Introduction
Homelessness has been at the top of San Francisco’s list of civic problems for a very long time. The city spends more than $500 million dollars every year (64% of which is for housing the formerly homeless) but the appearance of homelessness on the streets gets worse, not better. Michael Shellenberger, a well-regarded environmental activist and public intellectual, reached a breaking point during Covid when he was assaulted by a mentally ill man outside his storefront offices in Berkeley. His response was to apply his skills as a social critic to the collective problems of homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness and crime, and the result is “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.”
Shellenberger first became a public figure as co-author, with Ted Nordhaus (nephew of Nobel economist William Nordhaus), of an essay entitled "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World.(2004)" In that essay, Shellenberger and Nordhaus asserted that the environmental movement’s conceptual framework of fighting pollution to preserve the natural environment was inadequate to the challenges of climate change. In their essay and a follow-up book entitled Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (2007), they elaborated on the idea that technological innovation would be the key to addressing climate change and that this effort would create jobs and spur economic growth. As a result of the controversy and what one critic called his “in your face” personal style, Shellenberger became known as the “bad boy” of the environmental movement. In San Fransicko, Shellenberger employs his signature confrontational style to explore the causes and challenge established approaches to urban dysfunction.
In his introduction, Shellenberger states:
“Though I have been a progressive and a Democrat all my adult life, I found myself asking a question that sounded rather conservative. What were we getting for our high taxes? And why, after voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, had all three gotten worse. And why had progressive Democratic officials stopped enforcing many laws against certain groups of people, from unhoused people suffering mental illness and drug addiction in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, to heavily armed and mostly white anarchists in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis?”
“I wrote San Fransicko because I didn’t have answers to those questions and felt I needed them. What I discovered in the process was that much of what I and other progressives had believed about cities, crime and homelessness was all wrong, and we needed to get it right”.
While this mission statement may overstate Shellenberger’s open mind at the start of his research, his exploration of the ideas, politics and policies surrounding these issues makes San Fransicko a thought-provoking read.
Shellenberger’s general thesis is that progressives have failed to balance rights with responsibilities. Quoting Jonathan Haidt, “self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for “out groups,” are values necessary to the functioning of civilization.” According to Shellenberger, politicians in West Coast cities have embraced an extreme ideology he calls “victimology,” described as a hands-off approach to anyone who might be considered a member of an oppressed group. Victimology results in widespread tolerance for disorderly street behavior, including homeless encampments, open-air drug scenes, snatch and grab crime and general lawlessness.
San Fransicko is not just a critique of how leftist ideology undermines civic order, but a polemic in which Shellenberger proposes reforms and asks readers to take back the levers of power and reassert common sense control of the public square.
Homelessness
Shellenberger’s discussion of homelessness is the centerpiece of his case against progressives. The focus of his argument is that the policy of “Housing First” has failed San Francisco and the nation. Housing First is a strategy that asserts that housing should be made available to homeless persons and families without preconditions. The theory is that whatever difficulties a homeless person might be facing, including mental illness, substance abuse or other disabilities, are best addressed after that person has stable, permanent housing, not before.
Housing First is not only the dominant approach to delivering housing and services to the homeless; it is the official policy of the Federal government’s efforts to address homelessness. The Federal government’s focus under Housing First is assistance to the population defined as “chronically homeless”; persons who have either lived on the streets and in shelters continuously for more than a year, or who have had at least four episodes of homelessness during the previous three-year period. The chronically homeless are assumed to have more acute cognitive impairments that require housing in supervised facilities with “wrap-around” services, known as permanent supportive housing (PSH).
Shellenberger criticizes Housing First on two grounds. First, he believes San Francisco and other communities should offer housing only after certain preconditions, such as sobriety or recovery from drug addiction, are met. Second, he argues that money spent on housing would be better used to provide shelter beds, which in his view, would reduce or eliminate tent encampments and other signs of “sleeping rough” on the streets. On both these points, Shellenberger misses the mark.
The claim that housing should be used as a carrot to induce sobriety is a throwback to the regime before Housing First in which “transitional” housing was used to prepare homeless people to become “housing ready.” At that time, social workers discovered that housing before treatment was far more efficient than treatment before housing and produced better long-term results. Hence, the term “Housing First.” Shellenberger’s preference for contingency-based housing appears to reflect more on his own ideology of linking rights to responsibilities than on any evidence he has been able to uncover.
Shellenberger’s second criticism of Housing First is that it reduces funding available for shelters. Housing and shelter perform different functions and every community needs a balance between temporary and permanent accommodations. It is true that in many cities, including San Francisco, in the early days of Housing First, shelter became a low priority because the Federal government was providing funding for PSH and, to some extent, discouraging spending on shelters. The reason for this strategy was that prior to Housing First, few cities were actually housing the homeless; they were warehousing the homeless in shelters.
Federal funding for PSH was necessary because housing for the homeless is, locally, a politically unpopular cause, and the only way to create such housing was for the Federal government to pay for it. Currently, San Francisco and other cities acknowledge the need for adequate shelter capacity, and San Francisco’s pioneering of the Navigation Center concept of service-enriched shelters is an indication of its commitment. Over the past six years, San Francisco has created 10 such Navigation Centers, of which 8 are currently operational. Clearly, supporting increased shelter capacity is fully compatible with a Housing First strategy.
The larger disappointment with Shellenberger’s treatment of homelessness is that he fails to appreciate the humanitarian success of San Francisco’s efforts to address homelessness. He points out that San Francisco has created more PSH on a per capita basis than any other city in America, but he presents this observation to assert the irony that despite these efforts, San Francisco has the most visible homeless problem in America. With a more balanced view, Shellenberger would be acknowledging San Francisco’s accomplishments, while urging the city to do more to reduce its unsheltered population.
What Shellenberger and many others fail to grasp is that the humanitarian effort and the visibility of homelessness on the streets are unlinked. An increasing inventory of PSH and an increasing unsheltered street count are typical of San Francisco’s history of homelessness. It is not the failure of the humanitarian effort that it is structurally impossible to build your way out of the problem of visibility on the streets.
The reason for this disconnect is that the homeless population is not a stock but a flow. The population is in constant flux. People are entering the streets and the homeless service system as newcomers to the city or as native entrants, and leaving either because they find a solution to their homelessness within San Francisco, they decide to go elsewhere for housing, or they continue as homeless in San Francisco or elsewhere. Providing housing does not materially impact this flow. We are not drawing water from a pond; we are drawing it from a river.
To quote from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s (HSH) Five-Year Strategic Framework (2017) “HSH must also work to reduce the number of people who arrive in San Francisco homeless or without stable housing. In the 2017 semi-annual Point-In-Time (PIT) Count, 31% of the people surveyed were homeless when they arrived in San Francisco (approximately 2,300 people). This is more than the number of housing placements we make annually, so this is clearly impacting our ability to have a sustained reduction in homelessness.” Elsewhere in the same report, HSH states that “At the beginning of September 2017, there were approximately 115 chronically homeless Veterans in San Francisco, tracked by HSH and the VA. Each month, another 17 Veterans become chronically homeless or are added to the list.” The report also mentions that between 2011 and 2017, the city helped more than 11,000 people end their homelessness, yet the total homeless count increased by 1,189 persons from 5,669 to 6,858. This data implies that approximately 12,189 persons flowed into the system during this six-year period, or about 2,000 additional persons per year.
(N.B., The reference to 31% from out-of-town cited in the preceding paragraph is a canard perpetuated by the Coalition on Homelessness and others who claim that 70% of San Francisco’s homeless are “from here”. The data is highly suspect. It is a product of a questionnaire administered during the PIT count to approximately 1,000 homeless respondents by a group of homeless peers, many of whom are recruited by the Homeless Coalition for the task. All responses are self-reported without independent confirmation. In the survey it is generally understood that “staying with a friend” qualifies as being from San Francisco.)
Shellenberger’s call for more shelter beds is aimed at reducing the visibility of the homeless on the streets. This is the principal goal for most San Franciscans, and reflects a compelling concern for quality of life in the city. When most San Franciscans talk about dealing with the homeless problem, ending the appearance of homelessness on the streets is exactly what they are talking about. More shelter beds are needed to enable efforts to eliminate camping and “sleeping rough,” but the relationship between shelter capacity and visibility of the homeless on the streets is more complex than Shellenberger presents.
Prior to the pandemic, San Francisco had a program aimed at dismantling large encampments based on offers of a long-term placement in one of the city’s Navigation Centers, service enriched shelters that provide counseling aimed at exits from homelessness. More than half of those being displaced refused services. Of the 5,140 unsheltered homeless individuals who elected to go into the Navigation Center system between March 2015 and February 2019, 14% received permanent housing, 4% received temporary placement and 28% were reunified with family or friends out of town. 54% who entered left with what was termed “unstable exits,” meaning that their homelessness was not successfully resolved even though many were able to use the guidance they received to enroll in various benefits programs including public assistance (CAAP), food stamps and Medi-Cal. What this data indicates is the range of individual conditions characteristic of the unsheltered population. While a large portion may be resistant to services, more than half are eager to work to turn their lives around. Of this population, many are helped through their encounter with intensive case management and some actually achieve housing. The point of this illustration is to show that a shelter stay, at least in a Navigation Center, is a process with exits from homelessness occurring for almost half of the participants. With an average shelter stay of approximately 90 days, an additional 1,000 beds could help 4,000 people a year address their needs.
Having a surplus of shelter beds is a precondition to the police and social workers engaging with an unsheltered person in a conversation about housing and services. Consistent with San Francisco values, the process for eliminating encampments is compassionate and respectful of rights. The combination of shelter availability and law enforcement is the key to eliminating encampments and thereby reducing street visibility. Shellenberger does not discuss law enforcement in the context of homelessness except in reference to drug use. He seems to think that with shelters, “if you build them, they will come,” but experience with removing tent encampments has shown that many homeless people prefer camping to shelters, if only because shelters prohibit drug and alcohol use on premises. Preventing camping in San Francisco is the best way to discourage the inflow of persons from out-of-town.
Shellenberger is correct in asserting that San Francisco has a problem with its politics around homelessness, and that the so-called homeless advocates, led by the Coalition on Homelessness, view the visibility of homelessness as proof of the injustice of capitalism. They are on record opposing attempts to provide shelters and remove encampments. Notwithstanding this resistance, which is a potent force at City Hall, more shelter beds appear to be on the way. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is planning an additional 1,000 beds and legislation is starting to move through the Board of Supervisors to bring these shelters into existence, although the details of where and how will provide challenges in a city as sensitive to citizen input as San Francisco.
Shellenberger’s criticism of Housing First is poorly conceived. It is hard to argue that Housing First is a leftist philosophy given that it became HUD policy in 2002 under George W. Bush. In fact, Housing First is not a philosophy at all but an evidence-based strategy. It was adopted because it works.
Shellenberger is correct, however, to support the push for more shelters, which hopefully will be Navigation Centers with their intensive case management, but he misses the dynamic nature of homelessness in San Francisco. His failure to appreciate the humanitarian accomplishments of the city and its non-profit partners is a serious omission.
Open-Air Drug Scenes
The visibility of hard drug use on the streets and the overdose crisis are the subject of Shellenberger’s second inquiry into San Francisco’s dysfunction. In this case, Shellenberger identifies the theory and practice of “Harm Reduction” as the culprit, arguing that it provides intellectual justification for the self-destructive behavior of the addict. Harm Reduction is a non-judgmental approach to providing services to drug users and addicts that aims at minimizing the danger from drugs while respecting the autonomy of the individual.
Shellenberger describes himself as an advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction in the 1990’s, and brings his personal experience to his description of the fifty-year movement to legalize marijuana and decriminalize hard drugs. He relates his previous belief that “if drugs were legal, and if we treated addiction as a health rather than a criminal problem, there would be far less violence and no mass incarceration.” The epidemic of drug overdoses, however, changed his mind. He now believes that “People are not dying from drug overdoses in San Francisco because they are being arrested. They are dying because they aren’t being arrested. Decriminalization reduces prices by lowering production and distribution costs, which increases use”
Shellenberger argues that the criminal justice system should be used to encourage people into drug treatment and that social workers and the police should work together to maintain compliance. He cites the experience of Amsterdam, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Zurich, Philadelphia, New York and Phoenix in breaking up their open-air drug scenes to suggest that a combination of law enforcement and social support can produce results not achievable with social support alone. As part of his reform program, he calls for access to more and better drug treatment options.
While Shellenberger criticizes the theory of Harm Reduction, he appears to embrace many of its practical applications. He supports needle programs but prefers a needle exchange model in which the addict takes some responsibility. He endorses the use of buprenorphine, methadone and other Opioid Agonist Therapies (OAT), although he adds that similar techniques are not available for the growing number of methadone addicts. He supports the wide availability of Narcan to address the need to counter overdoses when they occur.
His main complaint with Harm Reduction appears to be with the political program to decriminalize and thereby normalize hard drug use. While Shellenberger does not appear to favor incarceration for users, he clearly believes in consequences for public consumption and dealing. He urges amendment of Prop 47 (2014) which decriminalized up to 3 grams of certain hard drugs including methamphetamines to enable law enforcement to play a more active role in getting addicts into drug treatment.
On balance, Shellenberger’s approach to dealing with the drug problem are mainstream among political moderates. Efforts to amend Prop 47 are underway at the state level, and Mayor Breed has called for increased enforcement to deal with the open-air drug scene in the Tenderloin. While her efforts have met with opposition from advocates and some San Francisco’s progressives, her proposals have broad support and are in the process of being implemented.
Severe Mental Illness
Shellenberger’s discussion of mental illness focuses on the small number of psychotic individuals who exhibit unpredictable, disruptive and occasionally dangerous public behavior. The inability of the law to adequately protect the public from these individuals, and to protect these individuals from themselves, is a well-recognized tragedy of urban life. Consistent with his approach in other areas, Shellenberg places the blame for the current dysfunction on leftist ideology in the social sciences. Prominent among the ideas he identifies is the anti-psychiatry movement of the sixties, inspired by Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965).
Shellenberger’s calls for common sense reforms in the treatment of the severely mentally ill are neither original nor out of the mainstream. He proposes greater flexibility in regulations governing involuntary commitment, more in-patient psychiatric beds and creation of a new California state department, which he calls “Cal-Psych”, to oversee a major expansion of treatment for the mentally ill and drug abusers, as well as contingency-based housing for the homeless.
Governor Newsom has recently proposed a set of legal reforms and support programs in this area that represents a start toward addressing this issue, and while there is opposition from the ACLU and other advocacy groups, it is likely that the reforms will be adopted in some form.
Fails to recognize that permanent supportive housing is, in part, the realization of the vision of the community mental health movement, forty years after Reagan gutted the programs. Although it is politically incorrect to say so, PSH is, in many cases, the re-institutionalization of the indigent mentally ill, with the keys held by the tenants rather than the staff. While PSH is not appropriate for persons whose psychiatric condition warrants 24-hour supervision, it does provide a supportive and lightly supervised environment for persons suffering from mental illness who successfully respond to medication and who are now able to live full lives in the community.
Homicide and Street Crime
Homicide and street crime is the final focus of Shellenberger’s review of San Francisco’s failures. In this category, Shellenberger embraces the ideas presented by Randolph Roth in his 2009 book, American Homicide which he summarizes as follows: “The underlying drivers of homicide are related to subjective conditions like ideology and politics, says Roth…Homicide rates among unrelated adults in the United States follow closely the proportion of the public who trust their government to do the right thing and believe that most public officials are honest. As trust in government fell in the late sixties and early seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the fifties and nineties, homicides decreased.” Further quoting Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist hired by the Justice Department to investigate the so called “Ferguson effect” in which less aggressive policing and more empowered criminals supposedly resulted in an increase in crime, Rosenfeld discovered a 17% rise in homicide in the nation’s largest cities between 2014 and 2015. He summarized his findings by concluding that “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust, they are less likely to obey the law.” Rosenfeld argued for support for Black Lives Matter as a catalyst for greater attention on police-community relations, but noted that “defund the police” is not the answer. Most minority communities want more and better policing, not a reduction in police presence.
Shellenberger’s support for greater police visibility and enhanced probation programs, his criticism of Prop 47 which raised the threshold for felony theft from $400 to $950 thus spurring a wave of smash and grab crime in California, and his condemnation of Chesa Boudin’s refusal to prosecute criminals in San Francisco are all broadly held moderate views in the Bay Area. Currently, a majority of Californians would like to see Prop 47 amended, and the recall of Chesa Boudin on the ballot in June is widely expected to succeed. The backlash to the lawlessness of the past several years is well underway.
Conclusion
Michael Shellenberger’s review of San Francisco’s current street scene is an admirable but flawed attempt to capture a moment in time and make sense of it. His emphasis on the role of ideas in shaping policies and outcomes results in a spirited and thought-provoking overview. His enthusiasm for trying to find the paradigm in order to topple it, in one case Housing First and in the other Harm Reduction, needlessly oversimplifies his analysis and keeps him from a deeper understanding that could have made his book more insightful. His critique of “How Progressives Ruin Cities” is mostly persuasive, but there is evidence that a backlash to progressive politics in San Francisco and other West Coast cities, may already be under way.
Finally, while alluding to the pandemic in passing, Shellenberger fails to acknowledge how its full impact included the sudden closure of all the homeless shelters, mass reduction of the jail population, suspension of court proceedings, and instructions to the police force to discontinue drug enforcement and avoid minor arrests. We can hope that as the pandemic winds down, the institutions of government will return to doing their job of protecting the community and ensuring civic order.