The great lie is that there's greater mental illness or addiction in San Francisco than other places. There's not.
What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness. And homelessness also leads to addiction and mental illness, due to the extreme situation of not having a home.
And if the first-principles logical argument doesn't convince, go look at the data. Every $100 increase in average rent is associated with an increase in homelessness.
'What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness'.
This is completely illogical. The upper east side side and Beverley Hills have very expensive housing which hasn't 'directly caused homelessness'. SF is a tiny densely populated 49 sq mile peninsula with people like politician Nancy Pelosi owning vast hill top homes they rarely visit and an ultra permissive approach to drug use in some districts which has resulted in a catastrophic influx of addicts who have often also developed serious mental illnesses.
You can be sure there are no tent/RV encampments outside the Pelosi's or other wealthy estates yet those same people are selling completely unrealistic YIYBY utopianism, which is cruel and wildly impractical.
You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness?
People don't become homeless because they can't afford the most expensive homes, they become homeless because the least expensive homes are still priced too high. This is not a hard concept to understand.
When I say "SF has expensive housing" I'm not talking about mansions, I'm talking about the crappiest, worst possible studio or bedroom under a staircase being rented for exorbitant amounts of money.
'You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness?'
It's a factor but not a fundamental as I previously said. SF has always had a large transient population - great climate, dumpster diving, permissive culture - which has now exploded due to the Fentanyl & meth disaster. There are lots of generational blue collar renter families really struggling to survive in the bay area and an acute shortage of housing primarily due to tech and over capacity of residents until recently.
What we now have is a mass exodus of tax paying residents and a huge influx of non contributing drug and smi casualties which is really tarting to hurt the tourism that pays the blue collar families rent via their jobs.
I don't know any YIMBYs who live in Pac Heights. They'd love to put apartments there of course, but transit-oriented development means we have to start where the BART stations are. Housing is something, but it's easier to get back into society if you can commute to your job.
I know plenty of YIYBY advocates who live in wealthy parts of SF that have clean streets, no homeless and own large properties. a good example would be 'democratic socialist' district 5 supervisor Dean Preston https://twitter.com/DeanPreston
Preston talks all about progressive housing on Twitter all the time, so does heroin Haney. Neither of them can get it together to practice what they preach so it's all useless YIYBY performative posturing anyway. In the past SF has wound up building disasters like Geneva Towers based on somewhat similar utopian ideals
The language he uses makes him a left-NIMBY, but that’s just what they look like in cities. Found in NYC too. In suburbs the same people switch to talking about property values and 50s rural neighborhood character.
Dean Preston is one of the most virulently anti-YIMBY politicians out there. He is constantly lying about YIMBY positions and starting fights over nonsense on Twitter.
You and he agree 100% on building new apartments, Preston hates them, and as a rich man living in a very expensive single family home in one of the most expensive cities in the world, he fits right into the NIMBY mould.
However, Preston also believes that homeless people should still be treated like people, a position he shares with YIMBYs. Due to that commonality, but also having irrational hate for YIMBYs, he is sometimes called anti-YIMBY rather than NIMBY.
To be more exact: homeless are people priced out of their home.
I've been a month in WV. Huntington and Charleston are plagued by visible users, but not by homelessness. Even daily users there haven't been priced out yet.
'Pandering' to who?! local residents who are sick of the city getting wrecked? Like so many people these days Shellenberger thinks the two dominant political organizations who control everything are morally and ideologically bankrupt.
It's only fantasists who believe the slow motion SF disaster is a good thing, and they also appear to think they have some sway with the DNC.
What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness. And homelessness also leads to addiction and mental illness, due to the extreme situation of not having a home.
And if the first-principles logical argument doesn't convince, go look at the data. Every $100 increase in average rent is associated with an increase in homelessness.