Can San Francisco Save Itself From the Doom Loop?

The WSJ has this article, with the above title, by Jim Carlton and Katherine Bindley. The article begins:

Local leaders are trying anything they can to keep San Francisco’s struggling downtown core afloat, including paying retired, unarmed police to keep an eye out for trouble.

In many cases, though, “local leaders” are the problem, not the people who are going to find the solution.

Many elements of the doom loop are the natural, inevitable results of policies intentionally chosen by misguided people. Tolerating theft and imposing no significant consequences for it naturally leads to more theft.

The “homelessness problem” is actually multiple problems, as people can be homeless for very different reasons requiring different approaches. For the relatively few “have nots” who are simply down on their luck financially, simple temporary assistance is all that is needed. For the “cannots” who are mentally ill or addicted and unable to make rational choices for themselves, a “tough love” approach is needed. For the “will nots” who simply chose urban camping to live a life of drug dealing, drug using, and theft, the policies commonly decried as “mean” by people who mistakenly believe themselves to be enlightened are actually correct. Treating the entire homeless population as “have nots” and tolerating their degradation of city life is disastrously foolish, yet that is the approach of many who regard themselves as “progressive.”

The most important step to stopping the doom loop is to vote these benighted people out. The people of San Francisco made a good start last year by ousting their disastrous District Attorney Chesa Boudin. See this post. They followed up by electing appointed replacement Brooke Jenkins to fill out the term.

Mayor London Breed appears to have mostly recovered from her earlier embrace of over-permissive nonsense and may be as good a mayor as San Francisco can be expected to elect. When asked what people could do to help, she answered, “Give me a new Board of Supervisors.” See this post from June this year. Unfortunately, that election isn’t until next year.