I left San Francisco just in time — at the end of 2016. Sure, I saw the occasional junkie shooting up in public when I still worked in the city. And yes, I saw men use the sidewalk at the…
Politicians, government officials, and academic “experts” from coast to coast have been insisting for years that homelessness is a “national crisis,” as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass both claim. That is a misdiagnosis, deflecting responsibility away from cities…
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has a world of political ambitions. But problem No. 1 with that ambition is California’s homelessness crisis. An opponent need only show images of Sacramento’s, San Francisco’s, and Los Angeles’ streets, which are overrun with homeless…
So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being. — Franz Kafka I started volunteering at a soup kitchen a few years before the pandemic. The program that I volunteered for…
There were 195 fires in homeless encampments in Oakland, California, over two years that ended in March. In April, someone died in a fire sparked by the toxic-stew squalor in the area known as Wood Street. There are frequent fires…
As the corpse went past, the flies left the pizzeria in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later. Somehow the corpse — a homeless man — was still on his feet, staggering down…
What’s the matter with California? “It’s suffering from San Fransickness,” which is “pathological altruism,” answers Michael Shellenberger, author of the book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. Too many homeless people. Too little common sense. Too much magical thinking. Shellenberger…
Many Americans were outraged by recent news that the Biden administration flirted with funding crack pipes as a part of a harm reduction strategy. They would be equally outraged if they knew that a major “charity,” to which millions of…
New Yorker Michelle Go was pushed in front of a moving subway train, Sandra Shells was waiting for a bus in Los Angeles, and Brianna Kupfer was working in a furniture store when their lives were taken from them. All…