“Magical thinking,” not a dearth of funding, feeds Bay’s homelessness

The Spectator’s Debra J. Saunders speaks with San Fransicko author Michael Shellenberger about the Bay Area’s hazardously “altruis[tic]” approach to homelessness. While ignoring true underlying factors like substance abuse, current governance hopes that throwing more money at Housing First and similar initiatives will solve unhoused people’s situations—to no avail.

What’s the matter with California? “It’s suffering from San Fransickness,” which is “pathological altruism,” answers Michael Shellenberger, author of the book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

Too many homeless people. Too little common sense. Too much magical thinking….

A Berkeley Hills resident, the author witnessed the City by the Bay’s decline as good intentions trampled common sense and homeless encampments mushroomed.

In Oakland this week, he tells me over a Zoom call, he visited an encampment that is a mile long.

Shellenberger’s remedy can be condensed into three Ps: policing, psychiatry, and probation.

His focus is not on what people do behind closed doors, but the normalization of drug addicts shooting up and camping out in public spaces — and getting away with it because they’ve convinced the Left they all are victims of circumstances beyond their control.

The result: San Francisco’s unsheltered homeless population spiked between 2005 and 2020, while the unsheltered homeless populations in New York, Chicago, and Miami decreased.

This article originally appeared in the Spectator. Read the whole thing here.

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