San Francisco's drug and homeless crises can't continue

Tomorrow, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, will give her annual State of the City report. It is sure to contain references to the city’s virtues but should also address the issues hurting all San Franciscans: a deserted downtown; the flight of medium-sized and large businesses and major conventions; the highest commercial office vacancy rates of any big city in the United States; planning policies that amount to a virtual border wall encircling the city; housing costs that make it prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthy or poverty-stricken; a public school system whose enrolment has plummeted and which has only 55 per cent English proficiency and 46 per cent maths proficiency (with a 9 per cent maths proficiency rate for black students); and a police department which is short of 645 officers.

But without tackling San Francisco’s open-air drug markets and homeless encampments, efforts to solve these problems will be fruitless. Fentanyl, the synthetic drug that is 50 times more powerful than and a fraction of the cost of heroin, has turned many blocks of the city into zombie zones. Beyond the shocking waste of potential, the drug use and homeless tents consume an enormous part of San Francisco’s $13.95bn budget. Direct spending by the City's Department of Homelessness has risen from $202mn for the fiscal year 2016 to $1.1bn this year.?

Even this number doesn’t approach the true costs because it fails to include the burden that drugs and homelessness place on the police, fire and public works departments, local hospitals and the judiciary. It also excludes contributions from state and federal funds.

None of this has happened overnight — it’s a situation that has built up over decades and to which state and federal policies have contributed. But much of it is the result of skilful politicking. San Francisco has an elected mayor, but it also has a Board of Supervisors, representing eleven different portions of the city, each of whom has the power to stymie any mayoral initiative.?In some races less than 9,000 votes?are enough for a supervisor to win — a tiny fraction of the 501,925 registered voters in San Francisco. Thanks to the malleable nature of the city’s term limits, supervisors can occupy a seat for two thirds?of their working lives.?

Complicating matters further are the local propositions that appear on every election ballot and which, while portrayed as a way for citizens to keep elected officials in check, are largely controlled by San Francisco’s eleven “district mayors.”?Last November’s election form contained 14 measures — whose language, for the most part, was designed to obfuscate the underlying issues.????

One result of years of such measures is the existence of 130 external commissions overseeing dozens of City departments. More corrosive still is a fractured and tribal body politic prone to manipulation by a handful of people who dominate public hearings, issue lawsuits and play the ballot measure pinball machine.

San Francisco’s drug and homeless crisis can be solved, but that would mean changes to the mechanics of government and co-ordinated political will. Several European cities, including ultra-progressive Amsterdam, have paved the way. It requires the co-ordinated and persistent pursuit of harm reduction programs, sufficient public shelters, commitment for treatment for those who are a danger to themselves and others, visible policing, a judiciary that enforces the law and — most of all — a change in the armature of government. That’s how the mayor should propose to build a San Francisco that will be better for everyone.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023