Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Posts

Hard To Believe: San Francisco Quarantines The Homeless In Commandeered Luxury Hotels.

/in /by

As the United States continues its “pause,” shuttering businesses and public spaces in order to prevent transmission of the coronavirus, residents are compelled to shelter inside their homes. Meantime, those who live on the streets remain outside. San Francisco is well known for its persistent homeless population, made up heavily of drug addicts, the mentally ill, or both. For now, individuals congregate in tents and encampments and drug suppliers continue to deal.

Before Covid-19 struck, San Francisco officials took no meaningful action to address the squalid conditions under which so many homeless people live. They threw money at the problem, but the problem grew. Homeless activists and some city leaders have argued that living on the street is a right, but today it presents a serious public-health dilemma: how will officials get homeless people to comply with social-distancing requirements, and what should they do with those who’ve contracted the virus?

The city is working to set up the Moscone Center as a shelter, a sensible idea. An even better one would be to revive the recently closed California Pacific Medical Center hospital campus and erect MASH-style medical units. These would allow for closely monitored and efficient care. In fact, the city could use this as an opportunity to provide intensive integrated treatment, including substance-abuse services.

Instead, Mayor London Breed and the Human Services Agency came up with the plan to route over 3,000 people currently living in shelters and navigation centers into hotels. The city is planning to put thousands of physically and psychologically sick people into private hotel rooms, in some of the most luxurious hotels in San Francisco—the InterContinental, Mark Hopkins, and The Palace. Occupants would receive three meals per day, hygiene products, and access to nurses.

At first glance, the plan appears sensible. The shutdown has devastated the hospitality industry, and hotels stand empty. Filling rooms with guests of any kind is attractive for hotel owners, especially since tax dollars will foot nearly all of the bill.

On closer examination, however, serious problems emerge. According to Matt Haney, a city supervisor actively promoting the proposal, occupants would be quarantined to their assigned rooms and be required to follow strict rules. But many of these future luxury hotel guests are hardcore drug addicts. How will the city manage their drug needs in the midst of a pandemic?

Haney concedes that intravenous drug use presents a major challenge to the city’s plan. It’s likely, for instance, that many guests will overdose in their rooms. Others may detox, alone and in agony. Providing addicts with access to maintenance medication such as Suboxone or methadone is a good idea, Haney says, yet these treatments require precise administration. No one has figured out the logistics of providing drug treatment to thousands of addicted residents who may not be interested in receiving it.

Additionally, if the hotels are quarantined, and drug dealers aren’t allowed in, what will prevent the contagious residents from leaving to score the substances they seek? As cravings intensify, violence may erupt that can put hotel staff and other occupants at risk. Armed security guards patrolling the halls and buildings might be required to keep the right people in and the wrong people out. Could the police be expected to maintain order and prevent antisocial drug addicts from leaving their rooms? Apparently the city will offer some type of case management, but there’s already a dearth of needed homeless services, including high-quality psychiatric care. Treating this service-resistant population is challenging under the best circumstances. “It’s not going to be a perfect system,” says Haney.

There’s also no exit plan. A four-month contract for the room occupants is being considered, but where all these people will go afterward is undetermined. California law stipulates that a person lodging in a hotel room for longer than 30 days is considered a tenant. Therefore, thousands of homeless people who have stayed in the posh hotels would become legal permanent residents, with protections against eviction.

Even Haney acknowledges the problem. “The city should make it clear that they would not be considered tenants,” he says. “It needs to be temporary. Once the emergency is over, they should leave.” Yet sending people back onto the streets will surely be met with resistance from homeless-rights activists, some government officials, and the homeless themselves. Who would want to pack up and move from The Palace, after all?

Few of the city’s decision-makers are looking at the long-term effects of placing sick, drug-addicted homeless people into hotel rooms. Once again, San Francisco is ignoring the law of unintended consequences.

Erica Sandberg is a widely published consumer-finance reporter based in San Francisco.  As a community advocate, she focuses on homelessness and crime and safety issues.

This City Made A Choice To Tolerate Vagrancy And Encourage Drug Use, With Dire Consequences.

/in /by

San Francisco

This city has been conducting a three-decade experiment in what happens when society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. It has done so in the name of compassion for the homeless. The result: Street squalor and misery have increased, while government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles guiding city policy remain inviolate: Homelessness is a housing problem, it is involuntary, and it persists because of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

“Everyone’s on drugs here . . . and stealing,” an ex-convict named Shaku explains from an encampment of tents, trash and bicycles across from Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin district. A formerly homeless woman living in a city-subsidized hotel, asked if she does drugs, replies: “Is that a trick question?” Jeff, 50, slumps over his coffee cup at 7:30 a.m. A half-eaten muffin sits next to him on a filthy blanket. “I use drugs, alcohol, all of it,” he tells me, his eyes closed. “The whole Tenderloin is for drugs.”

The city sends the message relentlessly that drug use is not only acceptable but expected. The Health Department distributes 4.5 million syringes a year, along with alcohol swabs, vitamin C to dissolve heroin and crack, and instructions on how to tie one’s arm for a hit. Officials have installed 17 needle-disposal boxes and kiosks throughout the city, signaling to children that drug use is a normal part of adult life.

Only 60% of the city’s free needles are returned; the rest end up on the sidewalks or in the sewers. Users dig for veins in plain view. At the corner of Hyde Street and Golden Gate Avenue, steps away from the UC Hastings College of the Law, I was easily able to purchase a 2-gram pellet of fentanyl for $16, a new-customer discount.

Public drug use has grown worse since the approval in 2014 of Proposition 47, the state ballot initiative that downgraded a host of drug and property crimes to misdemeanors. Local prosecutors and judges, already worried about contributing to “mass incarceration,” are loath to initiate misdemeanor drug cases. San Francisco police officers complain that even dealers get neither jail time nor probation. Drug courts have closed in some California cities, the Washington Post reports, because police have lost the threat of prison time to induce addicted dealers to begin treatment. The number of clients in San Francisco drug court dropped to 185 in 2018 from 296 in 2014, a decline of more than 37%.

The city also enables the entire homeless lifestyle. Outreach workers hand out beef jerky, crackers and other snacks. The city’s biannual homeless survey claims that “food insecurity” is a pressing problem, but the homeless don’t act like food-deprived people. Waste litters the sidewalks and gutters. A typical deposit outside a Market Street office building includes an unopened 1-pound bag of walnuts, a box of uneaten pastries, an empty brandy bottle, a huge black lace bra, a dirty yellow teddy bear, a high-heeled red suede boot and a brown suede jacket.

Free services and food—along with maximal tolerance for antisocial behavior—act as magnets. “San Francisco is the place to go if you live on the streets,” Jeff says. “There are more resources—showers, yeah, and housing.” A man standing outside the city’s latest shelter design, known as a Navigation Center, says that he was offered housing four times but always turned it down. Navigation Centers are designed to be maximally accommodating. Residents come and go as they please, order meals at any time of the day, and bring their pets, partners and possessions (known in shelter parlance as “the three Ps”).

Elevating the rights of the homeless over those of the working public has cost taxpayers billions, with nothing to show for it. The “unsheltered” count continues to rise—up 17%, to 8,011, in 2019 from 2017—and San Francisco continues to wonder why. Is it lack of city-created affordable housing, as advocates and politicians maintain? No other American city has built as many units of affordable housing per capita, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. From 2004-14, the city spent $2 billion on nearly 3,000 new units of permanent supportive housing, which comes with drug counseling and social workers. More have been constructed since, and thousands of shelter beds and apartment units are in the works.

No one has a right to live in the most expensive real-estate market in the country, certainly not on the public’s dime. It isn’t clear why any city is morally obligated to provide housing to someone who starts living on its streets. But assuming such an obligation, the money that San Francisco spends trying to house the homeless locally could go much further outside its boundaries; the millions saved could go to mental-health and addiction services.

Clean and sober campuses, serving an entire region, could be built on abandoned or undeveloped land in industrial zones and rural areas. Cities and counties should pool resources for these facilities, since the vagrancy problem is fluid—people move from one place to another. The bare-bones campuses must be immaculately maintained, safe and disciplined, so residents learn habits of self-control. Everyone should work.

The stories the homeless tell about their lives reveal that something far more complex than a housing shortage is at work. The tales veer from one confused and improbable situation to the next, against a backdrop of drug use, petty crime and chaotic child rearing. There are few policy levers to change this crisis of meaning in American culture. What is certain is that the continuing crusade to normalize drug use, along with the absence of any public encouragement of temperance, will further handicap this unmoored population.

Carving out a zone of immunity from the law and bourgeois norms for a perceived victim class destroys the quality of life in a city. As important, that immunity consigns its alleged beneficiaries to lives of self-abasement and marginality. Tolerating street vagrancy is a choice that cities make. For the public good, in San Francisco and elsewhere, that choice should be unmade.

This article first appeared at wsj.com. Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, from which this essay was adapted.

San Francisco: The City That’s More Politically Correct Than It Is Livable.

/in /by

In a city that permits pot smoking, distributes free needles to heroin-addicted junkies, sticks up for its sanctuary city status even as locals get shot, and permits the entire cityscape to become the homeless community’s public bathroom, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors has decided to ban … e-cigarettes, which are a kind of vaping.

For its own good, of course.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously voted to approve first-of-its-kind legislation to suspend the sale of e-cigarettes in the city, amid concerns over underage use of the addictive nicotine products. The measure is already being challenged by the nation’s largest e-cigarette company, Juul, which is laying the groundwork to take the issue to voters in November.

The bill still requires final approval, but the board voted 11-0 to pass the ordinance on the first reading, telegraphing its intent to make it official as early as next week.

The measure, if passed, would go into effect seven months after it is signed by the mayor. It would halt the sale of e-cigarettes in San Francisco’s brick-and-mortar stores and bar the delivery of e-cigarettes bought online to San Francisco addresses until the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviews the safety of the products, which it has not yet done.

It’s complete lunacy, starting on merit grounds alone. Vaping is not an evil thing, and neither are e-cigarettes, which are the poor man’s version of vaping. Vaping is a hipster thing found mostly in urban areas, where people who vape typically will go to a vape shop loaded with kitchen-table-created specialties, pick out the flavors of vape fluid and nicotine they like, place them into their vape pipes (sometimes fancy or custom-made), and then steam up a storm. Sometimes they do it at the shop bar, sometimes they take it home or vape in their cars or on the streets. It’s not a completely nicotine-free endeavor but it’s far less risky than real cigarettes or cigars because vaping has fewer chemicals. It also doesn’t stink, it doesn’t hold significant risk to anyone inhaling the steam, and it often helps people who otherwise smoke quit. That’s because the people who vape can adjust the level of nicotine within their devices to gradually lower the levels to the point where it’s not difficult to quit. E-cigarettes are pre-packaged cartridges where the nicotine level cannot be adjusted and the flavors tend to be predictable ones, such as menthol, but they are nevertheless popular, too, often purchased in convenience stores.

I investigated vaping in a long piece that ran in the New York Observer a couple of years ago and learned all this stuff. I was completely neutral about the matter before I started. I learned a lot about why people vape and how vaping works, particularly with its valuable role in helping customers drop their tobacco habits and nicotine addictions. I learned that it was a social thing, and smokers and non-smokers often compromised to vape together so they could mix company without the non-smokers getting sick from the smell. The other thing I learned was how questionable the FDA was, refusing to answer reporter questions, taking forever to approve vaping or e-cigs, refusing to admit that vaping is less harmful than smoking, and operating a revolving door with related lobbies. And most appalling, I learned it was not Big Tobacco that was trying to stomp out a rival, it was Big Pharma, which had smoking cessation devices of its own to market, with a lot of Democratic politicians on its string. Democrats playing Mrs. Grundy, trying to take away the hipster punch bowl? If there’s enough money involved, it seems to be their story.

Which draws attention to a couple of details. Juul Labs, which makes the targeted e-cigarettes about to be banned, is headquartered in San Francisco. It’s a successful company, with 1,500 employees and $2 billion in market cap on $1 billion in revenue at the very least, and it may be greater now. Why would San Francisco be targeting one of its own homegrown companies, this city that permits pot and poop on the streets, and along with it, all vaping, really, because we are talking about an actual ban? Not only are they targeting what must be a big taxpaying entity for their city, they are also targeting the native flora and fauna of that city, which is its famous hipsters. It is the city of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac, after all. Why?
It almost makes one wonder if there could be the Big Pharma-war-on-Big Vape going on. Might there be some Big Pharma in that city that really wants to make vaping or e-cigs a bannable thing nationwide as other cities take their cue from politically correct San Francisco? I have no information on this, but it’s probably worth noting that McKesson, a Fortune 100 mega-star, has a big glassy skyscraper headquarters in San Francisco – and what a coincidence, makes a smoking cessation product. They may not be involved in this stupidity, but so far nobody’s asking. And they may not be the only one, either. Could there be other players putting the squeeze to upstart Juul (founded in 2015)? It’s well worth looking at now that the craziness has reached even the hipsters who vote for these people.

In any case, the decision is bad, it’s an extension of the city’s straw ban, plastic bag ban, and all the other Big Brother bans that make San Francisco more politically correct than liveable. Nothing is solved with these bans and quality of life is never improved any more than the earth is saved. All this ban will do is drive vaping and e-cigs underground, where the taxmen can’t visit. It’s stupid and disgusting. And it ought to be reversed pronto.

This article appeared at https://www.americanthinker.com

Banning Plastic Straws Restricts Individual Consumer Choice

/in /by

There is no harm in wanting to make the world a better place. However, if in pursuit of your quest for progress an individual’s right to choose is compromised, then there is a real problem. But unfortunately, this happens all the time in the form of “ban everything” environmental activism.

Austin’s made headlines a few years ago when it banned the use of plastic bags, a policy that has recently been reversed. And while many of these bans are justified under the guise of environmentalism—plastic bags do take longer to biodegrade than other materials—the fact of the matter is that this type of prohibition does little to improve the overall state of things, and serve to destroy individual liberty by restricting choice.

The latest example of this comes in the form of a plastic straw ban, which is sweeping its way across the nation.

The Straw Debacle

The whole ordeal escalated rather quickly. At the beginning of July, Starbucks, along with other companies including American Airlines made the decision to ban straws. And while not all consumers were supportive of this change it was, at least, a voluntary decision on Starbucks part. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

As it turns out, Americans have strong opinions about straws. Angry consumers were using social media to express their disdain for Starbucks’ new policy while the environmentalists became vigilant crusaders against the use of plastic straws. Celebrities joined the circus and began a viral campaign demonizing plastic straws and promoting reusable straws. And then the media got involved.

A video showing a sea turtle with a straw stuck up his nose was spread far and wide as banning straws now became more about saving turtles. News outlets began sharing a statistic that claimed that Americans use 500 million paper straws each day. Of course, this outrageous number caused even more moral outrage over the use of straws which further fueled the campaign against them. However, Reason later found out that this number, which is absurdly high, was the result of a 9-year-olds estimation for a school project. Fifteen major news organizations had published this number as if it had been the discovery of environmental scientists. And yet, no one had bothered to fact check.

As it turns out, no one really knows how many straws are used each day and according to one Vice article, it doesn’t really matter. On a grand scale, stopping the use of plastic straws doesn’t do a whole lot to protect the environment. But according to the Vice article, banning plastic straws is a gateway ban that will help lead to banning more plastic products down the road. And while Starbucks enacted this band voluntary, the hype against plastic straws has resulted in cities stepping in to control consumer choice.

Government Bans vs. Voluntary Incentives

City councils around the country have now started banning the use of straws. In Seattle, a business offering straws is subject to a $250 fine. And while this sounds absurd the city of Santa Barbara, California has taken this ban to extreme levels.

If businesses operating within Santa Barbara are caught with contraband plastic straws, they are subject to $1,000 fine and six months in jail, per straw. Each straw is seen as its own separate infraction, so each individual straw comes with its own set of penalties. And while Santa Barbara is the most extreme situation, many other cities have enacted their own bans on plastic straws as well.

It is one thing to have Starbucks and other private businesses make the decision to ban a product on their own, after all, consumers are still free to take their business elsewhere, to a coffee shop with straws, for example. But when governments step in to control consumer choice they squash the individual’s right to choose.

But just because someone is against a government ban on plastic straws does not mean that they are inherently anti-environmentalism. Individuals should be free to make their own choices, but a preference for a plastic straw over a reusable straw should not make someone a criminal. If environmentalists want to enact real, lasting change, they should take a lesson from the market and use incentives.

Starbucks and other private companies are free to ban plastic straws or embrace them, and consumers have the right to decide which companies to support. But imagine how much stronger of an impact Starbucks could have if they used incentives to promote environmentalism. Instead of a ban, perhaps they could create a reward system that offered free drinks every now and again to those who routinely refuse straws. As an avid straw user myself, I would gladly use a plastic straw alternative if I was incentivized to do so. And this is just one solution.

The market is full of possible solutions, but the government only really knows how to use force to encourage individuals to adopt a certain behavior. There is nothing wrong with environmentalism unless it is forced on people using the threat of force, like jail time. If you want to really to encourage people to do stop using plastic straws, incentives are proven to work.

We need not go around banning everything to obtain the world we want to live in. By using market forces to encourage behavior we stand a better chance and really creating substantial change.

Write for CFI