From there it’s a reasonable assumption — given the current drug epidemic and the city’s vigorous “harm reduction” infrastructure, which dispenses free drug paraphernalia and exerts serious political and legal pressure to minimise enforcement of crimes associated with drugs and homelessness — that drug addicts are overrepresented among these thousands of recent arrivals. That is, it’s likely that at least hundreds of drug addicts from other places are coming to the city every year, and especially to the drug-ridden and drug-tolerant Tenderloin. Anecdotes from the neighbourhood support this modest assumption — such as San Francisco’s police chief noting that, in a recent drug crackdown in the Tenderloin, only three of 46 people arrested were from San Francisco, and the series of very affecting YouTube interviews called “Soft White Underbelly” whose Tenderloin subjects very much paint a picture of the district as a drug destination for outsiders.
These drug migrants to the Tenderloin may account for a small or even marginal portion of the city’s overall homeless population, but from the standpoint of its lawfulness and civic order, and of the survival of its small businesses and its tourism industry, and of the security and pride and happiness of its citizens, it’s not marginal at all. It’s central. The Tenderloin is in the centre of the city.
Activists and academic commentators often portray any concern with this aspect of homelessness as morally shallow and politically nefarious, a desire to render the homeless “invisible”. But the wishes of shopkeepers trying to keep their little businesses alive, and parents whose children have to pass those appalling scenes on the way to school, are not abstract or hypothetical. These people aren’t shills of international capital. It’s not to erase the needs and suffering of the homeless to consider the humble interests of these everyday citizens when we decide where to encourage the law-breaking homeless to pitch their tents and sell and use their drugs.
We’ve travelled to an interesting place, culturally and politically, when not wanting to step in human faeces on city sidewalks is considered morally frivolous. To put it another way, it’s possible that harm reduction is good for the drug-addicted homeless in the Tenderloin and bad for the city of San Francisco, and what we have is a political conflict, in which open contestation and compromise are necessary, rather than the dogmatism and language policing of the city’s homelessness functionaries. Then again, people seem to get a lot worse once they’ve been in the Tenderloin for any length of time. Encouraging more people to join them doesn’t seem like harm reduction. If bureaucrats and non-profit executives can be deceptive about homeless in-migration and blithe about its bad effects, their opponents can generate a tunnel-visioned portrait of homelessness that also hinders a clear understanding of the problem and its possible remedies — which threatens to leave us choosing between maintaining the homeless where they are and merely moving them from place to place, rather than reducing their number.
“We’ve travelled to an interesting place, culturally and politically, when not wanting to step in human faeces on city sidewalks is considered morally frivolous.”
California contrarian Michael Shellenberger, recent candidate for governor and author of San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities, has built something of a movement from pointing out the folly of Left-wing approaches to homelessness, and of progressive governance more generally. Shellenberger argues that homelessness is not, as progressives will tell you, a problem of poverty. It is, he says both in his book and in a growing number of online videos, a problem of drug addiction and mental illness. This latter claim is substantially true, but only within his very narrow framework. That is, his implicit comparison (I say “implicit” because his work contains little if any systematic demographic comparison) is between the homeless and non-homeless in cities — especially Los Angeles and San Francisco — already characterised by high rates of homelessness, as well as by nice weather and progressive governance. Within this framework, individual pathologies such as addiction and psychosis account for a lot of variation between who is and isn’t homeless, and thus seem to explain homelessness per se. And progressives, occupying safe seats of influence in these places, are easily blamed for their undeniable failures of vision and policy, the squalor and madness they seem happy to tolerate, if not actively curate. But the framework itself is conceived in a way that isolates individual variables like addiction and psychosis, and leaves broader economic ones to the side, barely considered.
When, instead of comparing individuals within high-homelessness cities with progressive power structures and Mediterranean climates, we compare rates of homelessness across different cities or regions in the United States, a very different set of variables rises to the surface, or a very different variable: housing costs. Yes, being psychotic or addicted to a powerful drug, along with being recently incarcerated and newly unemployed and disabled and a victim of domestic violence, increases your chances of becoming homeless wherever you live in America. But it increases these chances a lot more in some places than in others.
That is, when we compare rates of homelessness across different cities and regions, the differences do not correlate with levels of drug addiction and mental illness in these places. West Virginia, for example, has very high rates of drug addiction and very low rates of homelessness. These differences do, however, strongly correlate with housing costs. Drug addiction and psychosis are far more likely to cause homelessness in and around expensive San Francisco or Los Angeles than they are around more affordable, and progressive-led, Chicago and Detroit, or warmer-weather cities like Houston or Charlotte, North Carolina. Boston has one of the highest rates of homelessness in America because, though quite cold and snowy in winter, it’s a very expensive place to live.
This claim might seem counterintuitive to people who’ve zeroed in on mental illness and drug addiction as the obvious causes of homelessness. How can psychotics and drug addicts make rent? But New York housing analyst Stephen Smith, who posts as @MarketUrbanism on X, gives an illuminating gloss on how it applies at the individual level. “Fun fact,” Smith tweeted in 2021, “homeless people with mental illnesses and drug addictions are humans who can interact with the housing market. They often have families who can take them in (if they have room), and are eligible for housing subsidies (if housing is available).”
These and related expedients for housing the hardest cases are much more accessible where there’s more, and thus more affordable, housing. They’re not ideal, but the gulf between even these marginal housing arrangements and living on the streets — especially if you want to keep the addiction and mental illness from getting much, much worse — is huge. As Smith puts it: “Sometimes you see somebody talking to themselves on the street (normal life thing), and sometimes you see somebody who smells terrible and has what looks like rotting flesh talking to themselves on the street (scary city thing). The difference is housing.”
Somewhat depressingly, this is not a story of poverty or weak economies. It’s a story of affluence and economic vigour. American cities and regions with the highest rates of homelessness — such as New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their environs — are all, or recently have been, “superstar cities”. They’re employment destinations, coastal cities that many people move to over short timescales. Many of these new people are highly educated and high-earning, and, when they arrive, they bid up rents and home prices. The superstar performance of these local economies may boost wages for their poorest citizens, but they drive up housing costs a lot more.
The other part of the story is familiar to anyone who follows these issues: failure to build additional housing to meet the new demand. This, in turn, is largely a story of incumbent homeowners and their elected representatives using zoning, environmental, architectural and other pretexts and regulatory means to block new housing, especially multi-family housing, and thereby protect the inflated values of existing homes (like mine). Sometimes, as Shellenberger points out in San Fransicko, this reflects the hypocrisy of land-rich progressives in desirable cities, who put out social-justice yard signs and then make sure new homes for poor people don’t get built anywhere near them. But it’s also the work of conservatives, who invoke “local control” to defy state laws that oblige their roomy suburbs to approve a few apartment buildings. It’s fun to mock the limousine liberals of San Francisco and Santa Monica, but many of the most anti-housing members of the California legislature are Republicans.
“These are people who’ve made being deeply confused about housing markets into a guiding principle.”
For those who still want a solid reason to mock Leftists, a crucial anti-housing force at the city level is the teamwork of urban socialists and anti-gentrification activists, for whom landlords and real-estate developers have a sort of demonic status. These are people who’ve made being deeply confused about housing markets into a guiding principle. Given a choice between “no new housing” and “new housing someone might make a profit on” they consistently choose “no new housing”. Then, when rents go up and gentrification intensifies and more people end up homeless, they wave their hands and say capitalism did it.
One clear signal that housing costs drive much of the homelessness where I live comes from the vehicle encampments blighting my city’s streets, specifically the growing number of those trailers and vans and RVs that were built for people to camp in. For as long as those things have been a presence and a problem in Oakland, they’ve also been a mystery. People see them and wonder, “Why are they here?” “Where did they come from?” After all, owners of recreational vehicles are an unlikely class of people to be so conspicuously represented among the homeless.
But the people in those RVs don’t own them. They rent them, from people who’ve come to be called “vanlords”. These energetic businesspeople buy up old trailers and RVs and either drive or tow them to unfortunate neighbourhoods in cities like Oakland. There they enter into informal rental agreements with homeless people. These campers, and the people who own and rent them out, occupy a tier of the official housing market that should exist but, thanks to the efforts of high-minded urban fanatics and small-minded suburban Nimbys, does not.
Their growing presence should also be a warning. If you think landlords are a bad influence on your city, just wait and see what vanlords have in store for it.
***
This article was first published on 13 June, 2024.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThis mediocre article went on for twice as long as I was interested in reading it, and went out of its way to avoid blaming anyone, anyone at all, for the homeless crisis in America’s uber-liberal cities. The people in charge of said cities may have a little something to do with it, in me humble opinion.
The author took note that Republicans were the most anti-housing of all….Republicans have no power vis a vis Progressive & Democrat majorities in California.
In the biggest population centers yes. But many California congressional districts elect Republicans over and over. And many individual Republican and Populist landlords and officials surely feed on the larcenous rents we see here. Republican governors of red states also like to provide one-way bus tickets to progressive cities, then laugh and brag about it. Assigning blame for a huge, longstanding problem should never conveniently exonerate your own side. These problems existed to a bad degree when Schwarzenegger was governor. The social unrest and crime was bad under Reagan from 1967-1975 (in California and elsewhere). Was it all or even mostly his fault? Of course not.
It’d be nice if assigning blame was just a warm up followed by people banding together to improve things. Next year maybe.
You forgot to mention that the people being bussed to sanctuary cities are illegal migrants, invited into the country by those selfsame “progressives”, who never found someone else’s money they couldn’t be generous with. These busses are simply a way to make them be generous with their own space and things.
You forgot to observe that a number of homeless U.S. citizens are also offered one way bus tickets out of town (and that major waves of illegals were not invited by the citizenry at large). California does it too, but the far greater traffic is to sunny, less punitive destinations like much of California. I’m not trying to exonerate progressives or stand with those who excuse public insanity and addiction in the suppposed name of compassion. I’m trying to puncture the fiction of TOTALLY onesided blame that clouds this problem and others, turning the issue into an exercise in talking past each other or amplifying the warring extremes on the far wings, left and right.
Part of the problem is economic and also connected to unwillingness among to see the absurd number of people sleeping rough as full fellow human beings who are not so different from us. The economic woes and shortfall of real help is not the sole fault of any single side of our cartoonishly divided sociopolitics. And some lunatic vagabonds will refuse help or reform. But the numbers can be vastly reduced without excessive, unearned help or cold shoulder punishment and warehousing (which also carries a huge price tag). We need to try much harder and smarter, in red and blue states. In what is still officially called the United States.
With the new mayor and DA, San Francisco has taken a turn toward the center on homelessness. So has San Jose, where I live. They are building emergency housing units much more cheaply (cutting through red tape) and beginning to enforce rules against sleeping in parks, near waterways, or in vehicles. With the option of housing. Forced treatment, incarceration, or “exile” for the most severe and stubborn offenders. More than 70 percent of the whole state voted for stronger penalties for so-called quality of life crimes like shoplifting. Though it’s all overdue and not enough, it’s better than nothing.
I hear you, kid …
Thanks Dad.
I learned a lot from this article. But then again, I have no problem admitting my ignorance.
Can’t honestly say the same for myself. But Socrates made a great virtue of it.
Kudos to the author. Excellent writing!
“When the city cleared Wood Street, it hoped to move many residents into shelters but many of the homeless…just moved themselves to other parts of West Oakland.“
It’s almost as if the issue has nothing to do with the number of available roofs to out over one’s head. When all the money spent to deal with homelessness creates more of it, a reasonable person will ask if that’s not the goal. Because the aim is obviously not to eliminate the problem. At best, it’s to relocate it, as in “not in my neighborhood.”
I see your point overall, but the rhetorical question you pose is not reasonable or sincere at all. Nimbyism can suffer “mission creep” too, leading to a situation where we conveniently blame hundreds of thousands of homeless people who don’t have to live that way on California of New York. Like they caused all the underlying alienation and emptiness that rots our nation, for too many, too much of the time. Of course they bear differing levels of individual blame for their situation too, and certainly individual responsibility. As long as it’s Not In My State the problem seems easy to isolate. NIMSism?