Sacrifice

My wife and I are taking a brand new name built from the letters of our own. The new name borrows the "B" and the meaning from my name (Buss), and the other letters from her name (Fluor-Scacchi) – introducing Daria and Steven Bacio.

Our new name means "kiss" in Italian, just as my old name means "kiss" in Middle English. Our largest shared heritage is Italian, so it felt fitting to go with an Italian translation.

I have to admit that changing my name has given me some anxiety! But creating a new family name from pieces of our old names is our first bit of shared sacrifice to build a shared meaning and a shared life together. We're intentionally leaving behind our identities as individuals and creating new ones as a family.

Sacrifice in marriage doesn't just mean giving something up, it means creating something new and better through selflessness and hard work. There will be many more sacrifices from both of us as we tend to our new life together, and we will grow stronger through them.

Commitment

And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,
not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.
And your hands will meet,
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.

—Neil Gaiman

I'm not much of a traditionalist, but I do take the traditional western vows literally: "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part." In marriage, I am exiting my life as an individual with no attachments or responsibilities, and entering a new life as part of a larger whole, with duties that extend beyond myself.

Though I will do my best, I know I will often fail to do and be what's needed. She will do her best but I know she, too, will sometimes fail. We are all imperfect beings and it is guaranteed that we will, someday, face an obstacle that nearly breaks us.

But in marriage, there is no way out but through. Burn the ships!

Marriage is work. It's a joint effort to build a home full of love, become good parents, and instill virtues and ethics in our children. To plan our futures, care for each other in good times and bad, and ultimately, for the (un)lucky one, to bury the other.

I see marriage as a commitment to stand by each other until the end. Through ups and downs the constant will be our commitment to each other.

Practice

My wife and I set aside an hour on the third Sunday of every month for a check-in. It is scheduled so we know to prepare, clear our calendars, and get into the right mindset to discuss everything important. These conversations are to honestly take stock of how we're doing individually, how we're doing as a couple, and to act as a safe and judgment-free space where we can bring up anything that has been on our minds.

I'm not sure I can properly express how important this has been for us, and how important I think it is for any successful partnership and marriage.

I have struggled with being emotionally open my entire life. In all of my past relationships I avoided talking about difficult things, and instead I suppressed negative feelings and just opted to bear them silently. This is how you kill a relationship. I've spent about six years in therapy since my previous big relationship fell apart (yes, you should go to therapy, too), and have learned a lot of communication skills, but learning a skill and changing a behavior are different.

These regular check-ins provide me with an opportunity to talk honestly and openly about what I'm feeling, what I need help with, and what's bothering me. And they give me an opportunity to reflect on what I've done in the past month and apologize for things that were weighing on me. A delightful surprise from our first year of check-ins is that the things I felt lots of guilt about were not even things my fiancée remembered. I burdened myself with things that simply didn't matter.

But it's not just about me – I also learn what she needs and what's on her mind. There's no guessing, there's no misread signals; there's only open dialogue and plainly stated emotions. It's amazing.

You should have these check ins. And you should start having them when things are great, but it's OK to start them when they're not. The practice of being vulnerable, seeking feedback, giving feedback, and listening to your partner will pay off. Remember: your check-in is a judgment free zone. Your partner needs to feel safe being vulnerable, and you need to feel the same.

Oblivion

The album "A Crow Looked at Me" by Mount Eerie had a surprisingly profound effect on my thoughts about marriage. I haven't been able to listen to it without breaking down in tears. In fact, I've never actually managed to make it all the way through the album–his grief is too agonizing. I have to turn it off by the third or fourth track.

That may sound hyperbolic or even pretentious, but… just go to a private space, put on some good headphones, close your eyes, and listen to it.

The artist, Phil Elverum, experienced true love. Not the Disney "true love", but the fragile and mortal true love. He lived the joy and the pain that I am signing up for, eyes wide open.

It feels a little silly to say this album which I haven't even been able to finish informed my view of marriage, but it's true. It helped me think about marriage not just in terms of what it means as a beginning, but also what it means for the end. It was shock therapy that woke me up to the gravity of the commitment.

Vows

These are the vows I gave to my new wife:

When I proposed to you I said: "I love traveling the world with you, and I want to keep doing it. I want to share in your joys and your struggles. And you in mine. I want to build a home filled with love and laughter. Will you marry me and build this life together?"

We have already built a foundation of honesty, vulnerability, support, and complete trust. We lean in to the hard conversations, and are not afraid to talk about anything. And you don't laugh at me when I get happy tears.

I know it's a cliché to say you have made me a better man, but that doesn't make it untrue! You push me to hold true to my values, engage in spirited debate on sensitive and complicated issues, help orient my moral compass, and you help me reach deep and process my emotions. I'm truly a better person with you in my life.

Today I promise you, and everyone here, that I will do right by you. That I will respect and honor you. That, though I will sometimes fail at my responsibilities, I will always try my best. I vow to support you and build you up, never tear you down. I promise to never be petty or small-minded. I will turn to you in crisis and struggle, and never turn away. I will always fight for you. I will be a loyal and faithful husband who always puts our family first.

Our vows, "for better, for worse," are not trite sentiments. Through every trial, we will emerge stronger. I will be by your side through it all. "In sickness and in health" is not a throwaway line about giving you soup when you're ill. These vows are a promise that your burdens are my burdens. I will defend you, I will care for you as I do myself, I will argue with idiot doctors, and I will fight for you no matter the cost. My vows are a commitment to you, to my family, to your family, to our friends, that I will do whatever needs to be done to ensure we are safe, healthy, and happy.

We are not two ships passing in the night. We are not simply friends, or lovers, or even just partners. We are a new singular experience of complete trust; as I rely on my heart to beat I will rely on you. And as you rely on yours, you can rely on me. All this I promise you, until death do us part.

Future

Marriage is a promise to walk with each other into our final days. It's a vow to start and end each day together. A vow to stand by each other through it all. A vow that we are an unbreakable team.

Marriage isn't simply the next step on the relationship ladder. It is a conscious commitment that your partner can rely on you, and knowing beyond any doubt that you can rely on them.

Marriage takes work, absolutely. But I believe in working hard at work worth doing.

I love you, Daria, and I can't wait to see what we build together!

This is the longest voter guide I've ever written. Almost 60,000 words covering the 40+ contests on the ballot. Every ballot measure has a financial analysis as well as an explanation of *why* it's on the ballot. My goal is everyone has easy access to all of the information they need to be a well-informed voter.

I'm so proud of the work I've been able to do at GrowSF and we've never had a better chance to fix this city. But you have to vote, tell your friends to vote, and share the GrowSF Voter Guide with all your friends.

Let's do it 💪

If you’re a pissed off voter and want to vote for change, you have to vote for it. Don’t vote for the same people we’ve been electing for decades, vote against the incumbents and for newcomers and political outsiders.

How to vote in the February 15, 2022 Election

Vote YES on all three Board of Education recalls:

• YES on Recall Alison Collins

• YES on Recall Gabriel López

• YES on Recall Faauuga Moliga

Vote for Joaquín Torres for San Francisco Assessor-Recorder.

Vote for Bilal Mahmood for Assembly if you live in Assembly District 17 (the East side of San Francisco). He’s a political outsider bringing fresh ideas to California, an entrepreneur and scientist, and completely aligned with what I want to see in San Francisco.

Not sure if you live in his district? Check out this map and address lookup tool.

Why these endorsements?

Read my post, “Four Reasons to Recall the School Board,” for my analysis on why I believe all three Board of Education commissioners deserve to lose their jobs for their abysmal performance and utter contempt for parents.

And then read the GrowSF voter guide for why you should vote for Bilal Mahmood.

Jay Donde is a co-founder of the San Francisco Briones Society, a club for moderates, center-right conservatives, and their allies to connect, share ideas, and engage in the political process. To learn more, follow them on Twitter and visit their website.

When Chesa Boudin was elected as our new District Attorney in December 2019, his supporters hoped that he would usher in an era of reform, demonstrating that it’s possible to dramatically reduce our justice system’s reliance on incarceration while simultaneously maintaining, or even enhancing, public safety. Boudin’s detractors, on the other hand, argued that he was an irresponsible ideologue, a man who would free dangerous criminals to roam our streets.

In the past two years, despite some notable exceptions, arguments between these two camps have generated more heat than light. What follows is a modest attempt to improve the quality of this important public debate. It is, in immodest terms, everything you ever wanted to know about the administration of criminal justice in San Francisco, but were afraid to ask.

Before we start, though, I should lay my cards on the table. I am one of Boudin’s detractors. I believe that he has done an immense disservice to San Francisco, that his policies increase net human suffering, and that he should be recalled. Weaved throughout the following is what I think is the strongest, simplest argument for recalling Boudin—an argument that can be embraced by almost everyone, both on the left and the right.

San Francisco Does Not Practice Mass Incarceration

One claim that has been made about Boudin is that he is an adherent of what I call the Jean Valjean School of Criminal Justice: First, if only offenders had more access to social and economic opportunity, they would not turn to crime. Second, punishment is inherently unjust and ineffective. Sticks are never the answer; what’s always always always needed are more carrots.

This claim is intuitively appealing. Reading about some of the cases where Boudin has refused to file charges, or has pled the sentence down to time served, one is led to wonder whether he believes there’s ever any value in sending someone to, or threatening someone with, prison. 

For example: 73 felonies and 34 misdemeanors in San Francisco alone; Nearly two years after their daughter’s brutal murder, the DeYoe family still waits for justice; Two cyclists killed. Two drivers arrested; Child predator released by SFDA charged by FBI; Emma, Ronisha, and Latanette; How a driver who struck a bicyclist got away with murder; Patrick Thompson arrested in April 2020 with a drug pipe — and an axe; ‘We Just Want My Grandpa To Feel Safe’; Chesa Boudin is a man without a plan; Injustice for a Victim and the Victim’s Advocate; Boudin “Takes Action” And Now a 3rd Person Is Murdered; Danny Babineaux; Walker Quinn; Wife of man killed in SF crash tells heartbreaking story of California dream turned nightmare.

Of course, Boudin would object to this characterization, and say that he certainly does recognize the value of punishment. He just doesn’t recognize the value of mass incarceration. Fair enough. Though he campaigned as a radical decarceralist (e.g. “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted” and Chesa Boudin wants to transform San Francisco’s criminal justice system), and continues to present himself as such before certain audiences, his post-election messaging to the broader electorate—uneasy after two years of rising crime—has shifted: “Don’t believe your ears about what I said earlier. I’m just a commonsense reformer.” 

Indeed, reform is needed. There are more than 2 million people in American prisons, jails, and other carceral facilities. We lock up more of our population per capita than any other country in the world, including manifestly undemocratic states like Cuba and Turkmenistan. 

Even if you sincerely believe that offenders should be made to suffer greatly for their crimes, I think you’d be shocked by what you’d find if you looked closely at what happens in American prisons. In many cases, our penal system is unjust, costly, and inhumane. 

If you need to hear this from someone who is not a bleeding heart leftist to believe it, look no further than Peter Moskos, a sociologist at John Jay College and former Baltimore police officer. Moskos is so convinced of the folly of our current system that he wrote an entire book arguing that flogging offenders would be more compassionate than imprisoning them:

If we really wanted to punish people with something worse than flogging, we could sentence drug offenders to join gangs and fear for their lives; we could punish child abusers to torture followed by death; we could force straight men to have semiconsensual prisongay sex. But we don’t because we’re better than that… [except] all these things already happen….

There are strong arguments to be made that America relies too heavily on incarceration as a response to crime. But therein lies the rub: San Francisco is not America.

I don’t mean this in a jingoistic, pejorative, “SF is not the real America” sort of way. I mean it literally. Nationwide, approximately 630 out of every 100,000 Americans are in prison. But in San Francisco, our prison incarceration rate is much lower. In 2016, approximately 144 out of every 100,000 San Franciscans had been sentenced to prison. Furthermore, over the last five years, California’s incarcerated population has decreased by about 30 percent. I don’t have exact figures for San Francisco, but that would mean our city’s 2021 rate is closer to 103 prisoners per 100,000 residents. 

This didn’t happen by accident: In response to court rulings on prison overcrowding, California has been aggressively reducing its incarcerated population over the last decade, and laws such as 2014’s Prop 47 decriminalized a slew of offenses. Also, San Francisco DAs have for many years prosecuted fewer than half of all arrests presented to them, which is a singularly low prosecution rate. Compare us to Chicago or Philadelphia, for example, which are hardly lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key jurisdictions, but whose DAs’ rates have consistently been at or near 90 percent. 

With all that in mind, it’s worth reconsidering what’s implied by Boudin’s claim that San Francisco before him had been practicing mass incarceration. Here are some other places that, by his logic, must be doing the same: Taiwan (226 per 100,000 residents in prison), Greenland (225), Australia (167), New Zealand (164), Portugal (113), Canada (104), France (100), and Belgium (93). 

Do we really need to have an argument about whether New Zealand is a carceralist state, or can we all just agree that this claim is absurd on its face?

In fact, once you get down into the range of fewer than 70 per 100,000 residents in prison, what you find are mostly (a) very small countries (like Liechtenstein and Iceland), (b) countries with highly restrictive immigration policies and intensely conformist cultures (like Japan), or (c) failed or quasi-failed states where the government is incapable of providing basic policing and judicial services (like Yemen or the Central African Republic).

It’s also important to remember that these comparative figures are national, weighing down the naturally higher prison population rates of cities with the lower rates of suburbs and rural areas, which is a bit unfair to San Francisco. The proper comparison for us is against, say, London, not against the entirety of England.

Boudin’s claim that public safety would be enhanced if San Francisco incarcerated fewer offenders is contradicted by empirical evidence

So, San Francisco has prosecution rates that are inordinately low, incarceration rates lower than most urban centers around the world, and some of the highest property crime rates in America. On top of all that, we spend more money on social services than any other comparably-sized American city. I don’t think it’s unfair, then, to say that Boudin’s campaign claim that public safety would be improved if we incarcerated even fewer people is an extraordinary one, and requires extraordinary justification.

I can only think of two ways to steelman this claim: One, there must be something unrelated to criminal justice administration that (a) is only occurring in San Francisco, and (b) is so criminogenic that crime should actually be higher here, but our low incarceration rate is suppressing it. I honestly can’t think of what that would be, though. Alternatively, the claim must be that the functional form of crime (y) regressed on incarceration rates (x) is such that y increases as x decreases up to somewhere in 0 < x < 100, then rapidly decreases after that. In other words, there is some magical tipping point where almost no one is incarcerated, and that’s when crime will fall off a cliff. This is... an interesting theory, but is entirely without evidence, as far as I can tell.

Now, two years later, we can confirm that Boudin has in fact lived up to his campaign promise, and spent the last two years prosecuting and incarcerating fewer offenders than his predecessor.

Of course, what was popular in 2019 is not so popular anymore. So, as noted above, Boudin has lately been, with the assistance of shockingly incurious “data journalists” who re-publish curated reports provided to them by his office (and based on data that his office has elsewhere refused to disclose pursuant to Public Records Act requests), presenting himself to “normie” audiences as a mainstream reformer. 

In other words, lying to the public: Data shows Chesa Boudin prosecutes fewer shoplifters than predecessor; Is DA Boudin spinning or lying?; Boudin trials since taking office; 74 car break-ins/day; The Chronicle and Boudin: Creating Urban Myths; Boudin Provides Chronicle Contextless Statistics; Boudin gives victim info to Washington Post; San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin Unveils New Crime Data; Boudin: 19 Takeover Robberies Not Worthy of Jail Sentence.

Unfortunately, the duplicitous rot from Boudin’s office has spread to other branches of the criminal justice system in San Francisco, where decarceralist allies of Boudin have been covering for the complete failure of his marquee “bail reform” policy. What was sold to the public as a way to introduce equity into decisions regarding pretrial confinement has turned out to be a vehicle for leftist judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys to collude and release dangerous arrestees en masse. The results are not exactly a huge surprise, given what bail reform has wrought in other cities. 

We also can confirm that crime (especially property crime) has increased during Boudin’s tenure, again despite articles written by those aforementioned incurious journalists, who seem all too ready to accept government-provided statistics, so long as the numbers support a certain narrative. 

For example: Crime trends; Why crimes go unreported; Crime stats; Chronice police stats part 1; Chronicle police stats part 2; ‘Only 6 Shopliftings Occur Daily in SF’; Maria Cid Medina; Dion Lim; Sam Altman; Mark Pincus; Who’s listening to the Tenderloin’s children?; She structures when she leaves home around when she thinks it's most safe; Why Walgreens stores are closing part 1; Why Walgreens stores are closing part 2; All San Francisco Target locations reducing operating hours due to recent spike in crime; Ahsha Safai.        

And, yet, Boudin today still claims that we are practicing mass incarceration, and that public safety will be improved by prosecuting and incarcerating even fewer offenders. In other words, we need to accelerate on his acceleration.

Reducing the prison population in San Francisco would require releasing violent, repeat offenders into our communities

What would that even look like? Many believe that mass incarceration in America is due to the war on drugs and racial inequities in our justice system. If only we stopped locking people up for non-violent drug crimes, or for their first offense, America’s incarceration rate would resemble Western Europe’s or Japan’s, right?

Wrong. Non-violent drug offenders comprise less than 20 percent of the incarcerated population, and most of these offenders are locked up for trafficking, not possession. Even this low figure is likely inflated somewhat. As Rafael Mangual notes, “[G]iven that charges often get downgraded or dropped as part of plea negotiations, an inmate’s conviction record will usually understate the crimes he committed.” And here’s John Pfaff, elaborating: “[A]t a minimum, 55 percent of those in state prison have been convicted of a violent crime—and… nearly 30 percent… have been found guilty of murder, manslaughter, rape or sexual assault….”  

What about inordinately long sentences? Aren’t people increasingly being locked up for years over minor offenses? 

No. Not only has there been no discernable trend toward longer sentences over the past four decades, many people would be shocked at how little time is served for even violent crimes. The median sentence for all state prisoners released in 2016 was 1.3 years, and 40 percent of those prisoners served less than a year. The median sentence for violent offenders was just 2.4 years. Only murder will get you locked up for more than half a decade, if that. 

In many places in America, you have to try pretty hard to actually end up in prison. San Francisco is one of those places. Unless Boudin wants to argue that he’s no less carcelist than other DAs across the country, we can presume that, compared to the numbers above, an even larger percentage of offenders sentenced to prison in our city are either violent or repeat offenders, or both.

All of this means that initiatives like cut50, which aims to halve the US prison population, would necessarily entail releasing significant numbers of violent repeat offenders whose sentences are already far more lenient than the public would expect. This is a hard truth that people like District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney, a co-founder of cut50, don’t talk about—either because it’s something they don’t know, or because it’s something they don't want you to know.

And yet, despite all of the foregoing, Boudin argues that San Francisco should be even more lenient toward criminals. I’m at a loss as to how this can be any thinking person’s sincere conclusion. Is the argument that we simply haven’t yet reached the magical tipping point? Or that the criminogenic factors unique to our city before were somehow locally exacerbated over the last two years?

In blunter terms, Boudin might say that he recognizes that punishment sometimes has value, but if you’re incarcerating less than almost any other major city in the world, and property crime is high, and then you incarcerate even less, and property crime rises, and you still don’t think incarcerating more might be appropriate, at what point do you think punishment will have value? The answer, it seems, is “effectively never.”

True commonsense reformers might look at incarceration as akin to antibiotics—something currently overprescribed, but of use in treating a general variety of infections. More radical reformers might even look at incarceration as akin to opioids. Boudin’s actions, on the other hand, reveal him as embracing something beyond even the radical perspective: Incarceration is like an exotic treatment for a one-in-a-million genetic disorder. Sure, punishment has value, but only in exceedingly rare circumstances. In all other instances, the proper response to crime is more leniency, more money, more services.

Boudin’s claim that public safety would be enhanced if San Francisco incarcerated fewer offenders is contradicted by scholarly consensus

This is a position that is clearly contradicted by crime trends in San Francisco, and the only way it can be defended is by appeal to wildly implausible claims regarding confounding variables and functional form. But if the lived experience of thousands of San Franciscans is not enough for you, then perhaps you’ll be convinced by the fact that Boudin’s position is also contradicted by the majority of criminal justice scholars. The best available evidence, taken from a broad spectrum of fields including psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and economics is in agreement: Punishment is both effective and necessary for desistance. 

That doesn’t mean that punishment is sufficient. The proper response to crime is certainly not all sticks. For example, economic need, social disenfranchisement, and wealth inequality are indeed positively correlated with crime rates, and we could—and should—do more to address these root causes. But the mechanisms by which social ills cause crime is not as clear, or as sympathetic to criminals, as some might think. 

It’s also not the case that their mitigation will have an immediate impact on crime. For example, unemployment and economic dislocation were significantly more acute during the Great Recession than they are now, but crime rates were much lower in the late 2000s. Violent crime rates increased across the US during first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, but property crime rates didn’t, which isn’t what you would expect if your working theory of crime is that it’s proximately driven by economic desperation.

Just Add Carrots is not a cogent, mature policy response to crime. Consider this from the book Bleeding Out by Thomas Abt, former Chief of Staff in the Office of Justice Programs under Obama:

“Nothing stops a bullet like a job,” Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, a well-known reentry program for former gang members, used to say. But Father Boyle no longer believes his own famous line. “When somebody introduces me somewhere and they say that, it almost feels creepy,” Boyle said in an interview. “It doesn’t get at what this is about. I would find somebody a job, sometimes even a career. But then a monkey wrench would get thrown and… next thing you know, he was back in the neighborhood and then returned to prison.”

There are commonsense actions we can take right now to reduce crime

But enough about what doesn’t work, let’s talk about what does.

To begin, whether your objective is to prevent crime, reduce the prison population, or both, the best thing to do is the exact opposite of the modern left’s cri de coeur: Rather than defund the police, we need many, many, many more cops. Far from being a police state, the US is unique among developed countries in spending way too much on prisons and way too little on sworn officers. In terms of sheer numbers, the US has fewer police officers per capita (~240 per 100,000 residents) than most EU countries.

What these countries understand, and we apparently do not, is that there’s an inevitable tradeoff: If you want less crime, you can either have more police or more prisons. The former is cheaper, more effective, and more humane.

Catch more, punish fewer

If you want to end mass incarceration, the answer is more cops.

Why is this? By far the primary mechanism at work here is deterrence. Study after study from the fields of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology tells us that, especially among the young men lacking impulse control who commit the vast majority of crimes, increasing the severity of punishment usually isn’t helpful, because these offenders aren’t thinking through the consequences of their actions, or they don’t believe they’ll be caught. 

A better approach is to ramp up the certainty of being caught. Most criminals are cowards who exploit moments of opportunity and defenseless victims. When there’s a cop at every intersection, they don’t roll the dice on a mugging, a car theft, or a drug sale. This “certainty principle” is an old concept, going back at least as far as Cesare Beccaria, that we keep rediscovering. A recent, extensive survey of the evidence supporting it can be found in the works of Daniel Nagin at Carnegie Mellon. 

These two articles are particularly informative because they touch on two other important implications of police staffing levels. First, “defund the police” is largely a movement of privileged white folks living in safe neighborhoods. Most Americans, including Americans of color, want the number of cops in their neighborhoods to stay the same, or to be even higher—and that support for policing has only increased since June 2020. The fact is, when the rubber meets the road, those who shouted loudest in 2020 to defund the police reveal themselves as just wanting to defund your police, not theirs.  Now that the disastrous consequences and unpopularity of defunding the police have become evident, many on the left are attempting to rewrite history by claiming that what they always really intended was reform, not defunding. Don’t let them gaslight you. Second, increased manpower allows the police to implement a diverse array of proven strategies to prevent crime, effect safe arrests, and build trust within communities—strategies that aren’t actionable by a police force whose officers must rush from one emergency call to the next.

And what are those strategies? Almost all bear in mind a key insight: Most crime is committed by a small number of people engaging in a few risky behaviors in a handful of places. Like many other social phenomena, crime follows the Pareto Principle—except even more so. 

In some cities, upwards of 70% of violent crimes are concentrated within social networks comprising just 6% of the population, and sometimes even less than that. The most proven approach to pacifying these “impact offenders” is known as focused deterrence, which involves an interdisciplinary team of police, prosecutors, social services orgs, and community organizations directly engaging with the offenders. In focused deterrence programs, the teams make clear to targeted offenders that further criminal activity will be met with law enforcement consequences, but they also offer a tailored portfolio of support services and community resources to help the offenders go straight.

One of the behaviors most strongly correlated with criminal activity is—no surprise—illegally carrying firearms in public. Multiple studies confirm that a “firearms first” policing strategy dramatically reduces homicide rates and, more broadly, violent crime. See, also, “Police Strategies to Reduce Illegal Possession and Carrying of Firearms” in Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities. 

Curious about how de-policing firearms possession is currently playing out in Philadelphia? Here’s a hint: Under Boudin’s fellow traveler Larry Krasner, Philly’s homicide numbers are now as high as they were back in the bad old days of the early 90s. 

Now, in order to effect this type of strategy, there must be an emphasis on proactive policing that increases the likelihood of apprehension when carrying. That means some form of “stop-question-frisk.” Often misunderstood, and more often distorted as just “stop-and-frisk,” stop-question-frisk is a constitutionally permissible and highly effective strategy when implemented narrowly.  In the Kansas City Gun Experiment, for example, authorities focused exclusively on arresting and prosecuting individuals for carrying illegal firearms. 

Finally, most crimes occur in a few neighborhoods, on a few streets, and at a few intersections, known as “hot spots.” We now have a sizable body of evidence showing that increased police presence in these areas reduces crime without displacement. But the most impactful implementations of hot spot policing do not simply rely on the deterrent effect of more cops. This effect must be followed up with, at least initially, an emphasis on enforcing quality of life laws.

It’s important to understand that the key mechanism here is likely not policing. That’s just the catalyst. The prohibition of overt criminal activity on the street means more pedestrian traffic and a more hospitable environment for businesses. More businesses in a community means more tax revenue, more political influence, and, importantly, more civic participation in the form of neighborhood groups and the like. Each of these factors reinforces the other, yielding virtuous feedback loops that push neighborhoods past the tipping point from “bad” to “good.” Policing simply allows these feedback loops to accelerate. As Abt notes: “If police exercise their authority legitimately, they strengthen the community’s capacity to police itself.”

I want to pause here to highlight what all this evidence about hot spot policing and focused deterrence says about San Francisco’s current approach to open-air drug markets in the Tenderloin: It is literally the opposite of what should be done. Allowing the unimpeded operation of such markets, as advocated by the network of de-policing and harm-reduction nonprofits whose budgets are tied to the continuation of human misery in the Tenderloin, will only lead to more addiction, more violence, more death.

So, to recap: The above policies and strategies are effective because they increase the certainty of apprehension and they focus both policing and social resources on the most problematic persons, behaviors, and places. Here’s an excellent survey of the current state of research on crime prevention strategies. 

Credible threats curb antisocial behavior

How does all of this analysis of policing relate to Boudin? That's simple: Increasing the certainty of apprehension is only effective if there is some cost associated with that apprehension. No one’s going to sweat getting arrested if they’re released immediately. You still need sticks, or at least the credible threat thereof. A striking example of the failure of the approach that only emphasizes more carrots comes from “violence interrupters”-style programs. These programs are uniquely ripe for comparison against focused deterrence strategies: The two are almost identical, except for the fact that the latter includes a law enforcement component. This study performs that comparison, and if anything goes pretty easy on the interrupters. 

It appears that meaningful punishment does have value in modifying antisocial behaviors, which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever raised a child, coached athletes, or managed employees. Does any serious person want to argue that never holding someone accountable for his actions leads to good outcomes for the child, athlete, or employee—much less the family, team, or business of which they're a part?

But is punishment only valuable as an ex ante threat (or, ex post, to bolster the credibility of that threat)? I think this question is too broad to have one right answer. We need to start by understanding the diversity within offender populations, behaviors, and circumstances, and then develop a portfolio of sentencing strategies that account for that diversity. For simplicity’s sake, let’s divide the offender population into a series of binaries: young vs old, first-time vs repeat, violent vs non-violent. 

First, crime is almost exclusively a young man’s game. As noted above, certain cognitive factors that are acutely prevalent in youth are also strongly associated with criminal behavior—e.g., lack of impulse control, poor risk assessment skills, etc. Second, the more times someone has been arrested, the more likely he is to re-offend, and the more likely it is that his next offense will be a serious one. Finally, there is some evidence to suggest that non-violent criminals are more likely to re-offend than violent ones, although this is not a consistent finding across offender populations. Compare this study to this and this.

It may come as a surprise that violent criminals might be less likely to re-offend than others, but if you think about it for a moment, it makes sense. Violent crimes are often one-off acts of passion (or inebriation); property crimes are more often premeditated acts that form a pattern. For some criminals, theft, burglary, and robbery are professions; thankfully, there aren’t many “professional” murderers or rapists walking around.

With all of the above in mind, let’s first tackle an “easy” case: A woman in her 30s with no prior convictions gets drunk at a bar, provokes an argument, and gets into a fight with another patron. In all likelihood, prison is not the optimal sentence here. In fact, in situations like this, prison might actually increase the likelihood of recidivism. Does that mean we shouldn’t punish this drunken pugilist? That doesn’t seem right. 

Now consider a more complicated situation: A man in his 20s with a long history of property crime arrests is once again picked up for burglarizing someone’s home. Everything we know about crime and incarceration tells us that this type of offender should be sent to prison, and perhaps not released until he’s very old. Of course, that should strike you as a shockingly harsh sentence. But what’s the alternative? This burglar has proven time and time again that he’s incorrigible. We know that, even with access to social services, if he’s not kept in prison he WILL re-offend. A BJS study found that “5 in 6 state prisoners released in 2005 across 30 states were arrested at least once during the 9 years following their release,” with an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner. Moreover, according to the same study, this population regularly graduates to more violent offenses: “By the sixth year after release, prisoners released for a violent or property crime were similarly likely to be arrested for a [subsequent] violent crime.”

The point is, there are no easy answers here, no simple rubric that we can plug values into to calculate optimal sentencing. But we should at least start by taking a clear-eyed look at what prison—the predominant method of punishment in America—is good for, if anything.

What is prison good for?

As noted in the foregoing discussion of policing strategies, incarceration plays a key role in effecting “general” deterrence. The threat of meaningful punishment dissuades potential criminals from offending. But does incarceration dissuade a convicted criminal from reoffending after release? The evidence for this “specific” deterrence is mixed, but there does seem to be a weak negative correlation between recidivism and sentence length. Compare this study and this study to this, this, and this. 

Could it be that specific deterrence is not the mechanism at work here, but rehabilitation? Do lengthier sentences allow prisoners more time to reflect upon and change their patterns of behavior? No, at least not the way prisons in America are currently administered. In fact, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which governs federal sentencing policy, expressly rejects imprisonment as an effective means for promoting rehabilitation. 

Prison might actually have a net criminogenic impact. Intuitively, this makes sense if one considers the typical experience of prison. Again quoting Moskos: “[O]ne cannot imagine an environment less conducive to healing and mental health recovery than involuntary confinement surrounded by aggressive criminals—talk about a spiritual retreat from hell.” But while there’s a lot of advocacy-masquerading-as-analysis touting the criminogenic impacts of incarceration, there aren’t many quantitative studies concluding the same published in top journals, save this (cited earlier). 

None of this means that prisons can’t be rehabilitative; it just means they currently aren’t. What would a successful rehabilitative model look like? Actually, we already know. Rather than a warehouse for “doing time,” prisons can effectively be used (for many, but not all, types of offenders) as a sort of mandatory psychosocial treatment facility. While I find many of this article’s recommendations unconvincing, I think its fundamental argument is correct: Desistance requires maturation.

In other words, effective punishment requires teaching childish people to behave like adults. One way to accelerate that process is by sentencing offenders (whether in lieu of or in addition to prison) to anger management and emotional intelligence courses and, most importantly, to cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Of course, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: Instead of trying to rehabilitate offenders with severe behavioral and mental health issues, we could focus on preventing these issues from developing in the first place. Decarceralists are 100% right about this, and about the fact that there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to be plucked, including more access to basic healthcare and childhood nutrition, and less exposure to environmental toxins.  

But, when it comes to harder questions, like how to prevent the downward spiral of addiction that serves as a gateway to, and traps one in, a life of crime, they’re unwilling to acknowledge the effective, but unfashionable answers. Namely, housing first and harm reduction are policy failures that have led to an epidemic of homelessness and addiction in every jurisdiction that has embraced them. That’s why Portugal and the Netherlands abandoned these policies in favor of arrest and mandatory treatment. For more analysis on the link between crime, homelessness, drugs, and social policy, check out Tom Wolf and Michael Shellenberger, who know more about this nexus than practically anyone.

The costs of crime extend well beyond the harm to the immediate victim

Another way to make prison sentences more rehabilitative is to enroll offenders in programs for restorative justice. These programs involve a series of facilitated encounters between a criminal and his victim, which is sometimes an individual and sometimes an entire community. The purpose of restorative justice is to acknowledge and heal the trauma of the victim, while simultaneously providing the offender a path to redemption and reintegration into society.

Unfortunately, “restorative justice” has also become a catchphrase among decarceralists who fail to understand its key tenets and tout it as a consequence-free panacea for hardened criminals. One of those key tenets is that the offender must not only confront the harm he’s caused, he must be held accountable for it. In other words, even in—and perhaps especially in—restorative justice, punishment (and the internalization of the justness of that punishment) is a prerequisite to healing.

From a long-time restorative justice practitioner: “Minimizing harm by purposefully choosing language that blunts the reality of violence is neither restorative nor victim-centered. It also does a disservice to the significant journey of accountability for an offender.” 

Accountability is central to RJ because both “restoration” and “justice” demand some form of restitution. In monetary terms, our best estimates peg the direct, tangible costs of crime in America at over $600 billion per year. For reference, that’s approximately the entire 2019 GDP of Georgia, the ninth most productive US state. Researchers have also developed innovative methods of measuring the indirect costs of crime, like victims’ pain and suffering, insurance costs, and reductions in civic participation. These estimates reach as high as $3.41 trillion annually, just slightly less than the 2019 GDP of Germany. 

These staggering amounts are a stern rebuke to the increasingly fashionable trivialization, particularly on the left, of crime’s consequences. What they reflect is the fact that crime has an impact that extends far beyond the direct victim. Crime disfigures communities. Crime makes it impossible to run businesses, depriving already-underprivileged neighborhoods of basic services. Crime makes employees afraid to go to work. Crime is a pandemic of fear, emptying out parks and churches and social clubs, trapping children indoors, and draining the lifeblood from cities. As Patrick Sharkey notes: “[T]he very idea of city life doesn’t work if public spaces carry the threat of violence. Cities are places where people share space. That idea breaks down when public spaces are unsafe.” 

This passage from Sharkey’s Uneasy Peace describes the costs of that breakdown: 

During a heat wave in 1995, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg documented that residents in communities that had been taken over by open-air drug markets and gang activity were unwilling to leave their apartments… to find cooler air on their stoops or in the parks. Hundreds of people died, most living in streets where stores had closed their doors and signs of government presence in this emergency were nowhere to be found.

Crime is a fundamental violation of the compact between the government and the governed. When citizens are scared, when they feel nothing is being done to protect them, they withdraw from social, economic, and political participation, weakening the state. That’s why criminal matters are prosecuted not in the name of the instant victim, but of the People. In England, they are prosecuted in the name of the Crown. This practice is rooted in the centuries-old concept of “the king’s peace.” Crime undermines the integrity of the ruler’s oath to protect her people, her end of the bargain in exchange for their allegiance and their civic-mindedness. 

Thus, beyond deterrence, rehabilitation, restoration, and restitution, punishment also serves to reaffirm the government’s commitment to security, to reconsecrate that bargain. Punishment is a signal that the community takes the victimization of one of its own seriously. Scholars refer to this as the expressive theory of punishment, and when we fail to take it seriously, social order decays.

Incapacitation is sometimes a necessary and effective last-resort

Finally, we must come to terms with the fact that, more often than we’d like, some offenders will simply be incorrigible. In those instances, prison really does, and should, serve primarily as a means of incapacitation. It’s a last resort, but it does reduce crime. In fact, new research suggests that—contra the bien pensant line about the second-order effects of incarceration—removing offenders from their families actually improves outcomes for the latter. 

This is, admittedly, a grim finding, but it should only further motivate us to heed the evidence-based practices detailed above. Too often lost in the rancor of our public discourse over criminal justice is the fact that both “sides”—those who emphasize the harms of crime and those who emphasize the harms of incarceration—share compatible aims: If fewer people are offending, fewer people are going to prison. Taking these aims seriously means increasing support for social welfare programs, yes, but it also means more police and smarter policing. It means diversion courts for criminals who are not likely to re-offend, but it also means keeping dangerous people off the street—for their own good as well as for the community’s. In short, it means forgiveness and compassion, but also accountability. 

What comes next?

Even if none of the above is convincing to you, surely you want a decarceralist standard bearer that is at least minimally competent in his duties, right? But Boudin is not even an able ideologue: Judge Chan blasts Boudin; ‘Are you saying Boudin can’t win a case if a victim doesn’t testify?’; Nancy Tung; Why a progressive prosecutor just left D.A. Chesa Boudin’s office and joined the recall effort; Two SF Prosecutors Quit, Join Effort to Recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin; Why colleagues say District Attorney Chesa Boudin must go.

How long can this go on until it provokes a backlash against decarceralist efforts that are thoughtful and worthy? Or worse, until a critical mass of residents decide they’ve had enough, and those who can pick up and leave—hollowing out urban centers and abandoning underprivileged communities? Avoiding these outcomes requires taking the impacts of crime on our communities seriously, and electing leaders who follow the best available evidence in formulating policy. 

The simple argument, then, for recalling Boudin is a proof by negation. To argue that Boudin should remain in office, you have to (a) be willing to claim that countries like Canada and France are carceralist states, (b) ignore the consensus of criminal justice scholars who believe punishment is an important tool to effect desistance, and (c) be supportive of the administration of an incompetent liar. Personally, I find life easier not having to do any of those things. 

This is a complex topic. Maybe I’ve convinced you, maybe not. In any case, I hope that you’re now better equipped to think about and debate the future of criminal justice in San Francisco, and to cast your vote on the Boudin recall (in the June 7, 2022 ballot) accordingly.

This means a couple things for this newsletter:

1. All future essays will be public, but the paywall will stay up for comments

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1. I'm going to have a full time job at Grow SF

2. I'll focus nearly 100% of my time on the four upcoming elections next year (Feb 15, April 12, June 7, November 8)

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If you want to support my efforts and goals for making positive change in San Francisco, please donate to Grow SF (and feel free to cancel your substack subscription!).

Now, let me tell you more about Grow SF.

Grow SF

Grow SF wants San Francisco to become the world-class city we know it should be. That means better public transit, more housing, better schools, lower crime, more businesses, and a local government free of corruption.

We won't get there overnight, but it can happen faster than you might think. We will make significant progress over the next two years, and within ten years we will have flipped every seat. A better future is possible.

San Francisco has the highest income inequality in California, the second-highest rents in the world (pre-Covid), one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country (including a shocking number of homeless school kids), is one of the worst cities to do business across Canada, Mexico, and the US, and has among the highest rates of property crime in California. It's clear that so-called progressivism has failed San Francisco — it's time, instead, for a new liberalism.

Grow SF prioritizes outcomes over ideologies. We will reform laws to lower the barriers to entry for new businesses and make it legal to build more housing. We will ensure Muni is run by competent professionals and not derailed by neighborhood busybodies who want free parking. We will support candidates who want to fund the police to ensure we have enough officers and detectives to solve and prevent violent crime, and actually arrest the gangs running theft rings. We will have no tolerance for corruption or abuse.

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Our research has uncovered that most San Francisco voters are unhappy with the policies our elected officials are implementing, yet they keep re-electing those same politicians. This happens because voters lack robust and reliable information on what politicians actually believe, and a single-party city lacks the normal signals that voters use to make up their minds. Just voting for a Democrat means nothing when every candidate is a Democrat and they all believe different things.

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El Farolito wants to open a new store in North Beach, but San Francisco's "formula retail" ban is preventing them from opening their 12th family-owned taqueria. It is hard to find a city in America more hostile to small businesses than San Francisco, so on the one hand this is unsurprising. What should surprise you is that a law ostensibly created to keep out McDonalds and Starbucks is being used to hurt this hometown success story.

What is "formula retail"

The definition of formula retail is, basically, any store that has 11 or more physical establishments. The definition spans multiple categories: a coffee shop like Starbucks, fast food like McDonalds, a gym like Planet Fitness, or even a grocery store like Safeway. Here's the definition of formula retail, as found in San Francisco Planning Code Section 303.1(b):

A Formula Retail use is hereby defined as a type of retail sales or service activity or retail sales or service establishment that has eleven or more other retail sales establishments in operation, or with local land use or permit entitlements already approved, located anywhere in the world. In addition to the eleven establishments either in operation or with local land use or permit entitlements approved for operation, the business maintains two or more of the following features: a standardized array of merchandise, a standardized facade, a standardized decor and color scheme, uniform apparel, standardized signage, a trademark or a servicemark.

Combined with 303.1(c), which defines what retail uses are included, we understand the full breadth of this law:

[A] retail sales or service activity or retail sales or service establishment shall include the following uses[...]:

- Bar
- Drive-up Facility
- Eating and Drinking Use
- Liquor Store
- Sales and Service, Other Retail and Retail Sales and Service, General;
- Restaurant
- Limited-Restaurant
- Sales and Service, Retail
- Service, Financial
- Movie Theater
- Amusement Game Arcade
- Service, Limited Financial, except single automated teller machines at the street front that meet the Commission’s adopted Performance-Based Design Guidelines and automated teller machines located within another use that are not visible from the street
- Service, Fringe Financial
- Tobacco Paraphernalia Establishment
- Massage Establishment
- Service, Personal
- Service, Instructional
- Gym
- General Grocery
- Specialty Grocery
- Pharmacy
- Jewelry Store
- Tourist Oriented Gift Store
- Non-Auto Vehicle Sales or Rental
- Cannabis Retail

The problem isn't necessarily that we're extracting wealth from big chain stores by forcing them into a year-long conditional use approval process (though I'm no fan of that), rather that this definition of formula retail is far too strict and it's killing small businesses while exacerbating retail vacancies across the city.

Take North Beach, where El Farolito wants to open. The North Beach Neighborhood Commercial District has some of the strictest land-use rules of any neighborhood and a commercial vacancy of over 10% in 2018 (which has only worsened during Covid) — among the worst in the city.

Changing an old restaurant into a coffee shop, or a clothing store into a bar requires 10-14 months navigating San Francisco's kafkaesque bureaucracy to get permission to change the "use" of the space. Note that the business or individual seeking this change must be paying rent while jumping through these hoops. That can mean paying as much as $200,000 in rent for a vacant store while you wait for City Hall and the Planning Commission to allow you to pursue your dream.

If it's banned, why are there so many Starbucks?

Well, formula retail is only outright banned in three neighborhoods: North Beach Neighborhood Commercial District, Hayes-Gough Neighborhood Commercial Transit District, and Chinatown Visitor Retail District. A number of other commercial districts only ban certain kinds of commercial activity. See SF Planning Code Section 303.1(f) for the full list.

All other neighborhoods require formula retail to apply for a "Conditional Use Authorization" (CUA). The CUA process works like any other discretionary permit: approval is not guaranteed, the applicant must spend months doing "community outreach" and meeting with local residents and business owners and merchants associations, as well as attend a handful of mandatory public meetings to plead their case.

A small business like El Farolito doesn't have the resources to invest in this process and may opt to just give up, instead. But very large businesses like Starbucks are willing to sink $100,000 into getting their permit because their stores are so profitable and in such high demand.

Coffee shops may be fundamentally more suited to large chains. Independent cafes have wildly different quality (compare the fantastic Four Barrel to the absolutely awful Muddy Waters down the street), but consumers know exactly what to expect at Starbucks. It's not good coffee, but it's also not a gamble. Some business types are just more likely to both become successful chains and to better serve consumers as chains.

The prevalence of formula retail varies significantly by business type and size. For example, 49 percent of San Francisco’s coffee shops are formula retail, compared to 11 percent of all restaurants. The vast majority of pharmacies over 3,000 square feet and supermarkets over 10,000 square feet are formula retailers, while smaller establishments are much more likely to be independent retailers. More than 80 percent of all banks are formula retail.

- San Francisco Formula Retail Economic Analysis report, p. 4

Economic effects

Many advocates for the formula retail controls claim that this cumbersome process makes it easier for small businesses to find an affordable lease, which should lead to a boom of small businesses in neighborhoods that ban big businesses. A 2014 study by the SF Office of Economic Analysis disagrees (emphasis added):

In [neighborhoods at risk of commercial decline due to blight conditions], policies that discourage formula retail tenants could have negative consequences on the surrounding neighborhood and the city's economy.

- Expanding Formula Retail Controls Economic Impact Report, Office of Economic Analysis, p. 17

And another 2014 study by Economic Strategies, commissioned by the SF Planning Department, found a similar negative impact:

Expanding the application of formula retail controls to other types of land uses could affect a significant number of businesses considering new locations in San Francisco, and make it more challenging to fill vacant storefronts in some neighborhood commercial districts.

- San Francisco Formula Retail Economic Analysis report, p. 9

Indeed, there even seems to be a positive impact of formula retail on neighborhoods struggling with commercial decline and vacancy:

[A] formula retailer that serves as an anchor and draws new customers to a revitalizing neighborhood commercial district can have a positive effect on other retailers in the district, and potentially lead to increased sales and rents. [...] In the Ocean Avenue Neighborhood Commercial Transit District, for example, a new Whole Foods has attracted new customers and contributed to efforts to revitalize the area.

- San Francisco Formula Retail Economic Analysis report, p. 6

Additionally, formula retail not only employs more people, but also charges lower prices. This causes consumers to have more money in their pocket, which they can either save or spend at more businesses.

[T]he OEA's research suggests that prices at non-formula retailers are 17% higher than they are at formula retailers.

This price difference means that, even though policies that effectively divert spending to non-formula retailers do lead to higher levels of spending on local factors of production such as business suppliers, consumers that shift their purchases to non-formula retailers will have less to spend at other businesses.

As the table on the next page illustrates, the economic cost of higher prices on local consumers outweighs the potential benefit of greater local spending by non-formula retailers, and the net local spending impact is somewhat negative.

- Expanding Formula Retail Controls: Economic Impact Report, Office of Economic Analysis, p. 25

How did we get here

Finding the full story of how San Francisco came to ban large businesses reveals the small-c conservative nature of our local progressive government. Local politicians all sought to have more control over who got to set up shop in their little kingdom, and so-called small business advocates saw the chance to give themselves an unfair advantage and keep out competitors.

The SF Planning Department provides a helpful timeline view of how formula retail rules tightened like a one-way ratchet. In short: the first bans were enacted in 2004, expanded in 2007's Proposition G, and dramatically expanded and made less flexible in 2013 and 2014.

In 2011, as San Francisco was in rapid recovery from the economic crisis, there was rabblerousing about small businesses being hurt by big chain stores. There wasn't actually evidence of this happening, just a bunch of anecdotes and a strong feeling that gatekeeping the neighborhood was the Right Thing To Do.

This 2013 memo from the Planning Department was created "to review and analyze planning controls for formula retail uses in San Francisco due to the numerous pending proposals to change these controls." The stated goal of the report "to develop a series of controls that are clear, concise, and easy to implement that will protect neighborhood character and provide necessary goods and services" notably says nothing about fostering new business or growing the economy — instead the true small-c conservative nature of progressivism shows that it's more interested in protecting aesthetics. Here's a short excerpt from that report summarizing proposed and existing controls on formula retail:

2. Supervisor Breed would create the Fillmore [BF 120814] and Divisadero [BF 120796] NCDs which, among other controls, originally sought to prohibit new formula retail uses. Her new proposal would seek to weigh the community voice over other considerations (including staff recommendation); generally weigh the hearing towards disapproval; legislate a requirement for pre-application meeting; and codify our current formula retail policy for Fillmore and Divisadero. [...]

3. Supervisor Breed would also amend the definition of formula retail but only in the Hayes Gough NCT [BF 130468] [...]  to modify the definition of formula retail to include formula retail that is a type of retail sales activity or retail sales establishment and has eleven or more other retail sales establishments located anywhere in the world (emphasis added). [...]

4. Supervisor Kim introduced interim controls [BF 130712] at the July 9th, 2013 Board of Supervisors' hearing that would impose interim zoning controls requiring conditional use authorization [...] on Market Street, from 6th Street to Van Ness Avenue, subject to specified exceptions for grocery stores, for 18 months.

[...]

6. Mobile Food Facilities. Supervisor Wiener's recently approved ordinance amended the Department of Public Work's code [BF 120193] to restrict food trucks that are associated with formula retail establishments in the public right of way.[...]

You'll notice some familiar names there. Much to my disappointment, both then-Supervisors London Breed and Scott Wiener were proponents of these restrictions. Their support is illustrative of the misaligned incentives at the very local level vs higher office.

Supervisors, who represent roughly 75,000 people, respond to parochial interests and tend towards NIMBYism. But at higher office, where Breed and Wiener now represent 850,000 and 930,000 people, respectively, they're our best advocates for growth and YIMBYism. Understanding Supervisors as the lords of their little kingdoms explains a lot about the dysfunction of SF politics.

A later report from the Planning Department in 2014 did seek to balance economic concerns against the preservative nature of the formula retail controls. 

The ensuing policy recommendations are representative of the Planning Departments desire to put forth a balanced policy proposal designed to regulate formula retail in a manner that encourages economic development and job creation while maintaining the unique and distinctive nature of San Francisco’s neighborhoods.

Of note, this report recommended that the threshold of 11 stores be raised to 19:

• Of all existing FR in SF, only 5% have fewer than 20 locations

• Small businesses like Blue Bottle and Philz Coffee with 14 locations currently are reviewed under the same process as Subway and Starbucks with over 20,000 locations.

• Raising the threshold [to 19] would allow for greater small business development in SF

The economic analysis report agreed that 11 was too few:

Changing the definition of formula retail to businesses with at least 20 or 50 other establishments (rather than the current 11) would exempt some fast-growing start-ups, while still capturing the vast majority of large, established chains. […] only 5 percent of formula retailers in San Francisco are associated with businesses with fewer than 20 total branches or subsidiaries. Another 4 percent have between 20 and 50 locations. The remaining formula retailers are either franchises (about 17 percent) or have more than 50 locations (nearly 75 percent).

- San Francisco Formula Retail Economic Analysis report, p. 10

But like most recommendations based on economic vibrancy over aesthetic preferences, this recommendation was rejected and a limit of 11 stores was written into law. 

Do we even need these limits?

In short: no.

A recent research paper titled "Measuring McCities: Landscapes of chain and independent restaurants in the United States" sought to understand how chain stores spread through America. They found that cities like San Francisco are exactly the kinds of places you would expect local independently-owned stores to thrive:

Coastal metropolitan areas such as New York (lowest in percent chain) and San Francisco (lowest in replicability) tend to have low chainness. In contrast, cities in the South (e.g., Nashville), Midwest (e.g., Indianapolis), or Southwest (e.g., Phoenix) are more subject to chains.
[...]
Areas with very low or very high Walk Score, population density, and median household income tend to have medium or low chainness, and thus maintain a locally run food scene. These areas may correspond to rural tracts or wealthy downtowns.
[...]
In particular, areas with high Walk Score, such as pedestrian-friendly main streets or tourist areas, have the lowest predicted chainness across all sociodemographic features.

In our stupor to regulate The Big Bad Thing out of our city, we failed to realize that chain stores already are extremely unlikely to proliferate in San Francisco.

The biggest predictors of chain stores are car dependence and Trump voters:

Planning regulations such as zoning and parking requirements also privilege chains that tend to cluster and serve customers traveling by car.
[...]
Medium density census tracts (i.e. 1000–4500 people per square mile) that are car-dependent (Walk Score 15 to 40) and have a medium household income ($50,000) are most likely to be McCities.
[...]
The percentage of Trump voters is still the most indicative factor in defining a McCity, i.e. an area with high chainness, across spatial scales (census tracts, UA, or CBSA), even after controlling for race, age, income, and education.

- Measuring McCities

Not only do the formula retail controls slow down business and job creation, erect huge financial and bureaucratic barriers in front of growing small businesses, and end up being mostly useless at boosting local businesses, they also make San Franciscans poorer along the way.

Where do we go from here?

If I can put on my realpolitik hat for a minute: the best path forward is to propose a rule change that raises the limit from 11 to 50 stores. It will liberate actual small businesses from the bureaucratic nightmares we currently impose on successful businesses while applying the same tight controls on actually large businesses. But most importantly, people will vote for this change.

It's easy to understand why El Farolito getting screwed is bad. It's easy to understand that a business with 20 stores is different from one with 2000. It's easy to understand that recovering from the Covid recession will require loosening the noose around local businesses. And we have economic impact reports from several years ago all warning us that 11 was too low.

All we need to do is run a ballot measure.

After part 2 succeeds and no one is sleeping on the street, it's time to focus resources on preventing homelessness, building long-term supportive housing, and helping people escape poverty.

By far the easiest and most cost-effective way to help someone experiencing homelessness is to intervene while they still have a roof over their head. There are a few easy and cheap policies we can implement or expand.

How do we keep people out of homelessness today?

According to Heather Knight at the San Francisco Chronicle, "Of the $250 million [director Kositsky] spent [in 2017], two-thirds went to people who aren’t homeless at all. That’s the amount spent on rental subsidies, eviction prevention and permanent supportive housing." The budget for 2021-2023 is dramatically higher, about $600 million per year (still about two-thirds of it is spent on preventing homelessness).

For the next two years, San Francisco will spend about $60 million (10%) on administration, $140 million on roughly 20,000 homeless people (note: While the official point-in-time count shows roughly 8,000 homeless people, over the course of a year about 20,000 will enter homelessness while others exit it), and $400 million (67%) on preventing people from entering homelessness.

That $400 million is spent primarily on rental subsidies and build-out and maintenance of permanent supportive housing for the formerly homeless, and minimally through various other outreach programs.

This gives us the very rough back-of-the-napkin estimate of $7,000 per currently-homeless person per year. This is about double what it was in 2018 (about $3,800 per person per year).

I haven't been able to find out exactly how many people have been kept out of homelessness, but we can estimate based on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing's 2020 Implementation Plan report and the 2020 HUD Continuum of Care report. The HSH report says that in an 18 month period the department "helped over 2,500 households with housing, rent subsidies, and other programs" and "provided one-time assistance such as eviction prevention and move-in support to over 2,500 households." That gives a rough range of 2,500 to 5,000 individuals served with prevention programs.

Additionally, the HUD report shows the city maintains 11,238 permanent supporting housing units for the formerly homeless. Not all of these units are occupied all the time, so let's round it down to 10,500.

So $400 million will be spent across at least 13,000 to 15,500 people -- or just shy of $30,000 per person to keep them out of homelessness or in permanent supportive housing. But please note that this is definitely an overestimate of cost. I will attempt to find better numbers on how many people are helped and update this essay when/if I find them.

Expand rental assistance

As detailed in "Understanding Homelessness in San Francisco":

63% of people stay homeless because they just don't have enough money to pay their rent. 26% report their primary cause of homelessness is losing their job

For people who don't have enough money to cover their rent after an unexpected shortfall (eg, medical issue, car crash, surprisingly high bills, etc), the single most cost-effective solution is to give them a no-strings-attached lump sum payment to bridge the gap. The San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing offers one-time rental assistance already, but it is not very much money.

We should allow anyone at risk of becoming homeless to claim up to $7,000 per year (the cost spent per homeless person, detailed above). This should end up being a net cost savings because the city won't need to invest more resources into finding them a new place to live after they become homeless, and will surely save on the cost of medical care if they contract a disease or develop a drug habit while living on the street.

People who can't pay their rent should be able to get assistance without a lengthy application process. Hours and days matter to people who end up in this situation, and we shouldn't punish them for being poor. Yes, there will probably be some fraud, but the solution to that is random audits so that preventing fraud doesn't end up costing more than the program as a whole.

Fund Eviction Defense

San Francisco already provides city-funded eviction defense to tenants. This is great, but many tenants don't know it exists and it doesn't have a permanent funding source.

In the August 2020 budgeting process, the eviction defense program managed to avoid a budget cut and instead got an additional $750,000 for a total of $10.5 million per year. According to the San Francisco examiner, the eviction defense program only has a budget to counsel roughly only two-thirds of tenants facing eviction. And it's super effective, too:

Tenants who benefitted from both full and limited-scope representation from July 2019 to December 2019 were 94 percent low or moderate income, 28 percent white, 22 percent Black, 23 percent Latino, and 21 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, according to MOHCD in February.

Sixty-seven percent of closed cases ended with the tenant staying in their homes —with 80 percent of Black clients winning those cases — leaving about 31 percent of closed cases resulting in the tenant moving out.

- via SF Examiner

Not every person facing eviction will end up homeless, but no one enters homelessness without first losing their home. Investing in eviction defense and finding dedicated funding for this vital program will not only save taxpayer money in the long run, but will help the most vulnerable among us.

Promote the programs to the public

We don't want the first time someone learns about their guaranteed eviction defense rent payment assistance to be after they received a threatening letter from their landlord. Tenants who are on the edge of homelessness need to know their rights and that a lawyer is available to help them for free.

Mailing a letter to every one of the 360,000 households in San Francisco would cost about $112,3201 ($40,300 (at nonprofit rates) in postage plus about $72,000 in printing). This small cost would inform every resident of the city of their rights as tenants, the options available for people thinking of fleeing an abusive partner, or anyone who needs help but doesn't know who to ask.

But we shouldn't stop there. California already requires landlords to affix certain notices, warnings, or addenda to their leases to inform tenants of their rights. If you've signed a lease in the past decade you've probably seen something about Prop 65 and how your building will almost certainly give you cancer. At the very least, you've seen this sign:

Here's another example, drawn directly from my lease:

HAZARDOUS MATERIALS DISCLOSURE; LEAD WARNING: Pursuant to Section 25249.6 of the California Health and Safety Code, Landlord hereby makes the following required disclosure: “Warning - the Unit, the Building and the Development contain chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” Housing built before 1978 may contain lead-based paint. Lead from paint, paint chips, and dust can pose health hazards if not managed properly. Lead exposure is especially harmful to young children and pregnant women. Before renting pre-1976 housing, landlords must disclose the presence of known lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards in the dwelling. Tenants must also receive a federally approved pamphlet on lead poisoning prevention. The disclosure is attached hereto as Attachment C.

San Francisco should force landlords to inform tenants of their right to eviction defense, rental assistance, and how to report health & safety violations. This would come at almost no cost to taxpayers (except the one-time costs associated with writing the law), and pay dividends over time.

Build more

The most obvious way to keep people from becoming homeless is to build more homes in order to lower the market rate of housing, build publicly subsidized housing for people with very low incomes, and build supporting housing for people who can't take care of themselves.

It's honestly so obvious that it barely bears mentioning, but in San Francisco obvious truths are often elusive.

YIMBY Action, YIMBY Law, and California YIMBY have done great work locally and at the state level to push California to be more housing-friendly. Recent laws from Senators Scott Wiener and Nancy Skinner, and Assemblymembers David Chiu and Buffy Wicks have moved the needle on liberalizing housing production and holding cities accountable for bad actions. Still, these solutions will take 10 years to have a clear effect on rents so we need to do everything we can in the interim.

A dose of prevention is worth a pound of cure

I hope it's clear that preventing homelessness, while costly, will not only save us money in the long term, but it's also the moral thing to do.

Ending street homelessness requires a three-pronged approach: Mitigation (this essay), Prevention, and Treatment. Mitigation policies will get everyone indoors, prevention policies will keep people in their homes, and treatment policies will help those who can't help themselves.

Before reading the plan below, please read Part 1: Types of Homelessness. And subscribe now so you don’t miss future installments.

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Fast mitigation

The number one priority of any plan in San Francisco should be to get all 5,000+ individuals that sleep on the street every night into shelter. At first, we only need to provide the very basics: a roof, a cot, a blanket, a toilet, a sink, a shower, and a locker. Not a single person in San Francisco should ever go without these basic necessities.

But, perhaps surprisingly, new prefab shelters are more economical than the large-tent-style congregate shelters, while also providing better privacy and safety to the residents. So let's skip tents and go straight to cabins.

Small pre-fab shelters

The LifeMoves Mountain View project at 2566 Leghorn St provides low cost and high quality shelter for about 124 people as interim supportive housing on about 42,000 square feet, with about one quarter of that land reserved for parking and another quarter for medical and case management offices, shared bathroom facilities, a dog kennel, and a dining area.

DignityMoves proposed a similar installation at 33 Gough St in San Francisco. It will provide 70 temporary supportive housing units and onsite amenities on two parking lots that are about 19,800 square feet combined. The rough price tag is about $25,000 per unit. (Side-note: this project needs your support! Donate here.)

This shows an average density (excluding the parking) of about 3.5 shelter units per 1000 square feet1, including the space needed for shared amenities, healthcare, and social services.

Getting people into shelter should be considered a public health emergency, so we shouldn't waste time finding the perfect sites or negotiating land purchases or leases -- let's just use parking lots. There are 41 parking lots and garages owned by the city in San Francisco. These range from 10-story garages to small surface parking lots. For this policy proposal, I catalogued the square footage and heights of every city-owned parking lot.

Setting a minimum square footage of 9,000 square feet (about three residential San Francisco lots combined), and excluding underground garages and one farmer's market, we're left with 20 locations suitable for pre-fab shelters. The screenshot below shows their locations, with garages in purple and surface lots in blue.

Applying our average shelter density on the combined ~650,000 square feet at these locations, we have room for 2,275 pre-fab shelters2, at a cost of about $56.9 million3.

We need at least 5,000 shelters, so where else can we get the room?

More floors and congregate shelters

On the multi-level parking garages, we're only taking one of the floors, but we can take more and use some of the space for large congregate shelters. Yes, the congregate shelters cost a bit more but they house more people per square foot.

Let's use 444 Stockton Street and the 5th & Mission garages.

444 Stockton is a 10 story parking garage in the middle of downtown, with the main tower having a floor area of about 40,000 square feet per floor. The top four floors of this garage total 160,000 square feet and provide enough space for about 560 shelter units. 

The 5th & Mission Garage is ideally sized to host multiple congregate shelters. Each floor is 120,000 square feet with no intrusions into the envelope. Using the Navigation Center tent at 600 The Embarcadero as a reference, three tents totaling about 15,000 square feet serve about 200 people on a site that's roughly 43,000 square feet for about $12.5 million (about $62,500 per unit). That lot is irregularly shaped, so the density of 4.6 shelter units per 1000 square feet is below what the 5th & Mission garage could accommodate.

The top floor of this garage could hold roughly 10 large tents plus shared facilities, giving shelter to over 660 people, at a density of 5.5 people per 1000 square feet. We could also use the next level down for pre-fab shelters, adding another 420.

This puts us at a total of about 3,500 shelter units (see spreadsheet for breakdown). Lowering the square footage threshold to include the very small parking lots only brings the total just north of 3,700 units, but I doubt the administrative cost of running very small sites makes sense.

The very rough estimated one-time cost is about $112 million to do this plan.

Housing for humans, not cars

3,500 shelter units is 1,500 units short of the immediate need. Where will that extra space come from?

If we, as a city, decide that we care more about housing people indoors than providing underpriced parking spots for cars, we can house *everyone* in individual pre-fab shelters (no tents!). We just need to take half of every SFMTA parking garage.

Check out the "Maximum prefab" sheet in the sites spreadsheet. Every surface parking lot over 9,000 square feet, and the top half of the floors of every parking garage, are used for prefab homeless shelters.

We can do all of this for only $142 million and provide almost 5,700 homeless shelter units. 

Every one of these locations would have individual and family units, showers, kitchens, social workers, lockers, and pets would be welcome. Every single person sleeping on the streets would have somewhere safe and clean they can sleep every night while they get back on their feet.

What else can we do

If you really love parking and don't want to use so much space for getting people indoors, there is another (much more expensive) option: congregate shelter tents everywhere combined with hotel acquisition.

Using the "Maximum tents" plan, which puts congregate shelters on all of the sites (excluding some floors in 444 Stockton due to ceiling height), we start with about 4,500 units at a cost of $240 million. That's not enough, but it's a great start. The other units could come from extending the very successful hotel shelter model that has operated during Covid-19 by acquiring at least 1000 hotel rooms.

I do not have access to a list of available real estate that the city could purchase, but I know the total hotel capacity in San Francisco is over 34,000 rooms. I can't estimate how much acquiring enough properties will cost, unfortunately, because many hotel operators may be looking to exit the market and might sell at a steep discount, or may be holding out for the economic recovery.

The city maintains an artificial cap on hotel rooms, like it does with almost everything else, and should abandon this backwards policy so the hotel industry can build back capacity as tourism recovers post-Covid. By trading the purchase of hotels for liberalized regulations around new hotel construction, not only will the city add new shelters, but would lower hotel rates long-term while boosting tourism income.

These acquisitions would have to be financed by municipal bonds. Let's be pessimistic and say this would cost $500 million for 1,000 units. San Francisco voters routinely pass bonds for this amount, like this $600 million bond for affordable housing from 2019. But it would also take at least a year to write the bond, get it on the ballot, and have voters approve it (as all municipal bonds must be enacted).

I really don't like this plan because it is the slowest and most expensive option, it's less predictable since it's predicated on the electorate passing a bond and the city finding willing sellers, and it doesn't provide any privacy to the shelter residents.

We can't afford not to

The Maximum Prefab model would cost the city only $142 million, which is less than what the city currently spends per year on much worse facilities. (For reference, San Francisco's yearly city budget is over $13 Billion.) If we declare a homelessness state of emergency, the Federal government would even foot a big chunk of the bill. 

San Francisco desperately needs to increase tourism and business revenue, and our street homelessness crisis stands in the way. Tourists and residents don't feel safe, and don't want to visit or live in a dirty city.

We got a glimpse of our city in decline during Covid-19. We saw people flee our dysfunctional government, crime skyrocket, and businesses get wiped out. That could happen again, this time without a pandemic. We must fix our most shameful and inhumane problem before it's too late.

This is Part 2 of “A plan to end street homelessness in five years”. Read Part 1: Types of Homelessness, and subscribe now so you don’t miss future installments.

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But nobody agrees on how to do it.

We can solve street homelessness if we make some hard choices, stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and believe that it is our city's biggest moral failing to not help the people who need it most. I expect that no one will be happy with my full set of proposals because I'll be taking a pragmatic rather than ideological approach.

This essay, part 1 of this series, will describe the various types of homelessness. The next parts will describe the policies and programs we can implement, the political feasibility of them, a viable path to implementation, and long-term policies for getting more people in permanent housing.

Suggested prior reading: Understanding Homelessness in San Francisco.

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What is "street homelessness"?

People who are experiencing homelessness are not always visible. They may sleep on a friend's couch, in their car, in an SRO, a hotel, or a shelter. You wouldn't be able to pick them out of a crowd. But street homelessness is unmissable.

Street homelessness is the most visible form of homelessness, and what the majority of people think of when they hear the word "homeless." Street homelessness is vicious to people experiencing it: It traps people in poverty, exacerbates or causes physical and mental health problems, and leads to drug and alcohol abuse.

New York City has almost completely ended street homelessness. NYC is one of the few places in the country that has a "right to shelter" law that guarantees anyone a room who needs one. Anyone sleeping outside in New York City's harsh winters would likely die from exposure, so they can't take the same laissez-faire approach that San Francisco does. NYC's success shows that ending street homelessness is possible.

Ending street homelessness will not solve every problem, but it is the first and most important step. When elected leaders do not act, they provoke a backlash. If San Francisco, and California more generally, continue to fail then voters will give up on compassion and opt for harsh solutions. We're already seeing it in the fallout from the Governor recall: Newsom and his opponents are all doing photo-ops clearing homeless encampments, while the people living there have nowhere else to go. Voters want this, even though it's cruel, because at least they see results.

To stop the backlash, we must act.

Types of homelessness

Before proposing policy solutions to street homelessness, we must first take stock of the various types of homelessness. There are a few broad categories: youth homeless, the working poor, temporary homeless, those seeking opportunity, those needing healthcare and mental healthcare, those needing drug treatment, and the long-term homeless. Any one of these groups may experience street homelessness at any time.

Youth homeless

Young people become homeless due to desperate situations at home (emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, negligence, alcoholism and drug addiction), or because they were kicked out for not agreeing with their parents' religion or social values (for example: LGBTQ youth are disproportionately more likely to get kicked out and be homeless than other youth).

Becoming homeless at a young age can permanently alter your life by making it impossible to access education and trapping you in poverty. Young people may be preyed upon and forced into situations where they have to trade sex for safety, food, or shelter.

The working poor

Most adults become homeless because they lost their job, got evicted, left their partner, or got kicked out by their partner. Most people stay homeless because they just don't have enough money to pay rent. Many of these people are "working poor" — they have a job (or two, or three) but they don't make enough to afford a room on their own. Or they make enough to get a hotel every other week, but can't afford a deposit for anywhere more permanent. Given a better job, lower housing costs, or even a small lump sum for a deposit on an apartment, these people can easily get back on their feet.

The working poor are the most invisible of any homeless population. You've probably been waited on by someone experiencing homelessness, or your kids go to school with children whose parents have no permanent housing. In fact, at any given time about 4% of San Francisco's school children are homeless. That's one out of every 25 kids — or about one in every classroom.

Children of homeless parents don't have access to the same opportunities as their housed classmates. They aren't able to take part in the same extracurriculars, especially if those activities require buying equipment, they may not be able to make it to school on time, and they will struggle academically. They are often underfed and school lunch may be their only meal of the day.

The temporarily homeless

The vast majority of homeless in San Francisco lived here when they lost their home. At first they sleep on couches of friends and family, but eventually everyone's charity runs out. Most people in this situation are only temporarily homeless and after a few weeks or months couch surfing, they either move away or find a place they can afford. A shelter, a bus ticket, or a lead on a low-cost room is all they need to make it. Too often, though, temporary homelessness turns into permanent homelessness because they weren't able to access the services and help they needed.

Those seeking opportunity

Some people do move to San Francisco when they're already homeless (though this is a minority: 30% or less of the homeless population). Maybe they heard they can find a job easily, or they can get medical services they need, or maybe they have some friends in town who promised them a couch. Almost none of these people come here because our homeless services are good, and the weather is actually not ideal for outdoor sleeping. It's a myth homeless people move to SF for good services or the weather. People who move to San Francisco and end up homeless are all just seeking a better life.

It is very tempting and easy to think that homeless San Franciscans come here because we're generous, and that thought quite quickly turns into contempt, disgust, and anger. I can't blame anyone for feeling this way — it's a natural reaction that helps people deal with uncomfortable situations. Brains have this incredible ability to minimize the humanity of humans who don't fit our idea of how they ought to look or behave.

I'm not going to tell you you're a bad person for thinking this way. Instead I'll ask that you soberly look at the statistics, the reality of our poor services, and how much people are suffering on the street, and then introspect on why you think someone would *choose* that over other options.

It's tempting to think that just preventing people from coming to San Francisco would solve homelessness. But even if we suspended civil liberties and instituted domestic passports to stop anyone from moving here, we would still have more homeless than shelters, and have violated fundamental human rights along the way, so I won't even consider this as a solution. America is not communist China: people have freedom of movement in this country.

Those needing physical healthcare

A few minutes in San Francisco will make it obvious that a lot of homeless people are suffering from something. Whether that be open sores, swollen legs and feet, tooth decay, rashes from not washing, broken bones, infections, or any number of other issues: they all need a little medical care. Your body can rapidly deteriorate in difficult conditions and give you an ailment that makes it impossible to get around, clean up, and find a job. Being healthy and clean makes it so much easier to find a job and an apartment.

We don't have socialized healthcare, but hospitals are obligated to give everyone treatment. So, at least they can get help in an emergency. But good health requires so much more than occasional emergency room access: you need clean water, a bed, clean clothes, and sanitary food — all of which are incredibly hard to obtain when homeless.

Those needing mental healthcare

Most people assume that all homeless people suffer from mental health issues. This is part of our natural defense mechanism: we assume "those people" are "crazy," which helps absolve us of our guilt.

But, in fact, only 8% of people become homeless due to mental health issues. However, they are exceptionally visible: shouting, walking out into traffic, making messes, talking to themselves, and are often unable to keep themselves clean. They have no options: shelters won't let them in (either because they're already disruptive or have been disruptive in the past and have been banned), their fellow homeless don't want them around because a quiet and clean encampment is less likely to be shut down, and neither the police nor hospitals want to keep them any longer than absolutely necessary.

People suffering from mental health issues that prevent them from obtaining assistance need the most help and should be forced into it if they refuse help. It is inhumane to let people clearly suffering from mental health crises waste away on the street with no access to services. Most advocates for the homeless will disagree with me here, but I believe it is necessary to force some people into the care of the state.

Those needing drug or alcohol treatment

Like those needing healthcare, it's obvious many homeless people need drug treatment. Only 18% of people become homeless due to drugs or alcohol. However, many people develop a drug or alcohol problem once they are homeless: 42% of homeless people in San Francisco report using drugs or alcohol.

Drug treatment is outside the scope of this essay, so I'll briefly summarize my views: we need to open safe consumption sites where people can use drugs and be given medical attention before and after, and then have a zero-tolerance policy for open-air drug use. Anyone doing drugs on the street should be taken to a safe consumption site (not jail!). We will never end drug use; all we can do is minimize the harm it has on society. And needles lying around everywhere, people smoking fentanyl on public transit, and people nodding off on the sidewalk all harm our social fabric.

The chronically homeless

A small number of people are "chronically homeless". This means they've been homeless for a year or longer, or have experienced bouts of homelessness more than three times in the past three years. When someone is chronically homeless, it means all of our interventions and outreach have failed to make a lasting and meaningful impact in their lives.

What are the current shelters like?

San Francisco has over 8,000 homeless people and only 3,000 shelter beds. So every night there are at least 5,000 people sleeping on the street. But for the lucky 3,000 that can find a spot indoors, what is it like?

Most people have a contradictory view of homeless shelters: they picture a place that's simultaneously cushy and loaded with amenities while being a dirty and unsafe place they don't want to live near. The truth is, as it always is, more nuanced.

The most basic shelter facility is only open at night and people sleep on small cots or bunk beds, with many people sharing the same room. Spouses, partners, children, and pets, are all forbidden: these shelters only accommodate individuals. Also, drugs and alcohol are prohibited. There are basic bathrooms and showers onsite. You must wait in line to get in, and the staff may choose to take someone they deem higher priority than you, even if you're ahead of them in the line. You are kicked out every morning and must take all your belongings with you; there is no food storage and no lockers for your belongings. (Note: All of these facilities were shut down at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic due to the high risk of transmission in such a crowded setting.)

Faith-based shelters are similar: they let people in at night and kick them out in the morning. Sometimes, these shelters are only open a few nights per week. Many faith-based shelters also serve food and some allow families.

A small number of shelters allow drugs and alcohol. This was popularized during the "housing first" movement that sought to get people into housing first and then help them deal with their drug or alcohol abuse problems. I believe in meeting people where they're at and think that these "wet" shelters are vitally important. Both dry and wet shelters are part of the spectrum of solutions.

The next step up is San Francisco's navigation center concept. This is designed as a 90 day intervention to help people get back on their feet. Residents are able to bring partners and pets, and are assigned a bed and a locker so they don't need to move their belongings every day. There are no curfews or set meal times so people live normally. This stability, secure storage, and especially the reliable access to showers, is a huge benefit for people looking for a new job. Someone who hasn't showered in a week or who has to bring all of their belongings with them wherever they go has a nearly zero chance of finding a job.

One more step up is a daily or weekly room, commonly called residential hotels or SROs. These facilities are not free, and they're not that cheap either. Someone who lives in an SRO usually spends the majority of their income on rent. Many SROs also rent monthly. These facilities mostly cater to the "working poor" who just don't get paid enough at their jobs (and they often have more than one) or those living on a fixed income, like social security. Like all other types of housing that aren't for multi-millionaires, it's illegal to build new SROs. Bad government policy ensures that low-cost housing is not attainable to people who need it. The existing SROs are old and in various states of disrepair, with no handicapped accessibility to speak of.

Check out Shelterlist to see all of the types of homeless shelters in San Francisco.

Stay tuned for Part 2: The Plan

In Part 2, I'll lay out what I believe is a feasible plan to end street homelessness in five years. I think it can (and should) happen faster than that, but building the requisite political capital takes time.

Subscribe now so you don't miss part 2.

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Open Source Political Tools

My original pitch when I quit Google to work in politics full time was that I would start developing a bunch of open source tools for political activists, campaigns, and interested onlookers. My original list of ideas is still online over on my GitHub sponsors page, but only one of the projects listed there has had much progress.

Rather than spending most of every day working on these tools, I had the opportunity to help the Board of Education Recall campaign. I am a huge supporter of this effort (as you can see in "Four Reasons to Recall the School Board"), and I was excited to help! I offered advice, offered up my experience working with the Department of Elections, and most importantly built an app to validate the signatures on the recall petition. Typically, these tools cost a lot of money and have terrible UX, but I volunteered my time to build them one completely for free. It lets volunteers churn through thousands of signatures per day with a simple-yet-powerful search and easy and fast UI, while surfacing all the information campaigns need to know to achieve their goals.

I don't currently plan to open source this tool or make it available as a paid product. Instead, I plan to join future ballot proposition campaigns as a volunteer and help them use it. If you want to run a ballot prop, please reach out to me on Twitter. If we are aligned, then I'll be happy to help! And everything I do will always be offered completely for free.

While most of my weeks were spent volunteering, rather than doing the work my GitHub sponsors are paying for, I have made some progress on a cool tool to visualize the network of power and money in San Francisco politics. Now that the Recall campaign is winding down and they'll almost surely qualify for the ballot, I can focus more time on this open source tool.

This tool requires a big database of past endorsements and a digital archive of political mailers. Luckily, I've been keeping a paper archive in a filing cabinet since 2017. In the past couple months I have been digitizing them, spending many hours manually transcribing the endorsements. My next steps are to import the SF Ethics and California FPPC databases, to understand who funded which mailers.

Finally, I will present all of this information in an easy to explore website so we can better understand what dark money groups are funding the far-left. I'll announce it on my substack when it's ready to open source.

Grow SF

I'm super pleased to say that I've been working with Sachin Agarwal on Grow SF. Neither of us are being paid, so it's completely a labor of love. Grow SF believes in a San Francisco that is growing and changing — a city that welcomes new businesses and new residents with better regulations, a safer city where public safety is adequately funded, a more family-friendly city with properly managed public schools, and a city with taller, denser, more affordable housing.

Cities are either growing or dying, and our elected officials are trying their hardest to strangle the life out of San Francisco.

I am so proud to have helped on the Save Outdoor Dining campaign , which successfully saved San Francisco's outdoor dining from the anti-growth far-left. Most recently, we produced one of the only voter guides that actually tries to inform you of your choices in the Gavin Newsom recall. We will put out a voter guide in every election, put on education events, and help train people to run for office.

Sachin and I are now planning what's next for Grow SF. We're building a fundraising plan, an execution plan, and learning from more experienced organizers. It's too early to announce everything, but you can read a bit more about us in The Examiner.

If you're interested in helping us win, donate to the Grow SF PAC or DM me on twitter.

Substack

I've been having a blast writing this weekly1 newsletter, and I've been considering making all of the posts free. Unfortunately, since I'm still doing all of this political work as a volunteer, I need to keep a little money flowing. But I'm hoping I can figure out a way to make it free.

I am thankful for all of you, especially those of you who are paid subscribers, for helping me live this dream and deeming my thoughts worthy of your inbox! If you can't tell, I'm not a trained writer, so the fact anyone subscribes at all is a huge honor.

I particularly like the deadline pressure that running a weekly newsletter imposes on me. I have had so many essay ideas kicking around my head for years and only now have I actually written them down. I'll keep this up as long as I can.

What's Next

A LOT is happening in the next 18 months: the Board of Education and the Chesa Boudin recall, a California Assembly race alongside an SF District Supervisor special election (if you believe the rumors...), the June Primary and the November General Election which, like always, will have a dozen or more ballot props.

I will volunteer my time and energy for as many good candidates, good causes, and good ballot props as I possibly can. I will get this campaign finance and power network visualization tool online, and hopefully develop a few more open source tools. I will help Grow SF expand its influence and win elections. I will keep writing, though I'll probably miss a week here-and-there during campaign season.

And I couldn't do any of this without you. So thank you, all of you, for helping me be able to do this. Thank you to the paid subscribers for helping me pay my bills, and the free subscribers for sharing essays you like. Thank you to my GitHub sponsors for believing in open source political tools, even though I've been slower than I expected in releasing them.

We're making a real difference already.

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The winner of the recall will become our next governor even if they don't get 50% of the vote. The rules state that the person with the most votes — not a majority — wins. This has already happened: Arnold Schwarzenegger won the first-ever successful recall election with 48.6% of the vote.

The top-polling challenger, Larry Elder (R), currently has between 10% and 23% support. No challenger has anywhere close to a majority. If the recall succeeds, we are guaranteed to have a governor elected by only a small minority of the population. There is no primary. There is no runoff. There is only minority rule.

If you only vote No, you're effectively voting for Larry Elder.

The dynamics and consequences of this contest merit special consideration, and for you to vote with a plan. Don't just vote No. You need to vote No and vote for a sane backup option. Or, at least, the least-worst backup option.

Meet the Kevins

Kevin Paffrath, Kevin Faulconer, and Kevin Kiley are all polling fairly well and could each feasibly be the next governor. Incidentally, I think they're probably the least-worst choices you have, though none of them are good enough for me to endorse.

Kevin Paffrath (D): The landlord YouTuber

Kevin Paffrath (AKA "Meet Kevin") is the only well-polling candidate in the race that's also a registered Democrat. But that doesn't necessarily mean he's a good choice, or even a shoe-in in our one-party state. Paffrath is a "landlord YouTuber" with over 1.6 million subscribers.

Paffrath puts out videos that, charitably, teach people how to be landlords. Uncharitably, he teaches people how to defraud and abuse their tenants. There are also videos about politics, the housing market in general, the stock market, the federal reserve, among others.

His campaign website doesn't have much detail about policy, but he does list out his top priorities. Among them are mobilizing the national guard to build homeless shelters and then… forcibly moving people into them, using prison labor to keep streets clean, and "solving" traffic by... doubling road capacity by building tunnels directly under existing roads. Oh, and don't forget abolishing state income taxes for people making under $250k — a promise that the governor literally does not have the power to do.

It's not all bad, though. He wants to move control of building codes to the state level (hey, I actually agree with that!). Oh, and he wants to legalize gambling.

Like every other top-polling candidate, including the two Kevins below, Paffrath opposes vaccine and mask mandates.

So, he may be a registered Democrat but he's also completely unqualified to run the state and his policy proposals are either illegal or politically unachievable.

Paffrath is an unserious candidate who's probably only running to grow his YouTube audience. It is shocking and utterly disappointing that he's one of the few candidates who wouldn't be a total nightmare.

Kevin Faulconer (R): The center-right mayor

Kevin Faulconer is socially liberal and a center-right Republican. He has executive experience and has enough relationships to actually get some things done.

"[...] he's not your typical Republican: he's pro same-sex marriage, he acknowledges the science behind climate change, backs a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and he won two terms in [San Diego] with a majority of Democrats."

"Kevin Faulconer: Moderate Enough to Challenge Newsom?" by the SF Chronicle

Faulconer is generally pro-housing, and calls himself a YIMBY. As the Republican mayor of Democratic-majority San Diego, Faulconer worked across the aisle with Democrats to build more housing and lower the homelessness rate.

Faulconer made headlines earlier this year by pursuing a handful of pro-density policies in a city known more for its sprawl and affection for unobstructed coastline views than mutli-family apartment buildings. As a newly self-identified “YIMBY”—Yes in My Backyard advocate—Faulconer has moved to ease height restrictions and minimum parking requirements across San Diego.

- Via Cal Matters

However, in the most recent recall candidate debate, Faulconer promised to veto SB 9, which would legalize fourplexes statewide.

Faulconer does a pretty good job on most of the culture-war issues that Republicans typically fail on. He's pro-choice and believes the science of climate change, and he's the only top Republican that's pro-immigrant and against Trump's border wall. Faulconer seems decent on LGBTQ issues (in sharp contrast to the other Republican candidates), and he even supported the federal Equality Act:

Despite the progress that’s been made, LGBT people still face discrimination. Every single American deserves equal rights, and we should give every American an equal chance to succeed in this great country of ours.

- Kevin Faulconer, via NBC San Diego

But now for the bad news: Faulconer voted for Trump in 2020 (after saying "I could never vote for Trump" in 2016). And he pushed awful lies about Senator Wiener's bill to fix an overly puritanical and backwards law banning anal, oral, and other non-vaginal sex between young people, which unfairly discriminates against LGBTQ youth.

It’s up to you to decide if his blemishes are disqualifying.

Kevin Kiley (R): The young conservative

Kevin Kiley is definitely more socially conservative than Faulconer, but otherwise they seem pretty similar policy-wise.

Among his worst positions are that he's anti-choice, wants to punish undocumented immigrants by making them ineligible to receive state support and healthcare, and voted against making California a "sanctuary state".

Kiley does have some positive positions, though. Like Faulconer, he believes in the science of climate change and is quite pro-housing. Kiley even co-authored Senator Scott Wiener's SB 50 which would have legalized new homes near transit and high-opportunity areas. Recently Kiley voted with Democrats in favor of SB 9, which legalizes fourplexes statewide — a bill that Faulconer promised to veto, as mentioned above. Kiley also serves on the Committee on Housing and Community Development in the State Assembly. 

I haven't been able to find much of anything on Kiley's LGBTQ positions, and he's only rated 25% by Equality California. It's safe to assume he would not be a champion for LGBTQ rights.

The other two

Larry Elder (R) and John Cox (R) are the top contenders and it's likely that one of them will be our next governor. So I hope to motivate you to vote for one of the three people above so we aren't stuck with these clowns.

Larry Elder (R): The right-wing radio host

Larry Elder is a right-wing talk radio host that wants to ban abortions, abolish gun regulations, abolish the IRS, and end welfare. He's in favor of building Trump's border wall, and has said nothing at all about our housing crisis except that he opposes homeless shelters.

I wish I could tell you more about him, but he has put forward no positive vision for the state other than his extremely long-winded rant on his campaign website. And, frankly, I can't make my way through the whole thing.

Elder is the current favorite to win this election, but he's never held public office and I think he never should.

If you do not cast a vote for one of the other candidates, you are guaranteeing that Elder becomes our next governor.

John Cox (R): The old conservative

John Cox isn't a newcomer to politics like Larry Elder. In fact, he ran against Newsom back in 2018 with a platform of building a border wall and banning abortion. He was endorsed by President Trump. Luckily, Cox lost with 38.1% of the vote, but this time we may not be so lucky.

Cox has been traipsing around the state with a bear, hoping to get himself into the press to remind you that he still exists… and it's working. Cox is polling #2 in this election.

If elected, John Cox would push California backwards on fighting Covid-19. In contrast to Kevin Faulconer who believes everyone should get the vaccine (while falling short of mandating it), Cox advised people who already got covid to not get the vaccine, contradicting CDC guidance.

"There's a lot of people that have had COVID and have antibodies," [Cox] said. "They don't need the vaccine. They shouldn't get the vaccine."

Via SFGate

While Cox has some decent housing opinions like fixing CEQA and is generally supportive or building more homes, his homelessness policies are trash. He pushes the lie that all homeless people suffer from drug addiction and believes that they should be forced into conservatorship or jail rather than be given shelter and help.

Don't let John Cox become our next governor.

I got 99 problems but an endorsement ain't one

The Democratic Party is only endorsing No. The Republican Party is only endorsing Yes. Not a single political club or voter guide in San Francisco is giving voters enough information to make a rational, informed choice that can help avoid the worst outcomes.

Every political insider I know tells me the same thing: they don't want to endorse a backup option because they don't want to risk their reputation. I get it — politics is about reputation management. But I'm more interested in outcomes than politics.

If your politics get in the way of informing the people, then your politics are BAD.

At least the Democratic clubs have an excuse: the Democratic Party bans Democratic clubs from ever endorsing someone who isn't a registered Democrat. They can't even endorse Independents!

The Democratic Party never took this recall seriously and have justified their just-say-no plan by bringing up the 2003 recall. In that recall, Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante ran as the backup option and the Democratic Party believes that "Vote No and Bustamante" confused the voters, leading to their loss. I believe the actual reason Bustamante lost isn't that voters were too dumb to understand the message, but that voters were angry and wanted a change.

The Democratic Party has left Democrats in California with no guidance. We're sleepwalking into far-right control because they never took the recall seriously and don't think we're smart enough to vote No and for a backup option. Don't let it happen. Pick a backup option you can live with or we'll end up with one you can't.

By far the most popular opinion of tech people is that there isn't enough voting. Or not enough communication between elected leaders and the people. This is wrong.

Maybe it's the culture of open source and Linus's law that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." But solutions to technical problems from people vested in the provable correctness of their contributions do not map cleanly to the political arena. As I said in part 1 of Politics for Software Engineers: "it doesn't matter if you are right, it only matters if you have influence."

Voting on everything

Tomas Pueyo gained fame with his essay on the Covid-19 pandemic, "The Hammer and the Dance." Arguably, he set the direction of myriad public health departments around the world, but there's no arguing he affected how most of us thought about lockdown. He was not a public health expert or epidemiologist, but his analysis and advice may have saved a large number of lives. I really want to emphasize that this kind of citizen journalism can do really good things, and it doesn't need to come from a domain expert. Any smart person, like Tomas obviously is, can understand a problem and offer a good solution.

But Tomas is completely wrong about Democracy. Give this thread a read, or settle for my tl;dr: Tomas argues for direct democracy via a GitHub style legislative system where contributors are ranked by reputation.

Note: Sorry, Tomas, to pick on a year-old thread, but this essay has been kicking around in my drafts since your original tweet, so I hope you forgive me.

This appeal to more participation is extremely common among political hobbyists. Surely if no voting is bad and a little voting is generally good, then lots of voting must be way better! This is absolutely untrue. I don't think Tomas actually understands the problems with democracy, and is instead working with an idealized version of it. I don’t want you to interpret this as a slight against Tomas, but rather to show that even very smart and highly technical people poorly understand politics and the problems that politics solves.

His proposal for ranking contributors by “reputation” is just a roundabout and overly technical way to say that people who do things other people like will tend to accumulate power. That’s literally how politics works already. At best, he's advocating for a new, poorly scoped technical system with unknown vulnerabilities and failure modes. At worst, he's advocating for contributions to be fully captured by charismatic populists. In neither situation has he meaningfully improved democracy.

Governing is a full-time job

If you're going to seriously pitch the idea that we should devolve legislative authority to The People, first I want you to tell me about a single bill that your local government has passed in the last five years. Just one. Tell me what the legislators said it would do, tell me if you read the bill, and tell me what it actually does. What about at the state level? Can you even tell me how many bills they considered and voted on? What about Congress?

You can't, because keeping track of legislation is quite literally a full time job that we elect people to do.

Busy people who have jobs and friends and like to have fun do not want to follow every bill that moves through the government. They don't want to think about them. They certainly don't want to have to vote on them. But you know who does? The retired old NIMBY who shows up every week to the hearings. And, boy, does she have opinions.

This is kind of a taboo thing to say: the problems in SF are because we have too much input from regular people. It is already comically easy to communicate with the government. A solution that says people “just need to get in touch with their elected officials" ignores the reality of our current situation.

Direct democracy is anti-democratic

There's a woman in San Francisco with a surprising amount of power: Georgia Schuttish. She may be single-handedly responsible for tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars of fines levied against regular people who tried to do a little more to their homes than they got permission from the SF Planning Department for. She has solidified this power steadily over more than a decade.

But Georgia has never won an election, never ran for office, and I guarantee you've never heard of her. So how did she gain so much power and influence? Simple: Georgia has been showing up to the Planning Commission hearings at 1pm, every Thursday, for a decade. What were you doing? Working? Hahaha, what a chump!

Georgia Schuttish takes pictures of the construction going on at construction sites around the city, then she looks up the permits that were approved for that location and spends hours figuring out what totally minor thing the builder has done wrong. Then she shows up at Planning Commission to present her findings. The Planning Commission can then orders the Planning Department and DBI to investigate, levy a fine, and often halt construction.

Oh yeah, she also shows up frequently at the Board of Appeals. Did you even know these hearings existed?

San Francisco's uniquely participatory democracy means that your political obligations don't start and stop on election day. No, they recur every day in hundreds of small hearing rooms in City Hall that no reasonable (or employed) person would ever have the chance to attend or influence. Instead, retired people like Georgia, with her backwards-looking tattletale NIMBYism, control everything — and Georgia is only one of several dozen!

This is what direct democracy looks like, and if your theories on government and democratic reform don't account for people like her, then you are guaranteed to fail.

Return to representative democracy

San Francisco must end its failed experiment in direct democracy and return to representative democracy. Direct democracy is too easily captured by special interests and busybody NIMBYs, while representative democracy can actually represent the voice of the average person.

I want to redirect your energy from making government more participatory to making government more representative. Rather than write software tools to make it easier for people to stay in contact with their elected leaders, make software that helps people get better educated about elections. Make software that helps people quickly learn about an issue. Make software that summarizes legislation. Make software that reveals who controls what.

I have been working on a tool to document the network of power in San Francisco (one of the projects listed on my GitHub sponsors page). It requires a lot of manual effort to collect past endorsements, digitize old political mailers, and build the influence and endorsement graph. It should be ready to open source in a month or two, at which point I'd love your PRs.

Don't squander your energy on solutions that will make our problems worse. Spend some time understanding the problem space first. Go to a local political club meeting and talk to people. Understand your audience, understand why your city has problems. Only then should you write tools to fix democracy.

Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, from 11 years old. Vladimir Nabokov published his first book (a collection of poems) at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12, and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16 he was the family’s mainstay of income.

Sarris doesn't romanticize child labor; rather he points out that when exceptional children are given the opportunity and the means to do great things, they excel far beyond what most adults think children are capable of. I couldn't help but think of my own schooling: when I was in regular grade-level classes I did poorly because I was bored and was simply not allowed to excel. When I got into honors and AP classes I rose to the challenge. The experience changed how I thought about individual potential and the effect of having high expectations.

The Billionaire Space Race

I critique the left a lot. I do it because I'm part of the left (center-left, but still!) -- not because I think conservatism is better, but because I think liberalism is better than its worst actors! The nascent billionaire space race between Musk, Bezos, and Branson brought out the worst tendencies of the contemporary left: a sneering dismissal of the value of private enterprise and achievement.

I reject the modern left's demand that all good things ought to be done, instead, by the state. This is helpless thinking, and one which reveals their belief that people either lack agency or shouldn't have the agency to solve problems without government control. This thinking kills societies.

Critics of Bezos and Branson mostly correctly pointed out that what they accomplished wasn't technically new: we've had rocket-powered planes and suborbital VTVL rockets for several decades. But all of these were developed as part of government defense programs -- never because private industry thought they were economical. And they were only prototypes that never graduated to useful products. The key development is exactly that they did it with private enterprise and that they have a plan to make them self-sustaining.

Real technological innovation is happening in this market, if not yet at Blue Origin or Virgin. Elon Musk's SpaceX was the first private company to independently develop an orbital rocket. SpaceX pushed the boundaries of modern technology in developing the first reusable and autonomous VTVL orbital rocket. It had never been done before, and nothing close had ever been done by private enterprise or public programs. (Various governments were content to just throw money at the problem, reusability and costs be damned!)

SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic all show what is possible when stubborn people set out to solve a problem they deeply care about. That is agency at its best.

No Space for Agency

The modern left seems to think that the state has a monopoly on agency. We see this in the housing discourse: dominant voices on the left advocate for only building social housing (housing built and owned by the state) with no room for the private market. It doesn't matter that the state can't afford it, can't administer it, and can't effectively plan for it; all that matters is the ideological purity of the state solving a problem.

We're seeing the same attitude directed at the internet (nationalize Amazon, city-owned internet), election regulations (limiting individual contributions, democracy vouchers), healthcare, and space exploration.

Let me be clear: NASA is my favorite government agency and I have been a fanboy from a very young age. I attended Space Camp, built the Lego model of the Space Shuttle, witnessed one of the very last Space Shuttle launches, and even wrote a letter to President Clinton when I was 10 advising him to ignore the environmentalists protesting the launch a nuclear-powered space probe (and I got a response!). I love NASA and think we should increase their funding from 0.48% to 2% of the federal budget.

But none of my love and respect for publicly-funded space exploration precludes private actors from funding space technology. Indeed, the beauty of the American system is that the government can help bootstrap a new industry and then rely on private enterprise to deliver technological advances faster and cheaper than government programs. Our whole system depends on unleashing the potential of the average person to solve hard problems and being rewarded for their success.

And the left conveniently forgets that private enterprise often saves the government money.

In short: America is best when we encourage and celebrate individual agency.

Impacts On Governance

The biggest divide, in my eyes, between the average American and the modern left is their views on individual responsibility and agency. Your average Joe will tell you that a can-do attitude is fundamental to being American -- that JFK was right when he said "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." This American mythos of individual responsibility is reflected in the structure of our society and what we expect our government to do for us.

I believe in the Nordic model: a strong capitalist economy combined with a robust welfare state. I recognize, like President Obama pointed out, that no one is truly a self-made man. We rely on our institutions and public programs to build a prosperous society. No one should go hungry or without shelter just because they don't have enough money. And no one should be deterred from entrepreneurship because they worry about medical bills.

But leftists who dominate popular discourse take it a step too far: they want the state to take over industries and not allow the private market to function. We see this most clearly in San Francisco: socialists in our city government want to ban private housing development and only build government-owned housing. They refuse to allow the market to build enough homes for the middle class by imposing years-long processes that cost millions of dollars on anyone looking to build homes. They claim the only true way to achieve affordability is by state control.

This is an impoverished worldview. It is a rejection of what works in every other affordable city and an insistence that only The State can solve the problem, and individual agency is not just bad but actively harmful. This belief is stealing money from our pockets, preventing family formation, pushing thousands of people into homelessness, and overall just killing our cities.

Agency is not a four letter word

We know that centralized state control doesn't work. Communism has failed everywhere it's been tried. Centrally planned economies always fail. Centrally planned cities and societies are no exception. We can't keep treating entrepreneurship and individual action as bad things.

We must abandon this popular idea that our problems are too big for individuals to help solve. We must stop demanding that our government solve everything for us. It is beyond time for us to let Americans do what Americans do best: start companies, build things, and solve problems.

I, along with roughly 60% of San Franciscans, support the recall of Board of Education members Alison Collins and Gabriela López.

The recall won't fix all of our problems, but it is an important first step. Below, I'll explain how we got here, why I support the recall, and the reforms we can make to fix our schools.

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If you already support the recall, donate today, and if you're an SF resident print & sign the petition.

The School Board is a Progressive pipeline to office

Matt Haney, Jane Kim, Sandra Lee Fewer, Shamann Walton, Norman Yee, and Eric Mar -- what do they all have in common? They're all Progressive elected officials who used the Board of Education as a stepping stone to higher office.

This Progressive pipeline has been well-known among liberals in San Francisco for years, but we have consistently failed to stop it. The Progs have their people run for school board in order to increase their name recognition, making it easier to run for office. Ideologues more concerned with Progressive purity politics end up setting policy for our kids instead of competent professionals.

The endorsements for Alison Collins are a who’s-who of Progressive organizations that run the city. As you'd expect, the League of Pissed Off Voters endorsed Alison Collins and Gabriela López in 2018, Matt Haney in 2016, and Shamann Walton in 2014. Unfortunately, I can't find any archives of their endorsements from before then, but I wouldn't be surprised if they endorsed every single Progressive who sought to use the school board to launch their political career. They're part of the Progressive machine, after all.

Rather than elect education professionals who would apply best-practices and improve the performance of our public schools, the Progressive machine sought only to perpetuate their own power.

Why recall

I recommend you pause here and read Families for SF's "Our Take on SF School Board Recall" -- they do a fantastic job covering all the issues. But I'll also excerpt the top-line summaries below.

On Gabriela Lopez:

We support the recall of President López for multiple reasons. She has not been performing to the minimum standard as the leader of the school board. During this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, she has been unable to meet the moment and focus on the critical needs of the SFUSD student body.  Time and again, President López has ignored prescribed processes in managing meetings and taking Board actions, demonstrated extreme bias and abused her power and position to harass or diminish the voice of constituents.

On Alison Collins:

Commissioner (and former Vice President) Collins has failed to perform to the minimum standard of a vice president, disregarded proper processes, abused her office to harass and diminish constituents, demonstrated extreme bias in her actions on the Board, and has continually disrupted the proper functioning of the Board --  all while failing to focus on the critical needs of the SFUSD student body during the pandemic.

Performing to the minimum standard

Neither Alison Collins nor Gabriela López adequately performed their duties. López, as president of the school board, was responsible for setting meeting agenda and ensuring everything operated smoothly. She consistently pushed discussion of reopening to the end of every meeting despite it being the highest priority issue for parents and students.

What did López think was more important? Cancelling George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and renaming the schools. The school renaming effort produced a shockingly ignorant and factually incorrect spreadsheet (which was deleted, and which I have mirrored), detailing all the crimes our historical public figures are accused of. For a full picture of the nonsense, you should read the report by Families for SF, and the coverage in Mission Local.

López also gave an absolutely incredible interview with The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner on her work to rename our schools. Her ignorance, rejection of expertise, and doublespeak is on full display: 

Chotiner: You’re talking about the learning of history and its importance. Did the committee want historians to testify? And why or why not?

López: So, it’s hard for me to answer that question without just pointing to [committee statements that] “they did not want to include historians.” I think that that’s not the process that they created. They included a diverse set of community members, people with a set of experiences that contribute to these discussions, people from different backgrounds who are also educated in their own rights.

[...]

Chotiner: You were talking earlier about how, no matter whom we uplift, history needs to be taught. Since you’re highlighting the importance of history, I was curious if historians had testified. And it seems like they hadn’t.

López: Right. My work is in sharing with students this understanding of our history. I think that for me, it’s important to uplift.

[...]

Chotiner: The reason I bring this up is that some of the historical reasoning behind these decisions has been contested [...] factual things like Paul Revere’s name being removed for the Penobscot Expedition, which was not actually about the colonization of Native American lands. And so there were questions about whether historians should have been involved to check these things.

López: I see what you’re saying. So, for me, I guess it’s just the criteria was created to show if there were ties to these specific themes, right? White supremacy, racism, colonization, ties to slavery, the killing of indigenous people, or any symbols that embodied that. And the committee shared that these are the names that have these ties. 

[...]

Chotiner: I guess part of the problem is that the ties may not be what the committee said they were. That’s why I brought it up.

López: So then you go into discrediting the work that they’re doing.

Despite the obvious lies and inaccuracies that the renaming committee cooked up, the fact that López thought renaming schools was more important than reopening schools is grounds for immediate dismissal.

There was no plan to reopen

Collins was right alongside López during all of this, and she was the main reason the board didn't create a plan to reopen. ​​According to this tweet thread, Collins killed a potential contract for reopening schools because the contractor used to work for charter schools:

Beyond the rejection of a qualified consultant over his links to charter schools, the school board failed to find an alternative! Instead of finding another well-qualified consultant to help make a reopening plan, they instead chose to do nothing.

I'm sure you're thinking "well, that's because it wasn't safe to reopen schools." But in San Francisco private schools reopened with adequate safety measures while public schools stayed closed. No outbreaks of covid were caused by private schools because kids were masked and inter-group contact was minimized. The CDC has long recommended that schools reopen, even without vaccination, because education loss is a more important public health concern for children.

San Francisco is among the last cities in the US to reopen its public schools, despite having among the lowest rates of transmission and highest vaccination rates! Yet again, Progressive orthodoxy caused further inequality between those wealthy enough to afford private school and everyone else.

Picking up the slack from the clearly incompetent school board, the Mayor had the Department of Youth & Their Families and the SF Rec and Parks Department open "community learning hubs" for co-located remote learning. These hubs had zero Covid-19 outbreaks. Clearly we knew how to do this correctly; it was just incompetence (or maybe malice) from the school board that kept kids out of the classroom.

This affected kids of working class parents most of all. Parents had to make the impossible choice of working their essential jobs or staying home with their kids to make sure they got a good education. This put a financial and emotional strain on families already struggling to make it in San Francisco. When challenged by the Chronicle's Heather Knight about the impact this is having on kids, López simply denied it was a real problem:

“They are learning more about their families and their cultures, spending more time with each other,” López said. “They’re just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure, and the loss is a comparison to a time when we were in a different space.”

Simply put, we failed them.

Bullying and anti-Asian racism

I wish the recall were only about incompetence, but it's also about malice. Alison Collins has a long history of bullying her opponents and accusing them of racism in order to discredit them. So it's only fitting that her own racism came back to bite her.

In recently resurfaced tweets, Collins uses a racial slur to describe people of Asian descent that don't align with her political views:

This controversy was heavily covered by both local and national media and led to the school board stripping her of her Vice President title (notably, Gabriela ​​López was the only person besides Collins to vote against this). Collins found those consequences intolerable and sued the school district for $87 million in response -- all while schools remained closed and the district’s budget is stretched thin.

Collins has still not apologized.

Ending advanced instruction for gifted kids

As someone who participated in many gifted and advanced placement programs, I find this malpractice particularly galling. Gabriela López and Alison Collins led the charge to stop offering algebra in middle school and end merit-based admissions at Lowell.

Collins, continuing her pattern of abuse and lies, attacked student journalists at Lowell who wanted to keep the current admissions system:

Before the vote, Collins blasted high school journalists at The Lowell on Twitter for sharing a petition to keep the current admissions system, and for not covering a racist incident at the school. Neither accusation was true. Collins apologized, but never explained why she was publicly slamming teenagers in the first place.

I took algebra in middle school and think all kids ready for more advanced instruction should have access. Collins and López think it's more important that we delay instruction so pass rates can be artificially higher. I think this is not just flawed logic, but actively harmful to an entire generation of kids.

Next steps

If you haven't already, donate to the recall, if you're an SF resident print & sign the petition, and share this article with your friends.

I just ran a donation matching campaign with my friend Sachin, and we raised over $35,000 in just a week. Maybe we can hit $50,000?

Our work isn't over once the recall is done. We need to fix how the school board is chosen to stop the Progressive pipeline. There's a campaign to move to an appointed school board trying to get on the ballot by June 2022, which I will support. I'll share news of that as I learn it.

But while we have an elected school board, we need to elect people who actually care about education and not their own political careers. I recommend joining Grow SF, which I'm involved with, so you get our common sense voter guide every election.

Fixing our city happens slowly, step by step, together.

There's another movement growing around large-scale developments called charter cities. These cities will be situated inside existing countries, but with special rules for governing themselves. China has executed this strategy extremely well (just look at Shenzhen), but there's always the risk of an authoritarian takeover (just look at Hong Kong). The Charter Cities Institute is doing critical work on how to build these new governance models.

But what about simply redeveloping existing cities, fixing the mistakes of the post-war car-centric infrastructure and eliminating governmental barriers to low cost of living and greater economic activity? Not only is this possible, it's the cheapest way forward.

Enter: Colma, California.

Colma's housing demographics

According to the 2019 ACS 5-year estimates from the US Census Bureau, Colma, CA has roughly 1,300 residents across 934 total housing units (98% of which are occupied), with an average home value of around $1 million. Most of Colma is dedicated to sprawling cemeteries with only a small portion used for residential and commercial use. Colma, famously, has more dead people than living. It got this way primarily due to San Francisco relocating its corpses when it was expanding West.

Besides cemeteries, Colma sports a dozen big-box stores and another dozen car dealerships. It's not exactly flush with what anyone would call "neighborhood character" (then again, it has both a Panda Express and a Chipotle).

Colma is ideally located in a moderate coastal climate, near highway 101 and all of its residentially-zoned land is directly next to a BART station.

According to Colma's zoning map, all of the residential structures are single-family detached homes. I think this is pretty appalling land use for a tract of land on a regional zero-emissions transit system in one of the highest cost of living and highest productivity regions in the entire country.

So… let's fix it.

Voting in new leadership

Of the 1,300 residents, only 701 people are registered to vote as of February 2019. With only 300 children in the town, that's a pretty incredible 70% voter registration rate -- and at least some of the 300 unregistered adults are surely noncitizen immigrants who are not eligible to vote. For ease of our calculations, this works out to roughly 1 adult per household.

You could try to recruit some candidates to run for office to fundamentally remake the zoning rules of the city and face an uphill battle against incumbents that oppose change. Or you could just… buy them out.

To buy 50% of the 934 homes in the city (enough to guarantee you win an election (ok, technically you need 50% +1)), you only need $467 million. But you only need to buy homes of registered voters, so you need 50% of 700 households, which is just $350 million. But you don't need to do that if two voters move into every unit -- then you only need to buy 1/3 of the 700 homes, or just $233 million.

But that also assumes you'll have zero incumbents vote for the change. Many of them will realize that upzoning will allow them to get incredibly rich by selling their existing single-family home to a high-rise developer. So let's assume you have a baseline 20% support (140 people), that leaves just 560 households you need to buy out, and using the same 2:1 replacement strategy you only need to buy 140 homes for just $140 million. (560 - x = 140 + 2x)

But you don't even NEED that much! $140 million buys those homes outright, but this is America and have the incredible technology of a 30 year mortgage. You just need access to enough credit to get mortgages and raise enough cash for the down payments. Assuming you can get the mortgages for 20% down, that's just $28 million!

So for just $28 million and 280 adults who will move to Colma and vote, you can rewrite the zoning laws to allow unlimited height and density, and then either resell parcels to high rise developers at some unbelievable markup or redevelop them yourself. It sounds a lot like a money-printing machine, to me.

Green returns and tenant protections

But beyond the obviously good investment returns, you also get to build a walkable community next to a high quality transit system in a great climate. In the span of a few years, Colma could grow from a paltry 1300 people to nearly 10,000 people at Hong Kong density (or 668,000 at Kowloon Walled City density), while preserving all of the open space.

That doesn't even include redeveloping the car dealerships and big-box stores into high density housing and commercial space. Colma could conceivably grow to 50,000 people when factoring in that space, all within a short walk or bike ride from a BART station, and all without paving over a single blade of grass.

In any redevelopment proposal, tenant protections are a main concern. The ACS data on Colma indicate 288 units are renter-occupied, with the remaining 626 owner occupied. So you could execute the first half of this strategy by only buying out owner-occupied housing. Nobody gets unwillingly displaced and the homeowners get rich. But when the remaining parcels are actually redeveloped, the tenants who live there deserve a comparable unit at the same rent in the new building.

Luckily, that's super easy to do. A few units set-aside in a brand new high rise will not meaningfully eat into the margins. The tenants will get a brand new, well-insulated, and earthquake safe unit (with stellar views), and thousands of new renters get to join them. Hell, you could even afford to just grant them a condo deed and make them rich.

Solving our climate crisis and housing shortage requires some creative solutions, but simply redeveloping poorly used land is the least creative and most obviously economical approach.

Making this happen requires more than just money, but if you've got the funding, I've got the drive. DM me on twitter and let's become billionaires.

Social media sharing image of Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, CA © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons

It's the 4th of July, so America and our democracy is on my mind. 2021 has been a difficult year for our electoral system. From Donald Trump's sycophants refusing to honor the results of a free and fair election, to New York City's Department of Elections giving a masterclass in how to undermine faith in the voting process — America has had it rough.

Typically, this is when technologists start thinking of technical solutions to what are political or organizational problems. Surely, you say, if we assign everyone a private key and have them emit a hash of their ballot on the blockchain, we can not only prove that every vote was counted, but we can also vote online!

I hope most of you are already running for the hills.

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Voting on the blockchain

I'm not an anti-blockchain person. In fact, I'm a huge fan and I've been following Bitcoin since around 2014. I have some Bitcoin and some Ethereum. But it is an absolutely terrible technology for running an election.

Blockchains are designed to solve the problem of "how do I coordinate across a communication network I can't trust". By distributing competing nodes around the world, run by many disparate organizations and individuals, and using a proof-of-work solution to the Byzantine Generals problem, it allows cryptographic tokens to be exchanged with extremely high confidence that no one can tamper with the network or steal your tokens. This is an admittedly weak explanation, so if you want a better understanding, please read the original Bitcoin whitepaper (it’s short and easy to understand, I promise).

You'll notice there are a lot of things in there that don't apply to elections: zero trust, many disparate organizations, a widespread communication network. Despite being at what feels like a low point in trust in the integrity of elections, America is still a high-trust society. Most people have a general understanding and belief that corruption exists, is discoverable, and will be punished. We've built systems and institutions designed to deal with the icky human problems of trust. We're even ranked 25th least corrupt nation in the world!

But beyond the general feeling of trust in our society, a democratic government derives its power from the popular belief in its legitimacy. When people lose trust in elections, the government will either reform or be toppled (eventually, hopefully, after turning into an authoritarian state).

Blockchain voting addresses how to vote in a trust-less society, but a trust-less society cannot have a functioning democracy.

And this is all to say nothing of the sheer complexity and technical woowoo involved in communicating how blockchains work to the general public. You really, really, really don't want the average voter to believe their voting systems use the same technology that enables ransomware attacks and may be controlled by China. But people can easily understand and intuitively trust "Fill in the circle, the scantron counts it. If the machine fails we'll have a human look at it. And we randomly double check ballots to check for issues."

To get a really good feel for the wide variety of wrong opinions about blockchain voting, just peruse this Hacker News thread.

However, I will admit one great use for a key component of blockchains: Merkle trees. There is a decent argument to have the ballot scanners update a publicly accessible Merkle tree as votes are counted, so individuals can verify that their ballot was processed in real time. But that's a topic for another essay.

Simplicity is more important that provably correct

I want to drive home this point: when dealing with complex human systems that have thousands of moving parts across millions of people that they all need to both understand and trust, the most important thing is simplicity. Sure, if you're building an alternative currency you need provably correct cryptography and fault tolerance. But voting is literally as simple as writing down your choice and having it counted.

I think where most software engineers fail at politics, it's in understanding that key point. We tend to over engineer our systems and never need to explain the inner workings to anyone who is non-technical. This isn't restricted to just software engineers, of course. Any sufficiently advanced technology is difficult to explain in terms a non-expert can understand. But we do, at least, understand that we need to tailor the front-end user experience to the target demographic.

I understand how cars work, but I couldn't tell you what 98% of the things under the hood do. But I know gasoline explodes, moves a piston, turns a crank, and turns the wheels. When I press the gas pedal I go forward and when I press the brake I stop. I have a functional understanding of the car and enough trust in the systems that built it to get behind the wheel.

Voting, and indeed democracy itself, are technologies like any other. They're old technologies, they're fairly simple, and they are implemented via social networks. (I like to quip that politics is just a social network for alcoholics, and I'm only kind of joking...) And in any social network, trust is essential. But how do you build enough trust in a common voting system for people who vehemently disagree? By being as simple and as easy to explain as possible.

Blockchain voting fails at the most basic test of social technology: can you explain how it works to someone skeptical of the people in power in a way that makes them trust the system?

Please, abandon dreams of blockchain voting and focus on how you can make paper ballots provably counted. Start with a technology people trust, and then prove it works.

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According to the Department of Public Works, "complaints about human waste in public spaces around the Pit Stop locations have gone down" and "since the Pit Stop began [...] we have seen a steady increase in usage and a reduction in steam cleaning requests.” Each toilet gets used once every two minutes, on average.

But despite the success of the program, the 2021-2022 budget cuts the number of bathrooms down to 25 and eliminates all 24/7 bathrooms. Supervisor Matt Haney blames the Mayor, the Mayor blames limited funding, but in my opinion everyone shares some blame.

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Bathroom Budget

The Pit Stop program was launched as a trial program in 2014, and made permanent in 2015 with an initial budget around $1 million. Under Mayor Breed's leadership, the program was expanded to 24 bathrooms and the budget increased to about $8.9 million, providing one bathroom facility for every 242 homeless people (roughly).

Enter the Covid-19 pandemic. Suddenly San Francisco had both the political will to increase services for the homeless and the federal funding to do it. The Pit Stop program grew to 61 locations, funded via $16 million in Covid emergency money. As the pandemic has wound to a close, and our homeless population has exited the high-risk category as they got vaccinated, the federal aid dried up. At the time of writing in June 2021, San Francisco is only operating 36 Pit Stops, with 14 of them open 24/7.

Mayor Breed has just proposed a budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year that does not include any funding for 24/7 bathrooms and keeps the bathroom budget the same as it was in 2019 — $4.6 million. Supervisor Matt Haney has taken to twitter to complain about it, as he is apt to do.

Fund-a-Potty

On the one hand, it's reasonable that a temporary program returns to pre-emergency levels of service when the emergency ends and federal dollars stop coming. Indeed, the Department of Public Works highlights this as a main concern:

The department’s COVID budget includes funding to temporarily expand the Pit Stop program by extending hours at existing sites and adding new locations. Revised guidance from FEMA requires service populations to meet increased COVID risk criteria, therefore, the majority of Pit Stop expansion costs are not expected to be eligible for federal reimbursement. 

- FY 20-21 Nine Month Report

But on the other hand… our city has a budget of over $13 billion and the $4.6 million it costs to run public toilets amounts to just 0.035% of our budget. In my eyes, this is shitty political gamesmanship playing with the dignity of everyone who needs to use these public restrooms.

The great irony is that Matt Haney's own Proposition B from the 2020 election, which needlessly breaks up the Department of Public Works, has an implementation cost of about $7 million — enough to double the number of public toilets and keep many open 24 hours a day. As outlined in the Tech Worker Voter Guide in 2020, Prop B just adds extra bureaucracy with no promise of better performance. His performative accountability for DPW is now having real consequences.

The 2021-2022 budget is being actively negotiated right now. On Friday, June 25 the Board of Supervisors' Budget and Appropriations committee discussed the budget and took over 9 hours of public comment. I have no doubt that the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors will come to an agreement to keep some bathrooms open 24/7, and hopefully even increase the number of bathrooms. But for something as basic as public restrooms, we shouldn't even be having this fight.

Look, I'm not demanding perfection, I'm not even demanding the government do a good job. I just think that one of the richest cities in the richest country in the history of the world should not be struggling to fund public restrooms. San Francisco Progressives have focused on solving fake problems like banning chain stores while ignoring basic necessities and the incredible suffering all around us.

Drinks and Democracy

This week two bombshells dropped in San Francisco: Supervisor Aaron Peskin finally experienced some consequences for over twenty years of bullying fueled by his alcoholism, and Jason Kruta, a San Francisco Democratic Socialists of America (SF DSA) member, was identified as the man caught on video allegedly stealing school board recall petitions (a misdemeanor).

Peskin's problematic potables

I am no stranger to Supervisor Peskin's bullying and drunken abuse. I can't go into much detail, but Peskin once used the power of his office to threaten to deny a critical permit for a friend's business if I didn't stop saying mean things about him on Twitter. He did this in the open with no fear of being held accountable. I didn't want to ruin my friend's business prospects, so Peskin succeeded at shutting me up for several months.

Friends and acquaintances of mine have received late-night phone calls from an excessively drunk Peskin, where he alternated between whining about people being unfair to him and threatening to deny permits or vote against bills unless he gets some special favors.

His abuse and corruption have been an open secret since he entered politics. You should absolutely go read Healther Knight's reporting on this: "S.F. Supervisor Aaron Peskin says he's entering alcohol treatment after complaints", and "Why did so many stay quiet about Supervisor Aaron Peskin's behavior?"

I wish Supervisor Peskin the best of luck in treating his alcoholism, and I sincerely hope he's not just seeking treatment as a way of deflecting criticism away from his bad behavior. And we must make sure that his allies, like Matt Haney, actually hold him accountable.

Stealing an election is OK when it's your side that does it

Jason Kruta made a terrible decision to allegedly steal several pages of signed petitions for the San Francisco School Board recall effort. Kruta is a member of the San Francisco Democratic Socialists of America (SF DSA), the League of Pissed Off Voters, and seems to be an active member of the far-left Richmond District Democratic Club.

It's completely unsurprising to me that someone so closely associated with the San Francisco DSA would attempt to steal an election. Their members have sent me death threats, called me a "right-winger" for expressing the controversial opinion that the US government should not, in fact, be overthrown or destroyed, and systematically sought to unseat every moderate Democrat in San Francisco.

It's a Progressive pattern of abuse

The culture of bullying pervades the Progressive faction of SF politics, and Aaron Peskin plays a key role in it. I remember one event I attended, in particular, when the United Democratic Club (on which I was a board member) was seeking to have our charter renewed by the Democratic Party. At one point in the meeting Kat Anderson, who was seated next to Aaron Peskin, jumped up and exclaimed that he was mean and a bully:

In one heated moment, Peskin allegedly called DCCC member Kat Anderson “stupid”[...]

She stood up and shouted, “You’re a mean man!”

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/how-a-growing-democratic-club-whupped-supervisor-aaron-peskin/

Progressive Democrat John Avalos, who recently ran to reclaim his former position as District 11 Supervisor, has a history of misogyny and labeled former Supervisor Jane Kim a "femme fatale" after voting for his opponent. Kim was already quite familiar with Avalos's behavior:

Just 48 hours prior to this vote, this particular former elected and I had one of those quiet conversations about his past inexcusable behavior and angry tirades.

https://janekimwrites.medium.com/i-will-not-stay-up-late-at-night-waiting-for-an-apology-from-a-man-who-has-no-remorse-over-9277ceea65b8

Let's not forget that Avalos cheated on his wife with his employee but hoped "that everyone will just give him a pass on this one." Turns out, almost all the Progressives did.

Another progressive supervisor, Dean Preston, frequently bullies his constituents on twitter, often kicking off a pile-on from his supporters. Being on the receiving end of a twitter mob incited by an elected official is an experience that pushes any reasonable person away, and makes them less likely to express themselves. This is a persistent illiberal force in our society that must be resisted.

During Preston’s reelection, his campaign manager and legislative aide, Jen Snyder, refused to accept the democratic outcome against the party endorsing him for Supervisor and instead yelled obscenities and flipped off the Democratic committee.

A dangerous web

On the surface, there may seem to be little connection between all of this, but there is a thread weaving it all together: The League of Pissed Off Voters. The League endorsed all of the elected officials I mentioned above, and Kruta is a member. They're the dark-money-powered influence network that enables bullies to thrive in San Francisco, but present themselves with a punk Gen-X aesthetic that claims to want change.

I have raised the warning flag about the pissed off voters many times, and I've suffered for it. The last time I published something about the league, they threatened legal action and got my Medium account suspended, and tried to get my Google account suspended as well. Ultimately, I relented and took it all down because the pressure was too much.

The League of Pissed Off Voters and their progressive allies will do everything they can to silence people exposing their patterns of bad behavior and bullying. We've seen it with Peskin's twenty years of abuse, Avalos's decade of inappropriate behavior, and Preston’s cyberbullying. And it's high time they were held accountable.

Note: I removed part of this essay that mentioned a couple private citizens, rather than elected officials of their staff.

The Bay Area has at least 50 police departments, 161 school districts (or more, depending on what you count), and 27 public transit systems. The balkanized nature of our region leads to dramatic income and education inequality, dysfunctional transit systems that don't interoperate (though there's movement on this front via Seamless Bay Area), and segregated housing markets controlled by governments that think only their neighbors should build housing instead of themselves.

In total, some 7.5 million people are spread throughout a region with the highest income inequality in the nation (and a higher GINI coefficient than most OECD countries), the 7th-worst automobile traffic, and the nation's most acute housing shortage -- at least 700,000 homes.

These problems are solvable, but they require abandoning "local control" and uniting into a regional government.

Bay City

The two biggest benefits of Bay City will be around housing and transportation.

In his 2020 paper, "Warding Off Development: Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs", Evan Mast investigated the effect of cities changing from citywide elections to district-based elections. He found that moving to district elections "decreases housing units permitted by 24%, with 47% and 12% effects on multi- and single-family units."

To reiterate: production of multifamily buildings plummeted by nearly half just because the city moved to district elections.

Notably, San Francisco uses district elections.

But it's not just district elections that have caused our housing shortage, it's also the desire of local governments to only build commercial space so they gain tax revenue without having to pay for constituent services.

“We’ll provide the commercial, San Francisco will provide the housing.”

- Clifford Lentz, Mayor of Brisbane via SF Chronicle

The smaller the voting population, the more anti-growth policies we get. Moving from district-based elections to citywide elections will make representatives less beholden to neighborhood-level interest groups and more concerned with the health of the city at large. The same ought to hold true if we move from 101 individual cities to one large city: our leaders will care about the health, affordability, and growth of the region, rather than just their small fiefdom. A regional Bay City would mean people couldn't get elected on the promise of pushing development into neighboring towns.

Bay City could deliver the promise of Seamless Bay Area: a unified transit system that could move you from San Jose to Napa.

While Seamless Bay Area must struggle against intransigent local governments uninterested in solving regional transportation problems, a singular regional government would account for the interests of all 7.5 million people that commute around the Bay Area daily. We could finally extend BART to Marin and through San Mateo county, bypassing the local-control NIMBYism that killed those routes in the 1960s. Imagine what would be possible if commuters from Richmond could vote on infrastructure in Santa Clara!

Getting there

The whole problem is of utmost importance to the future of American cities. Aside from the obvious economies of a single local government, as opposed to two or more, it seems essential that the future development of large centers of population should not be hampered by conflicting policies of a double or multiple system of local governments. It is obvious, moreover, that perils which continually threaten the population of urban communities, such as fire, crime, and contagious diseases, constitute unified problems which are co-extensive with congested areas. It would seem essential that the control of these perils should be a unified one, and that too much reliance should not be placed upon a spirit of coöperation between different units.

The County by Henry Stimson Gilbertson, via @Rasheed_Shabazz

My long-term political goals include merging the entire Bay Area into a single Bay City, with each of the nine counties transformed into boroughs, much like New York City. This is no small feat.

Standing in the way of achieving Bay City include section 56741 of Title 5 of California's government code, the "home rule," and the fact that San Francisco is a Charter City... to say nothing of the incredible resources required to run a campaign to actually vote on it. Check out this handy 2012 report from the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research to learn more about the steps involved in annexing.

But all laws can be changed given sufficient pressure, and California's impending pension crisis may force the state or its municipalities into bankruptcy and receivership over the next several decades (which will either force or incentivize rule changes), so it's worth exploring the benefits of uniting into a regional government.

The City and County of Alameda

At the turn of the 19th century, there actually was a movement to consolidate the Bay Area governments. Henry Stimson Gilbertson outlines the proposed City and County of Alameda in his book, The County. The plan would have followed the New York City model, where the various cities of Alameda County would be transformed into boroughs of the new City and County. Legislative responsibilities would be shifted to the new regional government, while responsibilities of local concern, like public works, would be left in the hands of the boroughs.

Each borough would have its own Borough Board, with members directly elected by their citizens, whose responsibilities would be constrained to purely local matters. All citizens in the new City and County of Alameda would directly elect the Mayor and the City Council in at-large (aka citywide) elections.

Greater San Francisco

After the 1906 earthquake and fire, the Greater San Francisco Association put a plan into motion to annex "Colma, South San Francisco, Sausalito, Mill Valley, San Rafael, and East Bay cities spanning from Richmond to San Leandro." This effort was largely spurred by the desire to coordinate transportation projects and infrastructure, as well as help pay the cost of the Hetch Hetchy pipeline.

Unfortunately for us, the vote failed in November 1912 due to strong resistance to annexation by San Francisco's neighbors.

MTC-ABAG

Despite the failures of these historical movements, the San Francisco Bay Area does have a regional proto-government in the Metropolitan Transportation Commission & the Association of Bay Area Governments (MTC-ABAG). Southern California has something similar in the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG).

MTC-ABAG is a voluntary-membership organization that represents all nine counties and 101 municipalities of the Bay Area. MTC plans regional transportation and ABAG is involved in planning housing growth, land use, and environmental quality. The members of each organization are appointed by the elected leaders of the cities and counties in its member governments.

In my opinion, MTC-ABAG is not a huge success story. Our transportation system is still fragmented and under-funded and ABAG consistently underestimates how much housing growth is necessary. Though it has no executive power, its plans carry weight by directing where and how money is spent, and in fulfilling obligations for obtaining grants from the federal government.

Since MTC-ABAG lacks electoral accountability, there are no penalties for failure. In order to have effective regional planning, we need a regional government that's directly elected rather than composed of political appointees that aren't held accountable for their failures. We need a regional government with real executive power, not just pulling on purse strings. We need a regional government that is responsive to the needs of the region as a whole… one that says growth is good, and that Bay City can be affordable, dynamic, and accessible.

We can build Bay City, but it will take time and effort.

The short answer is yes, but only if we grow correctly.

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How is water used in California?

Before we can answer if California can grow, we must first understand how we currently use our water.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, "statewide, average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban." Environmental water use "refers to water in rivers to protect “Wild and Scenic”, instream flows to maintain habitat, water to manage wetlands, and water to maintain urban and agricultural water quality."1

For the purposes of governmental policy influencing growth, we can more-or-less consider environmental uses untouchable. The usage varies by year, fluctuating with rainfall, and that water goes largely unconsumed by any human activity (with the exception of some water that seeps into aquifers or flows to streams used for irrigation). The state has pretty good reasons for ensuring this water remains untouched -- it's vital to many habitats and the continued health of our wildlife. That leaves us with 80% of water used by humans sent to agriculture, and 20% sent to cities and towns.

So this kind of gives away the game immediately: humans are only using 50% of all easily available water, and most of it goes to growing water-intensive crops in an arid valley. That's silly, but government policy up until the 1980s encouraged situating farms in the central valley due to underpriced water. Starting in the early 1980s, California grew a robust water market where the price of water could actually respond to supply and demand. The market has been a remarkable success, and despite growing population and higher intensity farming, total water usage by the agricultural sector actually declined by 0.33% between 2000 and 2015 [1]. This reduction in usage was driven by conservation and technological innovation spurred by the rising price of water (neoliberalism wins again, you might say).

Here's how California's water market has responded to drought conditions between 2009 and 2018 (all prices are per acre-foot, in real 2009 dollars using the CPI—All Urban Consumers Average from the BLS) [1]

The reduction in water usage was not limited to the agricultural sector. Indeed, despite California's population growing from 34 million in 2001 to 39 million in 2015, urban sector water usage declined by 1%, "primarily due to efficiency and conservation measures." [1] And municipalities comprise roughly 55% of the demand-side market share in the water market.

Can California grow without using more water?

Based on the performance of the water market, conservation efforts, and technological innovation the answer is a clear yes. But we will have to change how we grow our urban centers and where growth is located to make that growth sustainable.

Urban water usage is primarily affected by two things: climate and density. San Francisco, with the coolest climate and highest density in the state, uses the least water -- a paltry 44 gallons of water per person per day. Sacramento, with its hot and dry climate and sprawling land use patterns uses over 100 gallons per person per day. For every one person that moves to Sacramento, two could have moved to San Francisco and still have used less water! Even Los Angeles is better than Sacramento, clocking in at 72 gallons per person per day.

Growth of low-density homes in rural and suburban areas is the worst way California can grow, but is tragically one of easiest ways to build -- both in cost & complexity of construction and ease of permitting. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) ironically makes sprawling, car-dependent development easy, and dense infill development incredibly difficult and expensive. California must reform CEQA to match the reality we now live in: suburban sprawl both consumes far too much water and causes literal tons of extra CO2 emissions from cars.

Facilitating this growth will mean surmounting NIMBY opposition based on water shortage fear mongering. The Burlingame Voice, a blog purporting to be a newspaper, showcases the typical talking points, both in their blog posts:

Someone other than me asked [Senator Scott] Weiner where all the water will come from?  He responded that “we have a structural deficiency” on water infrastructure and then made the ridiculous claim that “building housing doesn’t drive population growth” or water consumption.  He really said that.  After the obligatory comments on low-flow toilets and water reuse (“we are way behind Australia and Israel”), one was left to wonder how he would keep the middle-class in California without consuming more water.  It must be nice to live in the fairyland of the state senate and not have to worry about fixing “structural deficiencies” before plunging ahead with massive growth laws.

https://www.burlingamevoice.com/2019/06/scott-weiner-comes-to-burlingame.html#comments

And in their comment sections:

I was invited to attended a zoom water meeting today by our State Senator Josh Becker. I responded and asked this question, "Why are there still state mandated housing requirements, if there is not enough water for current residents?"

- User "Paloma Ave" in the Burlingame Voice comments section

This kind of thinking is widespread among the old-guard anti-growth environmentalists that control California Democratic politics. It's a rejection of basic facts in favor of aesthetic pastoralism that only allows the most wasteful urban development patterns.

Landscaping "makes up roughly half of all urban water use", which is one reason that dense infill development uses water so much more parsimoniously. A house on a quarter acre with a lawn in Sacramento uses more water to keep some plants alive than a single human being uses for all of their needs in San Francisco.

In order to grow California, we have to move beyond suburbs and faux-environmentalism that calls sprawling, remote, luxurious mansions "sustainable" just because they look rustic. The most sustainable development is a brand new apartment in a skyscraper outfitted with low-flow water fixtures and no yard that's near high quality public transit and within walking or biking distance to work, school, and recreation.

California has plenty of water to grow, but we lack the political will to make it possible.