Book Review: San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger
Their ideology blinds them to otherwise foreseeable harm.
San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger. Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross. HarperAudio, 2021. 11 hours (approx.).
Michael Shellenberger is the best selling author of Apocalypse Never (read my review here) and currently writes for Substack. He has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 years. During that time he advocated for “the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing and alternatives to jail and prison.” But those problems kept getting worse so he asked:
What were we getting for our high taxes? And why after 20 years of voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug addiction, mental illness and homelessness had all three gotten worse? And why had progressive Democratic elected officials stop enforcing many laws against certain groups of people …?
His latest book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities attempts to answer these questions. The answer is suggested by the subtitle: progressive policies exacerbate rather than alleviate the problems of homelessness, drug abuse and crime. He attempts to prove this with a plethora of data, interviews, history, policies and philosophy.
Shellenberger’s writing style is to begin by citing common misconceptions or faulty data and then correct those things. In chapter one he questions the idea that homelessness is caused by high housing costs.
A study by realtor website Zillow and the University of New Hampshire found, “When median rent exceeded 22% of median income the number of homeless people in a city grew, and rose especially rapidly at 32%”
However, “Homelessness and affordability are correlated only in the context of certain local policy efforts and social attitudes, concluded researchers.” Other cities such as Miami also experienced an increase in rents (35%) but a decrease in homelessness (9%).
If the high cost of homes is not causing homelessness, what is? Mental illness and drug addiction, says Shellenberger.
He suggests a number of ways to address these issues including adopting the Netherlands’ method of dealing with addiction. The Netherlands reduced addicts from several thousands to 400 or 500 on methadone and about 120 on medically dispensed heroin. The Netherlands achieved this through a combination of care and punishment.
Rene Zegerius, program manager of a healthcare organization called GGD Amsterdam, said, “If you only do it with care it’s not going to succeed … at some point there are some people who do not want to or are not able to listen. For them there are psychiatric examinations. And some people are just bad. Those people go to jail.”
But thanks to the influence of French philosopher Michel Foucault liberals and progressives have gone from advocating humanistic psychiatric care to opposing it. Indeed, they misattribute the addiction, untreated mental illness and homeless crisis to policies and politicians dating back to the 1980s. They also mistrust the criminal justice system.
So it is that the progressives of San Francisco adopted housing first, decriminalization and harm reduction policies, which Shellenberger argues not only don’t work but make things worse.
Take San Francisco’s permanent supportive housing model (or PSH) for example. Between 2005 and 2020, San Francisco saw a 95% increase in unsheltered homeless even though the number of PSH units provided by the city rose from 6,487 to 10,051. That gives San Francisco 11 permanent supportive housing units per 1,000 people. Contrast that with New York (4 per 1,000), Los Angeles (3 per 1,000) and Chicago (4 per 1,000). Yet, those cities’ homelessness dropped between 2005 and 2019.
Also, progressive leaders enable users by offering needle exchanges, safe use sites and adverts that promote using with friends so they might administer Narcan in the event of an overdose. According to Shellenberger, “... the governments of San Francisco, California and other progressive cities and states stress the remote dangers of cosmetics, pesticides and second hand smoke, they downplay the immediate dangers of hard drugs including fentanyl.” To be sure drugs are dangerous: 93,000 Americans died in 2020 due to overdoses. But to the point of homelessness, this enabling behavior worsens drug abuse and, as a result, causes more homelessness.
Some have argued it's a money problem: addicts want treatment but can't afford it. They have suggested a single payer health care system as the solution. However, a cocaine user will spend approximately $51,000 a year on drugs. If he or she really wanted treatment, he certainly has the money to do so. Moreover, Canada has a single payer health care system but British Columbia has seen overdoses increase 74%. Coincidently, BC’s largest city, Vancouver, embraced decriminalization, harm reduction and housing first policies.
Shellenberger argues all of this is rooted in the progressive ideology, which views the world through an oppressed/oppressor lens. The dark side of this “victimology” is in how it moralizes power. It asserts that victims are inherently good because they have been victimized. Meanwhile, privilege - real or imagined - is a sin.
This leads to pathological altruism, which is a “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,” according to Barbra A. Oakley. Progressive ideology blinds liberals and progressives to this otherwise foreseeable harm.
Criticism
Critics of Shellenberger argue that housing cost is, in fact, the root cause of homelessness. Wes Enzinna writes in the New York Times book review:
“The biggest growth area in homelessness” is “actually people who still have a car or an RV and are choosing to live in it because they can’t afford housing,” said Elaine de Coligny, the executive director of EveryOne Counts, the organization that conducts the homeless census across California.
Enzinna, who is also currently writing a book on the Bay Area’s housing crisis, goes on to say that Shellenberger ought to have interviewed current homeless people rather than former homeless people. Enzinna has done this in Oakland, and informs us that:
Among the camp’s 30 or so residents, there are many drug and alcohol users as well as two people suffering from severe mental illness. But the encampment has also served as a temporary home of last resort to a UPS worker who lost his job after a serious injury; former homeowners; a professional soccer player; a transgender DoorDash driver who moved from Louisiana to escape bigotry; and retirees and disabled persons whose Social Security checks of about $1,000 a month aren’t enough to afford them an apartment.
The obvious trouble with Enzinna’s second point is that it is anecdotal. Comedian Adam Carolla and lawyer Mark Geragos have provided many counter anecdotal examples on their podcast, Reasonable Doubt. Still, it calls Shellenberger’s argument into question.
Is homelessness caused by mental illness and drug addiction or unaffordable housing costs? I don’t know because Shellenberger and Enzinna both make good arguments backed by experts and statistics. But the answer is important because it will determine what will solve this crisis and what will exacerbate it.
Surely the answer is both. Certainly, in Seattle, there's been an ongoing rise in rents across the metro area, which has been pricing out lower-income residents.
That being said, however, it's pretty obvious to me that a substantial portion of the homeless are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs.
The existing homeless programs seem to do a fairly good job of helping the first category of homeless (i.e., basically well-adjusted people who have had financial problems) get back on their feet.
However, the "homeless NGO complex" in Seattle (and, from what I can tell, in San Francisco) refuses to admit that the second category of homeless even exists, and from what I can see, tries to use the same techniques for the first category with the second. And that's just not going to work.