Do progressives ruin cities

On Michael Shellenberger's lament for San Fran

“I discovered factors—some bureaucratic, some political—working in a kind of evil synthesis with each other that really prevented the long-term homeless from entering the system. Backing this up was a collection of so-called activists with heavy political clout who absolutely believed (and still believe) that homeless people should have a right to live on the street. They believed that homeless people had an absolute right to do everything they were doing, no matter how harmful to themselves or to the rest of the citizenry.”

This is former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in his memoir, as quoted in Michael Shellenberger’s San Fransicko (2022), but anybody living in Toronto last few years or following any of the progressive media will have met the type. Some of them will be your neighbours, who will put “We support our neighbours in tents” signs on their front lawns. Many will be working or columnizing in the Toronto Star, the Globe and the CBC. When the Toronto Police finally removed the Trinity Belwoods and the Lamport Stadium tent cities last year, the outcry in the media and on Twitter was deafening. The little Jane Jacobsians who have been advocating for public spaces in Toronto for decades cried fascism! from their many platforms. Not the open air drug consumption sites, that’s not what they had meant. Those can take over parks and every patch of green in the city.

I may be bitter. The two covid summers have taken away most of the green public spaces I used to rely on and turned them into drug camps, sex trade meeting points and psychotic promenades. Even the ravines had tents in them, and people lighting fires. (Yes, in forested areas.) Moss Park, Allan Gardens, all of the green patch running north-south just east of Yonge across Gloucester and Isabella: can’t even walk through, let alone sit on a bench. I also happen to live not far from Casey House, a moneyed specialized hospital with a newly built second building (Hariri-Pontarini, 2017) and a growing Harm Reduction Program. “Our harm reduction services have included providing 24/7 low-barrier access to safer injection and inhalation supplies since 2014, and access to safer crystal meth supplies since 2018.” There are buckets just inside the lobby, visible to any passer-by, labelled Injection Kits, Inhalation Kits, Pipe Kits. Harm Reduction approach, they quote from the Harm Reduction International, “refers to the evidence-based policies, programs and practices that aim to minimize the negative impacts of drug use, and focuses on working with people without judgment or requiring that they stop using drugs in order to receive support.” Ah, the judgment. We can’t have that.

Often the clients can’t wait and upon pickup settle in a discreet nook in the building to use. First couple of years in the neighbourhood I would walk right by the building coming home—what’s the big deal, I thought—until someone clearly unwell hit me on the arm with some sort of bendable rod, fighting off some demons only visible to him. Another time another “client” threw a plastic bottle at me, so I decided to take the longer way home at night. Being yelled at by a psychotic stranger, this being Toronto in 2022 after the Torontos of 2020 and 2021, now barely registers, though I did get up and leave the subway train pronto when a man across from me started yelling “I’m going to kill you all, I hate you all” and unzipping his sports bag.

I am trying to say that I might have been exposed to our neighbours in tents a little more than the average Torontonian and incomparably more than someone who say owns a house and lives in the yellow belt.

But imagine if a tent city / drug consumption site larger than the largest one we had in Toronto was a permanent fixture of downtown. Imagine if the money that gets thrown into reducing homelessness and overdose deaths keeps growing but the homelessness and overdose deaths keep stubbornly increasing too. Imagine if an Ontario equivalent of the US district attorney decided not to prosecute ‘lifestyle crimes’ (break-ins, shoplifting) and not only small possession but dealing as well.

That would, apparently, be called San Francisco. And a number of other West Coast cities run by progressives, like Seattle or LA. San Fransicko is a comprehensive book on what ails this American city and how the progressive-libertarian duo, once in power, exacerbate the problems. Shellenberger wrote this book as a farewell to the progressive sacred cows that he himself had for a long time, and a lot of this will be familiar to people living in Toronto or Vancouver. There is a lot of overlap. Here are some of those lost pieties.

The term homeless is a misnomer. We are actually talking about a population with untreated addiction and mental health issues.

Activists often like to connect homelessness to poverty and trauma (and racism) but there is no straightforward line; neither is the sufficient condition that leads to a life on the streets. Addiction and mental health illness are—and so the cuts to programs and social services but also equally different philosophies and methods in those services and programs can directly lead to different outcomes. As well as the dominant mores of the locale. Miami and various other red cities have lower homelessness than San Francisco per capita, and it’s interesting to read Shellenberger’s theories as to why. Their intake services and programs will have maintained a component of judgment and stick-and-carrot-ing; as have the ultraliberal countries like the Netherlands, whose approach is a mix of law enforcement and medical, not either-or. (American and Canadian progressives have long been faithful to the “it’s an illness not a crime” approach.)  

“Housing First” is not the panacea and, paradoxically, can increase the number of homeless.

You will have heard a lot about Housing First from Toronto activists in the media traditional and social. It’s a governmental program applied in various jurisdictions around the world that simply supplies apartments with support services to addicts or severely mentally ill or people who are both, with no conditions attached. The clients are presumed functional enough to decide on their own, as soon as they have their own place, to go into rehab or conscientiously take their medication and following that, look for a job. But, Shellenberger writes, there are studies that show no evidence of this. He talks to many people who work in the sector who know this to be untrue (and some others who are religiously devoted to it). A particularly grim study of a Housing First program shows high mortality numbers for the housed. Isn’t the goal the reduction of OD deaths, the author asks one of the HF proponents. No, the goal is safe housing.

What happened in San Francisco, he writes, is that the quite expensive Housing First projects hoover up the funds that could have been dedicated to increasing shelter beds and building more and better shelters. But homelessness activists don’t like shelters and impermanent or conditional housing. They don’t like addicts being asked to modify anything in their behaviour in exchange for housing. It’s all carrot, no stick.

Too, the hegemony of the Harm Reduction approach should be questioned.

The issue with Harm Reduction, says Shellenberger, is similar: the no-strings-attached approach which is kinda agnostic on the topic of whether someone should be an addict on a fast train to death, or not. If someone insists on harming themselves, what is your duty? These neuralgic spots of liberalism are fascinating to me, and I’ve been writing about this a lot lately: liberalism which completely excuses itself from the questions of good life is worthless. Liberalism without any judgment whatsoever cancels itself. 

And so the question of total liberalization of all drugs inevitably appears in the book and Shellenberger keeps turning it over from all possible angles in conversation with many different people to conclude, again, that American progressives have lost the plot. Portugal decriminalized drugs, yes, but open air drug sites are dismantled at any sign of early formation and any kind of public use is discouraged. Property crime or things like defecating in public are not waved off with “addicts be addicts” and rehab plan awaits anybody caught breaking the law. Drug use itself in Portugal, a fairly conservative Catholic country, is looked down upon. (As possession is being decriminalized in BC and considered for other Canadian jurisdictions, a key figure from Portugal has a word of advice for Canada, Vancouver especially.)

That legalization won’t increase use? Another case of progressive wishful thinking. Case in point, alcohol.

Conservatives like Reagan have closed down the institutions and thrown people out as a cost-cutting measure which is why so many mentally ill are out on the street.

Actually the deinstitutionalization in America had already started in 1920s and 30s, and incrementally grew (JF Kennedy was a key figure) to full blown by 1980s. Interestingly, one of the key factors was the anti-psychiatry movement which suggested “community-focused mental health institutions” as the substitute for bedlams. Those could, as Shellenberger points out, only deal with milder cases of mental illness but were absolutely inadequate for psychosis or what is now called clinical depression.

When I started reading as a young person about Laing, Szasz, Basaglia, Guattari, Foucault on the “history of madness” and the anti-psychiatry movement—there is no such thing as mental illness, what there is is a logical human response to a sick society!-- I was in thrall, but I was 20-30 years late, and in a country just out of communism which did have large mental institutions, some of which have been quite cold and factory-like. The western countries had already deinstitutionalized, big pharma’d, and had a host of other, very different problems. (A lot of them stemming from, in order to avoid litigation, laissez-faire-ism.) Particularly pertinent are the parts of the book where Shellenberger shows how inadequate Foucault’s model of pathologization of mental illness is today. It’s difficult and an expensive privilege to get a good talk therapist—and not an instrument of this diffuse societal power that inculcates norms. And in many ways, there’s been a return to the era before the cursed modern one that Foucault warns against, with “the mad” living itinerant on our public squares, free-range and unsurveilled. Shellenberger argues in favour of modest return to a bit more institutionalization and conservatorships, which is also very unpopular with personal choice progressives.

There is so much more in this book. Shellenberger also writes about policing, urban crime, homicide rates, incarceration, use of lethal force by police, and puts all those against race stats as well. I can’t even begin to do justice to it all, but when he takes the long view, the long view shows the incarceration and lethal force have been on a downward trend for a long while now. Why did homicide numbers among African Americans increase after 40s and 50s, with systemic racism weakening and economic status of African Americans improving? It’s actually the effect of the crisis of legitimacy of the US state that came out of the 60s and 70s, some of the social scientists that Shellenberger consults argue; it’s a mediated effect of the lack of trust in the union, in its possibility.

Highly recommended—and I wish we had a Canadian equivalent, but a lot of it does apply here as well.

PS: City of Vancouver apologizes for harm caused during daily street sweeps in the Downtown Eastside