and antisocial behaviour by supposedly merciful and liberal policies put forward by the progressives that end up disrupting life in the cities and hurting the very people they're supposed to help to the issues of policing, involuntary psychiatric commitment and wardship. It compares the troubling situation of San Francisco and Seattle to more proactive and conservative stances in other states including New York and showcases a lot of data with actual direct speech of a variety of people involved, homeless themselves, government officials, police chiefs and concerned citizens trying to make sure their neighbourhood is safe. Every chapter works on a contrast between the declared goals and shining advertisement of the political decisions and policies enacted and their actual results brining in data points, comparative experience of different practices and past situation.

Great, just great. Even though it paints the present in a grim colour, not everything is lost and there are ways to stitch up the fabric of the cities before it is too late and this book is a call for action to do so.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is slightly misleading, as the book is not just about San Francisco. He extrapolates across America and talks about all sorts of issues: rates and causes of homelessness, government welfare programs that try to address homelessness and poverty, mental illness and psychological treatment, institutionalization, crime rates, assault, incarceration, drug addiction, rehab and the war on drugs, medication, victimhood and personal responsibility, and so on.

Sometimes the writing descends into a conservative diatribe against progressives. But generally a helpful resource.

The book was published post-Covid and he speaks of challenges and events in 2020 and 2021.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have always wanted to read an in-depth take at the history and statistics of homelessness in California, and this was that book. Well researched and balanced. It goes through the decades preceding and the historical moments that led to today and does a fairly comprehensive survey of the problem now.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very thought provoking read, however could have been about 100 pages shorter.

[Emil O. W. Kirkegaard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kinda interesting but too many quotes and stuff. No figures or tables. A word book not a science book.

[JMarryott23 · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 Stars… The issue of homelessness has long fascinated me and to see this issue get worse and worse over time is so disconcerting. I’m also a huge numbers guy, so to see Shellenberger compare different cities really reinforced the points he was making. The book is so well sourced and is also structured excellently.

In my travels the three most dangerous places that come to mind for me are 1) The Tenderloin in San Fran, 2) Gastown in Vancouver, and 3) Callao in Lima, Peru (the main airport is located there). The first two didn’t necessarily feel unsafe to walk through during the day, but it was so disheartening to witness how people live. It felt like a zombie apocalypse and these are the only two places I’ve seen people OD’d on the streets as well as actively shooting up in public. In Callao, I didn’t witness anything in particular but it felt dangerous in the “I wouldn’t walk through here day or night” way. I’ve been to Portland and Seattle as well, and saw some crazy things, but not to the degree of these three places. They gave me a real perspective on the book and the feeling that witnessing this hopelessness gives off.

As expected, the book received some strongly negative reviews from places like The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. Does Shellenberger always portray his oppositions point of view 100% correctly? Probably not. But his research and recommendations appear to be backed up by other cities and countries trying them and succeeding, and by places like San Francisco time and again failing to address the issue despite the money and attention thrown at it. NYT in particular said that no homeless people were interviewed for the book. Clearly ignoring all the time the author spent around homeless people and examining studies taken of them. And they also said that only 8% of homeless people cite mental illness as their primary cause for their situation. I suspect that only 8% of people in prisons would say they’re guilty of a crime as well.

Homelessness really should not be a left vs right issue. And in many ways, it’s not an issue that comes up at the national voting level. It’s a City or State issue in places that are rarely swing states. Within the first few chapters Shellenberger destroys arguments that available housing, investment of money and resources, warm climate, and vast social services are the causes and/or solutions to this issue. You are unlikely to see this issue brought up in election debates, but I really think it’s a massive issue facing this country. I learned a lot from this book and I hope America as a whole can make the changes necessary to result in less homelessness and everything that it entails (mental health, drugs).

[Joel Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shellenberger should be governor of CA. This is excellent.

[Петър Стойков · Rating 4 out of 5]

Лос Анжелис и Сан Франциско доскоро бяха райската градина на западния бряг на САЩ - големи, либерални градове, удобни, приятни, с чудесен климат, отлично уредени, те предлагаха (и продължават да предлагат) огромни възможности както за всякакъв вид професионално развитие, така и за всякакъв вид увеселения.

В последните години обаче нещо рязко се случва с тия градове и те вече не са толкова приятни. Цените на жилищата и наемите там са абсурдно големи и най-високите в цялата страна, а дребната и насилствената престъпност се увеличава със застрашителни темпове, а улиците са засипани от човешки изпражнения и използвани спринцовки, резултат от най-голямата "епидемия" от бездомни хора в света. Които бездомни хора спят в палатки посред улици и паркове и са в голямата си част наркозависими и/или психичноболни.

Българската пословица казва "Каквото посееш, това ще жънеш", а икономическата пословица в същия смисъл е "За каквото плащаш, това ще получиш". Съответно, от десетилетия тия два града, заедно с много други управлявани непрестанно по "прогресивния" метод градове в САЩ (които сега имат същите проблеми), дават огромни количества пари за бездомните, намаляват присъдите за всякакви престъпления, въвеждат контрол на цените на наемите.

И разбира се, получават това, за което плащат - плащат за бездомни, получават... бездомни. Намаляват "цената" на престъпленията (цената на престъпленията се плаща със затвор, нали) - получават престъпност. Намаляват някои наеми - всички останали наеми скачат главоломно...

И така, докато чета тая книга, аз си мисля за нашенските начини за справяне с някои проблеми на обществото и как от "запад" се опитват да ни вкарват някакви прогресивни, "европейски" и много "хуманни" методи, защото нали, това е то прогресът на човечеството. Само дето някои от тия методи ги виждаме колко работят и съм бая скептичен към тях.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

sad story

It really saddens me to hear how progressive , by focusing on caring and ignoring accountability , are destroying the country. They define victims and only care about them . They never consider the suffering and destruction committed by these self defined victims on the people who are trying to live a clean, safe, drug free, crime free life. They manipulate language to make their victim class seem more respectable . It’s insane. The same people who throw a fit if someone’s yard abuts a wetland, or if someone’s pond isn’t pristine will make excuses for people pissing and shitting on the street. You have to pick up after your dog, but street people can shit on tor sidewalk. They think it can be fixed with money. We’ve tried that. The want to give people free houses. We’ve tried that. Their solutions, like most progressive ideas have been proven ineffective over and over again. More money, less accountability . It never works. The care industrial complex keeps begging, taxing and failing.