Blue Death
2024-01-03 05:25:03 UTC
Thank Nancy Pelosi and all the East Coast Democrats for ruining
California.
"There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, SanCalifornia.
Francisco has lost the plotthat progressive leaders here have been
LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city.
And many San Franciscans have had enough," writes Nellie Bowles.
San Francisco was conquered by the United States in 1846, and two years
later, the Americans discovered gold. Thats about when my ancestors
camemy German great-great-great-grandfather worked at a butcher shop on
Jackson Street. The gold dried up but too many young men with outlandish
dreams remained. The little city, prone to earthquakes and fires, kept
growing. The Beats came, then the hippies; the moxie and hubris of the
place remained.
My grandmothers favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned
young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by,
groceries in hand. If someone wanted to travel by unicycle or be a white
person with dreadlocks or raise a child communally among a group of gays
or live on a boat or start a ridiculous-sounding company, that was just
fine. Between the bead curtains of my aunts house, I learned you had to
let your strangeness breathe.
It was always weird, always a bit dangerous. Once, when I was very
little, a homeless man grabbed me by the hair, lifting me into the air
for a moment before the guy dropped me and my dad yelled. For years I
told anyone who would listen that Id been kidnapped. But every
compromise San Francisco demanded was worth it. The hills are so steep
that I didnt learn to ride a bike until high school, but every day I
saw the bay, and the cool fog rolling in over the water. When puberty
hit, I asked the bus driver to drop me off where the lesbians were, and
he did. A passenger shouted that he hoped Id find a nice girlfriend,
and I waved back, smiling, my mouth full of braces and rubber bands.
So much has been written about the beauty and mythology of this city
that maybe its superfluous to add even a little more to the ledger. If
he ever got to heaven, Herb Caen, the towns beloved old chronicler,
once said, hed look around and say, It aint bad, but it aint San
Francisco. The cliffs, the stairs, the cold clean air, the low-slung
beauty of the Sunset, the cafés tucked along narrow streets, then Golden
Gate Park drawing you down from the middle of the city all the way to
the beach. Its so goddamn whimsical and inspiring and temperate; so
full of redwoods and wild parrots and the smell of weed and sourdough,
brightly painted homes and backyard chickens, lines for the oyster bar
and gorgeous men in chaps at the leather festival. But its maddening
because the beauty and the mythologythe preciousness, the
self-regardare part of what has almost killed it. And I, now in early
middle age, sometimes wish it werent so nice at all.
But I do need you to love San Francisco a little bit, like I do a lot,
in order to hear the story of how my city fell apartand how it just
might be starting to pull itself back together.
Because yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district
attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didnt
seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in
service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. Its
not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from
housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plotthat progressive
leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to
create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.
On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the citys new
Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. Its downtown, an
open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the
sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching.
Theres a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned
with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it,
stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the
enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes,
referrals for housing. Its basically a safe space to shoot up. The city
government says its trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks
like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded
by half-eaten boxed lunches.
A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and
office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present
community of the homeless. Ive walked the corner a thousand times. Now
the homelessand those who care for the homelessare the only ones left.
During the first part of the pandemic, San Francisco County lost more
than one in 20 residentsmyself among them. Signs of the citys pandemic
decline are everywherethe boarded-up stores, the ghostly downtown, the
encampments. But walking these streets awakens me to how bad San
Francisco had gotten even before the coronavirus hitto how much
suffering and squalor Id come to think was normal.
Stepping over peoples bodies, blurring my eyes to not see a dull needle
jabbing and jabbing again between toesit coarsened me. Id gotten used
to the idea that some people just want to live like that. I was even a
little defensive of it: Hey, its America. Its your choice.
If these ideas seem facile or perverse, well, theyre not the only ones
Id come to harbor. Before I left, Id gotten used to the idea of
housing so expensive that it would, as if by some natural law, force
couples out of town as soon as they had a kid. San Francisco now has the
fewest children per capita of any large American city, and a $117,400
salary counts as low-income for a family of four.
Id gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to
leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least
quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass
stating some variation of Nothings in the car. Don't smash the windows.
One time someone smashed our windows just to steal a scarf. Once, when I
was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with
it, I didnt even shout for help. I was embarrassedwhat was I, a
tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal
thing to do then was to yell, to try to get helpeven, dare I say it,
from a police officerbut this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.
A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the
street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept
outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police
arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group
noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didnt have to get
into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So thats
what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the
sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a
block away.
It was easier to ignore this kind of suffering amid the throngs of
workers and tourists. And you could always avert your gaze and look at
the beautiful city around you. But in lockdown the beauty became
obscene. The city couldnt get kids back into the classroom; so many
people were living on the streets; petty crime was rampant. I used to
tell myself that San Franciscos politics were wacky but the city was
tryingreally tryingto be good. But the reality is that with the
smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San
Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive
that maintaining the purity of the politics required acceptingor at
least ignoringdevastating results.
But this dogmatism may be buckling under pressure from reality. Earlier
this year, in a landslide, San Francisco voters recalled the head of the
school board and two of her most progressive colleagues. These are the
people who also turned out Boudin; early results showed that about 60
percent of voters chose to recall him.
Read: Why California wants to recall its most progressive prosecutors
Residents had hoped Boudin would reform the criminal-justice system and
treat low-level offenders more humanely. Instead, critics argued that
his policies victimized victims, allowed criminals to go free to
reoffend, and did nothing to help the citys most vulnerable. To
understand just how noteworthy Boudins defenestration is, please keep
in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans. This
fight is about leftists versus liberals. Its about idealists who think
a perfect world is within reachitll only take a little more time, a
little more commitment, a little more funding, foreverand those who are
fed up.
If youre going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place
to do it. The fog keeps things temperate. Theres nowhere in the world
with more beautiful views. City workers and volunteers bring you food
and blankets, needles and tents. Doctors come to see how the fentanyl is
progressing, and to make sure the rest of you is all right as you go.
In February 2021, at a corner in the lovely Japantown neighborhood, just
a few feet from a house that would soon sell for $4.8 million, a
37-year-old homeless man named Dustin Walker died by the side of the
road. His body lay there for at least 11 hours. He wore blue shorts and
even in death clutched his backpack.
I cant stop thinking about how long he lay there, dead, on that corner,
and how normal this was in our putatively gentle city. San Franciscans
are careful to use language that centers peoples humanityyou dont say
a homeless person; you say someone experiencing homelessnessand yet
we live in a city where many of those people die on the sidewalk.
Here is a list of some of the organizations that work with the city to
fight overdoses and to generally make life more pleasant for the people
on the street: Street Crisis Response Team, EMS-6, Street Overdose
Response Team, San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team, Street Medicine and
Shelter Health, DPH Mobile Crisis Team, Street Wellness Response Team,
and Compassionate Alternative Response Team. The city also funds
thousands of shelter beds and many walk-in clinics.
The budget to tackle homelessness and provide supportive housing has
been growing exponentially for years. In 2021, the city announced that
it would pour more than $1 billion into the issue over the next two
years. But almost 8,000 people remain on the streets.
Alison Hawkes, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Health, said
money spent on the well-being of the homeless goes to good use: Many
people end up remaining on the street but in a better situation. Their
immediate needs are taken care of.
But many are clearly in an awful situation. San Francisco saw 92 drug
deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that
year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID.
Read: I dont know that I would even call it meth anymore
Of course, you cant blame the plague of meth and opioids on my
hometown. Fentanyl is a national catastrophe. But people addicted to
drugs come from all over the country in part for the services San
Francisco provides. In addition to the supervised drug-use facility in
the plaza, San Francisco has a specially sanctioned and city-maintained
slum a block from City Hall, where food, medical care, and counseling
are free, and every tent costs taxpayers roughly $60,000 a year. People
addicted to fentanyl come, too, because buying and doing drugs here is
so easy. In 2014, Proposition 47, a state law, downgraded drug
possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, and one that Boudin said he
wouldnt devote resources to prosecuting.
This approach to drug use and homelessness is distinctly San Franciscan,
blending empathy-driven progressivism with California libertarianism.
The roots of this belief system reach back to the 60s, when hippies
filled the streets with tents and weed. The city has always had a soft
spot for vagabonds, and an admirable focus on care over punishment.
Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that
people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in
tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical
decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then
fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents.
When the pandemic began, the drug crisis got worse.
In 2019, someone posted a picture in a Facebook group called B.A.R.T.
Rants & Raves, where people complain about the state of the regional
transportation system. The photo was of a young man, slumped over on a
train. People were chiming in about how gross the city was.
A woman named Jacqui Berlinn wrote in the comments, simply: Thats my
son.
His name is Corey Sylvester and hes 31 years old. She posted a photo of
him when he was sober: May he return there soon.
Berlinn has five children, and is also raising Sylvesters daughter.
Since she posted that comment, shes become an activist, calling on the
city to crack down on drug sales, put dealers in jail, and arrest her
son so hes forced to become sober in jail, which she sees as the only
way to save his life. She told me that she feels San Francisco has
failed people like him: Nothing that is being done is improving the
situation. Her work is nonpartisan, she said, but Id be lying if I
didnt say I really want to see Boudin recalled.
Not long ago, we met on a stoop by the Civic Center, where her son used
to hang out. She hadnt seen him in months, but she spoke with him
periodically. She cried as she talked about his journey into drugs. She
said he was a heroin addict. Hed get sober after stints in jail, but it
wouldnt last. Id see him sometimes, and he didnt look that bad, and
that was how it was for 10 years, she told me. But then the dealers
started putting fentanyl in everything, and being on fentanyl, its
changed him, deteriorated him so rapidly Before, he looked pretty
healthy and smiling. And now hes got this stoop. He walks almost at a
40-degree angle, like an old man.
Hes been stabbed twice. He got an infection in his thumb, and she
thought he might lose the hand. They need to stop ignoring the fact
that there are people out here selling fentanyl on the streets, she
said. When it was just heroinI cant believe Im saying just heroin.
Fentanyl is different. Were normalizing people dying.
One day, Berlinn was out looking for Corey in the Tenderloin
neighborhood when she came across someone elses son. He was naked in
front of Safeway And he was saying he was God and he was eating a
cardboard box.
She called the police. Officers arrived but said there was nothing they
could do; he said he didnt want help, and he wasnt hurting anyone.
They said its not illegal to be naked; people are in the Castro naked
all the time They just left him naked eating cardboard on the street
in front of Safeway.
What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin
Walkerthese are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism,
of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a
vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the
best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the
suffering is just judging someone whos having a mental-health episode,
and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of
someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican.
If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San
Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that
choice.
Last year, I bought my wife her wedding ring at a beautiful little
antique store a few blocks from my childhood home. It was ransacked at
the end of December. The shaken owner posted a video; the showcases were
empty and the whole place was covered in glass.
You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their
meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent
crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest
rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes
like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the
reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019.
Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more
car break-insand far more property theft overallper capita than cities
like Atlanta and Los Angeles.
The head of CVS Healths organized-crime division has called San
Francisco one of the epicenters of organized retail crime. Thefts in
San Franciscos Walgreens are four times the national average. Stores
are reducing hours or shutting down. Seven Walgreens closed between last
November and February, and some point to theft as the reason. The city
is doing strikingly little about it. About 70 percent of shoplifting
cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15
percent did.
Annie Lowrey: The people vs. Chesa Boudin
The movement to decriminalize shoplifting in San Francisco began in 2014
with Proposition 47, the state law that downgraded drug possession and
also recategorized the theft of merchandise worth less than $950 as a
misdemeanor. It accelerated in 2019 with the election of Boudin as
district attorney.
It is difficult to remember now, but the Boudin election was thrilling
for the city. It occurred during the heights of rage against President
Donald Trump, when more and more people were becoming aware of police
violence against Black people and demanding criminal-justice reforms.
London Breed, the citys first Black female mayor, wanted a liberal
moderate for D.A., but Boudin ran to the left as a fierce progressive
ideologue whose worldview was shaped by his imprisoned parents, members
of the Weather Underground. He was a public defender, not a prosecutor
at all. He had worked in Venezuela and in 2009 congratulated the former
dictator Hugo Chávez for abolishing term limits. Boudin was a
charismatic figure. His campaign manager called him a national movement
candidate.
The Police Officers Association fought hard against him, spending
$400,000 on a barrage of attack ads, according to the San Francisco
Examiner. They didnt work. At Boudins election party, a city
supervisor led the crowd in a chant of Fuck the POA. During his
campaign, Boudin said he wouldnt prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He
wanted to break the cycle of recidivism by addressing the social
causes of crimepoverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was
selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.
But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own
property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they
sell.
It has become no big deal to see someone stealing in San Francisco.
Videos of crimes in process go viral fairly often. One from last year
shows a group of people fleeing a Neiman Marcus with goods in broad
daylight. Others show people grabbing what they can from drugstores and
walking out. When a theft happens in a Walgreens or a CVS, theres no
big chase. The cashiers are blasé about it. Aisle after aisle of
deodorant and shampoo are under lock and key. Press a button for the
attendant to get your dish soap.
The rage against Boudin was related to that locked-up soap, but it went
far beyond it.
Under Boudin, prosecutors in the city could no longer use the fact that
someone had been convicted of a crime in the past to ask for a longer
sentence, except in extraordinary circumstances. Boudin ended cash
bail and limited the use of gang enhancements, which allow harsher
sentences for gang-related felonies. In most cases he prohibited
prosecutors from seeking charges when drugs and guns were found during
minor traffic stops. We will not charge cases determined to be a racist
pretextual stop that leads to recovery of contraband, Rachel Marshall,
the district attorneys director of communications, told me.
Boudin is a big proponent of collaborative courts that focus on
rehabilitation over jail time, such as Veterans Justice Court and
Behavioral Health Court, and under his tenure they tried more cases than
ever before. In 2018, less than 40 percent of petty-theft cases were
sent to these programs, compared with more than 70 percent last year.
Marshall said it was the judges who decided which cases to divert, not
Boudin, and eligibility rules for the collaborative courts have loosened
in recent years. But critics also pointed out that Boudin got fewer
convictions overall: 40 percent in 2021, compared with about 60 percent
under his predecessor.
About 60 prosecutors had left since Boudin took officeclose to half of
his team. Some retired or were fired, but others quit in protest. I
talked with two who joined the recall campaign. One of them, a homicide
prosecutor named Brooke Jenkins, told me she left in part because Boudin
was pressuring some lawyers to prosecute major crimes as lesser
offenses. (Marshall said this was a lie.) She couldnt be part of it.
The victims feel hopeless, Jenkins told me. They feel he has lost
their opportunity for justice. Right now what they see and feel is that
his only concern is the criminal offender. (I wouldnt be surprised to
see Jenkins run for D.A. herself, though this isnt something shes
floated yet.)
A 2020 tweet from the Tenderloin police station captured the frustration
of the rank and file: Tonight, for the fifteenth (15th) time in 18
months, and the 3rd time in 20 days, we are booking the same suspect at
county jail for felony motor vehicle theft.
Boudin has a rugged jawline and fast, tight answers for his critics. His
office vehemently rejected the argument that he wasnt doing enough to
tackle crime. The DA has filed charges in about 80 percent of felony
drug sales and possession for sales cases presented to our office by
police, Marshall pointed out. After all, he could prosecute people only
if the police arrested them, and arrest rates had plummeted under his
tenure. So how could that be his fault? But why had arrest rates
plummeted? The pandemic was one reason. But maybe it was also because
the D.A. said from the beginning that he would not prioritize the
prosecution of lower-level offenses. Police officers generally dont
arrest people they know the D.A. wont charge.
In 2020, I interviewed Boudin while working on a story for The New York
Times. When we talked about why he wasnt interested in prosecuting
quality-of-life crimes, he explained that street crime is small potatoes
compared with the high-level stuff he wants to focus on. (Kilos, not
crumbs is a favorite line.) He has suggested that many drug dealers in
San Francisco are themselves vulnerable and in need of protection. A
significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Franciscoperhaps
as many as halfare here from Honduras, he said in a 2020 virtual town
hall. We need to be mindful about the impact our interventions have
Some of these young men have been trafficked here under pain of death.
Some of them have had family members in Honduras who have been or will
be harmed if they dont continue to pay off the traffickers.
Read: His dad got a chance at clemency. Then his baby was born.
Of course there is good in what Boudin was trying to do. No one wants
people incarcerated for unfair lengths of time. No one wants immigrants
relatives to be killed by MS-13. Few of Boudins policy
ideasindividually, and sometimes with reasonable limitationsare
indefensible. (Ending cash bail for truly minor offenses, for instance,
protects people from losing their job and more while in jail.) But as
with homelessness, the citys overall take on criminal-justice reform
moved well past the point of common sense. Last month a man who had been
convicted of 15 burglary and theft-related felonies from 2002 to 2019
was rearrested on 16 new counts of burglary and theft; most of those
charges were dismissed and he was released on probation. It really
didnt inspire confidence that the city was taking any of this
seriously.
Boudins defenders liked to dismiss his critics as whiny tech bros or
rich right-wingers. One pro-Boudin flyer said stop the right-wing
agenda. But the drumbeat of complaints came from plenty of good
liberals, and so did the votes against him. If it were only the rich,
well, the rich can hire private security, or move to the suburbs. And
many do. Theyre not the only people who live here, and theyre not the
only ones who got angry.
It may not have been so clear until now, but San Franciscans have been
losing patience with the citys leadership for a long time. Nothing did
more to alienate them over the years than how the progressive leaders
managed the citys housing crisis.
Consider the story of the flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street. It slopes
down 2.2 acres in the sunny southern end of the city and is filled with
run-down greenhouses, the glass long shattereda chaos of birds and wild
roses. For five years, advocates fought a developer who was trying to
put 63 units on that bucolic space. They wanted to sell flowers there
and grow vegetables for the neighborhooda kind of banjo-and-beehives
utopian fantasy. The thing they didnt wantat least not there, not on
that pretty hillwas a big housing development. Who wants to argue
against them? In San Francisco the word developer is basically a slur,
close to calling someone a Republican. What kind of monster wants to
bulldoze wild roses?
Decades of progressive governance in San Francisco yielded a thicket of
regulationssafety reviews, environmental reviews, historical reviews,
sunlight-obstruction reviewsthat empower residents to essentially
paralyze development. It costs only $682 to file for a discretionary
review that can hold up a construction project for years, and if youre
an established club thats been around for at least two years, its
free. Plans for one 19-unit-development geared toward the middle class
were halted this year because, among other issues raised by the
neighbors, the building would have increased overall shadow coverage on
Dolores Park by 0.001 percent.
The cost of real estate hit crisis levels in the 2010s, as ambitious
grads from all over the world crammed into the hills to work in the
booming tech industry. Soon, there was nowhere for them to live. Tech
workers moved into RVs, parked alongside the poor and unhoused. Illegal
dorms sprang up. Well-paid young people gentrified almost every
neighborhood in town. In 2018, when London Breed was elected mayor at
the age of 43, she had only just stopped living with a roommate; she
couldnt afford to live alone.
Existing homeowners, meanwhile, got very, very rich. If all other
tactics fail, neighbors who oppose a big construction project can just
put it on the ballot. If given a choice, who would ever vote to risk
their property value going down, or say Yes, Im fine with a shadow
over my backyard? It doesnt happen.
Rage against this pleasant status quo has come from a faction of young
renters. I once went to a training session in the Mission District run
by a pro-housing group called YIMBYfor Yes in My Backyard. I watched
a PowerPoint presentation (And heres another reason to be mad at your
grandparents! Next slide.) and then joined the group for drinks.
The elderly NIMBYs literally hiss at people, said Steven Buss, who now
runs a moderate organizing team called GrowSF, about the tension at
community housing meetings. (One foggy night, at one of those meetings,
I heard the hissing, and it was funny, and the project they were talking
about never got built.)
Gabe Zitrin, a lawyer, popped in: Like 770 Woolsey. I love kale too,
but you could house 50 kids and their families on that site. Its about
priorities. They want a farm. Theyre selfish and theyre vain. A farm
does not serve the common good. I cant tell them not to want itbut I
can tell them that housing is what we need more. I dont want to end up
surrounded by a bunch of super-rich people and a farm.
The citys progressives seem to feel that it is all just too beautiful
and fragile to change. Any change will mean diminishment; any new,
bigger building means the old, charming one is gone, and the old,
charming resident is probably gone too. The flow of newcomers is out of
control; they should just stop coming here. The community gardens have
to stay, along with the sunlight spilling across the low buildings. No
one thinks about it as damning teachers and firefighters to
mega-commutes. No one thinks of it as kicking out the middle class.
Given the choice between housing people in sidewalk tents or in new
buildings that might risk blocking an inch of their view of the bay, San
Franciscans, for years, chose the tents.
The anger directed at Chesa Boudin probably could have been contained.
The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasnt what lit the city up for
revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but its been that way for
more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the
school board. And the population ready to rage was San Franciscos
parents.
The citys schools were shut for most of the 202021 academic
yearlonger than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San
Franciscos private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real
reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with
audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didnt have unilateral
power to reopen schools even if it wanted tothat depended on
negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers unionbut
many parents were appalled to find that the board members didnt even
seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They
didnt want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and
functionality. It seemed they couldnt be bothered with topics like
ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.
One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was
devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent
committee.
Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a
child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and
Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But
there was a problem: Brenzel is white.
My names Mari, one attendee said. Im an openly queer parent of
color that uses they/them pronouns. They noted that the parent
committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were
white). This was really, really problematic, they said. I bet there
are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer
QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.
Someone else called in, identifying herself as Cindy. She was calling to
defend Brenzel, and she was crying. He is a gay father of a mixed-race
family, she said.
A woman named Brandee came on the call: Im a white parent and have
some intersectionality within my family. My son has several
disabilities. And I really wouldnt dream of putting my name forward for
this. She had some choice words for Cindy: When white people share
these kinds of tears at board meetingsshe pauses, laughingI have an
excellent book suggestion for you. Its called White Tears/Brown Scars.
Id encourage you to read it, thank you.
Allison Collins, a member of the school board, dealt the death blow: As
a mixed-race person myself, I find it really offensive when folks say
that somebodys a parent of somebody whos a person of color, as, like,
a signifier that theyre qualified to represent that community.
Brenzel remained mostly expressionless throughout the meeting. He did
not say a word. Eventually the board agreed to defer the vote. He was
never approved.
The other big debate on these Zoom calls was whether to rename schools
named for figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, the
first female mayor of San Francisco. The board labeled these figures
symbols of a racist past, and ultimately voted to rename 44
injustice-linked schoolsthough after a backlash, the board suspended
the implementation of the changes.
The board members were arguably doing what they had been put there to
do. Collins and her two most progressive colleagues were elected in
2018, the year before Boudin, and it was a headier time, when Trumps
shadow seemed to loom over even the smallest local office. Collins had a
blog focused on justice in education, and there was a sense that she
would champion a radical new politics. But during the endless lockdown,
enthusiasm began to wane, even among many people whod voted for her.
They found themselves turned off by the boards combative toneas well
as by its actual ideas about education.
In February 2021, board members agreed that they would avoid the phrase
learning loss to describe what was happening to kids locked out of their
classrooms. Instead they would use the words learning change. Schools
being shut just meant students were having different learning
experiences than the ones we currently measure, Gabriela López, a
member of the board at the time, said. They are learning more about
their families and their cultures. Framing this as some kind of
deficit was wrong, the board argued.
That same month, the board voted to replace the rigorous test that
screened applicants for Lowell, San Franciscos most competitive high
school, with a lottery system. López had explained it this way: Grades
and standardized test scores are automatic barriers for students outside
of white and Asian communities. She said they have shown to be one of
the most effective racist policies, considering theyre used to attempt
to measure aptitude and intelligence. So the fact that Lowell uses this
merit-based system as a step in applying is inherently racist.
Collins echoed that: Merit is an inherently racist construct designed
and centered on white supremacist framing.
If you didnt like these changes, tough. A parent on Twitter accused
López of trying to destroy the school system, and she replied with the
words I mean this sincerely followed by a middle-finger emoji. In
July, on the topic of the declining quality of life in San Francisco,
she wrote, Im like, then leave.
Gabriela López must have thought that history was on her side. Boudin,
too. But things are turning out differently. If there was a tipping
point in this story, it was when the citys Asian American parents in
particular got really, really mad.
As Allison Collinss profile rose during the pandemic, critics started
looking through her old tweets. There were bad ones. In 2016, she had
written: Many Asian Americans believe they benefit from the model
minority BS. In fact many Asian American teachers, students and parents
actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to
assimilate and get ahead.
She also complained about Asian Americans not speaking out enough about
Trump: Do they think they wont be deported? Profiled? Beaten? Being a
house n****r is still being a n****r. Youre still considered the
help.
The San Francisco Bay Area is 52 percent white, 6.7 percent Black, and
23.3 percent Asian. And many Asian San Franciscans were horrified by the
tweets.
Her comments deeply insulted my family and the entire Chinese community
in San Francisco, Kit Lam told me. Lam is an immigrant from Hong Kong
with two children in public school. He works for the school district, in
the enrollment department, though he just learned that his job will be
eliminated next month. He said he knew what richer parents were doing
during the pandemic because he saw the paperwork: They were pulling
their kids out and sending them to private schools. Lam didnt have that
choice.
In April 2021, he started going on 1400 AM, the Bay Areas
Chinese-language radio station, to express his outrage. He spoke out
against school closures and the decision to get rid of the admissions
test for Lowell. Asian students have traditionally been overrepresented
at Lowell; getting in is one of the best ways for high-achieving poor
and middle-class kids in San Francisco to rise up the economic ladder.
Many people from his community agreed with him. They began gathering
signatures and raising money for a campaign to recall Collins, López,
and another progressive board member, Faauuga Moliga. Siva Raj, one of
the recall organizers, told me that roughly half of those volunteering
for the campaign spoke Chinese.
After the tweets came to light, a member of the board asked Collins to
voluntarily step down. But she refused. Instead, she sued five of her
fellow members. She also sued the district. She asked for $87 million,
citing, among other afflictions, severe mental, and emotional
distress, damage to self-image, and injury to spiritual solace.
Her case was tossed. And in February 2022, San Franciscans voted
decisively to remove all three from the board. A landslide 76 percent
voted to recall Collins, and the other two were recalled by about 70
percent each. They have been replaced by moderates, appointed by the
mayor. Collins and López slammed their opponents as agents of white
supremacy, but the turnout was diverse, and impressive, especially for a
special election: More people voted to recall the board members than had
cast votes for them in the first place.
Boudins opponents, likewise, came from all over the city. He liked to
say they were funded by elites, and the recall campaign did raise about
twice as much money. But wealthy people have donated to the pro-Boudin
campaign, too. The racial group that was most likely to say they wanted
Boudin recalled? Asian Americans. Their allies included many from the
remnants of the citys middle class, as well as the same sort of
swayable liberals who went from voting for Collins to recalling her.
Now a number of groups are trying to address quality-of-life issues in
the city. There is the new California Peace Coalition, which opposes the
open-air drug markets, and includes parents of drug users who are at
risk of or have died from overdose. Theres Innovate Public Schools and
Stop Crime SF, which are self-explanatory. Shine On SF is reigniting
civic pride by cleaning up the citys streets. SF.Citi is advocating
for the interests of tech workers.
For a long time, says Michelle Tandler, a start-up founder who
documented downtowns collapse on Twitter, San Francisco progressives
and Democrats were so focused on Trump that they werent paying
attention. Suddenly, theyre paying attention.
And Mayor Breed is responding. She was elected during the Trump
administration, like Boudin and the school board, and her approval
numbers are also faltering. But shes in a different mold. Breed is a
canny politician who knows which way the wind is blowing, and is open to
changing course depending on the results.
Just a few years ago, she had proudly embraced the defund the police
movement; no longer. This spring, after the citys gay-pride parade
banned police officers from marching in uniform, Breed announced that
out of solidarity, she wouldnt march either.
I took a stroll with her back in February. She had just given a press
conference on anti-Asian hate crimes outside a senior center in
Chinatown. As in places like New York, the city had seen a spike in the
reporting of hate crimes against Asians. People were scared. Breed grew
up in the citys projects and knows residents who have had family
members shot and killed recently. I know a lot of people who supported
Chesa because there was a strong push for criminal justice, she told
me. I dont think people believed that it meant that justice would not
occur. She added, Thats not justice reform, if everyone who commits
the crime is getting off for the crime. Now shell have a chance to
replace him.
As we talked, we walked through Chinatown, then up past the $7 million
homes of Russian Hill and down into North Beach. The bay lay ahead; the
cable-car drivers waved to the mayor; the citys problems seemed far
off. But Breed was angry, disappointed with the progressive faction and
how it had let the city down. A few months earlier, Breed had announced
a new approach to crime, starting with the Tenderloin, whose streets and
sidewalks are full of fentanyls chaos. She declared it to be in a state
of emergency and approved three months of funding for increased law
enforcement there.
The order was mostly symbolicthe drug problem isnt limited to a few
bad blocks. Often a sweep of the homeless just means pushing the tents
and dealers down the road. And anyone who lives in San Francisco knows
the Tenderloin has been an emergency for years. But it allowed the mayor
to trot out some new rhetoric: What Im proposing today and what I will
be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and
I dont care. It was time, she said, to be less tolerant of all the
bullshit that has destroyed our city.
My hometown isnt turning red on any electoral maps. But the shift is
real. The farm at 770 Woolsey? The developer finally has approval to
turn it into housing. If progressives have overplayed their hand, gotten
a little decadent in culture-war wins and stirring slogans, without the
good government to back them all up, San Francisco is showing the way
toward an internal reformation.
Before the school-board vote, the last local recall in San Francisco was
in 1983. There has not been this level of conflict at farmers markets,
where dueling signature-gatherers face off across from the
organic-dog-treat kiosk, in almost 40 years. This is, in part, because
until recently many San Franciscans were afraid. If a tech worker
complained, they were reviled. If an aging hippie complained, they were
a racist old nut. It was easier to blame all of our issues on
outsidersthose Silicon Valley interlopers who came in and ruined the
city. The drugs, the homelessness, the crimeblame the Google employees
who skewed the citys condo market and brought in their artisanal
chocolates, their scooters, their trendy barbers. If not for them and
the inequality they created, San Francisco would still be good.
Theres some truth to that: You cannot tell the story of the housing
crunch without the tech boom. But people started looking at City Hall,
and at the school board. They realized there were no tech bros there.
The fentanyl epidemic and the pandemic cracked something. With the city
locked down endlessly, with people dying in the streets, with schools
closed, it was slowly becoming okay to say Maybe this is ridiculous.
Maybe this isnt working.
Of course, itll take more than a couple of recall votes to save San
Francisco. When I asked Breed about the new center for addicts in the
plazathe creation of which she supportedshe seemed a little
uncomfortable and soon after wanted to wrap up our interview. She said
something vague about how not all change can happen at once.
NIMBYism and fentanyl are as much a part of the San Francisco landscape
now as the bridge and the fog. And the school board is still
school-boarding. At the end of May, it announced that the district would
no longer use the word chief in any job titles, out of respect for
Native Americans (despite the fact that the word actually comes from the
French chef).
The other day I walked by Millennium Tower. Once a symbol of the push to
transform our funky town into a big city, its a gleaming 58-story
skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco, and its been sinking into the
groundmore than a foot since it was finished in 2009. A group of men in
hard hats was just standing there, staring up at it. The metaphor is
obvious, but San Francisco has never been a subtle city. Id like to
believe those guys finally had a plan to fix the tower. At least they
seemed to accept that it needed fixing.
For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the
slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothings given me more
hope than the rage and the recalls. San Franciscans feel ashamed,
Michelle Tandler told me. I think for the first time people are like,
Wait, what is a progressive? Am I responsible? Is this my fault?
San Franciscans are now saying: We can want a fairer justice system and
also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: Its not
white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach
children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned.
San Franciscans tricked themselves into believing that progressive
politics required blocking new construction and shunning the immigrants
who came to town to code. We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis
and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the citys diversity,
even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the citys
actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls
mean theres a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city
go. And thank God.
Because Herb Caen was right. Its still the most beautiful city youll
ever see.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-becam
e-failed-city/661199/