Samuel Rigelhaupt/Sipa USA via AP Images
Unhoused people are seen in downtown San Francisco, November 22, 2021.
By now, the Association of Armchair Analysts has promulgated its take on Tuesday’s elections in San Francisco and Los Angeles: The Democrats are perceived as soft on crime and that’s what brought them down.
That analysis isn’t wholly wrong, of course, but it misses more than it sees. Yes, the rate of some serious crimes is up in L.A. and SF, but it’s just as up in the rest of California where the district attorneys are Republicans. Coming out of our first pandemic in a century, the rate of crime and anger and distemper is up everywhere; it pervades daily life in a myriad of ways.
Besides, Chesa Boudin is hardly the only progressive DA to have faced the voters. The first of this new generation of progressive big-city prosecutors, Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, won re-election last year in a city where brotherly love has long been hard to come by. Philly’s cops hate Krasner every bit as much as San Francisco’s cops hate Boudin. So what’s the difference? What pushed San Francisco liberals over the edge when Philly’s characteristically grumpy voters were okay with Krasner?
Homelessness.
Even when a San Franciscan hasn’t become a crime victim, it’s almost impossible for that person not to have encountered in their daily rounds the disorder and frequent distemper of homeless encampments and non-encampments. When simply traversing a sidewalk seems to present a risk—even if that risk is magnified in the mind of our representative pedestrian—then a sense of pervasive disorder, with all of its real and assumed threats, settles in.
Philadelphia is not the kind of place where the homeless monopolize the sidewalks. In summer and winter, any option is preferable. In San Francisco and L.A., with their more temperate climates, outdoor homelessness is way more pervasive.
Indeed, a poll in the Los Angeles Times on the eve of the primary found that local voters’ number one concern was homelessness, though a substantial number also listed crime.
That made L.A. mayoral candidate Rick Caruso the luckiest guy in American politics. Caruso’s calling card to voters is that he’s known as the creator of the sanitized shopping mall. Go to the Grove or Palisades Village, and you’re in an almost Disney-like environment (but more upscale), the very antithesis of a city street or sidewalk or back alley where the homeless reside. That doesn’t mean that Caruso has any viable ideas about what to do about L.A.’s homelessness, but as the creator of its symbolic antidote, he doesn’t have to.
When Michael Harrington wrote The Other America in the early 1960s, he began by noting a historically new phenomenon: Amid the broadly shared prosperity and the rise of suburbia in postwar America, the poor had largely become invisible to the great middle class. Today, however, in cities like L.A. and SF, the most desperate and marginal subgroups of the poor constitute a disproportionate share of the homeless, and they’re unavoidably visible.
So what should Democrats do about all this? At the most macro of scales, they need to become the affordable-housing party, as the one thing that unites the homeless with a vastly larger constituency is that the rent is too damn high. This is a problem the market won’t solve, and calls upon Democrats to advocate for massive social housing on the same scale that the greatest of all Democratic senators, New York’s Robert Wagner (about whom historian Michael Kazin wrote recently in the Prospect), once championed—and succeeded in getting a lot of it built. Karen Bass, the liberal Democrat L.A. mayoral candidate who’ll be running off in November against Caruso, should take a look at the social-housing plans drawn up by the greatest of all L.A. architects, Richard Neutra, for a never-built project in the late 1940s.
But macro solutions take time—years to enact the policies and, in this case, more years to build the housing. A quicker semi-fix could involve that staple of municipal law: zoning. I guess I’m deviating from some current urban progressive practice here, but when cities can’t find dwellings to house the homeless, they should designate particular outdoor areas in which the homeless can pitch their tents and restrict their dwellings to those areas. It should be easier to provide social services and limit the incidence of disorder and outbursts when the homeless are more easily accessible, as they would be when living in such areas.
What urban progressives can’t electorally survive is indifference to the public’s right to public space. This is a fraught and tricky issue, as I’m acutely aware, but liberals ignore it at their own peril, and their hold on elective office and the broad range of public policy is imperiled if they do.
