California is a real-life version of a Salvador Dali painting. The state is governed as if certain realities can be twisted by fantastical imagination – even ignored entirely – in the service of an all-embracing dream. Case in point: the “putrid city by the bay” *. San Francisco is the poster child of unintentionally engineered urban decay. This happenstance wasn’t produced by magic. Policies of longstanding have unexpected consequences of longstanding.
First, the situation. It is best described by local media reports:
– “Trash bags full of approximately 20 pounds of human poop were left on the sidewalk over the weekend in downtown San Francisco. It’s the latest — and perhaps most alarming — sign of the increased filthiness of one of the most popular cities in the United States”. Fresno Bee, July 4, 2018. **
– An investigation by NBC Bay Area “reveals a dangerous concoction of drug needles, garbage, and feces lining the streets of downtown San Francisco. The Investigative Unit surveyed more than 150 blocks, including some of the city’s top tourist destinations, and discovered conditions that are now being compared to some of the worst slums in the world.” NBC Bay Area, Feb. 18, 2018. ***
– The president of the SF’s travel association reported the cancellation of a convention by a medical assication due to the city’s filthy and mean streets. He said, “They just said that the conditions of the streets, in their mind, had gotten to the point where their delegates don’t feel safe coming to San Francisco. They see harassment on the street, and it’s not a pleasant environment, so they have reconsidered all future years in San Francisco.” NBC Bay Area, July 3, 2018. ****
– The problem encompasses more than SF. Similar conditions can be found up and down the state’s urban coastal corridor and capital. In Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee reported that “safety inspectors have issued nine citations and fined the Department of General Services for failing to adequately prepare groundskeepers asked to clean up needles and fecal matter in Capitol Park.” *****
Why is this so? For one, the state is smothered in regulations. Many of them meander back to lefty utopia-building. Take rent control. SF plans to address its homeless crisis with – you guessed it – rent control, the same mantra that helped create the problem. Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck put it best: “Next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities.” If SF’s elected officials were doctors, they’d be practicing phrenology.
The state is infatuated with regulating its way to the better world. Greenie obsessions are at the top of the list. Obsessions have consequences. Today, temps in Bakersfield will top over 100 degrees … but don’t turn on your air conditioner unless you want to file bankruptcy. Of course, you could surrender to the state’s shotgun wedding between you and solar panels.
And we have the tangle of intestines of the state’s multi-faceted, multi-layered system of land use controls. It’s something that would make Daedalus, the engineer of King Minos’s Labyrinth, green with envy. So, forget about addressing the state’s housing woes with an increase in supply.
Run to the hills if you have a six-figure income and wish to avoid the minefield of feces and needles, because you will pay, and pay, and pay in so many ways.
The state is a psychiatric patient in a condition of perpetual denial. It has unleashed a host of incentives and disincentives pointing in one direction: decay. While Dali had clocks melting over the edge of a table, the creators of California’s mess have constructed a canvass of a more all-encompassing meltdown. Let’s see if the state’s voters can find a new bank of artists before it’s too late.
RogerG
Footnotes:
* “Increasingly Putrid City by the Bay”, Steven Greenhut, California Policy Center, July 5, 2018, https://spectator.org/increasingly-putrid-city-by-the-bay/…
** “Approximately 20 pounds of human poop was found on a sidewalk of San Francisco”, Bryant-Jon Anteola, Fresno Bee, July 4, 2018, https://www.fresnobee.com/news/state/article214320174.html
*** “Diseased Streets”, NBC Bay Area, Feb.18, 2018, https://www.nbcbayarea.com/…/Diseased-Streets-472430013.html
**** “San Francisco’s ‘Dirty Streets’ Scare Off Long-time Convention with 15,000 attendees”, NBC Bay Area, July 3, 2018, https://www.nbcbayarea.com/…/Dirty-Streets-Threaten-San-Fra…
***** “Feces, blood, syringes at California Capitol: Workers unprepared for clean up, OSHA says”, Sacramento Bee, July 3, 2018, https://www.sacbee.com/…/the-state-wo…/article214208014.html