If Books Could Kill - San Fransicko

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

This week we're tackling "San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities," a book that dares to ask: What if everything that experts think about homelessness is wrong, and everything that one crank on Twitter thinks about homelessness is right?Thanks to Ned Resnikoff for helping us with the research for this episode!Support us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPodWhere to find us: TwitterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Inflection Points in Community-level Homeless RatesHow Housing Costs Drive Levels of HomelessnessThe 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report To CongressThe California Statewide Study of People Experiencing HomelessnessSan Francisco Homelessness Benchmarking ReportHomelessness is a Housing ProblemA randomized trial of permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless persons with high use of publicly funded servicesSan Francisco Department of Public Health Update Report on Mental Health ReformCivil Commitment in the United States Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Michael. Peter. What do you know about San Francisco? Personally, I am thrilled that finally someone is asking homeless people if they've tried not being homeless. Now, I don't know how much you know about this book, but it's sort of, it's not a mega bestseller. It's like technically a bestseller. It's one of those books that you see on the shelf that says The New York Times best selling book and you're like, hmm, it's like the trafficking documentary. Someone's buying up copies. The main reason I wanted to do it is because even though it's not like a freakingomics level bestseller It's very emblematic of a common set of conservative

arguments and popular modes of thinking both among conservatives and Centris about homelessness. Yes, so I know that you're aware of this book But have you read this book? I'm aware of Shellenberger as like great friend of Barry Weiss and great enemy of Twitter's attempts to censor conservatives. That's mostly the kind of him. And then also I'm sort of like weirdly obsessed

with homelessness as an issue, both because like I live in Seattle, which is experiencing a very San Francisco-like homelessness crisis. And also because I've actually done like I live in Seattle, which is experiencing a very San Francisco-like homelessness crisis. And also because I've actually done porting on homelessness. Like I went to Salt Lake City a couple years ago and spent a week there learning about like what happened to Salt Lake City's whole thing where they quote unquote, solved homelessness.

And it got a lot of attention. I believe in 2015. And then it kind of fell apart for like interesting reasons. Uh-huh. It's an issue that I know slightly more about than, for example, like atomic habits. I know more about this than rising and grinding. That's the problem with progressives right there.

Too much focus on how to solve poverty, not enough focus on how to get up and go. So shellingberger himself has sort of like, reason to prominence as a Twitter crank. Yeah. Over the last 20 years, he actually had sort of an interesting career. He got his BA in peace and global studies, which, you know, respect love of fake BA. I have to. MA in anthropology. Then he spent like two decades basically writing about the environment. In recent years, especially his work with respect to climate change became very anti-alarmist,

basically being like, this will be okay. In 2020, he publishes a book called Apocalypse Never, basically arguing that climate change is real, but the threat is overstated by environmentalists. This is my least favorite shit where it's like, well, correct on the merits. Credit toonberg is like kind of annoying. So like we have no choice, but to form an alliance with Tucker Carlson. Shellenberger is now just sort of like a right wing Twitter crank.

Like there's no other way to put it. He spends COVID doing like COVID denialism. And he gets prominent on Twitter in part because his Twitter handle at the time was his first two initials and his last name, MD Shellenberger. He knows what he's doing. I know it's like, oh, I never said I was a doctor, but like dude, he has since changed it. So I assume that that's why that he's like, all right.

Now that all of the debate about COVID has subsided, I will change it. So no one thinks I'm a doctor. Look, I don't know why anybody thinks that I'm racist just because my handle is KKK Mike. That is my name, Karen, Karen, Karen. So in 2021, he publishes San Francisco, why progressives ruin cities.

If I could summarize the argument the Chellenberger makes on homelessness, it's that progressive policies and culture have created a permissiveness that allows people to remain homeless, to use drugs in public, to cause general discomfort while failing to address the real causes of homelessness. Running through the book is a claim that the left treats homelessness as a structural problem, the result of economic and housing policy when it's actually primarily an individual problem driven by mental illness and addiction.

That's why European countries have so little homelessness. They just rising grind more. I've actually in response to this book, I've been handing out copies of four-hour work week. Everyone who's struggling, you get a book. Hey, I know it's hard out here, brother, but give this a read. Before we get into the book, I do think it's worth talking about the ways in which San Francisco is an outlier on homelessness issues and the ways in which things are in fact bad in San Francisco and across California on homelessness issues. Because this isn't like a made up problem, right? San Francisco does in fact have what is in many ways a distinctly bad problem with homelessness

Yes, I think that a lot of people on the left get caught up justifiably Talking about how bad faith conservatives are on this issue and it makes it seem like we're denying that any problem Exists or that it's upsetting. Yeah, I live in a city with also a huge homelessness crisis and like, it can be kind of scary to walk around and see so much like visible poverty and just like people in pain. Right. Those are all like understandable feelings to have. And you know, homelessness is getting worse across the country by many metrics. And it's notably bad in California.

California is 12% of the country, 30% of the homeless population, 50% of the unsheltered homeless population. And so San Francisco is sort of a microcosm of that. Yeah. I want to walk through some of the stats here, some of the ways in which San Francisco isn't outlier. It does have relatively high per capita homelessness. San Francisco also has a higher unsheltered homeless rate than most other cities. 57% of San Francisco's homeless population was unsheltered last year, and it's been even higher in prior years. Sheldonberger brings this up. He says like New York's homeless population is very high, but it's 95% sheltered, right? This is driven largely by climate cities with harsh winters tend to have much higher rates of sheltered homeless.

And I guess the basic idea is that it gets so cold in East Coast cities that homeless people will like die on mass. If you let people sleep on the street, and so historically the systems built up around the fact that like it's kind of an emergency if somebody's sleeping without shelter. And like we need to get them inside or else they'll die. Whereas on the West Coast, the assumption is that like, oh, they're going to be fine. Even though like many, many, many homeless people do in fact die on the streets. Like Seattle has six times more deaths of homeless people than we have homicides every year. Right. It just isn't necessarily weather related. And there isn't the same sort of sense of urgency to get people indoors on the West Coast.

Right. It's correlated with climate, but it appears to be largely driven by policy decisions that are downstream of climate. Yeah. Another area where San Francisco is a real outlier, and I think this is really important is that it's unsheltered homeless population is highly concentrated. Anyone who has visited San Francisco can attest to this, right?

The homeless populations are very heavily concentrated in a couple of neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are also adjacent to tourist areas and business districts, which makes the unsheltered homelessness problem extremely visible. And I think that this is a big driver of San Francisco's reputation. It's also very important to stress that like,

we talk about like the homelessness crisis and just in objective terms, there is one. But when non-homeless people talk about this, what they're mostly talking about is a problem of visible poverty and mental illness and addiction. That's right. As I've gotten to know more of my homeless neighbors,

my own neighborhood, a lot of the people you see like panhandling outside of grocery stores and stuff aren't homeless. Right. Many of them live and subsidize housing, but they don't get enough, like, income support from disability or whatever, to afford food. And so they panhandle for extra money. And so they're not homeless, they're poor.

By the way, I will be steelmaning Shellenberger's arguments throughout this episode to try to come up with, like, what I think the best faith arguments are here. Is this your way of being like, we're gonna give him some credit, but he's a huge scumbag, like trust us. Basically, yes. Well, you know, you're kind of reminding me because I do think that it's true that the political problem of homelessness goes away

if you just hide it from public view, but there is still a good faith criticism out there. Right? This is more than we should bear as a society. Yeah, and there's real failures, and I think it's also kind of fair to trace some of those back to like progressives. Now, before we get into his more substantive arguments, I want to share some initial narrative color.

This is us not giving him credit. This is us not steelmaning. I can sense a dunk coming. Look, we'll be bouncing back and forth. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Okay, so he says, In 2018, San Francisco's mayor, London breed,

held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow. I will say that there's more feces on the sidewalks than I've ever seen, said breed. Growing up here, that was something that wasn't the norm. Then you've ever seen, asked the reporter, then I've ever seen, for sure," she said. And we're not just talking about from dogs. We're talking about from humans.

Complaints about human waste on San Francisco sidewalks and streets were rising. Calls about human feces increased from roughly 10,000 to roughly 20,000 between 2014 and 2018. In 2019, the city spent nearly $100 million on street cleaning. Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than 300 lamp posts corroded by urine. After one had collapsed and crushed a car. This is sort of, this is the beginning of his movie. It's like opening shot, pan across the sidewalk. Just poop everywhere. Poo. Yeah. A corroded lamp post, slowly topples.

Yep. Title card, slowly fills in. It says San Fran and then it's like, sicko. And then we're not talking about dogs. We're talking about humans. I'm talking about human poop. Yes, not dog poop. A lot of the conversation, both within the book and the broader discourse,

is driven by this like visceral reaction to visible homelessness, visible poverty, and visible addiction. And you can sort of see that here, right? There is a legitimate complaint under here, but a lot of it is just like, yeah. This is also the perfect example of how viewing it from inside an SUV driving through the tenderloin versus viewing it as somebody who is homeless.

Like changes the problem that we're talking about, because if you actually talk to homeless people, one of the things they say is that there's almost nowhere to go to the bathroom in America. We have very few public restrooms, and when you go to a restaurant and you're like, hey, can I use the bathroom? They're not gonna let you, because you look homeless.

Right. And so when you talk to actual homeless people, they're like, I don't like pooping and peeing in public. This is really humiliating. Right. The actual solution to this is to give homeless people somewhere to poop and pee. I also will throw out there that lampposts mostly get corroded by dog pee.

Yeah, and also people like drunk people. If you go to like central London, there's like these old buildings from the 1800s that have like visible divots in them from people coming out of Lester Square and then peeing on them. Well, when it comes to the Brits, I do support a more Shellenburg-Rask solution. All right. So he then moves into the subject of argument a bit. He starts off by explaining more or less what I outlined that the homelessness issue in San Francisco has gotten worse. Yeah. This is all pretty uncontroversial, right? The real question is why and what to do about it. Yeah. And Shellenberger starts by listing off the things that he thinks do not explain San Francisco's

outlier status. Okay. First, he talks about climate. He says San Francisco's mild climate alone cannot explain why it has more homeless people than other cities. Miami, Phoenix and Houston have year-round warm weather and far fewer homeless than San Francisco per capita. This is a good introduction to Chellenburger because it's factually true but also misleading and missing the point. Yeah. He says San Francisco's

mild climate alone cannot explain why it has more homeless people than other cities. No one thinks that climate is the sole cause of homelessness, right? Yeah, yeah. It's warm out. I'm going to sleep on the streets. Yeah, no. Right. This is like the story of how he presents and analyzes data in the book rather than laying

it out in full and being like, okay, where are the correlations? What can we learn from this? What are the outliers? You just get these isolated little data points cherry-picked and thrown at you without any context. What do we know? What the heat actually predicts is soft leadership. They're in grapes.

He then says that San Francisco's homelessness problem cannot be explained by high housing prices. Here we go. This is one of the big claims of the book and the most controversial because there is widespread consensus among academics who study this, that housing prices are one of, if not the primary driving forces of homelessness. So this is like his big bombshell argument here, and I'm going to send you a very short excerpt. All right, he says, and I'm gonna send you a very short excerpt. All right, he says,

Nork and housing prices explain the discrepancy. Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have mild climates and expensive housing, but don't have differences, goes homeless problem. I told you I'd be still manning him, all right. And so at first I was just like rolling my eyes at this, but then I was like, okay,

maybe he has a point here, right? Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have very high rents and low homelessness. So the thing is that this is not what experts actually say. What experts say matter is housing prices relative to income. The most prominent study on this is from a few years back and it's called Infliction Points in Community Level Homeless Rates.

It was sponsored by Zillow, so everyone calls it the Zillow study, and it essentially showed that once rental costs surpassed about 30% of the median income in a given area, homelessness rates start shooting way up. So, yes, housing costs are very high in Beverly Hills, but so is the median income. So, homelessness remains low. It's also, I think, more instructive to talk about it as a regional problem, like regional housing costs rather than these micro housing costs, right? These like much smaller neighborhoods.

Because what I have heard from actual homeless people is that if you try to sleep outside in a rich neighborhood, a fucking cop will come and harass you. And go to Seattle, that's where you're supposed to be. You're not supposed to be here. It's a myth that homeless people move across the country to get the best services, that's bullshit. But within a region, like that's where you're supposed to be, you're not supposed to be here. It's a myth that like homeless people move across the country to get the best services, that's bullshit. But within a region, oftentimes it has like the same kind of housing price dynamics.

Homeless people oftentimes get pushed out of certain areas and there's even documented cases in which wealthy suburbs will buy bus tickets. So Chelenberger is aware of the Zillow study and he tries to respond to it. He says, as for the Zillow study that was reported to find a correlation between rising rents and homelessness, a deeper look at the research reveals a more nuanced finding. Homelessness and affordability are correlated only in the context of certain local policy efforts and social attitudes. So it seems like he's saying that the Zillow study found that the correlation between housing prices

and the homelessness doesn't exist outside of some like very specific political and cultural settings, but that is absolutely not what the study says. What the researchers said was that certain factors such as local policy, efforts, and social attitudes may also impact homelessness rates, which is just sort of common sense, right?

They were basically saying there are other latent variables at play here. Yeah. So basically, the researchers were identifying some other variables in the mix. And Schellenberger is saying that that somehow undermines the entire study. But the study absolutely shows that housing prices correlate strongly with homelessness across the country. It's like, it's the published conclusion of the study. Well, I spoke with Ned Resnikov, who is a homelessness researcher, and he had talked to the researchers themselves,

and they confirmed that Chelenberger is misreading the study. It's funny to me how the term, like, nuance, is used in these like reactionary tracks in a way that is completely the opposite of its actual definition because he's not making a nuance point. He's saying like the findings of the study don't matter. That's not nuanced. Right.

Some of that say things and I can hear myself cutting them in the edit as I'm speaking. I'm like, this isn't going to go in. I don't know why I said that. So he says the real issues driving homelessness are drug addiction and mental illness. He says basically activists and policymakers all seem to think that the issue here is the lack of affordable housing which leads them to attack the wrong root cause. Now it's pretty uncontroversial that the rates

of mental illness and drug use are higher in the homeless population than the general population. But Schellenberg claims that the problem is much worse than most people understand. He says, quote, San Francisco's Health Department in 2019 estimated that 4,000 of these cities, 8,000 homeless are both mentally ill and suffering from substance abuse. Okay. So he's saying that 50% of the homeless population is both mentally ill and addicted to drugs. That jumped out to me because I've never seen an estimate even close to that. So I track down the report and no, the report very clearly and repeatedly says that it's 4,000 homeless people suffering from mental illness and addiction out of 18,000 total homeless people. Oh! Not out of 8,000.

So the rate is not 50%. As Shellenberger says, it's about 22%, which is much more in line with what I would have understood. Right. What happened is that the report is using the number of homeless people in a city in a given year. 18,000, while Schellenberger is using the point and time number, which is the number on a given night, 8,000. Right. The reason that Schellenberger gets it wrong is because he didn't read the report. He just read a San Francisco Chronicle article about the report, which used the 4,000 number, and then he backfilled the denominator without knowing which metrics they were actually using.

And how do I know that? Because I read the the report and they say 18,000 over and over. Yeah, there is literally no way you can read the report and not. We need to go to Yale and get his boxes of stuff so we can see which passages he underlined to solve this. So okay, if you're keeping score so far, Shelenberger has like hand-waved away the most prominent and on-point research on this issue, and then is in making his own case, he just immediately relies on objectively

falls information. But then the thing is that statistic, like the percentage of homeless people with mental health problems and addiction, I don't even know how that's relevant, because like if they're suffering from mental health problems and addiction, I don't even know how that's relevant, because like if they're suffering from mental health problems and addiction, that's also an argument to help them with resources from the state. Well, he does support using resources from the state in a sense. Paying for homeless services is great as long as we're jailing them. The real reason

that that stat doesn't matter is because mental health addiction and homelessness are very hard to unpack because they are, as the experts say, bi-directional, meaning that addiction and mental health can cause homelessness, but homelessness can cause addiction and mental health issues. Right. The most obvious example is that depression is often categorized as a mental illness for these purposes, but like being homeless is depressing in that.

In that little sense that it can cause depression. I spoke to a lady in one of the tiny home villages in Seattle who started using meth after she was homeless and she did it so that she could stay up late enough to protect her belongings. Like people steal your stuff when you're asleep. I've also spoken to homeless people who said that they use drugs to keep warm. I'm not going to say there's like a noble purpose of every single homeless person using drugs, but it's like, if I was living on the street, I can also imagine

that I would use drugs like to cope with that or also to self-medicate if I don't have access to like the formal health system. Yeah, I mean, I use them to cope with stuff and I'm just a regular house guy. So, so this sort of leads to a problem which is it's hard to unpack which way the causation is cutting, right? So a simple way to do it would be to say, okay, if mental illness is a major cause of homelessness, you'd expect that places with high rates of mental illness would in turn have higher rates of homelessness. Like the financial district. There's a book published last year called Homelessness is a Housing Problem that I read. I read for this episode. I totally, I Hobbs did. Love that. What they did was actually look at these things and it turns out most of the states with significant I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure are these states with the highest levels of serious mental illness and only one of them

Oregon has relatively high homelessness. Oh really? The state with the worst per capita homelessness in the country, Hawaii actually has among the lowest serious mental illness rates in the country. So yeah, it's actually not that there's no correlation. There's a small negative correlation. States with a high rates of mental illness have lower rates of homelessness on average. And that also gets back to the ratio of housing prices and income too, that if you're someone who's like really struggling with mental illness or like you have a break or something and you lose your job, if you have enough money to

float your rent for a couple months as you recover, like that's going to prevent you from being homeless. But if you're like living check to check, barely getting by, losing, you know, two weeks of work, can like really be the difference between you saying, how's it not? There's also substance abuse, right? Higher rates of substance abuse actually are correlated with higher rates of homelessness,

but only a small amount. The researchers found that they explain about 6% of the variance between states by comparison, the median rent in a city explains 55% of the variance, meaning that housing costs are nearly 10 times better at predicting homelessness rates. But the remaining 40% is explained by attitudes and wokeness, fortunately. So, look, I don't want to overstate the case here, but this data just sort of annihilates Shellenberger's goal argument here. And more than that, I feel like it just shows that he's fundamentally doing propaganda.

He's positing that the real issue here is addiction and mental illness. And you'd think that the bare minimum effort to put into making that case would be to examine whether places with high rates of addiction and mental illness also have high homelessness. And he doesn't even do that. I feel like this also comes back to the visible poverty thing versus homelessness because the problem as experienced by non-homeless people is visible, like people on the street who are like shooting up or talking to themselves or something, things that are like visible markers of addiction and mental illness,

whereas the homeless population also includes a huge number of people sleeping in cars. A lot of people are just like walking around wearing a backpack like when I volunteered at the shelter, like a lot of people do not look homeless. Right. I think it's a very intuitive conclusion to draw that homelessness is resulting from drug addiction and mental illness when you're looking at the tenderloin.

For example, it's just one of those things that's not really true. He's brooksing. He's like, this feels true. And I'm just going to write a whole book about it. So that's the big descriptive claim that Chellenberger makes, right? That housing prices don't really explain, San Francisco's homelessness issues and the real underlying problem is mental illness and drug addiction. And that is incorrect. Yep.

There is a second part of this argument. Chellenberger is wrong about what's happening, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he's wrong about solutions. Even if everyone agrees that housing prices drive homelessness, there's still the matter of what to do about it, what works, what doesn't. You can't snap your fingers and reduce rent across the country.

So what do you do, right? Just about every activist and most scholars will tell you build affordable housing and use an approach called housing first. Now, I know you've written about this before, but what do you know about housing first? Uh, it's basically the idea that like you need to get people indoors. Yeah. And the minute you do that, you can get people on to Medicaid.

You can start to work on like getting whatever medications they need. You can start getting them on SSDI in many cases. Everything stems from the fact that like you know where you are going to sleep tonight and there's like a place to lock up your belongings. Yeah, that's exactly right. And the idea is that if you try to make housing contingent on finding a job or getting clean or whatever, that's actually counterproductive, right? What works best is providing housing first and working from there so that people have some stability. Yes. Housing first has been the primary approach across the country for about 20 years.

And Chelenberger is trying to argue that this has been a mistake, basically using San Francisco as a case study. He says, the problem with housing first stems from the fact that it doesn't require that people address their mental illness and substance abuse, which are often the underlying causes of homelessness, which if you recall, he just proves. Yeah, he just does. Several studies have found that people in housing first type housing showed no improvement in drug use from when they were first housed. Chellenberger points out that housing first has been the approach in San Francisco for many years, but homelessness remains high, which is true enough. And I think the closest he gets to like, generally being correct.

There must be something wrong, right? The question is what exactly is it? And so I think you can break this question into two parts. One, does housing first generally work? And two, if so, why hasn't it really worked in San Francisco, right? Which is a fair question, honestly. It is a very fair question. The bottom line answer to the first question is, yes, housing first generally improves results across many metrics, but not all of them. The most obvious thing that it does is solve short term homelessness for

a given person, right? Like, if you put a homeless person in a home, in the short term, they are, that is a 100% improvement in their housing situation. There are very few issues where it's fair to say, like it's right there in the name. Right. But like it is right there in the name. No, there's still, there is the question of

how much it works medium to long term. Randomized controlled studies have shown that housing first leads to greater housing stability over time. And generally results in the use of fewer emergency department services and health care resources. It's also generally more cost effective than many alternatives, though there are a lot of variables impacting costs. So it's not a guarantee, especially in places where housing costs are high. Also, if a city saves money on, like, emergency department admissions, the city doesn't get that money back.

This is like the fundamental problem with housing first, is that, viewed holistically, it is cheaper. However, cities don't operate holistically. So what it actually amounts to is cities spending a fuck ton of money on free housing for the homeless and then everybody loses their fucking minds. And then all of the savings are from like profit making entities are like completely different parts of the budget. There's a narrower version of his argument that's basically just like, well, if housing first works, why isn't it working in San Francisco?

And again, fair question. I asked Ned Resnickoff this question. Did you talk to him about how he didn't like our end of history episode? I do think it was an incredible act of grace by me to reach out to someone who... To not talk about his problematic views that our episode was bad.

To even say his name on a podcast. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. I only have the the free version of zoom so I didn't have I couldn't continue to extend our meeting and yell at him about the I'm I know we like net it was a fair it was a fair point it was a fair article Ned says you know a lot of the problem in California is sort of a cycle. High housing prices drive people into homelessness at high rates, while also making housing-based

interventions more expensive and relatively difficult. So the interventions can't keep up with the new inflows of homeless people. Basically, because if you're trying to buy 10,000 houses for 10,000 homeless people, if housing costs are really high, that's going to cost you $8 billion. Sometimes in cities, there's literally more than the entire city budget. And if it doesn't address the underlying cause of high housing prices, you're just going to continue getting getting more homeless people because more people that are sort of in precarious situations get driven onto streets.

Right. Right. So if you look at cities like Houston, policy wise, the reason that they have been more successful is that while San Francisco has a housing first approach, there's a lot of bureaucratic bullshit that prevents the ideal of widely available permanent housing from actually manifesting. For example, there are about 10,000 permanent housing units in San Francisco designated for homeless people. A thousand of them are sitting vacant, not because homeless people are declining them, but because the screening process is so onerous that it's holding them up.

And on top of that, you also have the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which has full discretion to reject hermits for new construction and often uses it to impede affordable housing. What Ned said was maybe the biggest key to Houston's success is that in Houston, there are no zoning laws, which creates a lot of housing supply and keeps prices lower. What's so interesting is that if Schellenberger wanted to levy a critique against San Francisco,

it's right here. San Francisco and other jurisdictions within California have failed to meet this challenge in numerous respects. And it's not entirely out of their control. Yeah. You can make the argument that housing first is sort of pushed as a simple and effective solution by the left. But it's not as simple as it's often made to seem. It can be easily bogged down by bureaucracy and politics, not to mention it can be made

much less effective by the broader economic situation. We are now segueing into the middle section of the book. Sheldonberger has made his truly awful database arguments. And now he's moving into a bigger picture, almost moral philosophical argument about progressivism. What he tries to argue is that liberal policies are fostering a sense of permissiveness that allows all of these problems to fester and promotes disorder. And he's talking about everything from lax homelessness policies to like defund the police and progressive DAs, right? Remember that the subtitle of the book is Why Progressives, Ruined Cities?

And I originally was like, oh God, seems like poor phrasing, right? Yeah. But then halfway through the book, I realized he sort of means it literally because he proceeds to engage in what is essentially like an elaborate armchair psychoanalysis of progressives. Oh, we are back to end of history.

He's just talking about minds. I'm going to be synthesizing this, but this is an extremely convoluted compilation of arguments. At one point, he says that the modern left's position on homelessness has its roots in marks. The middle chapters of the book mention Michelle Foucault. 38 times. I don't want to talk about Foucault on this podcast. Foucault, or books about Foucault, 38 times. I don't want to talk about Foucault on this podcast.

Foucault or books about Foucault are cited 22 times. This is a titanic achievement of pseudo-intellectualism. Discipline and punish the woke people. I'm going to send you a little excerpt. Progressive homelessness advocates hold two moral values particularly deeply, caring and fairness. Across many scales, surveys and political controversies, notes the psychologist Jonathan Height. Liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering, compared to conservatives, and especially to libertarians.

God, that tracks! Man, the first correct thing, Jonathan Height, has ever fucking said. But in the process of valuing care so much, progressives abandoned other important values. And then that doesn't end with a period, which makes me think that you took it out of context. You cut it off. No, I just didn't copy the period on my face. I don't even really want to talk about this quote. I just think that it supports my one book theory that we're

converging upon a single book. Every time I see another one of our authors in the book, I'm like, well, I have to bring this up to Michael. What, what dunk is this though? It's like liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering than conservatives of libertarians like, probably this argument that he's making is that liberals care so much that they end up basically becoming irrational

by other metrics. He says that progressives base their morality and their policies around whether they perceive someone to be a victim. And this leads them to ultimately embrace what he calls victimology. Oh, no, another word. Which is the belief that someone is inherently good

if they have been victimized. Oh, this is this fucking Jonathan Hyatt, like, cuddling of the American mind thing, where it's like progressives all believe this. And then it's like a strange thing that no one has ever fucking said. Yeah, then this is his big theory of the progressive mind. He likens Vickomology to a religion,

which I think is like something conservatives like to do because they don't like getting made fun of for being religious. So they just pretend that we're religious too, but like in a more abstract way. Like actually, believing in affordable housing is sort of like a religion, what you think about it. Well, believing in fucking housing is sort of like a religion, when you think about it.

Well, believing in fucking anything is kind of like a religion when you think about it. That's why it's not that interesting to think about it. Believing in conservatism has been like religion. What's your fucking point? Throughout this section, he is sort of diving into progressive versus conservative psychology.

I am sending you another excerpt. Okay. He says, progressives also value liberty or freedom differently than conservatives. Many progressives reject the value of liberty for big tobacco and cigarette smokers, but embrace the value of liberty for fentanyl to... Wait, what? But embrace the value of liberty for fentanyl dealers and users. Why? Because progressive view fentanyl dealers and users who are disproportionately poor, sick,

and non-white as victims of a bad system. Jesus Christ! Progressives hate tobacco companies, but they love fentanyl dealers. When he's not like a butchering data or just like misrepresenting his sources, he's making the worst analogies you've ever heard in your fucking life. Like, are progressive policies regarding smoking somehow comparable to their policies regarding fentanyl? Like, give me a call when there's like a fentanyl section

in restaurants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I'm gonna send you another one. And we're still exploring the progressive mind. OK. Conservatives and moderates tend to define fairness around equal treatment, including enforcement of the law. They tend to believe we should enforce

the law against the homeless man who is sleeping and urinating on bark, even if he is a victim. Progressives disagree. They demand. We take into account that the man is a victim in deciding whether to arrest and how to sentence whole classes of people, including the homeless, mentally ill, and addicts.

Oh, he's going back to like Victorian, like arguments about like. That's right. He's the only guy that read that, Anatole Franz quote, that's like the law for bids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, and he just took it literally. to read that Anatole Franz quote, that's like the law for bids, Richard Pora Lake from Sleeping Under Bridges, and he just took it literally.

He was like, yeah, that's a quote about how much the law rocks. Yeah. Because like, yeah, why wouldn't you take into account somebody's circumstances? Like, of course, you would. And the law does. And also the statement that conservatives believe

that the law should apply equally to everyone might be close to the actual literal opposite of what conservatives believe about the law. This portion of the book has this sort of like half baked psychology shit. It has a lot of anecdotes about left wing excesses, both historical and contemporary. Some of which are perfectly valid criticisms and some of which are very bizarre exaggerations. Probably the most interesting bit is about Jim Jones,

the Jones town cult leader. Okay. The Jones town cult was like a Marxist cult, essentially, at least on the surface. It was called the People's Temple and Jones had all sorts of ties to people on the left, progressive causes, et cetera. What I did not know was that before he was a cult leader,

he was the chairman of the San Francisco Housing Commission. Really? I didn't know that. As you can imagine, Shellenberger goes absolutely nuts with this. Yeah. Basically claiming that like the same forces that blinded people on the left to cult leader mass murderer Jim Jones are the forces that are now blinding them to the reality of the homeless situation in San

Francisco. I love that like we keep on the show coming across the stupidest shit. So he's basically saying that like did you know Jim Jones also wanted to help the homeless. I will say that reading this book basically gave me a non-stop migraine because it's just like these constant, like, decontextualized data points and then, like, little anecdotes confined to a paragraph. And then there were five pages about Jim Jones and it was a breath of fresh air. I would like, oh, this is fun. You know, like, I feel like I'm learning something. I'm sure that there were like little lies baked in there that I didn't hatch. But it was

the first time in the, and really the only time in the whole book where I was sort of like, this is interesting. I didn't know this. So, you know what, I forgive him. You learned a single thing. You learned a thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of hard to explain the various ways in which he's dishonest because they aren't always immediately obvious. His style of writing is really to compress and compile a ton of different stories and anecdotes and data points and just sort of rattle through them. So it's hard to fact check everything. But at various points, he would say something that just like set off my bullshit detector And I like had to look into it. So at one point he's talking about Chesa, Boudin the now recalled former progressive DA in San Francisco

That's why we don't have crime in San Francisco anymore Sheldon burger says in 2020 Boudin announced that he was not going to prosecute street-level drug dealers because in part, they are quote themselves victims of human trafficking. I don't know, my friends. So I looked it up and you didn't say that. What he actually said was, quote, law enforcement should focus on drug suppliers rather than on the small scale street level sellers. We also must create specialty courts for those sellers who are in fact themselves victims of human trafficking. You don't have to agree with like his policy prescription, but he didn't say,

yeah, no, that they're not prosecuting street level dealers because they are themselves victims of human trafficking. This is just like Michael Schellenberger, like not understanding how like language works. Right, right. And I'm going to send you another one. This is very short. And I'm only sending it to you because I want to get your reaction to it in real time. Okay. All right.

In 2020, a Seattle City Councilor introduced legislation to order the district attorney to stop enforcing laws if they are committed by the poor, to mentally ill, or people with substance use disorders. Crime is legal in Seattle. Have I not mentioned this, Peter? It's actually the purge at all times. If your brain is doing good, if you have like any semblance of a bullshit meter

in your head, you should be able to read that and just immediately know that it's not true. The thing is, I actually beat somebody to death on the street recently and the cops are like, hey, your under arrest, I was like, no, I'm gay. That's right. I have an identity and they're like, all right, please proceed. Officer, I am a podcaster. So what actually happened here is that one council member in Seattle, Lisa Herbold, proposed creating a legal defense for people who commit misdemeanors as a result of behavioral health

issues or poverty. We don't actually know the details of this proposal because it never made it past the sort of like initial proposal stage. But the idea wasn't that you just get off the hook for like assault for being poor. It was that you might get the charge dismissed if you could show that the crime was committed to me quote, an immediate basic need. We don't need to dig into the details. I'm not even saying this is like a good idea or whatever, but I am saying that Chelenberger's

characterization of it is a straight-up lie. He says the DA would be ordered to stop enforcing laws against the poor and mentally ill. It's also funny because in practice, the sort of the modern Republican party would actually like crime to be legal if you are rich. It's just the fact that crime being legal if you're poor is the part that actually offends them. Right. Final phase of this episode, we've learned so far that housing prices are not driving homelessness and that progressives affinity for victims is what drives their, their crazy policy decisions. But there's still the question of what Shelenberger thinks the solution is, right? Is it like prison camps? I feel like it's always like ship them away.

I'm not gonna say that it's not prison camps. Okay. You never really like sits down and just like concisely lays out an affirmative plan for what should be done. But if I were to in good faith, peace together his prescription for San Francisco's homelessness problem would be in three parts,

one, optional, build more shelter beds, two, have police clear homeless encampments, and three, an aggressive policy of forcible treatment for de-mentally ill. So homeless camps in San Francisco and elsewhere are like a big flashpoint for these debates. And his argument about these camps is basically like a microversion of his big picture argument, right? Tolerance of drug use and lack of law enforcement, make these encampments desirable to many homeless people and give them no incentive to improve their situation. He's very into anecdotes about homeless people in these camps refusing help. Yeah, of course. He says, quote, of the 150 people moved during a single month of homeless encampment cleanups

in 2018, just eight people accepted these cities offer of shelter. We can't help them because they don't even want our help. Exactly. A lot of them are just like resistant to shelters. And like then you talk to actual fucking homeless people and they're like, yeah, the shelters have fucking bed bugs. Right. And you can't get any fucking sleep

and they kick you out of eight in the morning and there's nowhere to put your belongings. And like a lot of the shelters suck shit. Right. People don't want to sleep in sucky conditions and like sleeping in a tent on the side of the road is actually better than a lot of the shelters. And the report that he's citing for this has the reason

that everyone turns down the shelter offer. He omits it. But again, according to his own source, the reason is that a prerequisite for entering the shelter was giving up your tent and most belongings, and the maximum stay in the shelter was seven days. So at the very best, one week later, you'd be back on the street with fewer possessions. So I'm gonna give up the way that I sleep so that I can sleep somewhere for one fucking week. Frankly, the fact that eight people accepted the offer

is confusing. Yeah. You know, I want to be clear that there are many situations where people would prefer to be on the streets when compared to shelters, and not all of them are good reasons, right? Yeah. Some of them are absolutely because of sobriety requirements.

And that might not be because of pure addiction, it might be because someone just wants to do drugs or doesn't give a shit. There's also a difference between an offer of a shelter bed and an offer of actual housing. And I spoke with people who said, and totally their experience is that when someone trusts that you are actually giving them a real offer of housing, they will accept it

far more often than they'll accept a shelter bed. So yeah, to just look at all of that and be like, they don't even want help. Like, you weren't even offering help. You were offering to take their shit and give them a bed for a week. It's funny how we're both going out of our way to be like, some homeless people are also like pieces of shit.

We don't want a thing where it's like the noble homeless. And like every single homeless person is like, they lost their job and they fell out of housing. Like some people are like, yeah, kind of suck. And like, that's also fine. Those people should also be inside. And it makes people on the left look naive sometimes to create a steel manned homeless person

who's doing everything right, but still things are going going great for them. That person exists, but if you present that image in these discussions, I think it allows people to brush off what you're saying because you just come across like someone who's excessively naive. Some people like doing meth because like it's fun and they like want to do it. Right. And what makes us progress is that we believe that those people should be the president. So what Shellenberger implies in the books is you clear the camps, but you provide shelter beds so that people have somewhere to go when you do, right? It makes sense. And the fact that San Francisco doesn't have enough shelter beds is a prominent

part of his argument. The reason that I say that he considers shelter beds optional is because to date San Francisco has not provided adequate shelter beds. And yet, Schellenberger has been an outspoken advocate for clearing the camps. Again, the camps have been like this big political fight in San Francisco because many residents, conservative interest groups, and moderate Democrats, including San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, wants to see them cleared. But there is a problem for those people, which is that there's a case from the ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Federal Court of Appeals, Martin V. Boise, which says that you cannot legally clear camps

unless the city has provided the residents of those camps with a place to go. And I guess that means that the ninth circuit Court of Appeals has not heard of a little thing called victimology. But the fighting on this in California is like very high profile. I Elon Musk called for a boycott of the law firm that did the pro bono work representing

the homeless people here. Yeah, God. The mayor has said that San Francisco is being held hostage by the homeless coalition. Oh, Governor Gavin Newsom said that the court rulings were preposterous. Shellenberger has taken to calling the encampments homeless rape camps. Oh my God. Yeah, all of them sort of like quietly alighting the fact

that like legally they can clear the camps. They just need to provide the people that they displace with shelter. Yeah. The reason I'm sort of like harping on this is because the sort of central element of what Shellenberger's proposing is to jack up the cruelty to disincentivize people from living on the streets.

The purpose of these laws is the comfort of non-homeless people, and you can tell by like this kind of shit where it's sort of like an afterthought, like, yeah, there's no shelter as men in the, which like if you live next to a homeless encampment, for you, getting rid of the homeless encampment is priority number one, and it is kind of an afterthought. What happens to them afterwards? But if you're actually a homeless person, if you get kicked out of a homeless encampment, right?

A cop comes, they typically like rip up your tent so you can't reuse it, oftentimes they take all your shit, and then you're just there, you're just outside on the street with nowhere to go. So, you know, Shelenberger wants to break up the camps, but he knows that that only scatters people across the city. And that's why you need phase two of his plan, which is forcing large numbers of those homeless people into psychiatric hospitals.

Yeah, this is basically just like a return to like the 1960s, isn't it? That's right. This is basically reversing the deinstitutionalization of the late 20th century and making it easier to involuntarily commit someone to a mental hospital. So a little bit of history here. Prior to the mid century, we had a wide array of people in psychiatric facilities. The conditions were awful. There was a series of youth scandals that sort of turned public sentiment against the institutions. And that combined with the advent of anti-psychotic medications and concerns about civil liberties that sort of bubbled up in the 60s led to the de-institutionalization movement.

The idea was that we would move away from these facilities and toward community-based resources. Now of course, those resources were never adequately funded and so we ended up where we are today with a ton of untreated mental illness. Shellenberger harps on the fact that like, he's like liberals blame Reagan for this, but actually it wasn't really Reagan, it predates Reagan.

And there's some truth to that. Reagan didn't exactly make it easier to be poor in this country or to have untreated mental illness in this country, but the institutionalization predates Reagan. That's true. This is a little bit like those people that say that the volcanoes were going to kill off the dinosaurs, like if the asteroid hadn't hit, which my understanding is like is true, but also like the asteroid did hit. But I think one thing to keep in mind,

and one thing that he points out is that the institutionalization was a progressive cause. Prior to the 1970s or so, it was much, much easier for states to involuntarily commit people with mental health issues. Now it's much harder, and the person would need to be demonstrably dangerous to themselves or others. So

Shelenberger is advocating for rolling that back, though it's not entirely clear exactly what standard he's advocating for. But in the 1950s, you could be sent to a psychiatric facility for public drunkenness or drug addiction and then never see freedom for the rest of your life. There's also a thing where like there definitely are like people on the street. I feel like who were like so disconnected from reality that like they clearly need something like some sort of care of the state, but not prison. Like right now, we're mostly using jails and prisons as our mental health services, which just like obviously isn't working, right? I feel like the Shellenberger type argument always rests on this idea that like, it's too

hard to do this in America. Like, this idea that nobody can be involuntarily committed. Right. When like, we have these systems in place, but they're also like kind of underfunded as well. A lot of hospitals I know in, but they're also underfunded as well. A lot of hospitals I know in Washington State are already overprescribed with people like this. It's not just a matter of finally the progressive grip

on the criminal justice system. Finally needs to lift so we can start committing people. That's really not the barrier. Well, here's the thing, is that when we actually had these systems, what was happening was that these people weren't actually receiving treatment. They were just functionally in prison with the actual difference being that they couldn't get out. So like they were sentenced to three years or something, they were just stuck in a facility until someone deemed them fit to leave. And often that never happened.

But he's putting forward this purely theoretical policy argument here, where it's like, oh, we will do mental health, but good this time. And also, then we're back to spending more money on it. This is what's always so weird to me about the discourse around this. Nobody wants to spend money on housing first or shelters or the stuff that we need to do because it's like, oh, we're throwing money at people who don't deserve it. But then imprisoning homeless people

for sleeping on the street is also expensive and potential lifetime commitment of people with schizophrenia is also very expensive. So ultimately we're spending fucking money. Very American to think that hurting people is priceless. You know, you just can't put, you can't put a dollar figure on it. Mastercard. So that's the book. I do want to talk about the sort of post script for Shellenberger. This book is like part of his attempt to run for governor in 2020, the failed recall of Gavin Newsom. He is sort of doing this while also being a COVID crank online. He has moved on to trans people, of course, and was of course one of

the people who Elon Musk tapped to publish the Twitter files, which I'm not going to explain on this podcast, but it's pretty good evidence that you are like a fake independent journalist who's actually a reactionary freak. Yeah, when you're getting like quote unquote leaks from a billionaire to do it's like reactionary bidding. It's like not you like afflicting the comfortable. I don't think that his book is compelling, but it does read as effective propaganda to me. He is deep enough in the space that he can sort of use the vocabulary of progressives and the academics

on these issues. And that's how I think he got himself into this space where he's like lauded on the right as like a foremost expert in almost his policy. When in fact, he's just a guy who like started a reading about it and like took an aggressive position. That's it. I think in the sort of overall framing of this

as like a progressive issue, like how progressives ruin the cities and then using homelessness as an example. To the extent that like there is a anti progressive case to make, I do think that progressives underestimate the extent to which this is acting as an engine of radicalization for people who live in cities. I think the reality here is that progressives have not been able to cleanly articulate a

satisfying answer to the homelessness question, right? You go to San Francisco, you see an encampment of people where there's open drug use and it feels a little dangerous. Saying, well, we need to provide these people with housing. It's not a satisfying answer when the alternative is we need to just clear these people out. One of those is very clearly,

if you look at the data and effective solution and one of those is very clearly, if you look at the data and effective solution, and one of them is very clearly not. Totally. That's a real problem for progressives. I'm not sure that I know the solution to it, but that's why shit like this is so effective because you look like a naive chump to a lot of people when you start talking about like, well, we need to help them. Right. I don't know for other cities as well, but in Seattle we're in this doom loop where the primary Approach to homelessness is like policing. It's all this kind of punitive stuff. It's basically what shellenberger wants Like we're doing a ton of encampments. We don't have enough shelters

We do housing first, but we're not funding it adequately. So there's not that many units And then over and over again, we get these reactionary Mayoral candidates who get into office going, it's time to stop being soft on homelessness. Sort of parallels to like the police funding arguments where it's like progressives want to defund the police and look at what a catastrophe their cities are. And it's like, okay, the police in every major city are extremely well funded. So if that's the solution, it would already be working. Like we are already doing the conservative thing

in just about every major city on these issues. I do feel like also this kind of overall framing of like how progressives ruin cities. I think like assumes that there's some sort of conservative alternative, right? And if conservatives had been running cities this whole time, we wouldn't have homelessness problems. But like you could argue that the reason homelessness

is so bad is because of conservative policies, right? It's like erosion of the safety net. Right. But then also, I just don't think that homelessness actually follows partisan lines all that well. I think there's just like a bipartisan understanding that like we shouldn't be giving any free stuff to homeless people.

There is like a severe misapprehension in the general population about what exactly liberal cities policies toward homeless people are. The sort of estimation of how far left like the San Francisco city council is, for example, is wildly off base, right? The reality is that the sort of like activists and scholars

and whoever who are like really all about building affordable housing and making it easier to build affordable housing and housing, and housing homeless people as like a number one priority are a fringe in politics in major cities. Housing first is the stated approach of many major cities, including San Francisco, but that doesn't mean that they're actually taking steps of facilitated. Years ago, I was writing an article on conspiracy theorists and I talk to this dude who's

like super duper far right, QAnon guy. And I was asking him, like, well, if you were president, like, what would you do with like criminal justice stuff? And he's like, I'll tell you what, I would stop coddling black people. And I was like, is it your understanding that the criminal justice system of the United States coddles black people? It's like, this is just like the factual universe

that he is existing within. And I feel like there's something similar on homeless people where it's like, we're way too nice to homeless people. It's like all of this stuff is based on this concept of homeless people as just like some group that just gets all these goodies and it just isn't fucking true. You can see this in Shellenberger's discussion of victimology. The position has become that

it's straight up easier to be black to be a woman, to be trans, that liberal society caters to you if you are any of those things. And it applies equally to homeless people, the fact that progressives might step in and be like, seems like you're in a shitty situation. Here are some benefits we can provide to help alleviate that. They see as like an overall advantage.

Right. They're like, wow, you're just giving resources to homeless people. I don't get resources. Yeah. All I get is a $400,000 PPP loan that I spent on six boats. Yeah. And my mortgage interest, for giving every year, yeah. It's such, it's so clearly nonsense. But it's something

that I think shellenberger is trying to articulate with his sort of victimology analysis and I didn't even get into the sort of criminal justice elements, but like his whole argument there is basically that the new Jim Crow is wrong and that the actual driver of mass incarceration is not like low-level drug offenses and racism, but just like an increase in violence in the black community. He's touching on like real academic research. There are like serious people who disagree with the the New Jim Crow's analysis. But what he's doing is basically being like you might think that the way that we're treating black people or homeless people is unfair.

But actually, it's extremely fair and what we should be doing is maybe even treating them worse. Right. It's just sort of a, you know, a slightly more serious version of, I'd stop coddling black people or whatever that would take said to you, you know. Peter, it sounds like you're suggesting we do a whole bonus episode about how conservatism is actually a religion. Actually, if you think about it.

you