My Platform:
Here are the facts:
1. I live in the citadel of the Democrat Party: zip code 94110, Nancy Pelosi’s actual district, Dianne Feinstein’s state, the city and county of San Francisco. We are literally the bastion of liberal power. To give you a sense: we occasionally have elections where there are open positions (school board, attorney general, etc.) with LITERALLY NO CHOICE BUT ONE. The choice is Kim Jong Un. No, just kidding. But there really are elections here with no options, except the singular option you’re given to vote for in this Potemkin Village of a republic, as decreed by the Geriatric (I mean…Democratic) party. I, a grown American citizen, have literally participated in elections where I, a voter, entered a legal voting booth and filled out a legal ballot in the United States of America, wherein I HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO vote for the only option available to me: an option which has always, inevitably been in my lived experience, one selected for me by the entrenched operatives of the DNC. It’s like East Germany, except without the poverty and Berlin Wall (though we DO have the omnipresent threat of a Republican wall lest we question our righteous Democrats). All major positions in the government of this city and county are controlled by Democrats, and have been for years: such is their ubiquity and dominance as a party and machine in this region of California that all 11 city supervisors, the mayor, and EVERY SINGLE elected city and county official is a Democrat. EVERY SINGLE ONE! It’s like Soviet Russia: the party picks for you!
a. IT MATTERS NOT THE QUALIFICATIONS OR ETHICAL CHARACTER OF THESE DEMOCRATS: I want to be clear in my view that most of these “elected” officials are hardworking, well-intentioned, decent human beings. But that is not the point. Even if they are Mother Theresa, only getting Mother Theresa on the ballot as your choice is not what you’re entitled to in a democracy. San Francisco’s ballots are, fundamentally, the ANTITHESIS OF A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY. Single candidate elections? Why even have an election? Why not just have a coronation? Or a homecoming parade? We all know who the winner is before we even get to vote; why waste our time in the fake pretense of pedantic "voting"? Why not just skip to the grandstanding? The speeches where our “elected” officials chastise the rest of the nation for not being “rich and liberal like us.”
b. In 02016, 84.5% of the city voted Democrat in the Presidential election (I’m not sure there’s another place where the “other” category in the Presidential race comes within a few percentage points of the total GOP vote count… 9.2 vs 6.3, respectively, in the city of SF). Look, Trump is a monster; but his monstrosity shouldn’t be reason for us to do away with a healthy, functioning democracy that offers its citizens legitimate choice in elections.[1]
2. I also live in a citadel of privilege and wealth: unlike much of the United States (not to mention the world), we have virtually limitless financial resources. We are uniquely endowed with more money than anywhere and anyone.And, furthermore, we all want to be taxed even more! Even though we are rich! Most of our billionaires favor further taxation; we, as a city and county, consistently vote for more and more taxation (at the state, federal and local [property] tax level) despite already having amongst the highest combined taxation regime (sales, property, income) in the nation.
3. So, to summarize: here, where I live in California, we have more money than anywhere else when it comes to government expenditure capacity; and here, more than anywhere else, we have a city and county government totally monopolized by Democrats, with a population totally supportive of this entrenched party, and a municipal agenda thus entirely malleable in their hands, resource constraints be damned. Yet here in this land of the rich and ultra-plurality political parties, we are in genuine local crisis. The Democrats are a super-majority with almost total control of what happens in government; and here, unlike elsewhere, they have the means (in dollars) and will (in public support) to do almost anything they like. And here, the poop flows like water into the gutters of our goodwill. I should know, I saw a homeless man poop on Mark Zuckerberg’s street yesterday.
OK, now here are the living conditions:
4. We are the only major city I’ve ever visited, in my life, where grown women are regularly cautioned, not at all patronizingly and usually with just cause, against walking home alone at night. Literally: grown, American female citizens cannot roam San Francisco streets at night without a legitimate, substantiated fear of violence, crime and harassment. I am a 6’2”, 180+ lobs white male. Yes, I’m very gay and effeminate, but I don’t ever live with the conscious fear of being raped. And I have been mugged, personally, four times within blocks of my home; I have had my car stolen, at gunpoint, while my partner and dog were inside; I have called the police repeatedly and gotten no response; I was once told by a 911 operator, after she disconnected my call, that I should only call “after someone has been hurt” to report threatening individuals making violent sexual threats against women in my neighborhood so loudly I could hear them scream “C*nt” from inside my home. This is simply not the case anywhere else I’ve ever been that is as wealthy and developed as the Bay Area: I cannot imagine someone warning a 20-something female in Honk Kong, London or New York to “not walk through the downtown neighborhood” because they LITERALLY will not be safe. I also don’t know anywhere where there is broken glass, every day without fail, in the gutters from the countless broken car windows whose perpetrators face no criminal consequence because the police cannot prosecute theft under $965.
5. There is, also, quite literally and yet also demonstratively (in terms of our city’s problems), actual human poop on the sidewalks, in our streets, and on your neighbor’s doorstep. The filth in this city of under 900,000 is incomprehensible: it is abundant and visible, to a degree that is shocking even to us locals. “Homeless” citizens inject drugs in broad daylight, usually in our parks, often in sight of schools and playgrounds. They are never, to my knowledge, forced to seek treatment or consequences for their actions; they are given more Patagonia tents, and sent back into our gutters. Even the public-school teachers and administrators I know don’t send their kids to public school: not because they want to support private schools, but because our public schools are that bad. Yes! San Francisco: it has public schools so bad, even liberals dare not enroll their children. And our public transit system? What it lacks in efficiency it makes up for in modes of transport (trolley, electric bus, cabled bus, conventional bus, subway, rail car, train, shuttle, half-train-half-subway-whatever-goes-up-Church-Street-J-Line-Muni-transport… whatever it is, on average, it is the slowest in the nation. We also, dare I mention, have terrible income inequality; and a population of indigent drug addicts living on our sidewalks that literally shocks visitors and locals alike. Basically: “homeless” drug addicted mentally ill defecate in the streets while a trolley going 7 mph drops off the poorest children at their local failing elementary.
Here is what I propose doing about it, collectively, as a group of engaged citizens who care about their own lives, the lives of their loved ones, and the lives of their neighbors, be they rich or poor, sane or insane, sober or drunk, sheltered or unsheltered, documented or “illegal”:
1. No democracy can function without healthy debate, competition, and options. When you only have one candidate running because only one party has power, the democracy is not just dying, it is already dead. We need real choice; real difference in opinion; real debates; real contrarianism. We cannot allow ourselves to become like South Africa after apartheid: where one party had such an obvious, well-deserved moral authority versus a condemnable opposition (I mean, Trump is putting our children in cages) that their victory became manifest destiny, predictable, and unquestionable. This will inevitably breed decay, corruption and poor governance. Again, I harken back to what I said at the outset: unlimited resources, in the citadel of the Democrats, and there is actual human poop on the streets. And yet, we vote 84% for the party in power to continue its run.
a. So, we need a healthy debate. A genuine choice in our elections. It should be close, it should be bitterly contested, and no single party should ever, ever hold a super-majority year-over-year unless objective conditions are literally blissful and utopian.
2. We spend way too much time, money, energy and thought worrying about the less than 10,000 “homeless” people living here. 5,000 of these individuals are sheltered (in government-subsidized housing). Of the remaining 4,000 (yes, just 4,000!!!), an estimated third are living in their cars or RVs. Combined, the 9,000 homeless in SF receive $300 million in city and county funding every year; this surreal figure does not include the millions and millions homeless services receive from our charitable-industrial complex, state government, and federal government. Tipping Point, arguably the most visible “billionaire’s charity” in our city, routinely heralded for its accountability and performance-based metrics, is currently spending $700,000 per unit to construct new affordable housing in this city. IF you said to me: “We are going to spend $700,000 to attempt a marginal improvement in the living conditions of a single resident, with modest to poor measurable outcomes and a track record of failure,” I’d tell you: “YOU ARE WASTING MONEY.” And WE ARE. WE ARE WASTING OIUR MONEY. I AM NOT HEARTLESS. I AM NUMERICALLY LITERATE. it’s not just money. It’s time, it’s focusses, it’s shear bandwidth of our collective attention. 9,000 people in our city get a gross (truly, grossly) disproportionate share of public resources, despite increasingly poor measurable outcomes, and we seem to think this is a Franciscan charity. It’s not. No one is here to argue the “homeless” live inarguably sad, painful, unacceptably. IT IS AWFUL. AN UNNACEPTABLE. AND NEEDS TO STOP.IT IS ABHORRENT AND SHAMEFUL. These people live hard lives; but millions do in our society, and no one receives the kind of subsidy ($700,000 per housing unit?!) this small, small segment of the population receives.
3. Proposition 47 was a huge mistake. It should be repealed immediately. Theft of property should be prosecuted and successfully penalized as a felony, not a misdemeanor. And we need a Right TO Shelter Law like they have in the rest of the less temperate country: which gives people the right to shelter, but also no right to refuse shelter.
4. The ultra-rich, like Marc Benioff, should not be able to bully us into higher taxation purely by evidencing the chaos of municipal failings we all witness every day. I know, more than he ever will, the damage and pain of homelessness; I see it literally on my front door every morning. I know it’s horrible, and awful, and unacceptable. But I also know we spend more per capita than anywhere in the world: $40,000+ per homeless person, in city and county funds alone (not to mention nonprofit dollars!), with decliningand worseningresults to show for it. Do not tell me I am not compassionate, or Christian, or kind, or caring: the Vassar graduate who is white, able-bodied, native-born, English speaking and wearing last season’s North Face jacket does not need a government-purchased tent in which to house his or her MacBook. I can’t speak to any other neighborhood but my own; for all I know, it is a totally different situation in other neighborhoods of our city. But in my neighborhood, that is the reality: people with MacBook’s, living in tents paid for by Tipping Point’s billionaires, pooping on my doorstep. No. Fucking. Joke.
5. The right to a home is a birthright: we have advanced enough as a civilization, and prospered enough as a state and a city, to guarantee this to everyone. But the right to a home in a particular location is not; especially when maintaining a specific location precludes economic efficiency, equality and optimal living conditions for the most amount of people in the most places everywhere. Sell the single unit, detached public housing on Webster to a developer; make millions in proceeds; build the existing residents better housing, really good housing, housing that is dignified and becoming of the children of California, with the proceeds. Build it somewhere cheaper and more capable of providing services to low income residents. Yes, I said it: the 49 square miles of San Francisco should be sold and developed in whatever way funnels the maximum amount of dollars to public services aimed at alleviating poverty. In no way should we actively take steps to ensure no one ever needs to move at the expense of ensuring everyone has somewhere to move to.
6. We should be proud of our economic achievements, not embarrassed or ashamed; look at what we have done, as a community, in terms of technological advances and wealth generation. We brought the world Wikipedia and the iPhone. We either overthrow predatory capitalism or we acknowledge its supremacy in our nation and world; if the latter, let’s fucking own our earned position at the top of the heap. Right now, it’s like this: we don’t do anything to overthrow our dominant mode of production (capitalism), yet we admonish those who succeed under its terms (gentrification we cry!) and vilify anyone who questions whether it always runs counter to the general good (Marc Benioff: “the issue is that the homeless don’t get enough money….”; no, Marc, that’s the fucking problem. Go build us another bourgeois, banal, suffocating normative skyscraper while you tell us about how we’ve neglected shelter…. You have the Democrat Party’s support!”
OK, I LVOE TO RANT. SO ENOUGH RANTING. Actionable steps:
1. Object, on principle, to any election where you are not offered a legitimate, meaningfully differentiated, oppositional group of candidates with varying, diverse and contrasting ideas.
2. Stop assuming money will solve our problems; it hasn’t’, even as we throw more and more into the pit. Some of this is about laws and police and the ability to enact ju8stice and force people who are addict4ed and homeless and mentally ill into treatment and care. Everywhere else does it: Nordic Europe, Switzerland, Salt Lake City. It’s not some mystery: we are the only major city that thinks we need “innovation” to solve homelessness, despite its having been solved everywhere but here. Let’s just copy what everyone else did we are the only place with the poop in the streets.
3. Do not disparage the successes of our neighbors and home-grown industry: yes, Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook probably served as mission-critical prerequisites for Brexit and Trump, and should be denounced accordingly; but Lyft and Mozilla and yes, even Apple, have fundamentally shaped our world in a way most of us look at with wonder, amazement, and righteous appreciation. We are the world’s sixth largest economy, with the world’s preeminent tertiary public education system, a citizenry that is majority minority, and the home of fucking Disneyland. Let’s be proud of California.
4. For just a few years, let’s focus on other issues plaguing our society besides “homelessness”: like the fact we’re facing irreputable climate catastrophe and will leave our children a planet in ecological collapse, or the fact we are letting down said tertiary education crown jewel, or how we have, as our most senior legislative delegate in Washington, a woman who does not use a computer because she does not want to learn how(Dianne Feinstein).
5. The truth is: our shit stinks. Our political operatives, operation and opus have caused arguably the most acute societal crisis in modern American municipalities since the 1980s. It has festered here in San Francisco, at a time of unparalleled wealth and cash flow. Our liberal ideals of emulating St. Francis’ loving embrace have resulted in more homeless than anyone deserves, and a population of them that grows in direct (NOT indirect) correlation with the more funds we appropriate to their alleged cause. No one is allowed to dare criticize the homeless-industrial complex of non-profits whose survival requires sclerosis and inertia in solving this problem. We have let down our children, our immigrant communities, our teachers, our goddamn subway (Muni? Trolley? WHAT ARE THEY CALLED?) riders.
6. Enough is enough. The man who builds us a penis monument (the Salesforce tower) doesn’t get to tell me I’m not sufficiently generous. I would give the shirt off my back to help my neighbor. Which is why, in the name of my neighborhood, I refuse to allow anyone to keep giving shirts to the people pooping on my sidewalk. Let them go naked. We have bigger fish to fry (or sustainably farm, cook healthily, and distribute ecologically and fairly…. I AM a Californian, after all. Actually, we should probably be vegetarian. But let’s get the poop cleaned up first).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Francisco