If Books Could Kill - San Fransicko

00:00:00.000 Michael. Peter. What do you know about San Francisco?

00:00:04.320 Personally, I am thrilled that finally someone is asking homeless people if they've tried not being homeless.

00:00:23.940 Now, I don't know how much you know about this book, but it's sort of it's not a mega bestseller.

00:00:28.880 it's like technically a bestseller it's one of those books that you see on the shelf that says

00:00:34.120 the new york times best-selling book and you're like it's like the trafficking documentary

00:00:38.380 someone's buying up copies the main reason i wanted to do it is because even though it's not

00:00:43.340 like a freakonomics level bestseller it's very emblematic of a common set of conservative

00:00:50.960 arguments and popular modes of thinking, both among conservatives and centrist about homelessness.

00:00:59.600 Yes.

00:01:00.200 So I know that you're aware of this book, but have you read this book?

00:01:03.600 I'm aware of Schellenberger as like great friend of Barry Weiss and great enemy of Twitter's

00:01:11.760 attempts to censor conservatives. That's mostly what I know of him. And then also I'm sort of

00:01:16.660 weirdly obsessed with homelessness as an issue, both because I live in Seattle, which is experiencing

00:01:21.720 a very San Francisco-like homelessness crisis, and also because I've actually done reporting on

00:01:27.560 homelessness. I went to Salt Lake City a couple of years ago and spent a week there learning about

00:01:32.700 what happened to Salt Lake City's whole thing where they, quote unquote, solved homelessness.

00:01:37.840 And it got a lot of attention, I believe, in 2015. And then it kind of fell apart for interesting

00:01:41.880 reasons. It's an issue that I know slightly more about than, for example, like atomic habits.

00:01:47.720 I know more about this than rising and grinding. That's the problem with progressives right there.

00:01:54.040 Too much focus on how to solve poverty, not enough focus on how to get up and go.

00:02:01.400 So Schellenberger himself has sort of like risen to prominence as a Twitter crank. Yeah.

00:02:07.840 Over the last 20 years, he actually had sort of an interesting career.

00:02:12.400 He got his BA in Peace and Global Studies, which, you know, respect, love a fake BA.

00:02:18.520 I have two.

00:02:19.140 MA in Anthropology.

00:02:21.340 Then he spent like two decades basically writing about the environment.

00:02:26.820 Right.

00:02:27.020 In recent years, especially his work with respect to climate change became very like anti-alarmist,

00:02:33.200 basically being like this, this will be OK.

00:02:35.700 And in 2020, he publishes a book called Apocalypse Never, basically arguing that climate change is real, but the threat is overstated by environmentalists. 0.94

00:02:48.080 This is my least favorite shit where it's like, while correct on the merits, Greta Thunberg is like kind of annoying. 0.78

00:02:54.240 So like we have no choice but to form an alliance with Tucker Carlson. 1.00

00:02:57.360 Schellenberger is now just sort of like a right wing Twitter crank.

00:03:01.800 Like there's no other way to put it.

00:03:03.000 He spends COVID doing like COVID denialism.

00:03:06.700 Yes.

00:03:07.020 And he gets prominent on Twitter in part because his Twitter handle at the time was his first

00:03:13.960 two initials and his last name, M.D. Schellenberger.

00:03:21.420 He knows what he's doing.

00:03:23.040 I know it's like, oh, I never said I was a doctor, but like, dude.

00:03:26.160 He has since changed it.

00:03:27.340 So I assume that that's why that he's like, all right.

00:03:30.180 Now that all of the debate about COVID has subsided, I will change it so no one thinks

00:03:36.960 I'm a doctor.

00:03:37.880 Look, I don't know why anybody thinks that I'm racist just because my handle is KKK Mike.

00:03:42.180 That is my name, Karen, Karen, Karen.

00:03:45.060 So in 2021, he publishes San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

00:03:52.660 If I could summarize the argument that Schellenberger makes on homelessness,

00:03:56.160 It's that progressive policies and culture have created a permissiveness that allows people to remain homeless, to use drugs in public, to cause general discomfort while failing to address the real causes of homelessness.

00:04:13.640 Running through the book is a claim that the left treats homelessness as a structural problem,

00:04:18.220 the result of economic and housing policy, when it's actually primarily an individual problem

00:04:24.880 driven by mental illness and addiction.

00:04:28.220 That's why European countries have so little homelessness.

00:04:30.820 They just rise and grind more.

00:04:32.280 I've actually, in response to this book, I've been handing out copies of The Four Hour Workweek.

00:04:39.800 Everyone who's struggling, you get a book.

00:04:41.960 You get a book.

00:04:42.940 Hey, I know it's hard out here, brother, but give this a read. Before we get into the book,

00:04:48.340 I do think it's worth talking about the ways in which San Francisco is an outlier on homelessness

00:04:54.280 issues and the ways in which things are, in fact, bad in San Francisco and across

00:04:59.820 California on homelessness issues, because this isn't like a made up problem, right? San Francisco

00:05:05.780 does, in fact, have what is in many ways a distinctly bad problem with homelessness.

00:05:11.060 Yes. I think that a lot of people on the left get caught up justifiably talking about how bad faith conservatives are on this issue.

00:05:18.740 And it makes it seem like we're denying that any problem exists or that it's upsetting.

00:05:23.560 Yeah. I live in a city with also a huge homelessness crisis.

00:05:25.820 And like it can be kind of scary to walk around and see so much like visible poverty and just like people in pain.

00:05:32.280 Right. Those are all like understandable feelings to have.

00:05:35.480 And, you know, homelessness is getting worse across the country by many metrics.

00:05:39.460 and it's notably bad in California. California is 12 percent of the country, 30 percent of the

00:05:45.800 homeless population, 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless population. And so San Francisco is sort

00:05:52.100 of a microcosm of that. I want to walk through some of the stats here, some of the ways in which

00:05:56.980 San Francisco is an outlier. It does have relatively high per capita homelessness. San Francisco also

00:06:03.560 has a higher unsheltered homeless rate than most other cities. 57 percent of San Francisco's

00:06:08.220 homeless population was unsheltered last year, and it's been even higher in prior years.

00:06:13.520 Schellenberger brings this up. He says, like, New York's homeless population is very high,

00:06:17.740 but it's 95 percent sheltered, right? This is driven largely by climate. Cities with harsh

00:06:23.740 winters tend to have much higher rates of sheltered homeless. And I guess the basic idea

00:06:27.640 is that it gets so cold in East Coast cities that homeless people will, like, die en masse

00:06:32.600 if you let people sleep on the street. And so historically, the system's built up around the

00:06:37.400 fact that it's kind of an emergency if somebody's sleeping without shelter and we need to get them

00:06:41.640 inside or else they'll die. Whereas on the West Coast, the assumption is that, oh, they're going

00:06:47.000 to be fine, even though many, many, many homeless people do in fact die on the streets. Seattle has

00:06:52.460 six times more deaths of homeless people than we have homicides every year. It just isn't necessarily

00:06:56.760 weather related. And there isn't the same sort of sense of urgency to get people indoors on the West

00:07:01.120 Coast. Right. It's it's correlated with climate, but it appears to be largely driven by policy

00:07:06.960 decisions that are downstream of climate. Yeah. Another area where San Francisco is a real

00:07:12.260 outlier, and I think this is really important, is that its unsheltered homeless population is

00:07:16.520 highly concentrated. Anyone who has visited San Francisco can attest to this. Right. The homeless

00:07:21.860 populations are very heavily concentrated in a couple of neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are

00:07:26.480 also adjacent to tourist areas and business districts, which makes the unsheltered homelessness

00:07:32.740 problem extremely visible. And I think that this is a big driver of San Francisco's reputation.

00:07:41.380 It's also very important to stress that like we talk about like the homelessness crisis and just

00:07:45.560 in objective terms, there is one. But when non-homeless people talk about this, what they're

00:07:50.220 mostly talking about is a problem of visible poverty and mental illness and addiction.

00:07:55.420 That's right. As I've gotten to know more of my homeless neighbors, my own neighborhood, a lot of the people you see like panhandling outside of grocery stores and stuff aren't homeless. Right. Many of them live in subsidized housing, but they don't get enough like income support from disability or whatever to afford food. And so they panhandle for extra money. And so they're not homeless. They're poor.

00:08:15.000 By the way, I will be steel manning Schellenberger's arguments throughout this episode to try to come up with like what I think the best faith arguments are here. 1.00

00:08:23.100 Is this your way of being like, we're going to give him some credit, but he's a huge scumbag. 0.99

00:08:27.080 Like, trust us. 0.99

00:08:28.120 Basically, yes.

00:08:30.200 Well, you know, you're kind of reminding me because I do think that it's true that the

00:08:34.360 that the political problem of homelessness goes away if you just hide it from public

00:08:41.080 view.

00:08:41.700 But there is still a good faith criticism out there, right?

00:08:45.680 That this is more than we should bear as a society.

00:08:49.520 Yeah, there's real failures.

00:08:50.340 And, like, I think it's also kind of fair to trace some of those back to, like, progressives.

00:08:54.680 Now, before we get into his more substantive arguments, I want to share some initial narrative color.

00:09:01.220 This is us not giving him credit.

00:09:02.640 This is us not Steele Manning.

00:09:03.900 I can sense a dunk coming.

00:09:05.800 Look, we'll be bouncing back and forth.

00:09:09.980 OK, so he says, in 2018, San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow.

00:09:18.140 I will say that there's more feces on the sidewalks than I've ever seen, said Breed.

00:09:22.620 Growing up here, that was something that wasn't the norm.

00:09:24.960 Than you've ever seen, asked the reporter.

00:09:26.920 Than I've ever seen, for sure, she said.

00:09:28.980 And we're not just talking about from dogs, we're talking about from humans.

00:09:32.700 Complaints about human waste on San Francisco sidewalks and streets were rising.

00:09:36.360 Calls about human feces increased from roughly 10,000 to roughly 20,000 between 2014 and 2018.

00:09:41.980 In 2019, the city spent nearly $100 million on street cleaning.

00:09:45.860 Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than 300 lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.

00:09:54.180 This is sort of, this is the beginning of his movie.

00:09:56.100 It's like opening shot.

00:09:57.360 Yeah.

00:09:57.720 Pan across the sidewalk.

00:09:59.220 Just poop everywhere.

00:10:00.240 Poop.

00:10:00.660 Yeah.

00:10:01.040 A corroded lamppost slowly topples.

00:10:04.320 Title card slowly fills in. 0.95

00:10:06.340 It says San Fran and then it's like, sicko.

00:10:08.880 And then we're not, we're not talking about dogs.

00:10:10.840 We're talking about humans. 0.95

00:10:11.840 I'm talking about human poop.

00:10:13.400 Yeah, it's not dog poop.

00:10:14.100 A lot of the conversation, both within the book and the broader discourse, is driven by this visceral reaction to visible homelessness, visible poverty, and visible addiction.

00:10:25.380 And you can sort of see that here, right?

00:10:26.900 There is a legitimate complaint under here, but a lot of it is just like, blech.

00:10:30.960 This is also the perfect example of how viewing it from inside an SUV driving through the tenderloin versus viewing it as somebody who is homeless changes the problem that we're talking about.

00:10:42.080 Because if you actually talk to homeless people, one of the things they say is that there's almost nowhere to go to the bathroom in America.

00:10:46.680 We have very few public restrooms.

00:10:48.300 And when you go to like a restaurant and you're like, hey, can I use the bathroom?

00:10:50.860 They're not going to let you because you look homeless.

00:10:52.560 Right.

00:10:52.780 And so when you talk to actual homeless people, they're like, I don't like pooping and peeing in public.

00:10:57.080 This is really like this is really humiliating.

00:10:59.120 Right.

00:10:59.380 The actual solution to this is to give homeless people somewhere to poop and pee.

00:11:03.800 I also will throw out there that lampposts mostly get corroded by dog pee.

00:11:08.220 Yeah. And also like drunk people. If you go to like central London, there's like these old buildings from the 1800s that have like visible divots in them from people coming out of Leicester Square and then peeing on them.

00:11:18.540 Well, when it comes to the Brits, I do support a more Schellenberger-esque solution. So. All right. So he then moves into the substantive argument a bit. He starts off by explaining more or less what I outlined, that the homelessness issue in San Francisco has gotten worse.

00:11:35.900 Yeah. This is all pretty uncontroversial, right? The real question is why and what to do about it.

00:11:42.600 Yeah. And Schellenberger starts by listing off the things that he thinks do not explain San

00:11:49.300 Francisco's outlier status. OK. First, he talks about climate. He says San Francisco's mild

00:11:56.260 climate alone cannot explain why it has more homeless people than other cities. Miami,

00:12:02.360 Phoenix and Houston have year-round warm weather and far fewer homeless than San Francisco per

00:12:09.440 capita. This is a good introduction to Schellenberger because it's factually true,

00:12:15.760 but also misleading and missing the point. He says San Francisco's mild climate alone

00:12:21.100 cannot explain why it has more homeless people than other cities. No one thinks that climate

00:12:27.400 is the sole cause of homelessness, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's warm out. I'm going to sleep on

00:12:33.600 the streets. Yeah, no one. This is like the story of how he presents and analyzes data in the book

00:12:39.100 rather than laying it out in full and being like, okay, where are the correlations? What can we

00:12:43.720 learn from this? What are the outliers? You just get these isolated little data points cherry

00:12:48.400 picked and thrown at you without any context. What do we know? What the heat actually predicts

00:12:52.560 is soft leadership. They're eating grapes. He then says that San Francisco's homelessness

00:12:57.280 problem cannot be explained by high housing prices. Oh, here we go. This is one of the

00:13:02.380 big claims of the book and the most controversial because there is widespread consensus among

00:13:07.500 academics who study this that housing prices are one of, if not the primary driving forces

00:13:14.520 of homelessness. So this is like his big bombshell argument here. And I'm going to

00:13:21.200 send you a very short excerpt. All right. He says, nor can housing prices explain the

00:13:26.900 discrepancy. Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have mild climates and expensive housing,

00:13:31.480 but don't have San Francisco's homeless problem. I told you I'd be steel manning him. All right.

00:13:36.060 So at first I was just like rolling my eyes at this, but then I was like, okay,

00:13:39.840 maybe he has a point here, right? Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have very high rents and low

00:13:45.480 homelessness. So the thing is that this is not what experts actually say. What experts say matter

00:13:51.940 is housing prices relative to income. The most prominent study on this is from a few years back,

00:13:57.960 and it's called inflection points in community level homeless rates. It was sponsored by Zillow.

00:14:03.260 So everyone calls it the Zillow study. And it essentially showed that once rental costs

00:14:08.520 surpassed about 30 percent of the median income in a given area, homelessness rates start shooting

00:14:14.500 way up right so yes housing costs are very high in beverly hills but so is the median income

00:14:20.040 so homelessness remains low it's also i think more instructive to talk about it as like a regional

00:14:24.880 problem like regional housing costs rather than these like micro housing costs right these like

00:14:29.820 much smaller neighborhoods because what i have heard from actual homeless people is that like 0.98

00:14:34.620 if you try to sleep outside in a rich neighborhood a fucking cop will come and harass you right and 0.99

00:14:39.700 like go to seattle like that's where you're supposed to be you're not supposed to be here 1.00

00:14:42.480 Right. It's a myth that like homeless people move across the country to get the best services.

00:14:46.180 That's bullshit. But within a region, oftentimes it has like the same kind of housing price 0.87

00:14:50.600 dynamics. Homeless people oftentimes get pushed out of certain areas. And there's even documented

00:14:56.040 cases in which wealthy suburbs will buy bus tickets. So Schellenberger is aware of the

00:15:01.420 study and he tries to respond to it. He says, as for the study that was reported to find a

00:15:07.060 correlation between rising rents and homelessness, a deeper look at the research reveals a more

00:15:11.920 nuanced findings. Homelessness and affordability are correlated only in the context of certain

00:15:18.460 local policy efforts and social attitudes. So it seems like he's saying that the Zillow study

00:15:24.700 found that the correlation between housing prices and homelessness doesn't exist outside of some

00:15:29.760 like very specific political and cultural settings. But that is absolutely not what the study says.

00:15:35.720 What the researchers said was that certain factors such as local policy efforts and social

00:15:40.140 attitudes may also impact homelessness rates, which is just sort of common sense, right?

00:15:45.060 They were basically saying there are other latent variables at play here.

00:15:49.220 So basically, the researchers were identifying some other variables in the mix, and Schellenberger

00:15:55.420 is saying that that somehow undermines the entire study.

00:15:58.460 But the study absolutely shows that housing prices correlate strongly with homelessness

00:16:03.320 across the country.

00:16:04.320 It's like it's the published conclusion of the study.

00:16:07.200 I spoke with Ned Resnikoff, who is a homelessness researcher, and he had talked to the researchers

00:16:15.120 themselves and they confirmed that Schellenberger is misreading the study.

00:16:19.480 It's funny to me how the term like nuance is used in these like reactionary tracts in

00:16:24.420 a way that is completely the opposite of its actual definition, because he's not making

00:16:28.180 a nuanced point.

00:16:29.200 He's saying like the findings of the study don't matter.

00:16:32.000 That's not nuanced.

00:16:33.280 Right.

00:16:33.600 Sometimes I say things and I can hear myself cutting them in the edit as I'm speaking.

00:16:37.200 I'm like, this isn't going to go in.

00:16:39.280 I don't know why I said that.

00:16:40.540 So he says the real issues driving homelessness are drug addiction and mental illness.

00:16:46.400 He says basically activists and policymakers all seem to think that the issue here is the

00:16:52.860 lack of affordable housing, which leads them to attack the wrong root cause.

00:16:58.420 Now, it's pretty uncontroversial that the rates of mental illness and drug use are higher

00:17:04.540 in the homeless population than the general population.

00:17:07.200 But Schellenberger claims that the problem is much worse than most people understand.

00:17:13.040 He says, quote, San Francisco's health department in 2019 estimated that 4,000 of the city's

00:17:19.260 8,000 homeless are both mentally ill and suffering from substance abuse.

00:17:24.780 So he's saying that 50 percent of the homeless population is both mentally ill and addicted

00:17:29.760 to drugs.

00:17:30.460 That jumped out to me because I've never seen an estimate even close to that.

00:17:36.400 So I tracked down the report. And no, the report very clearly and repeatedly says that it's 4,000 homeless people suffering from mental illness and addiction out of 18,000 total homeless people, not out of 8,000. So the rate is not 50%. As Schellenberger says, it's about 22%, which is much more in line with what I would have understood.

00:17:58.880 What happened is that the report is using the number of homeless people in the city in a given year, 18,000, while Schellenberger is using the point-in-time number, which is the number on a given night, 8,000.

00:18:10.740 The reason that Schellenberger gets it wrong is because he didn't read the report.

00:18:14.700 He just read a San Francisco Chronicle article about the report, which used the 4,000 number, and then he backfilled the denominator without knowing which metrics they were actually using.

00:18:23.940 and how do i know that because i read the report and they say 18 000 over and over again there is

00:18:31.000 literally no way you can read the report and not see we need to go to yale and get his boxes of

00:18:36.280 stuff so we can see which passages he underlined the only way to solve this so okay if you're

00:18:41.920 keeping score so far schellenberger has like hand waved away the most prominent and on point

00:18:48.160 research on this issue. And then in making his own case, he just immediately relies on objectively

00:18:54.380 false information. But then the thing is that statistic, like the percentage of homeless people

00:19:00.640 with mental health problems and addiction, I don't even know how that's relevant. Because like if

00:19:05.380 they're suffering from mental health problems and addiction, that's also an argument to help them

00:19:10.820 with resources from the state. Well, he does support using resources from the state in a sense.

00:19:18.160 Paying for homeless services is great as long as we're jailing them.

00:19:21.680 The real reason that that stat doesn't matter is because mental health, addiction and homelessness are very hard to unpack because they are, as the experts say, bi-directional.

00:19:33.480 Yeah, meaning that addiction and mental health can cause homelessness, but homelessness can cause addiction and mental health issues.

00:19:41.280 the most obvious example is that like depression is often categorized as a mental mental illness

00:19:47.460 for these purposes but like being homeless is depressing in the yeah in the literal sense that

00:19:53.940 it causes it can cause depression i spoke to a lady in one of the tiny home villages in seattle

00:19:58.280 who like started using meth after she was homeless and she did it so that she could stay up late

00:20:03.940 enough to protect her belongings like people steal your stuff when you're asleep right i've

00:20:07.960 also spoken to homeless people who said that they use drugs to keep warm. Yeah. I'm not going to say

00:20:11.780 there's like a noble purpose of every single homeless person using drugs, but it's like,

00:20:16.000 if I was living on the street, I can also imagine that I would use drugs like to cope with that or

00:20:21.240 also to self-medicate if I don't have access to like the formal health system. Yeah. I mean,

00:20:25.420 I use them to cope with stuff and I'm just a regular, a regular housed guy. So, so this sort

00:20:32.220 of leads to a problem, which is it's hard to unpack which way the causation is cutting, right?

00:20:37.960 So a simple way to do it would be to say, OK, if mental illness is a major cause of homelessness, you'd expect that places with high rates of mental illness would in turn have higher rates of homelessness.

00:20:51.980 Like the financial district.

00:20:53.020 There's a book published last year called Homelessness is a Housing Problem that I read.

00:20:58.220 I read for this episode.

00:20:59.940 I fully I Hobbs did.

00:21:01.540 Love that.

00:21:01.880 What they did was actually look at these things.

00:21:05.280 And it turns out most of the states with significant rates of serious mental illness do not have high homeless rates.

00:21:13.200 Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Wisconsin, Oregon, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Vermont are the states with the highest levels of serious mental illness.

00:21:24.300 And only one of them, Oregon, has relatively high homelessness.

00:21:28.120 Really? The state with the worst per capita homelessness in the country, Hawaii, actually has among the lowest serious mental illness rates in the country. So, yeah, it's actually not that there's no correlation. There's a small negative correlation. States with high rates of mental illness have lower rates of homelessness on average.

00:21:49.160 And that also gets back to the ratio of housing prices and income too, that if you're someone who's like really struggling with mental illness or like you have a break or something and you lose your job, if you have enough money to float your rent for a couple months as you recover, like that's going to prevent you from being homeless.

00:22:03.840 But if you're like living check to check, barely getting by, losing, you know, two weeks of work can like really be the difference between you staying housed and not.

00:22:12.020 There's also substance abuse, right? Higher rates of substance abuse actually are correlated with higher rates of homelessness, but only a small amount. The researchers found that they explain about 6% of the variance between states. By comparison, the median rent in a city explains 55% of the variance, meaning that housing costs are nearly 10 times better at predicting homelessness rates.

00:22:36.140 But the remaining 40 percent is explained by attitudes and wokeness, fortunately.

00:22:41.640 So, look, I don't want to overstate the case here, but this data just sort of annihilates Schellenberger's cool argument here.

00:22:50.940 And more than that, I feel like it just shows that he's fundamentally doing propaganda.

00:22:56.500 He's positing that the real issue here is addiction and mental illness.

00:23:01.400 And you'd think that the bare minimum effort to put into making that case would be to examine

00:23:07.040 whether places with high rates of addiction and mental illness also have high homelessness.

00:23:11.460 Yeah.

00:23:11.700 And he doesn't even do that.

00:23:12.860 I feel like this also comes back to the visible poverty thing versus homelessness,

00:23:16.240 because the problem as experienced by non-homeless people is visible,

00:23:21.400 like people on the street who are like shooting up or, you know, talking to themselves or something,

00:23:26.360 things that are like visible markers of addiction and mental illness.

00:23:30.020 Whereas the homeless population also includes a huge number of people sleeping in cars.

00:23:34.240 A lot of people just like walking around wearing a backpack.

00:23:36.320 Like when I volunteered at the shelter, like a lot of people do not look homeless.

00:23:39.880 Right.

00:23:40.260 I think it's a very intuitive conclusion to draw that homelessness is resulting from

00:23:46.500 drug addiction and mental illness when you're looking at the tenderloin, for example.

00:23:51.840 It's just one of those things that's not really true.

00:23:55.380 He's brooksing. 0.97

00:23:56.460 He's like, this feels true. 1.00

00:23:58.280 And I'm just going to write a whole book about it.

00:23:59.860 So that's the big descriptive claim that Schellenberger makes, right?

00:24:02.500 That housing prices don't really explain San Francisco's homelessness issues.

00:24:06.620 And the real underlying problem is mental illness and drug addiction.

00:24:10.540 And that is incorrect.

00:24:12.400 Yep.

00:24:12.600 There is a second part of this argument.

00:24:15.040 Schellenberger is wrong about what's happening, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he's

00:24:20.780 wrong about solutions.

00:24:23.080 Even if everyone agrees that housing prices drive homelessness, there's still the matter

00:24:27.040 of what to do about it, what works, what doesn't. You can't snap your fingers and reduce rent across

00:24:32.640 the country. So what do you do? Right. Just about every activist and most scholars will tell you

00:24:39.580 build affordable housing and use an approach called housing first. Now, I know you've written

00:24:45.640 about this before, but what do you know about housing first? It's basically the idea that like

00:24:50.500 you need to get people indoors. Yeah. And the minute you do that, you can get people onto

00:24:55.460 Medicaid. You can start to work on like getting whatever medications they need. You can start

00:24:59.980 getting them on SSDI in many cases. Everything stems from the fact that like you know where you

00:25:05.340 are going to sleep tonight and there's like a place to lock up your belongings. Yeah, that's

00:25:08.920 exactly right. I mean, the idea is that if you try to make housing contingent on finding a job

00:25:14.860 or getting clean or whatever, that's actually counterproductive, right? What works best is

00:25:20.600 providing housing first and working from there so that people have some stability yes housing

00:25:25.700 first has been the primary approach across the country for about 20 years and chellenberger is

00:25:32.340 trying to argue that this has been a mistake basically using san francisco as a case study

00:25:36.920 he says the problem with housing first stems from the fact that it doesn't require that people

00:25:41.500 address their mental illness and substance abuse which are often the underlying causes of

00:25:45.640 homelessness which if you recall he just proved several studies have found that people in

00:25:50.540 housing first type housing showed no improvement in drug use from when they were first housed

00:25:55.920 chellenberger points out that housing first has been the approach in san francisco for many years

00:26:00.660 but homelessness remains high which is true enough and i think the closest he gets to like

00:26:07.040 generally being correct there must be something wrong right the question is what exactly is it

00:26:14.180 and so i think you can break this question into two parts one does housing first generally work

00:26:20.260 and two if so why hasn't it really worked in san francisco right which is a fair question honestly

00:26:26.740 it is a very fair question the bottom line answer to the first question is yes housing first

00:26:32.560 generally improves results across many metrics but not all of them the most obvious thing that

00:26:39.000 it does is solve short-term homelessness for a given person right like if you put a homeless

00:26:44.860 person in a home, in the short term, they are, that is a 100% improvement in their housing

00:26:50.300 situation. There are very few issues where it's fair to say, like, it's right there in the name.

00:26:54.560 Right. But like, it is right there in the name.

00:26:56.780 Now, there's still, there is the question of how much it works medium to long term.

00:27:01.960 Randomized controlled studies have shown that Housing First leads to greater housing stability

00:27:06.780 over time and generally results in the use of fewer emergency department services and

00:27:13.180 healthcare resources. It's also generally more cost effective than many alternatives,

00:27:18.040 though there are a lot of variables impacting costs. So it's not a guarantee, especially in

00:27:23.580 places where housing costs are high. Also, if a city saves money on like emergency department

00:27:29.540 admissions, the city doesn't get that money back. This is like the fundamental problem

00:27:33.920 with Housing First is that viewed holistically, it is cheaper. However, cities don't operate

00:27:40.080 holistically right so what it actually amounts to is cities spending a fuck ton of money on free 0.99

00:27:45.380 housing for the homeless and then everybody loses their fucking minds and then all of the savings 0.93

00:27:49.540 are from like profit making entities are like completely different parts of the budget there's 0.98

00:27:54.740 a narrower version of his argument that's basically just like well if housing first works why isn't it

00:28:00.800 working in san francisco and again fair question i asked ned resnikoff this question did you talk

00:28:07.680 him about how he didn't like our end of history episode i do think it was an incredible act of

00:28:12.260 grace by me to reach out to someone to not talk about his problematic views that our episode was

00:28:17.460 bad to even say his name on our podcast i only have the uh the free version of zoom so i didn't

00:28:28.420 have i couldn't continue to extend our meeting and yell at him about fukuyama

00:28:33.040 No, we like that. It was a fair it was a fair point. It was a fair article. 1.00

00:28:38.300 Ned says, you know, a lot of the problem in California is sort of a cycle.

00:28:42.400 High housing prices drive people into homelessness at high rates,

00:28:45.780 while also making housing based interventions more expensive and difficult.

00:28:52.280 Right. So the interventions can't keep up with the new inflows of homeless people.

00:28:55.980 Right. Basically, because if you're trying to buy 10,000 houses for 10,000 homeless people,

00:29:01.020 If housing costs are really high, that's going to cost you like a billion dollars, which

00:29:04.500 sometimes in cities is like literally more than the entire city budget.

00:29:07.320 And if it doesn't address the underlying cause of high housing prices, you're just going

00:29:11.340 to continue getting more homeless people because more people that are sort of in precarious

00:29:15.580 situations get driven onto the streets.

00:29:18.380 Right.

00:29:18.500 So if you look at cities like Houston, policy-wise, the reason that they have been more successful 0.97

00:29:23.360 is that while San Francisco has a housing-first approach, there is a lot of bureaucratic bullshit

00:29:28.500 that prevents the ideal of widely available permanent housing from actually manifesting.

00:29:34.700 For example, there are about 10,000 permanent housing units in San Francisco designated for

00:29:41.480 homeless people. A thousand of them are sitting vacant, not because homeless people are declining

00:29:46.180 them, but because the screening process is so onerous that it's holding them up.

00:29:50.520 Then on top of that, you also have the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which has

00:29:54.560 full discretion to reject permits for new construction and often uses it to impede

00:29:59.540 affordable housing. What Ned said was maybe the biggest key to Houston's success is that in Houston

00:30:05.560 there are no zoning laws, which creates a lot of housing supply and keeps prices lower.

00:30:11.160 What's so interesting is that if Schellenberger wanted to levy a critique against San Francisco,

00:30:16.800 it's right here. San Francisco and other jurisdictions within California have failed

00:30:22.480 to meet this challenge in numerous respects. And it's not entirely out of their control.

00:30:27.040 You can make the argument that housing first is sort of pushed as a simple and effective

00:30:32.920 solution by the left, but it's not as simple as it's often made to seem. It can be easily

00:30:40.040 bogged down by bureaucracy and politics, not to mention it can be made much less effective

00:30:45.240 by the broader economic situation. We are now segueing into the middle section of the book.

00:30:51.580 Schellenberger has made his truly awful data-based arguments. And now he's moving into a bigger

00:30:58.740 picture, almost moral philosophical argument about progressivism. What he tries to argue is that

00:31:05.700 liberal policies are fostering a sense of permissiveness that allows all of these problems

00:31:11.420 to fester and promotes disorder. And he's talking about everything from lax homelessness policies to

00:31:18.240 like defund the police and progressive DAs, right? Remember that the subtitle of the book is

00:31:23.760 Why Progressives Ruin Cities. And I originally was like, oh, that seems like poor phrasing,

00:31:29.260 right? But then halfway through the book, I realized he sort of means it literally because

00:31:34.140 he proceeds to engage in what is essentially like an elaborate armchair psychoanalysis of

00:31:41.180 progressives. Oh, we are back to end of history. He's just talking about minds.

00:31:45.280 I'm going to be synthesizing this, but this is an extremely convoluted compilation of arguments.

00:31:51.920 At one point, he says that the modern left's position on homelessness has its roots in Marx.

00:31:58.680 The middle chapters of the book mention Michel Foucault 38 times.

00:32:04.460 I don't want to talk about Foucault on this podcast.

00:32:06.940 Foucault or books about Foucault are cited 22 times.

00:32:11.300 This is a titanic achievement of pseudo-intellectualism.

00:32:15.280 Discipline and punish the woke people.

00:32:17.440 I'm going to send you a little excerpt.

00:32:22.060 Progressive homelessness advocates hold two moral values particularly deeply,

00:32:26.720 caring and fairness.

00:32:28.700 Across many scales, surveys, and political controversies,

00:32:31.600 notes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt,

00:32:33.640 liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering

00:32:37.840 compared to conservatives and especially to libertarians.

00:32:41.460 God, that tracks. 0.99

00:32:42.720 Man, the first correct thing Jonathan Haidt has ever fucking said. 0.98

00:32:46.280 But in the process of valuing care so much, progressives abandoned other important values. 0.96

00:32:52.600 And then that doesn't end with a period, which makes me think that you took it out of context.

00:32:55.600 You cut it off.

00:32:56.520 No, I just didn't copy the period.

00:32:59.260 No, I don't even really want to talk about this quote.

00:33:02.220 I just think that it supports my one book theory that we're converging upon a single book.

00:33:06.900 Every time I see another one of our authors in the book, I'm like, well, I have to bring this up to Michael.

00:33:13.160 What dunk is this, though?

00:33:14.620 It's like liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering than conservatives or libertarians.

00:33:20.280 Like, probably.

00:33:21.600 This argument that he's making is that liberals care so much that they end up basically becoming irrational by other metrics.

00:33:30.700 he says that progressives base their morality and their policies around whether they perceive

00:33:36.900 someone to be a victim and this leads them to ultimately embrace what he calls victimology

00:33:44.120 oh no another word which is the belief that someone is inherently good if they have been 0.98

00:33:51.760 victimized oh this is this fucking jonathan height like coddling of the american mind thing where it's 0.94

00:33:56.600 like progressives all believe this and there's some like deranged thing that no one has ever 0.96

00:34:01.880 fucking said yeah then this is his big theory of the progressive mind uh he likens victimology to 0.65

00:34:07.800 a religion which i think is like something conservatives like to do because they don't 0.99

00:34:12.920 like getting made fun of for being religious yeah so they just like so they just pretend that like

00:34:16.820 we're religious too but like in a more abstract way like actually uh believing in affordable

00:34:23.720 housing is sort of like a religion when you think about it. 0.95

00:34:26.940 Well, believing in fucking anything is kind of like a religion when you think about it. 0.96

00:34:29.900 That's why it's not that interesting to think about it. 0.99

00:34:32.040 Believing in conservatism is kind of like a religion. 0.99

00:34:33.540 What's your fucking point? 0.99

00:34:34.500 Throughout this section, he is sort of diving into progressive versus conservative psychology. 0.99

00:34:42.180 I am sending you another excerpt.

00:34:45.060 Okay.

00:34:45.980 He says, progressives also value liberty or freedom differently than conservatives.

00:34:50.760 Many progressives reject the value of liberty for big tobacco and cigarette smokers, but embrace the value of liberty for fentanyl dealers and users.

00:35:06.400 Why?

00:35:07.000 Because progressives view fentanyl dealers and users who are disproportionately poor, sick, and non-white as victims of a bad system.

00:35:14.800 Jesus Christ.

00:35:16.540 Progressives hate tobacco companies, but they love fentanyl dealers. 1.00

00:35:20.760 When he's not, like, butchering data or just, like, misrepresenting his sources, he's making the worst analogies you've ever heard in your fucking life. 0.98

00:35:30.860 Like, are progressive policies regarding smoking somehow comparable to their policies regarding fentanyl? 0.96

00:35:39.380 Like, give me a call when there's, like, a fentanyl section in restaurants.

00:35:42.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:35:43.780 No, I'm going to send you another one.

00:35:45.640 We are still exploring the progressive mind.

00:35:49.360 Okay.

00:35:49.720 conservatives and moderates tend to define fairness around equal treatment including

00:35:54.720 enforcement of the law they tend to believe we should enforce the law against the homeless man

00:35:59.060 who is sleeping and urinating on bart even if he is a victim progressives disagree they demand

00:36:04.480 we take into account that the man is a victim in deciding whether to arrest and how to sentence

00:36:09.120 whole classes of people including the homeless mentally ill and addicts oh he's going back to

00:36:15.240 like Victorian like arguments about that's right he's the only guy that read that Anatole France

00:36:21.460 quote that's like the law forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges and he just took

00:36:27.660 it literally he was like yeah that's a quote about how much the law rocks because like yeah

00:36:33.280 why wouldn't you take into account somebody's circumstances like of course you would and and

00:36:38.560 the law does uh and also the statement that conservatives believe that the law should apply

00:36:44.080 equally to everyone might be close to the actual literal opposite of what conservatives believe 0.93

00:36:50.720 about the law this portion of the book has this sort of like half-baked psychology shit it has

00:36:57.940 a lot of anecdotes about left-wing excesses both historical and contemporary some of which are 0.69

00:37:03.780 perfectly valid criticisms and some of which are very bizarre exaggerations probably the most

00:37:09.860 Interesting bit is about Jim Jones, the Jonestown cult leader.

00:37:14.020 The Jonestown cult was like a Marxist cult, essentially, at least on the surface.

00:37:18.160 It was called the People's Temple.

00:37:20.020 And Jones had all sorts of ties to people on the left, progressive causes, etc.

00:37:26.520 What I did not know was that before he was a cult leader, he was the chairman of the San Francisco Housing Commission.

00:37:33.260 Oh, really? I didn't know that.

00:37:34.600 As you can imagine, Schellenberger goes absolutely nuts with this.

00:37:38.980 Yeah, basically claiming that, like, the same forces that blinded people on the left to cult leader mass murderer Jim Jones are the forces that are now blinding them to the reality of the homeless situation in San Francisco. 1.00

00:37:53.180 I love that, like, we keep on the show coming across the stupidest shit. So he's basically saying that, like, did you know Jim Jones also wanted to help the homeless? 0.96

00:38:02.960 I will say that reading this book basically gave me a nonstop migraine because it's just

00:38:10.600 like these constant like decontextualized data points and then like little anecdotes

00:38:15.440 confined to a paragraph.

00:38:16.820 And then there were five pages about Jim Jones and it was a breath of fresh air.

00:38:20.560 I was like, oh, this is fun.

00:38:23.360 You know, like I feel like I'm learning something.

00:38:27.360 I'm sure that there were like little lies baked in there that I didn't catch.

00:38:31.460 But it was the first time in the – and really the only time in the whole book where I was sort of like, this is interesting.

00:38:36.840 I didn't know this.

00:38:38.540 So you know what?

00:38:40.140 I forgive him.

00:38:41.160 You learned a single thing.

00:38:42.160 You learned a thing.

00:38:43.160 Yeah.

00:38:44.100 It's sort of hard to explain the various ways in which he's dishonest because they aren't always immediately obvious.

00:38:51.420 His style of writing is really to compress and compile a ton of different stories and

00:38:57.060 anecdotes and data points and just sort of rattle through them.

00:39:01.560 So it's hard to fact check everything. 0.98

00:39:04.000 But at various points, he would say something that just like set off my bullshit detector 0.54

00:39:08.000 and I like had to look into it. 0.84

00:39:10.360 So at one point, he's talking about Chesa Boudin, the now recalled former progressive

00:39:15.440 DA in San Francisco.

00:39:17.540 That's why we don't have crime in San Francisco anymore.

00:39:19.360 This movie was called The Soft-On-Crime Prosecutor.

00:39:22.100 Schellenberger says, in 2020, Boudin announced that he was not going to prosecute street-level drug dealers because, in part, they are, quote, themselves victims of human trafficking.

00:39:33.560 I don't know about that.

00:39:34.860 So I looked it up.

00:39:35.900 I don't know about that.

00:39:36.360 And he didn't say that.

00:39:37.320 What he actually said was, quote, law enforcement should focus on drug suppliers rather than on the small-scale street-level sellers.

00:39:46.440 We also must create specialty courts for those sellers who are, in fact, themselves victims of human trafficking.

00:39:53.860 You don't have to agree with, like, his policy prescription.

00:39:56.840 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:57.260 But he didn't say that they're not prosecuting street-level dealers because they are themselves victims of human trafficking.

00:40:04.920 This is just, like, Michael Schellenberger, like, not understanding how, like, language works.

00:40:08.440 Right, right.

00:40:09.800 And I'm going to send you another one.

00:40:11.520 And this is very short and I'm only sending it to you because I want to get your reaction to it in real time.

00:40:18.720 OK. All right.

00:40:20.180 In 2020, a Seattle city counselor introduced legislation to order the district attorney to stop enforcing laws if they are committed by the poor, the mentally ill or people with substance use disorders.

00:40:33.180 Crime is legal in Seattle.

00:40:34.300 Have I not mentioned this, Peter?

00:40:35.440 It's actually the purge at all times. 0.99

00:40:37.100 If your brain is doing good, if you have like any semblance of a bullshit meter in your 0.70

00:40:43.440 head, you should be able to read that and just immediately know that it's not true. 0.99

00:40:48.980 The thing is, I actually beat somebody to death on the street recently and the cops

00:40:52.620 are like, hey, you're under arrest. 0.74

00:40:53.800 I was like, no, I'm gay. 0.90

00:40:55.660 That's right.

00:40:55.900 I have an identity.

00:40:56.620 And they're like, all right, please proceed.

00:40:58.500 Officer, I am a podcaster.

00:41:00.620 So what actually happened here is that one council member in Seattle, Lisa Herbold, proposed

00:41:05.280 creating a legal defense for people who commit misdemeanors as a result of behavioral health

00:41:11.760 issues or poverty. We don't actually know the details of this proposal because it never made

00:41:16.840 it past the sort of like initial proposal stage. But the idea wasn't that you just get off the

00:41:21.520 hook for like assault for being poor. It was that you might get the charge dismissed if you could

00:41:26.780 show that the crime was committed to meet, quote, an immediate basic need. We don't need to dig into

00:41:33.220 the details. I'm not even saying this is like a good idea or whatever, but I am saying that

00:41:38.040 Schellenberger's characterization of it is a straight up lie. He says the DA would be ordered

00:41:43.740 to stop enforcing laws against the poor and mentally ill. It's also funny because like in 0.97

00:41:49.360 practice, like the sort of the modern Republican Party would actually like crime to be legal if

00:41:54.900 you are rich. It's just the fact that crime being legal if you're poor is the part that actually

00:42:00.360 offends them right final phase of this episode we've learned so far that housing prices are not

00:42:07.720 driving homelessness and that progressives affinity for victims is what drives their

00:42:13.800 their crazy policy decisions but yes there's still the question of what schellenberger thinks the

00:42:19.240 solution is right is it like prison camps i feel like it's always just like ship them away i'm not

00:42:25.840 going to say that it's not prison camps he never really like sits down and just like concisely

00:42:33.020 lays out an affirmative plan for what should be done but if i were to in good faith piece together

00:42:40.440 his prescription for san francisco's homelessness problem it would be in three parts one optional

00:42:47.080 build more shelter beds okay two have police clear homeless encampments and three an aggressive

00:42:54.600 policy of forcible treatment for the mentally ill. So homeless camps in San Francisco and

00:43:02.800 elsewhere are like a big flashpoint for these debates. And his argument about these camps is

00:43:09.220 basically like a micro version of his big picture argument, right? Tolerance of drug use and lack of

00:43:15.920 law enforcement make these encampments desirable to many homeless people and give them no incentive

00:43:22.000 to improve their situation right he's very into anecdotes about homeless people in these camps

00:43:26.400 refusing help yeah of course he says quote of the 150 people moved during a single month of

00:43:32.960 homeless encampment cleanups in 2018 just eight people accepted the city's offer of shelter we

00:43:39.000 can't help them because they don't even want our help exactly a lot of them are just like resistant 0.61

00:43:42.580 to shelters and like then you've talked to actual fucking homeless people and they're like yeah the 0.97

00:43:46.340 shelters have fucking bed bugs right and you can't get any fucking sleep and they kick you out at 0.99

00:43:49.660 eight in the morning and there's nowhere to put your belongings and like a lot of the shelters 1.00

00:43:52.300 suck shit right people don't want to sleep in sucky conditions and like sleeping in a tent 0.97

00:43:56.700 on the side of the road is actually better than a lot of the shelters and the report that he's 0.99

00:44:01.360 citing for this has the reason that everyone turns down the shelter offer he omits it but

00:44:07.660 yeah again according to his own source the reason is that a prerequisite for entering the shelter

00:44:12.740 was giving up your tent and most belongings and the maximum stay in the shelter was seven days

00:44:19.080 So at the very best, one week later, you'd be back on the street with fewer possessions. 0.98

00:44:25.500 So I'm going to give up the way that I sleep so that I can sleep somewhere for one fucking 0.99

00:44:28.380 week. 0.95

00:44:28.860 Frankly, the fact that eight people accepted the offer is confusing to me.

00:44:32.980 You know, I want to be clear that there are many situations where people would prefer

00:44:36.640 to be on the streets when compared to shelters, and not all of them are good reasons, right?

00:44:42.380 Some of them are absolutely because of sobriety requirements, and that might not be because

00:44:47.420 of like pure addiction.

00:44:48.320 it might be because someone just wants to do drugs or doesn't give a shit yeah there's also 0.70

00:44:51.580 a difference between an offer of a shelter bed and an offer of actual housing yeah and i spoke 0.97

00:44:57.480 with people who said anecdotally their experience is that when if someone trusts that you are

00:45:02.400 actually giving them a real offer of housing they will accept it far more often they'll accept a

00:45:07.300 shelter bed so right yeah to just look at all of that and be like they don't even want help like 0.99

00:45:13.700 yeah you weren't even offering help you were offering to take their shit and give them a bed 0.95

00:45:18.400 for a week it's funny how we're both going out of our way to be like some homeless people are also 0.99

00:45:22.740 like pieces of shit we don't want we don't want a thing where it's like the noble homeless and like 0.97

00:45:27.740 every single homeless person is like they lost their job and they fell out of housing like some 1.00

00:45:31.800 people are like yeah kind of suck right and like that's also fine those people should also be

00:45:35.820 inside and it makes people on the left look naive sometimes to create a a steel man homeless person 0.94

00:45:43.940 who's doing everything right but still things aren't going going great for them that person

00:45:48.860 exists but right if you present that image in these discussions i think it allows people to

00:45:56.080 brush off what you're saying because you just come across like someone who's excessively naive

00:46:00.320 some people like doing meth because like it's fun and they like want to do it right and what

00:46:04.940 makes us progressives that we believe that those people should be the president. So what

00:46:09.940 Schellenberger implies in the books is you clear the camps, but you provide shelter beds so that

00:46:17.360 people have somewhere to go when you do. Right. Makes sense. And the fact that San Francisco

00:46:23.060 doesn't have enough shelter beds is a prominent part of his argument. The reason that I say that

00:46:28.420 he considers shelter beds optional is because to date, San Francisco has not provided adequate

00:46:35.880 shelter beds. And yet Schellenberger has been an outspoken advocate for clearing the camps.

00:46:41.620 Again, the camps have been like this big political fight in San Francisco because many residents,

00:46:48.520 conservative interest groups, and moderate Democrats, including San Francisco's mayor,

00:46:54.600 London Breed, wants to see them cleared. But there is a problem for those people,

00:46:59.280 which is that there's a case from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Federal Court of

00:47:02.860 Appeals, Martin v. Boise, which says that you cannot legally clear camps unless the city

00:47:07.640 has provided the residents of those camps with a place to go. And I guess that means that the

00:47:13.740 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has not heard of a little thing called victimology. But the fighting

00:47:22.140 on this in california is like very high profile elon musk called for a boycott of the law firm

00:47:28.220 that did the pro bono work representing the homeless people here the mayor has said that

00:47:33.980 san francisco is being held hostage by the homeless coalition governor gavin newsom said the court

00:47:41.080 rulings were preposterous uh schellenberger has taken to calling the encampments homeless rape

00:47:47.420 camps oh my god yeah all of them sort of like quietly alighting the fact that like legally

00:47:53.760 they can clear the camps they just need to provide the people that they displace with shelter yeah

00:47:59.820 the the reason i'm sort of like harping on this is because the sort of central element of what

00:48:07.540 schellenberger is proposing is to jack up the cruelty to disincentivize people from living on

00:48:13.980 the streets. The purpose of these laws is the comfort of non-homeless people. And you can tell

00:48:18.800 by like this kind of shit, where it's sort of like an afterthought, like, yeah, there's no 1.00

00:48:23.140 shelters, which like if you live next to a homeless encampment, for you, getting rid of 0.99

00:48:28.300 the homeless encampment is priority number one. And it is kind of an afterthought. What happens

00:48:32.920 to them afterwards? Right. But if you're actually a homeless person, if you get kicked out of a

00:48:37.620 homeless encampment, right, a cop comes, they typically like rip up your tent so you can't

00:48:41.280 reuse it. Oftentimes they take all your shit. And then you're just there. You're just outside on the 1.00

00:48:45.660 street with nowhere to go. So, you know, Schellenberger wants to break up the camps,

00:48:50.480 but he knows that that only scatters people across the city. And that's why you need phase

00:48:56.460 two of his plan, which is forcing large numbers of those homeless people into psychiatric hospitals.

00:49:03.560 Yeah, this is basically just like a return to like the 1960s, isn't it?

00:49:07.020 That's right. This is basically reversing the deinstitutionalization of the late 20th century

00:49:13.300 and making it easier to involuntarily commit someone to a mental hospital.

00:49:18.580 So a little bit of history here. Prior to the mid-century, we had a wide array of people in

00:49:25.160 psychiatric facilities. The conditions were awful. There was a series of abuse scandals that sort of

00:49:31.420 turned public sentiment against the institutions. And that combined with the advent of antipsychotic

00:49:38.160 medications and concerns about civil liberties that sort of bubbled up in the 60s led to the

00:49:43.360 deinstitutionalization movement. The idea was that we would move away from these facilities and toward

00:49:48.100 community-based resources. Now, of course, those resources were never adequately funded. And so we

00:49:54.340 end up where we are today with a ton of untreated mental illness. Schellenberger harps on the fact

00:50:00.360 that like he's like liberals blame reagan for this but actually it wasn't really reagan it

00:50:05.180 predates reagan and there's some truth to that reagan didn't exactly make it easier to be poor

00:50:09.080 in this country or uh to have untreated mental illness in this country but deinstitutionalization

00:50:15.600 predates reagan that's true this is a little bit like those people that say that the volcanoes

00:50:20.400 were going to kill off the dinosaurs like if the asteroid hadn't hit which my understanding is like

00:50:26.180 is true, but also like the asteroid did hit. But I think one thing to keep in mind and one

00:50:30.880 thing that he points out is that deinstitutionalization was a progressive cause. Prior

00:50:36.220 to the 1970s or so, it was much, much easier for states to involuntarily commit people with mental

00:50:43.020 health issues. Now it's much harder and the person would need to be demonstrably dangerous to

00:50:49.620 themselves or others. So Schellenberger is advocating for rolling that back, though it's

00:50:55.940 not entirely clear exactly what standard he's advocating for. But in the 1950s, you could be

00:51:03.100 sent to a psychiatric facility for public drunkenness or drug addiction and then never see

00:51:10.600 freedom for the rest of your life. There's also a thing where like there definitely are like people

00:51:16.220 on the street, I feel like, who are like so disconnected from reality that like they clearly

00:51:19.800 need something, like some sort of care of the state, but not prison. Like right now we're

00:51:24.880 mostly using jails and prisons as our mental health services, which just like obviously isn't

00:51:30.180 working, right? I feel like the Schellenberger type argument always rests on this idea that like

00:51:35.640 it's too hard to do this in America. Like this idea that nobody can be involuntarily committed

00:51:40.680 when like we have these systems in place, but they're also like kind of underfunded as well.

00:51:45.260 a lot of hospitals I know in Washington state, like are already over prescribed with people

00:51:50.340 like this. It's not just a matter of like, finally, like the, the progressive grip on the

00:51:55.680 criminal justice system finally needs to lift so we can start committing people. That's really not

00:52:00.320 the barrier. Well, here's, here's the thing is that like, when we actually had these systems,

00:52:05.280 what was happening was that these people weren't actually receiving treatment. They were just

00:52:09.900 functionally in prison with the actual difference being that they couldn't get out. It's not like

00:52:15.240 they were sentenced to three years or something. They were just stuck in a facility until someone

00:52:22.160 deemed them fit to leave. And often that never happened. But he's putting forward this like

00:52:29.140 purely theoretical policy argument here where it's like, oh, we will do mental health, but good this

00:52:35.420 time. And also then we're back to spending more money on it. Like this is what's always so weird

00:52:40.520 to me about like the discourse around this is like nobody wants to spend money on like housing

00:52:44.200 first or shelters or like the stuff that we need to do because it's like, oh, we're throwing money

00:52:47.660 at people who don't deserve it. But then like imprisoning homeless people for like sleeping on

00:52:52.600 the street is also expensive. And like potential lifetime commitment of people with schizophrenia

00:52:57.760 is also very expensive. So like ultimately we're spending fucking money. Very, very American to 0.99

00:53:02.520 think that hurting people is priceless. You know, you just can't put you can't put a dollar figure

00:53:07.600 you're on it. MasterCard. So that's the book. I do want to talk about the sort of postscript for

00:53:14.940 Schellenberger. This book is like part of his attempt to run for governor in 2020, The Failed

00:53:21.900 Recall of Gavin Newsom. He is sort of doing this while also being a COVID crank online. He has

00:53:31.200 moved on to trans people. Of course. And was, of course, one of the people who Elon Musk tapped 1.00

00:53:38.100 to publish the Twitter files, which I'm not going to explain on this podcast.

00:53:43.220 Yeah, Jesus Christ.

00:53:44.060 It's pretty good evidence that you are like a fake independent journalist who's actually a 0.96

00:53:48.960 reactionary freak. Yeah. When you're getting like, quote unquote, 0.98

00:53:51.400 leaks from a billionaire to do is like reactionary bidding. Right.

00:53:55.560 It's like not you like afflicting the comfortable.

00:53:57.520 I don't think that his book is compelling, but it does read as effective propaganda to me. He is deep enough in the space that he can sort of use the vocabulary of progressives and the academics on these issues.

00:54:13.460 And that's how I think he got himself into this space where he's like lauded on the right as like a foremost expert in policy, when in fact, he's just a guy who like started reading about it and like took an aggressive position.

00:54:30.600 That's that's it.

00:54:31.400 I think in the sort of overall framing of this as like a progressive issue, like how progressives ruined cities and then using homelessness as an example, to the extent that like there is a anti-progressive case to make, I do think that progressives underestimate the extent to which this is acting as an engine of radicalization for like people who live in cities.

00:54:51.960 You know, I think the reality here is that progressives have not been able to cleanly articulate a satisfying answer to the homelessness question, right?

00:55:05.000 You go to San Francisco, you see an encampment of people where there's open drug use and it feels a little dangerous.

00:55:13.260 Saying, well, we need to provide these people with housing is not a satisfying answer when the alternative is we need to just clear these people out.

00:55:20.780 Right. One of those is very clearly, if you look at the data, an effective solution. And one of

00:55:26.560 them is very clearly not. Totally. That's a real problem for progressives. I'm not sure that I know

00:55:30.540 the solution to it, but that's why shit like this is so effective because you look like a naive 1.00

00:55:36.700 chump to a lot of people when you start talking about like, well, we need to help them. Right. 0.99

00:55:40.600 Right. I don't know about other cities as well, but in Seattle, we're in this doom loop where

00:55:44.480 the primary approach to homelessness is like policing. It's all this kind of punitive stuff.

00:55:50.260 It's basically what Schellenberger wants.

00:55:52.240 Like we're doing a ton of encampments.

00:55:54.100 We don't have enough shelters.

00:55:55.260 We do housing first, but we're not funding it adequately so there's not that many units.

00:55:58.740 And then over and over again, we get these reactionary mayoral candidates who get into

00:56:04.540 office going, it's time to stop being soft on homelessness.

00:56:07.980 Sort of parallels to like the police funding arguments.

00:56:10.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:56:11.080 Where it's like progressives want to defund the police and look at what a catastrophe

00:56:14.580 their cities are.

00:56:15.360 And it's like, OK, the police in every major city are extremely well funded.

00:56:19.480 So if that's the solution, it would already be working.

00:56:22.980 Like we are already doing the conservative thing in just about every major city on these

00:56:28.380 issues.

00:56:28.940 I do feel like also this kind of overall framing of like how progressives ruin cities, I think

00:56:34.440 like assumes that there's some sort of conservative alternative, right?

00:56:38.580 And if conservatives had been running cities this whole time, we wouldn't have homelessness

00:56:43.020 problems.

00:56:43.480 But like you could argue that the reason homelessness is so bad is because of conservative

00:56:47.600 policies, right?

00:56:48.500 It's like erosion of the safety net.

00:56:49.760 But then also I just don't think that homelessness actually follows partisan lines all that well.

00:56:56.440 I think there's just like a bipartisan understanding that like we shouldn't be giving any free stuff to homeless people.

00:57:03.240 There is like a severe misapprehension in the general population about what exactly liberal cities policies toward homeless people are.

00:57:12.180 The sort of estimation of how far left like the San Francisco City Council is, for example, is wildly off base. Right.

00:57:22.940 The reality is that the sort of like activists and scholars and whoever who are like really all about building affordable housing and making it easier to build affordable housing and housing and housing homeless people as like a number one priority are a fringe in politics in major cities.

00:57:43.980 Yeah. Housing first is the stated approach of many major cities, including San Francisco.

00:57:50.540 But that doesn't mean that they're actually taking steps to facilitate it.

00:57:53.620 Years ago, I was writing an article on conspiracy theorists and I talk to this dude who's like super duper far right QAnon guy.

00:57:59.760 And I was asking him, like, well, if you were president, like, what would you do with like criminal justice stuff? 1.00

00:58:03.780 And he's like, I'll tell you what, I would stop coddling black people. 0.98

00:58:07.000 And I was like, is it your understanding that the criminal justice system of the United States coddles black people? 1.00

00:58:12.980 It's like this is like the factual universe that he is existing within. 0.62

00:58:18.680 And I feel like there's something similar on homeless people where it's like we're way too nice to homeless people. 0.96

00:58:22.640 It's like all of this stuff is based on this concept of homeless people as just like some group that just gets all these goodies and it just isn't fucking true.

00:58:30.060 You can see this in Schellenberger's discussion of victimology. 0.94

00:58:33.880 the position has become that it's straight up easier to be black to be a woman to be trans

00:58:41.600 that that uh liberal society caters to you yeah if you are any of those things right um and it

00:58:49.300 applies equally to homeless people the right the fact that progressives might step in and be like

00:58:55.700 seems like you're in a shitty situation here are some uh benefits we can provide to help alleviate

00:59:01.960 that, they see as like an overall advantage, right?

00:59:05.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:06.760 They're like, wow, you're just giving resources to homeless people.

00:59:10.140 I don't get resources.

00:59:11.720 Yeah.

00:59:12.500 All I get is a $400,000 PPP loan that I spent on six boats.

00:59:19.460 Yeah.

00:59:19.700 And my mortgage interest forgiven every year.

00:59:22.360 Yeah.

00:59:23.120 It's so clearly nonsense, but it's something that I think Schellenberger is trying to

00:59:28.560 articulate with his sort of victimology analysis.

00:59:31.760 And I didn't even get into the sort of criminal justice elements.

00:59:35.520 But like his whole argument there is basically that the new Jim Crow is wrong and that the

00:59:42.640 actual driver of mass incarceration is not like low level drug offenses and racism, but

00:59:47.340 just like an increase in violence in the black community.

00:59:50.560 He's touching on like real academic research.

00:59:53.200 There are like serious people who disagree with the new Jim Crow's analysis. 0.73

00:59:57.020 But what he's doing is basically being like, you might think that the way that we're treating black people or homeless people is unfair, but actually it's extremely fair. 0.93

01:00:10.860 And what we should be doing is maybe even treating them worse. 1.00

01:00:14.760 Right. 1.00

01:00:15.060 It's just sort of, you know, a slightly more serious version of I'd stop coddling black people or whatever. 1.00

01:00:22.200 Yeah, totally. 1.00

01:00:22.720 to accept to you you know peter it sounds like you're suggesting we do a whole bonus episode

01:00:25.660 about how conservatism is actually a religion actually if you think about it

If Books Could Kill - October 19, 2023

San Fransicko

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