It would be easy to make a barbed remark here about politicians creating slogans for programs. MAGA and Build Back Better aren't the first such declarations. In Duluth the population has been in the 86,000-87,000 range for the 35 years I have lived here, but because of the the need to expand our tax base the former mayor Don Ness initiated a 90/20 goal. That would be a population of 90,000 by 2020.
It was a worthy objective, and hopefully the effort produced a few insights as to where the obstacles lay.
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Shellenberger is not immune to controversy. His book Apocalypse Never created something of an upheaval because he had been for two decades a super-advocate for environmental action. When he began running into young people who were planning to not have families because of their belief in an environmental apocalypse, he realized that environmentalists had been striing the "end of the world chord" a little too hard. At first, they felt they needed to make enough noise to create awareness. Instead, they created a fear vibe that permeated a generation. Panic is not rational and difficult to reason with.
That was his last book. His latest is about California. Here are a few notes.
Between 2008 and 2019, 18,000 companies including Toyota, Charles Schwab, and Hewlett Packard, fled California due to a constellation of problems sometimes summarized as “poor business climate." California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax, and higher sales tax in United States, spends significantly more than other states on homelessness, and yet has worse outcomes.
California has had its share of troubles for decades, he notes, but things have grown exponentially worse in the past ten years.
I was confused. So I have been a progressive in this Democrat all of my adult life, I find myself asking a question that sounded rather conservative. What were we getting for our big high taxes? And why after 20 years of voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, had all three gotten worse? Why had progressive Democratic elected officials stopped enforcing many laws against certain groups of people, from 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?
Shellenberger says he wrote San Fransicko because he didn’t have the answers to those questions and he felt he needed them. I identified with that feeling because it's what drove me to read hundreds of pages of think tank reports on this issue so as to organize my own thinking. My aim is to apply what I learn to our community, just as Shellenberger's intent is to get clarity about his city.
From 2005 to 2020, San Francisco experienced an astonishing 95% increase in unsheltered homelessness has the number of permanent supportive housing units offered by the city rose from 6487 to 10,051.
Today San Francisco has the greatest quantity of permanent supportive housing units per capita of any major city in the United States. It has 11 permanent supportive housing units per thousand people which is nearly 3 times as much as New York City and Chicago and over six times as much as Miami-Dade County. All of that and yet the sheltered homeless population of New York City, Chicago and Miami fell 11, 10 and 50% respectively between 2005 and 2020 whereas San Francisco’s rose 95%. Why was that?
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Correcting Another Narrative
One of the canards that people have repeated so often that it's accepted as truth is that Ronald Reagan was responsible for the closing of mental institutions. Shellenberger, leaving no stone unturned, digs into this a little further unearth's this.
While it's true that as California’s governor Reagan oversaw the closure of mental hospitals, he didn’t start the de-institutionalization. It began nationally in the 1930s, mostly to save money. The closure of California’s mental hospitals began in earnest in the 1950s, more than a decade before Reagan became governor. The emptying of state mental hospitals continued at the same rate between 1959 and 1969. By the time Reagan took office in 1967 nearly half the patients in California state mental hospitals had already been released.
As for the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, it was a creation of civil libertarians, mental health professionals, and anti-psychiatry activists. Sponsored by two Democrats, it passed by a 77-1 vote. It would’ve passed even had Reagan vetoed it. And while Reagan, as president, cut over 300,000 workers from Social Security insurance and Social Security disability insurance, he reversed course a year and a half later. By the end of his presidency nearly 200,000 won back their benefits.
In reality it was a Democrat who got the de-institutionalization of psychiatric hospitals rolling. President John F Kennedy proposed successfully proposed and successfully advocated a crucial 1963 reform that required the federal government to fund community mental health centers but leave it to the states to fund these mental hospitals.
In 1963, JFK argued that medical advances would enable "most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and return to a usual place in society."
Optimism may be good at the beginning, but when the problems worsen, it seems new approaches need to be considered.
Shellenberger has an issue with the abundance of human poop on the sidewalks and the acceptance of open air addiction communities. Most of us have images in our heads of Amsterdam's Needle Park. Shellenberger flew there to see it for himself and discovered that it has all been cleaned up. The outcomes were troublesome and unhealthy. Amsterdam solved their problem by having the police and social workers working together to help individuals get off the junk and on to a new kind of life.
This is not what's been happening in California.
More can be said, but our research has only just begun.
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