For a first-world city in a prosperous area, San Francisco has a curiously large number of crises. The crime, homelessness, and unaffordability are much discussed, but the more fundamental crisis is little noticed: adult literacy.
It’s not that San Franciscans in the main can’t read, just that they don’t.
In a way, that’s a good thing. It creates jobs. Perhaps one for Bilal Mahmood, the latest state assembly candidate banking on San Franciscans’ tolerance for fog.
But no one—certainly not the progressives he’s courting—seems pleased with the outcomes the city is achieving. I don’t doubt for a moment the sincerity of their concern over the social problems around them, so their reading deficit is a great puzzle and a great tragedy.
Another honest politician
In one way or another, people are always telling you what’s on their mind. Mr. Mahmood is an open book, but one you have to read closely.
He’s promising change and bold action. Change, though, is the least bold word a progressive politician could choose. Certainly it’s not an accident; he’s trying to draft behind whatever hopes you invested in all those politicians before. When he says change, he’s telling you “I’m just like all the others.”
When he says bold, he doesn’t mean MAGA-hat-in-the-Haight bold, but precisely the opposite: he’s doing his best to get assimilated into California’s progressive machine and champion the same platform they’ve had for decades. No boldness will be asked.
So is he lying? Or are his real intentions easy to read?
Here are two conjoinings of a policy word and a feel-good word. Economic growth would be a measurable outcome, but instead he’s offering economic equity. What does that mean?
Many people worry about temperatures and seas rising, so climate stabilization might be an attractive goal, but what does climate justice mean exactly? And what does now mean? He credentials himself an Obama Administration policy wonk, so he knows policies take time to negotiate and work, and he’s not in office yet. Whatever he means by now, it’s not the meaning we’re familiar with.
What do words mean when they don’t mean anything? You can’t achieve a goal you can’t define, so he’s telling you to not to expect any particular results. Money will be spent, urgent speeches made, and when the problems get worse, even more money and even more urgent speeches.
Ending Homelessness
We’ve heard a lot and spent a lot on homelessness over the past few decades, so how do you choose a politician who will make a difference? Read their words:
If you overlook Bilal’s “chronic” qualifier, get to his optimistic claim that his bold idea already worked in 17 cities and stop reading, you’re doing it wrong. He goes on to suggest that dedicated counselors and—what, tracking devices?—will end homelessness. He probably wanted you to stop reading before that part.
Click through to the fine print on the community solutions site he links to, and you’ll find more words that bear close reading.
I don’t know if “measurably and equitably ending homelessness” is better or worse than simply “ending homelessness,” but they don’t sound quite the same. If SF’s homelessness ended, it would be easily measurable by anyone walking a few blocks. Why the emphasis on “Built For” Zero? It will become clear.
If you read further, you’ll meet even more curious qualifiers and redefinitions. By “zero” they mean “functional zero,” by which they mean “an ongoing state where homelessness is continually rare and brief.” Words that mean, well, anything they say they mean.
If you haven’t gleaned their overall message yet, they’re saying they have no expectation of ending homelessness in the qualitative sense of citizens finding sidewalks clear and clean. But they are hoping to dent some bits of it and trying to sell a bureaucratic definition of success. Next year they will report how their amazing success (or their devastating setback) highlights the need for a bigger budget.
I read San Francisco’s existing homeless strategy, which likewise focuses on growing the city bureaucracy and building “systems” to enable swelling social services agencies to coordinate better. The city bureaucracy itself is of course the only thing City Hall controls, so it’s no surprise that building it and improving it is the major theme of both SF’s plan and the community solutions mission statement.
It’s also not surprising that they frame program success around improving their systems, rather than results. Even the people who wrote SF’s plan apparently didn’t expect much Change in homelessness, at least not for the better, and they certainly didn’t get it. Pre-pandemic homeless counts had already revealed their projections of success were just telling City Hall what it wanted to hear.
Bilal’s “Bold Idea” is essentially the same as San Francisco’s existing plan, right down to presenting itself as a “call to action” and a “radical transformation.” He’s telling you what you want to hear.
It is pure homelessness theater.
Do you want a liveable city with good public services, or more theater?
San Franciscans keep claiming they want the first, then voting for the second.
To compound the paradox, politicians keep telling us they’re going to provide only theater.
All you have to do is read the words they’re using. Reflect on what those words really mean. Do they mean anything at all? Are they euphemisms like bold or change that are contradicted by the candidate’s actions?
What is the candidate saying about you when he dodges important issues with platitudes? That he reckons you’re too thick to notice? Or that you’re only pretending to care much about homelessness, so he’ll only pretend to be able to solve it?