No, Progressives Didn’t Ruin Cities Like San Francisco

Despite the apocalyptic stories you may have heard from Fox News, the New York Post, CNN, and other outlets, San Francisco, California, remains an epically beautiful, achingly poetic, richly diverse, and uniquely important American city. This “cool, grey city of love,” as poet George Sterling coined it back in 1892, has long been a haven for progressive ideas, groundbreaking literature and art, and enlightened social justice.

The City by the Bay has been a national leader on living wages, universal healthcare, criminal justice reform (until recently), and LGBTQ+ rights. But the city has a lesser-known conservative streak that is now mightily resurgent, as deep-pocketed reactionary political forces aim to overhaul San Francisco politics by weaponizing homelessness, drug addiction, and crime to fuel election-year fearmongering about urban crisis.

Progressivism is under siege in this historically forward-looking town that has blazed trails for same-sex marriage, tenants’ rights, immigrant protections, and more. A center-right reactionary movement—financed by Republican billionaires, wealthy corporate Democrats, and big business interests—is pushing hard to take over city politics and roll back progressive policies on everything from homelessness to crime and policing, housing, and elections. It’s a remarkable political volte-face that gained national attention with the 2022 recall of progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin.

The city’s famously pretty and increasingly gritty streets—which, like all cities, are tragically sites of chronic homelessness, virally publicized crimes, and fentanyl fatalities—are now a flashpoint for a conservative narrative on rampant homelessness, crime, and punishment.

While moderate and conservative forces have always existed in San Francisco, the current insurgency surfaced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Frustrated by lengthy school closures and the perception of crime run amok (even though most violent crime rates remained lower than most American cities), the center-right coalition funded and fomented a reactionary rebellion, recalling three progressive school board members and then Boudin. Building on these wins, these groups ran hard and spent big to defeat two progressive candidates last year, splurged on campaigns to upend judges, pushed for local legislative districts to favor moderates, and are gunning for more in upcoming elections in March and November. Famously, tech billionaire Elon Musk proclaimed he would chip in $100,000 to defeat Democratic Socialist supervisor Dean Preston; a week later, Musk insisted Preston “should go to prison” for his progressive positions.

This agenda, promoted through ballot initiatives and candidate campaigns as well as advertising and media, includes expanding policing, arresting both drug dealers and users, rolling back criminal justice reforms, building more market-rate housing despite the city’s affordability crisis, and eroding both police accountability and the environmental review of development projects.

The city’s famously pretty and increasingly gritty streets—which, like all cities, are tragically sites of chronic homelessness, virally publicized crimes, and fentanyl fatalities—are now a flashpoint for a conservative narrative on rampant homelessness, crime, and punishment.

Blaming the left for San Francisco’s struggles—which are in fact common to most big cities in America, and to many rural areas as well—is a prime talking point among right-wing and mainstream media, as well as Republican candidates for president. In a Fox News debate last November with California’s Democratic Governor (and former San Francisco mayor) Gavin Newsom, Florida governor and former Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis held up a “poop map,” allegedly showing the proliferation of human feces on San Francisco streets. After a 20-minute pit stop in the city, DeSantis featured San Francisco in a lurid and sensational campaign ad blaming “leftist policies” for the strife in the streets. The day after President Joe Biden announced his 2024 candidacy for re-election, the Republican Party spat out a “what if” campaign commercial featuring apocalyptic AI-generated imagery of San Francisco’s streets overrun with crime and drugs.

Locally and nationally, San Francisco is being weaponized like a two-pronged pitchfork aimed simultaneously at erasing local progressive change and mobilizing Republican voters motivated by anti-urban fear. These two prongs, the local centrist and the national right-wing, are at once distinct but mutually reinforcing.

At a public safety forum last December, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins told a televised audience that homeless people “have to be made to be uncomfortable.” This stunningly Orwellian moment merits repetition: A high-level elected official in one of America’s allegedly more progressive cities insists that people living on the streets need to be made uncomfortable, as if barely surviving without a home isn’t hard enough.

The GOP’s war on cities isn’t just for votes, it’s also a lunge for political control—even when it means diminishing local control, a longstanding Republican mantra.

Jenkins’ bizarre remarks echoed Mayor London Breed’s oxymoronic declaration a few months earlier, at a chaotic outdoor city supervisors meeting near a block known for intense drug dealing, that “compassion is killing people.” Wait—what? Compassion is what’s killing people, not poverty, trauma, abuse, inequality, and nationwide shortages of affordable housing and treatment facilities? The mayor’s remark crystallizes the reactionary thinking ascendant in San Francisco—a deeply conservative politics that blames “compassionate” policies rather than addressing the region’s and the nation’s epic inequalities and decades of declining public investments in affordable housing and treatment for both mental health and substance addiction.

Now, borrowing from the Republican playbook amid her re-election bid this year, Breed is pushing a ballot measure that would require drug testing for recipients of county general assistance—a basic financial lifeline—despite widespread evidence that the approach doesn’t work and often discourages people from getting this meager assistance that helps sustain the poorest of the poor.

Over the past year, Breed, Newsom, conservatives, and moderates alike have prioritized reviving police “sweeps” to remove homeless people from tent settlements on sidewalks—despite chronic shortages of shelter and drug treatment beds and supportive housing, and despite court rulings against criminalizing homeless people for sleeping on sidewalks when there are no clear alternatives. In August, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed the ban on sweeps, angry protesters—joined by Breed and some city legislators—came to the courthouse to voice their outrage that police are not allowed to sweep away homeless people from city sidewalks. (Somehow, these rulings didn’t prevent Breed and police from forcibly removing homeless people from downtown areas during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.)

In his deeply problematic 2021 book, San Fransicko, author Michael Shellenberger wrote, “Progressives ruin cities,” but there’s one big problem with this view: It is profoundly, empirically wrong. Worse, it is fueling a style of politics based on fearmongering and scapegoating that conveniently distracts from tackling the economic and social chasms propelling these crises.

Fearmongering about urban crises has been standard Republican fare for decades, most famously in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, which established the template for making crime, “law and order,” and images of urban chaos a key strategy for winning white suburban and rural votes.

At a campaign stop in Bakersfield, California, in 2020, Donald Trump railed, “Look what’s happened to San Francisco, so sad what’s happened when you see a slum. It’s worse than a slum, there’s no slum like that.” He lost.

In 2022, Republican Darren Bailey ran a heavily anti-urban campaign for Illinois governor, calling Chicago a “crime-ridden, corrupt, dysfunctional hellhole.” He, too, lost.

Along with San Francisco, New York City is a prime target of this narrative. But as Newsweek found, crime rates in many Republican-led cities, such as Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Miami, Florida, are higher than in the Big Apple.

At the Republican state convention in North Carolina in 2021, Trump railed against Democratic-led cities that “defunded” police, echoing police groups’ claims that staffing reductions led to crime spikes. While some violent crimes rose, most cities trimmed police budgets barely, if at all, and crime rose in places that increased police spending as well as those that cut it, according to a report in The Tennessean.

The city’s chronic homelessness and drug addiction in the streets are rooted in astronomic housing prices, and structural regional and national inequality, exacerbated and enabled by public disinvestments in affordable housing and treatment for mental health and substance abuse.

Now, in a particularly cynical move, Republicans are shipping immigrants to Democratic-led big cities. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida’s DeSantis are flying and busing undocumented immigrants to cities such as Chicago, Denver, and New York City, an election-year strategy to rid their states of mostly brown asylum-seekers while adding fiscal and political pressures on Democratic-led urban areas. In response, Democratic mayors have expanded shelters for immigrants and are pressing Biden to bolster federal resources to address people’s needs.

The GOP’s war on cities isn’t just for votes, it’s also a lunge for political control—even when it means diminishing local control, a longstanding Republican mantra. As Mother Jones reported, Republican legislatures and governors “are moving to curb the power of blue municipalities and other institutions that don’t fall in line; erase the voting power of non-Republicans; expel the people those communities elected; and strip them of redress.” This “war on local control” includes challenging the powers of public school systems, district attorneys, and ballot initiatives. Plus, recall efforts are increasing nationwide.

While the Republican “culture wars” don’t resonate in San Francisco, local centrist groups speak a similar GOP-like language on crime, homelessness, and addiction in the streets. The difference is that they articulate it in a locally palatable, seemingly moderate dialect.

As one longtime city resident and observer of San Francisco politics commented on X (formerly Twitter): “The SF Tech-Finance Republican platform that is exactly the same as the ‘moderate Democrat’ one: Criminalize poverty; cops and more cops; deregulate government oversight commissions; deregulate real estate; racist school segregation; deregulation and tax cut[s] for business.”

The financial interests behind San Francisco's reactionary movement were primary funders of the school board and Boudin recalls, and continue to flood the city’s politics with cash. In one example, just two tech industry entrepreneurs spent $350,000 to boost the mayor’s ballot measure to expand policing.

This well-financed octopus of center-right political groups, many with quite similar names (GrowSF, Advance SF, TogetherSF, and Neighbors for a Better SF, among others) features overlapping funders and political ties, local researchers Nate Horrell and Lisa Awbrey have documented.

Shellenberger, who has also written a climate-denial book and espouses troubling transphobic beliefs, is a key figure. His group, Environmental Progress, funds a host of local advocates who promote various planks of the reactionary agenda, from criminalizing drug users and homeless people to expanding policing and incarceration.

Another top funder is Michael Moritz, a knighted Welsh billionaire who got phenomenally rich as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Moritz funds both The San Francisco Standard online publication and political groups like Neighbors for a Better SF and TogetherSF. Moritz has plowed a stunning $336 million into San Francisco “social and political causes” over the past three years.

Other players include the conservative Manhattan Institute and one of its leading ideologues, Christopher Rufo, who produced a slick, heart-tugging, yet deeply misleading video about San Francisco’s struggles, titled “Chaos by the Bay,” which has netted nearly 2 million views on YouTube alone.

While progressive policies have clearly not fixed the crises in the streets, they have reduced the harm and suffering.

According to Tim Redmond, editor of the local news outlet 48 Hills, this reactionary movement is “driven by a false media narrative” that “suggests San Francisco is crime-ridden and unsafe, and that the solution is more police and more incarceration.” Redmond, who has covered city politics since 1986, adds, “It’s funded by very, very rich Big Tech and real estate folks who are, frankly, taking advantage of a situation where the voters are unhappy to try to impose a neoliberal agenda.”

The thing is, they’re wrong about San Francisco and the causes of its problems. The city’s chronic homelessness and drug addiction in the streets are rooted in astronomic housing prices, and structural regional and national inequality, exacerbated and enabled by public disinvestments in affordable housing and treatment for mental health and substance abuse. Decades of citywide gentrification—and a seismic economic and political shift propelled by the tech and real estate industries—spawned thousands of evictions, even from subsidized housing; meanwhile, 71% of homeless people in the city were formerly housed here, city officials report. A recent peer-reviewed, multi-university study on homelessness in California found that high rents and housing instability are top drivers of the state’s soaring homelessness.

A key character in this story is the tech industry, which has dominated the local and regional landscape for the past quarter-century. This inequitable economic monocropping has produced the world’s greatest concentration of billionaires, alongside California’s most glaring inequality, with the top 10% raking in more than 12 times what those in the bottom 10% make. This, combined with stratospheric housing prices, has fomented a mass exodus of poor and working-class people from the city.

Combine these local and regional factors with a national affordable housing shortage, and nearly half the nation at poverty's precipice, and you have a volatile recipe for homelessness and desperation. Homelessness jumped by record levels in 2023, due to the dearth of affordable housing and stark drops in post-pandemic public assistance. And now, Republicans are trying to eliminate or cut welfare and food stamps.

The suffering on some San Francisco streets, and those of other American cities and towns, is horrifically real. But as long as these reactionary movements blame false causes, while distracting from these huge structural culprits, the suffering—and those reactionary howls for yet more policing and punishment—will only get worse.

While progressive policies have clearly not fixed the crises in the streets, they have reduced the harm and suffering. A harm-reduction center for drug users that Breed first opened and then shut down saved hundreds of lives by preventing overdose deaths, which have spiked since its closure.

Progressive ballot measures in recent years that tax the rich to expand supportive housing and services for homeless people have housed thousands. Progressive policies preventing tenant evictions have helped keep many residents housed who might otherwise have ended up on the streets.

Other progressive policies have substantially improved San Franciscans’ lives: a living wage ordinance; an anti-wage-theft ordinance; universal local healthcare; free public transit for children; and a tax on the city’s wealthiest property owners to fund rental assistance and more affordable housing.

What San Francisco needs is not more punishment, nor more slashing of public aid, nor a new “just say no” war on drugs. Our best hope is to greatly expand and fund policies known to help: more affordable and supportive housing, combined with more treatment for addiction and mental illness; living wages so people can afford that housing; and a New Deal for homeless and poor people that engages, employs, houses, supports, inspires, and includes these people rather than weaponizing them for political gain.