Re: Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco: 40 Years of Failure

[Blue State Gay Pedophiles]

Brock7 <patr...@protonmail.com> wrote in
news:umqk5m$1fjco$5...@dont-email.me:

> Nancy Pelosi and Democrats have ruined San Francisco, Portland and
> Seattle.

Downtown San Francisco appeared different after the city removed most
homeless residents and their possessions from the Asia-Pacific Economic
Conference (APEC) area. Business leaders and political commentators
proclaimed amazement that San Francisco’s homeless woes were seemingly
vanquished for APEC. Many asked why downtown couldn’t look like this all
the time. So, I have to wonder: do these people really think San
Francisco city government hasn’t tried to sweep away the homeless
before? San Francisco sweeps homeless people away from downtown whenever
it hosts the Super Bowl, World Series or any major event downtown. This
isn’t new and homeless people will return like clockwork afterwards.

I’ve discovered how few participants in San Francisco politics have a
knowledge of San Francisco’s history beyond ten, maybe twenty years.
This limited knowledge is common even among people who defend the
homeless and mistakenly believe the tech boom created the housing
crisis. If we want a downtown San Francisco where people aren’t dying on
the streets, we need to accept this isn’t really about the current
mayor, the board of supervisors or the technology sector. Any solution
to homelessness must first understand that homelessness in San Francisco
goes back over forty years and not much has changed since.

Today, there are an estimated 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco,
while homeless advocates charge the real number is 2 or 3 times than the
official night count. In 1982, the earliest official approximation of
San Francisco’s homeless population was — drum roll, please — about
8,000. S.F. has around the same number of unhoused residents over forty
years ago that it has now. Homeless activists in 1982 also believed this
to be an under-estimate and argued the real population was upwards of
15,000.

By the 1980s, San Francisco’s residential construction had all but ended
thanks to mass downzoning of neighborhoods to prevent apartments, public
housing defunding, redevelopment destroying homes and economic issues.
While rents increased and rent control was enacted to withstand it,
office development downtown took off. The growing imbalance between
employment and housing; deindustrialization and growth of white collar
employment, transformed homelessness from a problem of runaway hippies
to one of Vietnam veterans, minorities and immigrants unable to get
housing.

To make matters worse, the decline of SROs in the United States during
the 1970s put people who otherwise could find a room out on the streets.
By 1990, the U.S. Census Bureau conducted a homeless count and found
that there were 6,000 homeless at any given night in San Francisco.
Census volunteers told the media this was an under count due to high
numbers of uncooperative and missed individuals.

A study sponsored by the Association of Bay Area Governments used
customer data from a homeless support organization to estimate 23,000
had been homeless in San Francisco at any given point in 1990. In
comparison, the San Francisco Department on Homelessness estimates that
21,000 people experienced homelessness in 2019. Again, 30 years later
and hardly a difference between them. By 2000, the city began its own
homeless count system based on shelter usage and estimated 5,400 were
homeless. It jumped to 8,600 and then fell back 6,500 in the aughts,
mostly due to changes in the count methodology and some minor
improvements in re-housing people. The homeless count remained steady
until 2017 when the count jumped back to 8,000 and has remained since.

Just as San Francisco’s homelessness crisis repeats itself like the
movie Groundhog Day, the city also endures the same cycle of reactionary
politics. A cocktail of economic whiplashes and housing shortages make
the city unable to accommodate normal mobility and migration, putting a
new generation of residents and newcomers into tents and vehicles. A
drug crisis springs up that disproportionately hits the unhoused. It was
crack-cocaine then and it’s fentanyl now. A pandemic disproportionately
kills homeless people; be it AIDS in the 1990s and COVID-19 today.

Media and business groups proclaim the streets populated with tents and
drug addicts in the Tenderloin signal the death of San Francisco.
Homelessness, high housing costs and displacement spills out of San
Francisco and into nearby cities. Anti-homeless laws are passed in Bay
Area suburbs, leading to envious political centrists in San Francisco
desiring the same. Leftist activism flares up before police crack down
on them with occupations of vacant property like Moms 4 Housing in 2019
Oakland, and the various Bay Area “Homeless Union” occupations of the
1980s and ‘90s.

The umpteenth San Francisco mayor, upon realizing homelessness increases
at a rate faster than people are re-housed, evicts encampments after
housed residents get angry. Every generation, well-spoken anti-homeless
pundits insist homelessness is not a housing problem to a sympathetic
center or liberal audience. Newspapers and political pundits call into
question the large sum of money going to a problem that doesn’t seem to
end.

Regarding the last point, there’s understandable frustration about the
millions going to nonprofits yet street improvements not appearing
evident. The cost to build homes for homeless people now exceeds $1
million per individual home in S.F. Administering services is getting
costlier, in-part due to the cost of living issue for workers, thus
reducing purchasing power of current subsidies. But the real issue is
that these costs are getting higher, not the homeless nonprofits that
administer them and do a fairly good job. Without these nonprofits the
homeless wouldn’t be helped, and defunding them wouldn’t do anything to
rebuild public sector capacity in administering these services. It was
austerity of the 1970s and 1980s that gave birth to these nonprofits and
killed public capacity to begin with.

The real criticism of progressives is that they are really good at
responding to homelessness, unlike political moderates, but they’re not
good at preventing it. They refuse to believe building more
non-subsidized homes does anything other than make homelessness worse.
Despite near unanimous research to the contrary. Even now they’re
fighting the state from forcing the city to rezone and approve homes
faster — something literally no other citywide progressive coalition in
the Bay Area or even the state of California is doing.

The progressives in S.F. have this unique and unusual anti-housing
development position because Moderate vs. Progressive politics in S.F.
is an extension of the pro-development Downtown vs. pro-preservation
Neighborhoods fight of San Francisco’s mid to late 20th century. This
dynamic gets rebranded over the years to Progressive and Moderate, Pro-
vs. Anti-Growth but the core opinions are generally the same.

The sad thing is that S.F. progressives undermine themselves by holding
these evidence-free positions. They rightly identify “Housing First” and
not sweeps as the evidence-based solution to homelessness. The
progressives are correct and anti-homeless pundits like Michael
Shellenberger are incorrect. Housing First has substantially reduced
overall homelessness in Houston, Atlanta and Minneapolis by giving the
homeless homes before beginning drug treatment and sobriety programs.
Logical too, since many of these addiction issues stem from being
unhoused. But S.F. progressives ignore that these cities also had high
home construction. Thus, homeless housing construction and acquisition
yielded absolute reductions in homelessness while stopping increased
homelessness with a better housing market.

The byproduct is that San Francisco paradoxically has one of the
nation’s best homeless re-housing services, but it can’t scale it
against the insurmountable housing demand which produces more
homelessness every day. Metropolitan Houston, while enduring a
population boom, saw its homeless count decline from 8,400 to 3,200
since 2011, while San Francisco, which isn't seeing a population boom,
has increased in homelessness from 6,400 to 7,200 over that same time
frame.

So now we’re in the midst of the umpteenth right-ward, anti-tax lurch on
homeless policy because nothing’s changed about San Francisco’s
conditions to voters. This is the S.F. Groundhog Day cycle. What’s new
is that the rise of fentanyl has collided with unsheltered homlessness
like a nuclear reaction. People are in severe distress in the Tenderloin
district. It’s not too dissimilar to the streets of declining cities
like Philadelphia, but S.F. gets national focus because the poverty
contrasts with the city's immense wealth and national media pundits
reside there. Moreover, these street conditions weren’t as bad during
the crack-cocaine epidemic because poor people in S.F. could still
squeeze out homes to do drugs in. Nowadays, former crack houses cost $2
million in San Francisco.

The drug issue is also being selectively engaged with by moderates and
progressives. Moderates ignore the evidence showing how conditioning
welfare on drug rehabilitation fails. They also keep pushing this line
that homeless people in distress are refusing treatment, but ignore that
there’s no vacancy in treatment beds for the vast majority of people
seeking medical services. Meanwhile, progressives uphold the
decriminalization of drugs that Portugal did as a solution for S.F.
However, they omit that Portugal’s decriminalization success heavily
involved police and courts coercing people into treatment.

I have news for the next phase of city politics on homelessness. Mayors
Feinstein, Agnos, Brown, Newsom and Lee all tried the same, failed
strategy of sweeping them away, doing “care not cash”, voucher programs
to curb panhandling, or doing re-housing without building enough homes
overall. None of it reduced homelessness. Anti-homeless laws like
Proposition Q in 2016 successfully evicted S.F.’s homeless to Oakland
and birthed Oakland’s shanty towns, but new homeless people took their
place in downtown San Francisco. Of course, there should be mitigation
rules for encampments such as not allowing drug use near schools or
working with encampment residents to prevent fires and get sanitation
services. But homeless bans fail every time they’re tried.

The number one priority for San Francisco should be the creation of
shelter beds by the thousands. Shelters that can both accommodate pet
owners and non-pet owners, protections for various genders and sexual
orientations, and with storage capacity for personal belongings. The
city should be declaring a state of emergency and requesting both state
and federal assistance in erecting homes and shelters.

The contrast between New York City, where you seldom see encampments,
compared to the shanty towns of the Bay Area and the bodies all over the
sidewalk of S.F. is astounding. It is solely because San Francisco and
the Bay Area does not have enough shelter beds as an intermediary
between becoming homeless and getting subsidized housing. The
consequences of unshelered homelessness mean death and induced mental
illness for thousands of people. California has the sad distinction of
leading the nation in unsheltered homelessness, by far.

The second thing that needs to happen is San Francisco must be absolved
of its land use authority. Since the 1960s, San Francisco has proven
totally inept at building housing, from the city’s redevelopment agency
destroying houses and inducing a housing shortage, to office heavy
downtown developments attracting global capital but depending on suburbs
to house them. The issue of housing in San Francisco concerns not only
its residents but the cities around San Francisco, like Oakland, who
suffer from high home prices, displacement and homelessness due to
S.F.’s exported externalities.

San Francisco is used as an example by governments all over the world on
how to completely bungle housing. If we want to turn this around and not
let the 2020s be decade number 5 in San Francisco as a homeless capital
of the United States, we need a lot more homes, now. Not just in housing
units, but in shelter beds and in treatment beds for drug
rehabilitation. Everything else, including sweeping the homeless, has
and will fail.

https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/san-francisco-40-years-of-failure