San Francisco Is Not Too Left, It's Too Unequal

On Nellie Bowles, Recalls, and Development

Nellie Bowles takes a victory lap in a rambling piece at the Atlantic about San Francisco, maybe, clawing its way back from progressive foolishness. She sees the signs of hope in the successful recalls of three school board members and a reform district attorney, but also in the permit approval, against the wishes of neighbors, to build condos on a piece of land in the southern part of the City. Aside from making it easier for developers, she doesn’t offer any concrete proposals to address houselessness, drug addiction, or petty theft, other than, perhaps, incarceration. Although she describes the obscene reality of human beings sleeping on sidewalks just meters away from multi-million dollar homes and condos, she doesn’t connect the dots. Instead, she chooses to blame leftist politics, NIMBYism, and various reforms that were either irrelevant (changing the names of schools) or barely attempted (prosecutorial reform). Ultimately, her piece comes across as the meandering reflections of a well-off person with reactionary ideas, who really does not want to be labeled “reactionary.”

Bowles focuses a lot on crime and, like Fox News and right-wing media, wants to paint San Francisco as a city out of control. Yet she relies heavily on anecdotes: the theft of a scarf from her car, people lying on the street near a new safe-injection site, viral videos of thefts from Walgreens. The most damning fact she cites is a 40% increase in burglaries since 2019. The few other facts she assembles are cherry-picked to sound bad, but leave out critical context.

She is forced to acknowledge that the City has relatively low violent crime rates and one of the lowest rates of homicide when compared with similar cities, but she claims that property crimes are high. She doesn't mention that, compared with many cities in the U.S., property crime rates are actually low or mostly average. Even shoplifting, which she devotes some column inches to by describing stuff she saw on the internet, is neither comparatively high nor trending higher in recent years (unless you believe whatever CVS or Walgreens happen to put in their press releases).

Then there are the homeless and people using drugs on the street. Again, she goes on about some of the scenes she’s seen or heard about from others, but doesn’t really offer any solutions. It’s clear she thinks the safe injection site is a bad idea, but what is her alternative?

She let an activist named Jacqui Berlinn provide one possibility. According to Bowles, Berlinn wants San Francisco police to, “arrest her son so he’s forced to become sober in jail …” Yet, she acknowledges that he had been arrested multiple times in the past: “He’d get sober after stints in jail, but it wouldn’t last.” So, perhaps the solution for Bowles is longer sentences, forced drug treatment, or something else. But it is definitely not whatever Chesa Boudin – the reform prosecutor who appears to have been recalled this week by about 15% of registered San Francisco voters – was trying to do.

Boudin had only been in office two years, and the reforms he implemented were both modest and vigorously resisted by some in his office and the police union. Bowles lists some of the reforms he made, such as halting the use of so-called “gang enhancements,” which had been used to get longer sentences. She doesn’t explain how these policy changes directly relate to any of her anecdotes. She certainly cannot explain how they have led to higher rates of crime, because then she'd have to actually grapple with the lack of data showing any such increase.

Not only does she have trouble with solutions, she doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of the source of the problems. If you can follow her narrative – where she connects the recall of a prosecutor, with that of some school board members, and then with the ease of opposing development – it seems she is blaming San Francisco residents who genuinely wanted progressives in charge and liberatory reforms; but now, seeing the results, are coming to their senses.

Indeed, she identifies locals as having a unique politics that, among other things, is responsible for houseless people living miserable lives on the streets and even dying: “What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin Walker—these 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.”

Never mind that most homeless advocates propose doing something very un-libertarian – giving homeless people housing – and leave aside that doing something for Bowles is apparently some form of mass incarceration, her attempt to pinpoint the problem as “progressive-libertarian nihilism” leading to a mish-mash of “woke” policies, modest reforms, and red tape for real estate developers is just confused. It seems to be just a collection of things left-leaning political actors do or support that she doesn’t like.

The muddled thesis isn’t surprising, since she skates around the big problem – one that is hardly new or unique to San Francisco – vast inequality. Maybe it is somewhat unique in that San Francisco is among a handful of cities where the super-rich want to live and invest. Yet, as with most major urban areas, it is also a city with thousands of houseless residents, rampant drug addiction, and theft. Above all of this is fierce political debate about how to deal with these very real problems; but even there, inequality plays a big role. Again, Bowles ignores this.

Despite prosecutor and school board member being very different roles, she connects the recalls by pointing to support for all of them from the Asian community, but makes no mention of another huge connection – a Republican billionaire who spent millions of his dollars to move them forward. By doing this, she ties herself into knots trying to otherwise put everything together. For example, having lived in San Francisco, I imagine many of those supporting the school board recall would also oppose real estate developments in their neighborhood. There’s nothing coherent about her collection-of-things-she-doesn’t-like argument other than it also happens to be the things property investors, wealthy business owners, and the risk management execs at corporate chains don’t like. Sure, locals sometimes share these dislikes, sometimes not, but it rarely maps onto the working-class residents as well as she presents it.

I spent 15 years living in San Francisco - from the Mission to the Sunset to the Excelsior. Based on Bowles’ narrative, she’s been an odd target for petty crime. In my time in the City, I was assaulted once by a man on the street – he slapped my coffee out of my hand and all over my work clothes – but otherwise can’t recall anything else happening directly to me. I regularly saw drug use in the Civic Center, witnessed a theft, and even discovered someone had been murdered just outside a bar I was in one night in the Mission. This was years before Boudin, and long before “Defund the Police” became a slogan. It was clear then that more police and more incarceration were not going to solve any of it, even if an aggressive dose of those things might hide the problems a bit more. After years of pushing for different solutions, the left finally had a movement to counter the tough-on-crime crowd. But with barely a new policy in place, the pushback has been fierce all over the country. Bowles’ writing is nothing more than part of this misguided reaction, untethered from facts, and offering nothing new.