SF case study: “Progressive” policies tied to explosions of homelessness, safety crises, outmigration
Jacob Peter Gowy, The Fall of Icarus, 1637. Public Domain
The Spectator analyzes San Francisco, America's once-flourishing metro, and traces population shrinkage back to lax criminal justice approaches. Who knew that turning a blind eye to sidewalk camping, substance abuse, and non-violent offenses would only create dangerous and filthy streets—which a third of San Franciscans want to escape ASAP?
As recently as the early Nineties, when the great cities of the Midwest and East Coast were careening toward what seemed like an inevitable downturn, the urban agglomerations along the Pacific coast offered a demonstrably brighter urban future. From San Diego to the Puget Sound, urban centers along America’s western edge continued to thrive and expand as migrants from other parts of the country, and the world, crowded in....
Yet now these same cities — despite differing histories and industrial mixes — face a precipitous decline. Never before have all the burgeoning cities of the future, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, started to shrink. This is, at least in part, a reaction to high prices, relentless property crime, homelessness — San Francisco’s rate of homelessness, for example, is twelve times the national average — and diminished economic opportunity, particularly for the middle and working classes.
At the same time, big companies like Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Jacobs Engineering, Fluor, Bechtel and McKesson have moved headquarters; others are shifting their operations elsewhere, largely to more business-friendly and less costly regions in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Tennessee. Hundreds of other less notable companies, most paying above average wages, have also gone east and south....
The results of these policies are particularly evident in tech-rich San Francisco, where decades of tolerance for even extreme deviant behavior has helped create a city with more drug addicts than high school students; little wonder it ranked last in the US for efficiency in a recent WalletHub survey. In Southern California’s far more proletarian city of Los Angeles, a UN official last year compared conditions on downtown’s Skid Row to those in Syrian refugee camps. Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Oakland, Portland and Seattle show some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness in the country.
This article originally appeared in the Spectator. Read the whole thing here.
Read more about SF’s downfall here.
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