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.
"San Francisco is fortunate that unlike modern New York or Detroit or Chicago, little of the Third World can afford to live there."
True, but beside the point. After all, it wasn't the third world who turned SF into a shithole, literally, a public toilet, not to mention a crime-infested, open-air insane asylum.
"San Francisco, like Boston and Seattle, can survive leftist nitwittery better than your more Third World cities."
The jury is still out on that. Disclaimer: I'm not Right or Left. They're two parts of what I like to refer to as The Cult of Polarization, in which the Left will ALWAYS win. And since the Left is all about destruction, those three cities will go down like everything else they control.
In fact, they already are. And for a reason. The entire country is unsavable.
Unsavable? Maybe, maybe not. USA may not be as free a country now as it was 200 years ago, but it still beats every other system. Granted, the mental and spiritual disease of godless Leftism is a relentless poison. The antidote of Liberty is strong. People are getting wise to the effects of the Marxist-Leninist target statement. The depravity and despair of many cities and individuals originates from these words:
“We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink! Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Communists deserve every horrible smidgen of what they've got coming...
In one of her few wise thoughts, Grace Slick thought that rocking after 40 was ridiculous so she quit and is some sort of artist, certainly no Rembrandt. I looked it up and she's worth $20 million so she lives comfortably.
What I find interesting is that Cassady and Kaukonen were raised in Washington DC about the same time as my father. Washington in the Fifties still had a small city feel with a substantial white working class and middle class. Both streamed out of Washington after Brown v- Topeka and the desegregation of DC schools.
Apparently Chick fil-a was stupid enough to use the song for a jingle. Grace Slick was happy enough to sue Chick fil-a, the left's most hated fast-food joint.
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.
Mostly agree. There are at least two kinds of homeless people the ran outta money kind and the drugs and/or mental illness got real bad kind. The former has been a solved problem in California for a long time. I have a friend who through irresponsible behavior and a smidge of IV drug abuse, worked her way into homelessness. The social services made her wear a drug detecting patch as a condition for visits with her daughter and she did it and with the year went from shelter to housing.
For whatever reason we seem to have compensated by incentivizing more seriously organically mentally ill drug enthusiasts to come to the state and live on the sidewalks and parks if they like.
Here in LA the government is getting a little better at it. I saw an official notice to vacate a campsite next to the now charred remains of the improvised shelter under the highway. Still, our mayor was the one who decided not to take advantage of the recent bizarrely sane supreme court ruling (which said, whadya know, it isn't cruel and unusual punishment not to let someone camp on the sidewalk).
Most of these people wouldn't have ever been in mental institutions though, the problem is all drug related. The problem with your solution once you make it so that nobody can have drugs well we are back at step one.
AG: I wasn’t clear. I believe in legalization of all drugs just not in open drug use in public spaces. Mental problems are certainly a part of the problem. In the encampments that I envision there would be no prohibition on drug use.
I lived for a year in San Francisco and at one point really feared that I would hurt myself. It's a depressing black hole of a city in a way that I can't describe. Maybe besides the filth it's the almost complete lack of children and families. It gives it the air of a work camp
SF is one of those places that basically has no excuse to not be one of the best cities to live in on the planet, so it really takes an incredible level of political derangement on the part of leaders and voters to screw that up - and they did it!
But having huge numbers of incredibly wealthy people who might be persuaded to invest in reversing some of this is a luxury a lot of other cities that went off the deep end don’t have, or favorable demographics. Oakland, Portland, Minneapolis- St. Paul all are probably screwed for a generation at this point but theoretically could come back. Detroit, St. Louis, and Baltimore are never coming back for other reasons and Chicago only can if it throws off black political dominance. The story of the coming decades for many cities will be of suburbs creating live/work/play environments so residents can basically avoid ever going to the urban core.
Baltimore has a great hospital, a busy port, the two stadiums, an aquarium, a couple somewhat livable neighborhoods and a small business district that is surrounded by urban squalor. The Baltimore of cleanly paved doorways on row houses and a bar on every corner is gone. The city is run by idiots. The Baltimore bureaucracy is a massive jobs program for blacks.
Every time I have been to Baltimore it’s obvious is was once a great city, it’s just in a demographic death spiral. The other noticeable thing is that there are always tons of people in the streets obviously doing absolutely nothing.
The South Side of Chicago is also sad - the signs of the care that was put into some of the boulevards and housing long ago are still visible but it’s a dump now. Same with Detroit, it’s jaw dropping.
I attended college at Salisbury State College on Maryland's Eastern Shore and became friends with three brothers from Essex, a working-class suburb of Baltimore. We would occasionally hit a bar in the city or in Essex. Roma's of Essex was a favorite with a separate dining room attached to a bar. Baltimore has changed so much in fifty years. Edgar Allen Poe, Babe Ruth and HL Mencken wouldn't recognize it. Nor would Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., mayor of Baltimore from 1947-1959 and father to the Queen of San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi.
I grew up in the Bay Area, and was based in SF starting in 1991, but moved on in 2020- for most of the usual reasons (cost, deteriorating street life, lax law enforcement, etc). But the biggest reason? Karl the Fog finally became unbearable. Sub 50's temperatures, and grey skies for most of July & August (and the rest of the year in my particular location in the micro-climate). I've moved on to warmer and sunnier (not to mention friendlier & cheaper) climes in the California Sierra foothills. Karl is something The City will never fix, so I'm out for good.
Lurie looks like he's part of what for lack of a better term one might call the "New New Class" (or maybe "Vibe Shift Left"?)
Basically, there are a lot of high human capital folks on the left, and they want to raise their families in pleasant, functional, safe, beautiful cities with lots of good and affordable housing and quality public infrastructure and efficient services quickly responsive to changing needs. They are fed up that they can't have these perfectly reasonable nice things like plenty of big cities in other developed countries, and when they look for the reasons for "this is why we can't have nice things", they know that they can't actually get very far blaming the right for everything, especially since most of these cities are as Deep Blue dominated as possible. So they end up being heretics on one major tenet of the latest progressive political consensus, and trying to nudg3 that consensus to drop that tenet while insisting they ought to remain regarded as a committed progressive in good standing.
As an example, Ezra Klein has that new book "Abundance", which has got to have the record for the number of early reviews that are a total waste of author words and reader time. The thing reviewers are missing or unwilling to say they notice is that it is a good example of "the modem bourgeois progressive urbanist facing the dilemma of resolving their own heightened contradiction" - a combination of the basis for Charle's Murray's plea that these progressives preach what they practice (bourgeois virtues and lifestyles for family, work ethic, prudence, etc.) and Conquest's Law that people are conservative about the thing they know best (or a leftism-aggravated problem they just studied enough to write a book about it).
But you can imagine this book as being one in a multi-volume series with all the other heresies one at a time. Lurie could right "Safety, Security, and Order". Maybe DeBoer could write "Tracking - to each according to their talents (which are really different and impossible to change much)".
You add all these hypothetical books up and you'll get the position of "urbanist right" of James Q Wilson's era. Vindicated at last.
You're just distracted and excited about the new colossal female nude statue.
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.
"San Francisco is fortunate that unlike modern New York or Detroit or Chicago, little of the Third World can afford to live there."
True, but beside the point. After all, it wasn't the third world who turned SF into a shithole, literally, a public toilet, not to mention a crime-infested, open-air insane asylum.
"San Francisco, like Boston and Seattle, can survive leftist nitwittery better than your more Third World cities."
The jury is still out on that. Disclaimer: I'm not Right or Left. They're two parts of what I like to refer to as The Cult of Polarization, in which the Left will ALWAYS win. And since the Left is all about destruction, those three cities will go down like everything else they control.
In fact, they already are. And for a reason. The entire country is unsavable.
Unsavable? Maybe, maybe not. USA may not be as free a country now as it was 200 years ago, but it still beats every other system. Granted, the mental and spiritual disease of godless Leftism is a relentless poison. The antidote of Liberty is strong. People are getting wise to the effects of the Marxist-Leninist target statement. The depravity and despair of many cities and individuals originates from these words:
“We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink! Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Communists deserve every horrible smidgen of what they've got coming...
By the way, of the early Jefferson Airplane, only Grace Slick, Jack Cassady and Jorma Kekounen(sp) still live.
Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, who still perform as Hot Tuna. Grace Slick has been long retired.
In one of her few wise thoughts, Grace Slick thought that rocking after 40 was ridiculous so she quit and is some sort of artist, certainly no Rembrandt. I looked it up and she's worth $20 million so she lives comfortably.
What I find interesting is that Cassady and Kaukonen were raised in Washington DC about the same time as my father. Washington in the Fifties still had a small city feel with a substantial white working class and middle class. Both streamed out of Washington after Brown v- Topeka and the desegregation of DC schools.
She kept it up into her 40's and had one of her biggest hits in 1985 with Jefferson Starship, the much-reviled We Built This City at age 46.
Apparently Chick fil-a was stupid enough to use the song for a jingle. Grace Slick was happy enough to sue Chick fil-a, the left's most hated fast-food joint.
oh the Starship were godawful
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.
White liberal guilt is the most destructive drug in society!
Amen, Brother.
Mostly agree. There are at least two kinds of homeless people the ran outta money kind and the drugs and/or mental illness got real bad kind. The former has been a solved problem in California for a long time. I have a friend who through irresponsible behavior and a smidge of IV drug abuse, worked her way into homelessness. The social services made her wear a drug detecting patch as a condition for visits with her daughter and she did it and with the year went from shelter to housing.
For whatever reason we seem to have compensated by incentivizing more seriously organically mentally ill drug enthusiasts to come to the state and live on the sidewalks and parks if they like.
Here in LA the government is getting a little better at it. I saw an official notice to vacate a campsite next to the now charred remains of the improvised shelter under the highway. Still, our mayor was the one who decided not to take advantage of the recent bizarrely sane supreme court ruling (which said, whadya know, it isn't cruel and unusual punishment not to let someone camp on the sidewalk).
I guess she just likes fire.
Most of these people wouldn't have ever been in mental institutions though, the problem is all drug related. The problem with your solution once you make it so that nobody can have drugs well we are back at step one.
AG: I wasn’t clear. I believe in legalization of all drugs just not in open drug use in public spaces. Mental problems are certainly a part of the problem. In the encampments that I envision there would be no prohibition on drug use.
Social Darwinist!
I kinda agree, but am in no position to throw stones at them.
I lived for a year in San Francisco and at one point really feared that I would hurt myself. It's a depressing black hole of a city in a way that I can't describe. Maybe besides the filth it's the almost complete lack of children and families. It gives it the air of a work camp
This is good news. As San Francisco goes, Seattle and Portland follow.
Seems as though maybe Lurie has listened to Michael Shellenberger.
SF is one of those places that basically has no excuse to not be one of the best cities to live in on the planet, so it really takes an incredible level of political derangement on the part of leaders and voters to screw that up - and they did it!
But having huge numbers of incredibly wealthy people who might be persuaded to invest in reversing some of this is a luxury a lot of other cities that went off the deep end don’t have, or favorable demographics. Oakland, Portland, Minneapolis- St. Paul all are probably screwed for a generation at this point but theoretically could come back. Detroit, St. Louis, and Baltimore are never coming back for other reasons and Chicago only can if it throws off black political dominance. The story of the coming decades for many cities will be of suburbs creating live/work/play environments so residents can basically avoid ever going to the urban core.
Baltimore has a great hospital, a busy port, the two stadiums, an aquarium, a couple somewhat livable neighborhoods and a small business district that is surrounded by urban squalor. The Baltimore of cleanly paved doorways on row houses and a bar on every corner is gone. The city is run by idiots. The Baltimore bureaucracy is a massive jobs program for blacks.
Every time I have been to Baltimore it’s obvious is was once a great city, it’s just in a demographic death spiral. The other noticeable thing is that there are always tons of people in the streets obviously doing absolutely nothing.
The South Side of Chicago is also sad - the signs of the care that was put into some of the boulevards and housing long ago are still visible but it’s a dump now. Same with Detroit, it’s jaw dropping.
I attended college at Salisbury State College on Maryland's Eastern Shore and became friends with three brothers from Essex, a working-class suburb of Baltimore. We would occasionally hit a bar in the city or in Essex. Roma's of Essex was a favorite with a separate dining room attached to a bar. Baltimore has changed so much in fifty years. Edgar Allen Poe, Babe Ruth and HL Mencken wouldn't recognize it. Nor would Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., mayor of Baltimore from 1947-1959 and father to the Queen of San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi.
I grew up in the Bay Area, and was based in SF starting in 1991, but moved on in 2020- for most of the usual reasons (cost, deteriorating street life, lax law enforcement, etc). But the biggest reason? Karl the Fog finally became unbearable. Sub 50's temperatures, and grey skies for most of July & August (and the rest of the year in my particular location in the micro-climate). I've moved on to warmer and sunnier (not to mention friendlier & cheaper) climes in the California Sierra foothills. Karl is something The City will never fix, so I'm out for good.
Mariah needs to step up and blow.
Um ?
Guess you're too young
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByqYEzugleE
I still think they should rename the Golden Gate the London Breedge.
Lurie looks like he's part of what for lack of a better term one might call the "New New Class" (or maybe "Vibe Shift Left"?)
Basically, there are a lot of high human capital folks on the left, and they want to raise their families in pleasant, functional, safe, beautiful cities with lots of good and affordable housing and quality public infrastructure and efficient services quickly responsive to changing needs. They are fed up that they can't have these perfectly reasonable nice things like plenty of big cities in other developed countries, and when they look for the reasons for "this is why we can't have nice things", they know that they can't actually get very far blaming the right for everything, especially since most of these cities are as Deep Blue dominated as possible. So they end up being heretics on one major tenet of the latest progressive political consensus, and trying to nudg3 that consensus to drop that tenet while insisting they ought to remain regarded as a committed progressive in good standing.
As an example, Ezra Klein has that new book "Abundance", which has got to have the record for the number of early reviews that are a total waste of author words and reader time. The thing reviewers are missing or unwilling to say they notice is that it is a good example of "the modem bourgeois progressive urbanist facing the dilemma of resolving their own heightened contradiction" - a combination of the basis for Charle's Murray's plea that these progressives preach what they practice (bourgeois virtues and lifestyles for family, work ethic, prudence, etc.) and Conquest's Law that people are conservative about the thing they know best (or a leftism-aggravated problem they just studied enough to write a book about it).
But you can imagine this book as being one in a multi-volume series with all the other heresies one at a time. Lurie could right "Safety, Security, and Order". Maybe DeBoer could write "Tracking - to each according to their talents (which are really different and impossible to change much)".
You add all these hypothetical books up and you'll get the position of "urbanist right" of James Q Wilson's era. Vindicated at last.
Excellent comment.