Goings-on in SF — August 2022
Happy Monday, Brionies!
Our little club has grown rapidly over the last few months, not only in terms of member participation, but also the scope and visibility of our activities. As exciting as that’s been, it has also required us to re-think the way we allocate resources and efforts, which is why you haven’t seen a Goings-on email in your inbox for a few weeks. After experimenting with a few different frequencies and formats, our plan moving forward is to deliver this newsletter to you as a comprehensive monthly. So, sit back, relax, and prepare to shake your head a few times at the nonsense – here’s August in San Francisco politics! But first…
Shilling in the name of
We’ve got a podcast! And, somehow, we were able to recap the last eight months of San Francisco politics and still get a clean rating 🤔. Give it a listen, and don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. Available on Apple, Spotify, and all your favorite podcatchers. We’re working on a carrier pigeon option for our paleoconservative friends.
While you're at it, check out our redesigned website and, if you haven’t already, follow us on Twitter!
Tonight, Monday, August 29, at 6pm, join District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey and our friends at Rebuild D6 for a Zoom meet and greet to discuss public safety, homelessness, and housing. Register here.
Permanent supportive housing: A solution that is not permanent, not supportive, and doesn’t provide housing
In the August 2nd episode of the Chronicle’s new podcast Fixing Our City, the hosts compare San Francisco’s approach to alleviating homelessness with Houston’s, and unsurprisingly find that Houston is running circles around us (to be fair, though, “complete and total failure” is a low bar to clear). So, what’s Houston doing that we’re not? According to the hosts, a big part of the secret sauce is Housing First policy, which sounds entirely reasonable. After all, what could be a more direct and immediate solution to homelessness than literally just putting homeless people in housing? Unfortunately, what activists in Houston mean by “Housing First” and what those in San Francisco mean by it are somewhat different.
Here in SF, Housing First is often deployed as a shorthand for one of three things.
The primary reason people become homeless is the high cost of housing. Therefore, if we want to alleviate homelessness, before we do anything else we need to make housing more affordable.
Drug addiction and mental illness cannot be treated by a combination of law enforcement and compelled in-patient hospitalization. The only way to treat these scourges is by offering permanent supportive housing units (re: taxpayer-funded studio apartments) to any and all comers. If people take up the offer, great; if they don’t, try relaxing the rules around drug use and illegal activity in the units.
Congregate shelters are immoral and unnecessary. Only permanent supportive housing units should be offered to the homeless, and entering those units should be entirely optional. Until then, homeless people have a right to camp wherever they want in the city – parks, playgrounds, you name it.
The first key difference to note between Houston’s approach and San Francisco’s is that Houston has a camping ban – and actually enforces it. In other words, Houston will help you find and pay for housing, but staying on the street is not an option. Relatedly, Houston is much more carceral than San Francisco. Across the country, homeless individuals comprise a significant portion of the jailed population, which means that locking up the homeless – even if it’s for correlated antisocial behaviors like open-air drug use, aggressive panhandling, or public nudity – is also part of Houston’s Housing First secret sauce. Finally, permanent supportive housing in Houston (and anywhere in the US where those units are supported with public funds) isn’t simply available to all comers. In order to qualify for assistance, you must meet the fairly restrictive HUD definition of “chronically homeless.” So, it’s not exactly the arms-wide-open free-for-all that many homelessness activists in San Francisco dream of.
That’s not to say that we should be following Houston’s lead, or that activists in San Francisco have it all wrong. For starters, increasing the number of homeless people in jail doesn’t sound appealing, and it’s probably true that housing costs do explain some of the variance between different cities’ homeless populations (though maybe not in the way people assume). What it does suggest is that we should all be a lot less doctrinaire about this complex problem. Houston’s results hold some promise, but almost all of the gains that city made occurred in the first five years of its implementing the Housing First model. In fact, beginning in 2016, the total homeless population in Houston inched up steadily, then plateaued along with the number of unsheltered homeless people.
Why did this happen? One of the least controversial criticisms of Housing First is that its “anything goes” policies yield chaotic living environments, particularly for families experiencing homelessness due to domestic violence or economic dislocation. If you think shelters are immoral, wait til you get a load of the permanent supportive housing units in San Francisco. Needless to say, if you’re homeless because of drug addiction or mental illness, and trying to get sober, one can think of few circumstances less conducive to recovery than living in what is essentially a modern day opium den. In fact, among the more entertaining developments in San Francisco politics has been watching Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and a proprietor of some of the dilapidated SROs profiled in the Chronicle article linked above, slowly be redpilled into becoming a critic of the housing model he’s championed for decades.
Somewhat more controversially, many are beginning to realize that for the most vulnerable populations, Housing First is nothing more than an illusion – a disappearing act that cities and nonprofits perform to obtain funds from the federal government. Take a bunch of drug addicts off the street and put them in unsupervised hotel rooms and housing units, and guess what happens? At best, instead of getting the help they need to become self-sufficient, they end up as permanent dependents of the state. At worst, they start overdosing in large numbers.
And what happens when the money runs out, or the cost of a single unit of housing tops half a million dollars, as in San Francisco? The results are predictable. In fact, we’ve seen this exact same story play out before: journalists write a bunch of credulous fluff pieces marveling at the wonders of Housing First, only to later admit that the reality did not match the hype.
There’s got to be a better way, and while its not clear yet what solution, or solutions, San Francisco should adopt to address its unique circumstances of a homeless population disproportionately impacted by drug addiction in a city where housing is disproportionately expensive, the ideas proposed by Michael Shellenberger and others (many of which have been implemented successfully in Europe) deserve a look.
Picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel
Speaking of unsatisfying journalism, the Fixing our City episode contains a data point that should be catnip to any investigative reporter, but which the podcast hosts gloss over with hardly any discussion: In the past 10 years, homeless services agencies in Houston and San Francisco have actually housed the same number of people (around 26,000)! But Houston’s point-in-time count decreased by more than 60 percent, while San Francisco’s increased by almost 20 percent. If our approach is just as effective, albeit wildly more expensive, than Houston’s, but the underlying problem isn’t going away, you’d think someone would start asking questions. Are the reported numbers accurate? Does this put the lie to the claim that San Francisco’s generous assistance programs aren’t attracting homeless persons from elsewhere? In next month’s Goings-on in SF, we’ll examine some potential answers to these questions.
Of course, it would be nice if someone who actually gets paid to investigate and report the news performed that examination, but journalists in San Francisco clearly had more important things to do in August, including: weirdly obsessive hit pieces on Twitter personalities; article after article after article after article full of innuendo over a black woman getting paid for her labor and then disclosing those payments in accordance with the law; and play-by-plays of childish social media spats.
On the other hand, here are some not very important things that got little or no attention from mainstream local news outlets in August: a bunch of businesses have been leaving the city and it seems at least in part tied to that tax we were told would not result in business leaving the city; one of the city’s largest “nonprofit” contractors has so much money it can burn half a million dollars on abortive, half-baked initiative campaigns that are unrelated to its core mission, which is a totally normal thing that doesn’t indicate massive corruption, at all – and, by the way, everyone is afraid of its president; nearly all of the fired Boudin-era prosecutors who complained (and wrote op-eds) about being terminated by voicemail flagrantly disregarded pending cases to campaign for their boss (who took money from public defenders with open cases against his office), then started extended vacations on the first day of Brooke Jenkins’ tenure; District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan believes that the FBI should be a secret police that investigates her political opponents; and the Chinatown subway station, which was probably just a way for Rose Pak to funnel money to her political allies, is almost five years overdue. Let’s also not forget that none of the major newspapers has yet picked up Susan Dyer Reynolds’ article about another large city contractor apparently defrauding San Francisco out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe they’re just planning to wait a couple years before reporting on it, like they did with the corruption scandal that has (so far) ensnared Harlan Kelly, Victor Makras, and Mohammed Nuru.
To give credit where it’s due, some local journalists have actually been producing important, thoroughly reported pieces recently.
You can’t fight City Hall…
But you can breathe a little freer when it’s on vacation. The Board of Supervisors is in recess this week. Summer break ends next Monday.
Have a great week!
The Briones Society