Noblesse Oblige in San Francisco:
San Francisco appears to be less disgraceful under new mayor Daniel Lurie.
I haven’t been to San Francisco since the early 1990s, but by most accounts, the new mayor, Daniel Lurie, has been doing a bang-up job in his first 100 days at getting the depravity and despair off the sidewalks and back behind closed doors, where it belongs.
Former mayor Willie Brown, Kamala Harris’s ex-boyfriend, is less enthusiastic than most observers. And, indeed, Willie is right that former mayor London Breed, whom Lurie defeated in November, wasn’t as crazy as most San Francisco politicians have been since the good old days of King Willie’s reign.
But still …
Lurie is the wealthy stepson of Peter Haas, the late CEO of jeans maker Levi Strauss, and an heir to the blue jeans fortune.
Lurie seems to radiate a sense of noblesse oblige, which includes not just being nice, but also being stern to the miscreants befouling his hereditary domain.
He’s now trying to motivate his fellow Old Money San Francisco zillionaires to donate to fund his various civic improvement campaigns on the grounds that their funds won’t be wasted under his proven tutelage.
None of this suggests Lurie should run for governor of California or president of the United States. Making San Francisco, the city with the most billionaires per capita in the world (apparently even more than Monte Carlo), a nice place to live and visit isn’t really that hard.
But nobody had done it in recent years.
So, good for Lurie.
It's not like Lurie is going to have a pogrom on Castro Street. So left-wing San Francisco still exists. Whoever still lives of the Jefferson Airplane would still recognize the city today. But Lurie is trying to run San Francisco with normal common sense. And he's trying to encourage the wealthy elite to pitch in. New York City's WASP elite had a great sense of noblesse oblige well into mid-century long after they were a tiny minority.
San Francisco is fortunate that unlike modern New York or Detroit or Chicago, little of the Third World can afford to live there. The San Francisco elite and voters might be leftist but they're white and the biggest minority, the Chinese, are model, law-abiding citizens with strong conformist traits. San Francisco, like Boston and Seattle, can survive leftist nitwittery better than your more Third World cities.
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It's the refusal of society to say no. No, you can't camp in this city. No, you can't shit in the streets. No, you can't panhandle aggressively. No, you can't shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It's your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community.
This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
What specific steps should be taken by cities to deal with the problem? Cities should use all existing shelters and further provide simple shelter space with surplus military tents with mess and recreational tents, a medical tent and restroom and shower facilities (the way I lived in the army) on leased or purchased unused commercial or industrial sites on the outskirts of the city. As many who want to and are able to work should be hired to help feed others and to maintain the facilities. Individuals could use surplus military squad tents or their own for sleeping. When those facilities are available the city should send in crews to clean up existing encampments, without arresting anyone who does not physically resist.
Custodial care should be mandatory for those who are so mentally or drug addicted that they cannot care for themselves. We did a huge disservice to the mentally ill when we closed rather than reform our state mental hospitals. We need them back. This approach actually would cost far less and be far more effective than the current housing first attempts to fix the problem. Most of the homeless lack the capacity to live unassisted in modern society but that is not an excuse to destroy our beautiful cities and drive out our productive citizens.