San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities - Hardcover

Shellenberger, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0063093626 ISBN 13: 9780063093621

Publisher: Harper, 2021

Synopsis

National bestselling author of APOCALYPSE NEVER skewers progressives for the mishandling of America’s faltering cities. 

Progressives claimed they knew how to solve the homelessness crisis, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, from San Francisco to Seattle, progressives made those problems worse.

Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison. But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the public policy failures.

What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies. San Francisco and other West Coast cities ― Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland ― had gone beyond merely tolerating homelessness, drug dealing, and crime to actively enabling them.

San Fransicko reveals that the underlying problem isn’t a lack of housing or money for social programs. The real problem is an ideology that designates some people, by identity or experience, as victims entitled to destructive behaviors. The result is an undermining of the values that make cities, and civilization itself, possible.

This unflinching investigation confronts the root causes of urban decay head-on, revealing:

• The Failure of Housing First: Why spending billions more on housing―without addressing the underlying issues of addiction and mental illness―has failed to solve the problem in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
• The Ideology of Victimhood: An exploration of how a well-intentioned focus on social justice has led to policies that enable self-destructive behavior and erode the civic values that make city life possible.
• The Truth About Crime and Drugs: How the decriminalization of hard drugs and the refusal to prosecute quality-of-life crimes have contributed to open-air drug markets and a shocking decline in public order.
• A Path Forward: A pragmatic, evidence-based plan for restoring accountability, compassionate care, and functional cities by moving beyond the failed progressive policies of the past.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Shellenberger is the nationally bestselling author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” the winner of the 2008 Green Book Award from the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Center for Science Writings, and an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has written on energy and the environment for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Nature Energy, and other publications for two decades. Michael has broken major stories, including on the Twitter Files, for which he won the 2023 Dao Award for Journalism. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0063093626
• ISBN 13: 9780063093621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416