The Streets of San Francisco (which look a lot like the Streets of San Jose)

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute reports that San Francisco's lax law enforcement is complicit in the marginalization of our homeless fellow citizens and the wrecking of a once-great American city.

"San Francisco has been conducting a three-decade experiment in what happens when society stops enforcing the bourgeois norms of behavior. It has done so in the name of compassion for the homeless. The result: Street squalor and misery have increased, while government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles guiding city policy remain inviolate: Homelessness is a housing problem, it is involuntary, and it persists because of inadequate public funding. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

"The city sends the message relentlessly that drug use is not only acceptable but expected. The Health Department distributes 4.5 million syringes a year, along with alcohol swabs, vitamin C to dissolve jeroin and crack, and instructions on how to tie one's arm for a hit. Officials have installed 17 needle disposal boxes and kiosks throughout the city, signaling to children that drug use is a normal part of adult life.

"Public drug use has grown worse since the approval in 2014 of Proposition 47, the state ballot initiative that downgraded a host of drug and property crimes to misdemeanors. Local prosecutors and judges, already worried about contributing to 'mass incarceration' are loath to initiate misdemeanor drug cases....

"Free services and food--along with maximal tolerance for antisocial behavior--act as magnets. 'San Francisco is the place to go if you live on the streets,' says Jeff, outside the Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin. 'There are more resources--showers, yeah, and housing.' A man standing outside the city's latest shelter design, known as the Navigation Center, says that he was offered housing four times but always turned it down....

"Elevating the rights of the homeless over those of the working public has cost taxpayers billions, with nothing to show for it. The 'unsheltered' count continues to rise and San Francisco continues to wonder why. Is it lack of city-created affordable housing, as advocates and politicians maintain? No other American city has built as many units of affordable housing per capita, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. From 2004-14 the city spent $2 billion on nearly 3,000 new units of permanent supportive housing, which comes with drug counseling and social workers. {Editor's note: yes, that amounts to over $600,00 per unit)...

"The stories the homeless tell about their lives reveal that something far more complex than a housing shortage is at work. The tales veer from one confused and improbable situation to the next, against a backdrop of drug use, petty crime, and chaotic child rearing. There are few policy levers to change this crisis of meaning in American culture. What is certain is that the continuing crusade to normalize drug use along with the absence of any public encouragement of temperance, will further handicap this unmoored population.

"Carving out a zone of immunity from the law and bourgeois norms for a perceived victim class destroys the quality of life in a city. As important, that immunity consigns its alleged beneficiaries to lives of self abasement and marginality. Tolerating street vagrancy is a choice that cities make. For the public good, in San Francisco and elsewhere, that choice should be unmade.

This essay was adapted from an article in the October issue of City Journal.

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