2022.06.08 旧金山如何成为一个失败的城市

shiyi18

IDEAS
HOW SAN FRANCISCO BECAME A FAILED CITY
And how it could recover

By Nellie Bowles
Photographs by Austin Leong
JUNE 8, 2022
SHARE
About the author: Nellie Bowles, the author of a forthcoming book of essays, writes a column in the newsletter Common Sense.

San francisco was conquered by the United States in 1846, and two years later, the Americans discovered gold. That’s about when my ancestors came—my German great-great-great-grandfather worked at a butcher shop on Jackson Street. The gold dried up but too many young men with outlandish dreams remained. The little city, prone to earthquakes and fires, kept growing. The Beats came, then the hippies; the moxie and hubris of the place remained.

My grandmother’s favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by, groceries in hand. If someone wanted to travel by unicycle or be a white person with dreadlocks or raise a child communally among a group of gays or live on a boat or start a ridiculous-sounding company, that was just fine. Between the bead curtains of my aunt’s house, I learned you had to let your strangeness breathe.


It was always weird, always a bit dangerous. Once, when I was very little, a homeless man grabbed me by the hair, lifting me into the air for a moment before the guy dropped me and my dad yelled. For years I told anyone who would listen that I’d been kidnapped. But every compromise San Francisco demanded was worth it. The hills are so steep that I didn’t learn to ride a bike until high school, but every day I saw the bay, and the cool fog rolling in over the water. When puberty hit, I asked the bus driver to drop me off where the lesbians were, and he did. A passenger shouted that he hoped I’d find a nice girlfriend, and I waved back, smiling, my mouth full of braces and rubber bands.

So much has been written about the beauty and mythology of this city that maybe it’s superfluous to add even a little more to the ledger. If he ever got to heaven, Herb Caen, the town’s beloved old chronicler, once said, he’d look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.” The cliffs, the stairs, the cold clean air, the low-slung beauty of the Sunset, the cafés tucked along narrow streets, then Golden Gate Park drawing you down from the middle of the city all the way to the beach. It’s so goddamn whimsical and inspiring and temperate; so full of redwoods and wild parrots and the smell of weed and sourdough, brightly painted homes and backyard chickens, lines for the oyster bar and gorgeous men in chaps at the leather festival. But it’s maddening because the beauty and the mythology—the preciousness, the self-regard—are part of what has almost killed it. And I, now in early middle age, sometimes wish it weren’t so nice at all.

a woman hangs upside down in a hoop from a tree
Performers in Washington Park
a street scene with two men nude walking past a food vendor
Two nudists walking by a food cart
But I do need you to love San Francisco a little bit, like I do a lot, in order to hear the story of how my city fell apart—and how it just might be starting to pull itself back together.

Because yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.

On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.

RECOMMENDED READING

Chasing the ‘Holy Grail’ of Baseball Performance
BEN ROWEN
A cracked piggy bank
$350,000 a Year, and Just Getting By
ANNIE LOWREY

SPONSOR CONTENT
A Main Street of Small Businesses Created For You
FACEBOOK, INC.
A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.

During the first part of the pandemic, San Francisco County lost more than one in 20 residents—myself among them. Signs of the city’s pandemic decline are everywhere—the boarded-up stores, the ghostly downtown, the encampments. But walking these streets awakens me to how bad San Francisco had gotten even before the coronavirus hit—to how much suffering and squalor I’d come to think was normal.

Stepping over people’s bodies, blurring my eyes to not see a dull needle jabbing and jabbing again between toes—it coarsened me. I’d gotten used to the idea that some people just want to live like that. I was even a little defensive of it: Hey, it’s America. It’s your choice.

If these ideas seem facile or perverse, well, they’re not the only ones I’d come to harbor. Before I left, I’d gotten used to the idea of housing so expensive that it would, as if by some natural law, force couples out of town as soon as they had a kid. San Francisco now has the fewest children per capita of any large American city, and a $117,400 salary counts as low-income for a family of four.


Annie Lowrey: Four years among the NIMBYs

I’d gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass stating some variation of Nothing’s in the car. Don't smash the windows. One time someone smashed our windows just to steal a scarf. Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed—what was I, a tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it, from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.

mattresses on the ground in front of city hall seen through a chain linked fence
The city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street.
a family walks past a man laid out on the sidewalk
A family walks by a man laid out on the sidewalk
A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.

It was easier to ignore this kind of suffering amid the throngs of workers and tourists. And you could always avert your gaze and look at the beautiful city around you. But in lockdown the beauty became obscene. The city couldn’t get kids back into the classroom; so many people were living on the streets; petty crime was rampant. I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.

But this dogmatism may be buckling under pressure from reality. Earlier this year, in a landslide, San Francisco voters recalled the head of the school board and two of her most progressive colleagues. These are the people who also turned out Boudin; early results showed that about 60 percent of voters chose to recall him.

Read: Why California wants to recall its most progressive prosecutors

Residents had hoped Boudin would reform the criminal-justice system and treat low-level offenders more humanely. Instead, critics argued that his policies victimized victims, allowed criminals to go free to reoffend, and did nothing to help the city’s most vulnerable. To understand just how noteworthy Boudin’s defenestration is, please keep in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans. This fight is about leftists versus liberals. It’s about idealists who think a perfect world is within reach—it’ll only take a little more time, a little more commitment, a little more funding, forever—and those who are fed up.

If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it. The fog keeps things temperate. There’s nowhere in the world with more beautiful views. City workers and volunteers bring you food and blankets, needles and tents. Doctors come to see how the fentanyl is progressing, and to make sure the rest of you is all right as you go.

In February 2021, at a corner in the lovely Japantown neighborhood, just a few feet from a house that would soon sell for $4.8 million, a 37-year-old homeless man named Dustin Walker died by the side of the road. His body lay there for at least 11 hours. He wore blue shorts and even in death clutched his backpack.

I can’t stop thinking about how long he lay there, dead, on that corner, and how normal this was in our putatively gentle city. San Franciscans are careful to use language that centers people’s humanity—you don’t say “a homeless person”; you say “someone experiencing homelessness”—and yet we live in a city where many of those people die on the sidewalk.

Here is a list of some of the organizations that work with the city to fight overdoses and to generally make life more pleasant for the people on the street: Street Crisis Response Team,  EMS-6, Street Overdose Response Team, San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team, Street Medicine and Shelter Health, DPH Mobile Crisis Team, Street Wellness Response Team, and Compassionate Alternative Response Team. The city also funds thousands of shelter beds and many walk-in clinics.

The budget to tackle homelessness and provide supportive housing has been growing exponentially for years. In 2021, the city announced that it would pour more than $1 billion into the issue over the next two years. But almost 8,000 people remain on the streets.

Alison Hawkes, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Health, said money spent on the well-being of the homeless goes to good use: Many people “end up remaining on the street but in a better situation. Their immediate needs are taken care of.”

But many are clearly in an awful situation. San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID.

Read: ‘I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore’

Of course, you can’t blame the plague of meth and opioids on my hometown. Fentanyl is a national catastrophe. But people addicted to drugs come from all over the country in part for the services San Francisco provides. In addition to the supervised drug-use facility in the plaza, San Francisco has a specially sanctioned and city-maintained slum a block from City Hall, where food, medical care, and counseling are free, and every tent costs taxpayers roughly $60,000 a year. People addicted to fentanyl come, too, because buying and doing drugs here is so easy. In 2014, Proposition 47, a state law, downgraded drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, and one that Boudin said he wouldn’t devote resources to prosecuting.

This approach to drug use and homelessness is distinctly San Franciscan, blending empathy-driven progressivism with California libertarianism. The roots of this belief system reach back to the ’60s, when hippies filled the streets with tents and weed. The city has always had a soft spot for vagabonds, and an admirable focus on care over punishment. Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents. When the pandemic began, the drug crisis got worse.

In 2019, someone posted a picture in a Facebook group called B.A.R.T. Rants & Raves, where people complain about the state of the regional transportation system. The photo was of a young man, slumped over on a train. People were chiming in about how gross the city was.

A woman named Jacqui Berlinn wrote in the comments, simply: “That’s my son.”

His name is Corey Sylvester and he’s 31 years old. She posted a photo of him when he was sober: “May he return there soon.”

Berlinn has five children, and is also raising Sylvester’s daughter. Since she posted that comment, she’s become an activist, calling on the city to crack down on drug sales, put dealers in jail, and arrest her son so he’s forced to become sober in jail, which she sees as the only way to save his life. She told me that she feels San Francisco has failed people like him: “Nothing that is being done is improving the situation.” Her work is nonpartisan, she said, but “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I really want to see Boudin recalled.”

Not long ago, we met on a stoop by the Civic Center, where her son used to hang out. She hadn’t seen him in months, but she spoke with him periodically. She cried as she talked about his journey into drugs. She said he was a heroin addict. He’d get sober after stints in jail, but it wouldn’t last. “I’d see him sometimes, and he didn’t look that bad, and that was how it was for 10 years,” she told me. “But then the dealers started putting fentanyl in everything, and being on fentanyl, it’s changed him, deteriorated him so rapidly … Before, he looked pretty healthy and smiling. And now he’s got this stoop. He walks almost at a 40-degree angle, like an old man.”

He’s been stabbed twice. He got an infection in his thumb, and she thought he might lose the hand. “They need to stop ignoring the fact that there are people out here selling fentanyl on the streets,” she said. “When it was just heroin—I can’t believe I’m saying ‘just heroin.’ Fentanyl is different. We’re normalizing people dying.”

One day, Berlinn was out looking for Corey in the Tenderloin neighborhood when she came across someone else’s son. “He was naked in front of Safeway … And he was saying he was God and he was eating a cardboard box.”

She called the police. Officers arrived but said there was nothing they could do; he said he didn’t want help, and he wasn’t hurting anyone. “They said it’s not illegal to be naked; people are in the Castro naked all the time … They just left him naked eating cardboard on the street in front of Safeway.”

What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin Walker—these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.

boarded up store
A boarded-up store downtown
Last year, I bought my wife her wedding ring at a beautiful little antique store a few blocks from my childhood home. It was ransacked at the end of December. The shaken owner posted a video; the showcases were empty and the whole place was covered in glass.


You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019. Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.

The head of CVS Health’s organized-crime division has called San Francisco “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime.” Thefts in San Francisco’s Walgreens are four times the national average. Stores are reducing hours or shutting down. Seven Walgreens closed between last November and February, and some point to theft as the reason. The city is doing strikingly little about it. About 70 percent of shoplifting cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15 percent did.

Annie Lowrey: The people vs. Chesa Boudin

The movement to decriminalize shoplifting in San Francisco began in 2014 with Proposition 47, the state law that downgraded drug possession and also recategorized the theft of merchandise worth less than $950 as a misdemeanor. It accelerated in 2019 with the election of Boudin as district attorney.


It is difficult to remember now, but the Boudin election was thrilling for the city. It occurred during the heights of rage against President Donald Trump, when more and more people were becoming aware of police violence against Black people and demanding criminal-justice reforms. London Breed, the city’s first Black female mayor, wanted a liberal moderate for D.A., but Boudin ran to the left as a fierce progressive ideologue whose worldview was shaped by his imprisoned parents, members of the Weather Underground. He was a public defender, not a prosecutor at all. He had worked in Venezuela and in 2009 congratulated the former dictator Hugo Chávez for abolishing term limits. Boudin was a charismatic figure. His campaign manager called him “a national movement candidate.”

The Police Officers Association fought hard against him, spending $400,000 on a barrage of attack ads, according to the San Francisco Examiner. They didn’t work. At Boudin’s election party, a city supervisor led the crowd in a chant of “Fuck the POA.” During his campaign, Boudin said he wouldn’t prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He wanted to “break the cycle of recidivism” by addressing the social causes of crime—poverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.

But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.

It has become no big deal to see someone stealing in San Francisco. Videos of crimes in process go viral fairly often. One from last year shows a group of people fleeing a Neiman Marcus with goods in broad daylight. Others show people grabbing what they can from drugstores and walking out. When a theft happens in a Walgreens or a CVS, there’s no big chase. The cashiers are blasé about it. Aisle after aisle of deodorant and shampoo are under lock and key. Press a button for the attendant to get your dish soap.

The rage against Boudin was related to that locked-up soap, but it went far beyond it.

Under Boudin, prosecutors in the city could no longer use the fact that someone had been convicted of a crime in the past to ask for a longer sentence, except in “extraordinary circumstances.” Boudin ended cash bail and limited the use of gang enhancements, which allow harsher sentences for gang-related felonies. In most cases he prohibited prosecutors from seeking charges when drugs and guns were found during minor traffic stops. “We will not charge cases determined to be a racist pretextual stop that leads to recovery of contraband,” Rachel Marshall, the district attorney’s director of communications, told me.

Boudin is a big proponent of “collaborative courts” that focus on rehabilitation over jail time, such as Veterans Justice Court and Behavioral Health Court, and under his tenure they tried more cases than ever before. In 2018, less than 40 percent of petty-theft cases were sent to these programs, compared with more than 70 percent last year. Marshall said it was the judges who decided which cases to divert, not Boudin, and eligibility rules for the collaborative courts have loosened in recent years. But critics also pointed out that Boudin got fewer convictions overall: 40 percent in 2021, compared with about 60 percent under his predecessor.

About 60 prosecutors had left since Boudin took office—close to half of his team. Some retired or were fired, but others quit in protest. I talked with two who joined the recall campaign. One of them, a homicide prosecutor named Brooke Jenkins, told me she left in part because Boudin was pressuring some lawyers to prosecute major crimes as lesser offenses. (Marshall said this was “a lie.”) She couldn’t be part of it. “The victims feel hopeless,” Jenkins told me. “They feel he has lost their opportunity for justice. Right now what they see and feel is that his only concern is the criminal offender.” (I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jenkins run for D.A. herself, though this isn’t something she’s floated yet.)

A 2020 tweet from the Tenderloin police station captured the frustration of the rank and file: “Tonight, for the fifteenth (15th) time in 18 months, and the 3rd time in 20 days, we are booking the same suspect at county jail for felony motor vehicle theft.”

Boudin has a rugged jawline and fast, tight answers for his critics. His office vehemently rejected the argument that he wasn’t doing enough to tackle crime. “The DA has filed charges in about 80 percent of felony drug sales and possession for sales cases presented to our office by police,” Marshall pointed out. After all, he could prosecute people only if the police arrested them, and arrest rates had plummeted under his tenure. So how could that be his fault? But why had arrest rates plummeted? The pandemic was one reason. But maybe it was also because the D.A. said from the beginning that he would not prioritize the prosecution of lower-level offenses. Police officers generally don’t arrest people they know the D.A. won’t charge.

an empty store front with a for lease sign
A store for lease downtown.
Diptych: people clean up after a car is broken into, a man lookiing at his phone walks by a group of homeless people.
Left: A man sweeping up broken glass after a car was broken into in the Tenderloin. Right: The Civic Center.
In 2020, I interviewed Boudin while working on a story for The New York Times. When we talked about why he wasn’t interested in prosecuting quality-of-life crimes, he explained that street crime is small potatoes compared with the high-level stuff he wants to focus on. (“Kilos, not crumbs” is a favorite line.) He has suggested that many drug dealers in San Francisco are themselves vulnerable and in need of protection. “A significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco—perhaps as many as half—are here from Honduras,” he said in a 2020 virtual town hall. “We need to be mindful about the impact our interventions have … Some of these young men have been trafficked here under pain of death. Some of them have had family members in Honduras who have been or will be harmed if they don’t continue to pay off the traffickers.”

Read: His dad got a chance at clemency. Then his baby was born.

Of course there is good in what Boudin was trying to do. No one wants people incarcerated for unfair lengths of time. No one wants immigrants’ relatives to be killed by MS-13. Few of Boudin’s policy ideas—individually, and sometimes with reasonable limitations—are indefensible. (Ending cash bail for truly minor offenses, for instance, protects people from losing their job and more while in jail.) But as with homelessness, the city’s overall take on criminal-justice reform moved well past the point of common sense. Last month a man who had been convicted of 15 burglary and theft-related felonies from 2002 to 2019 was rearrested on 16 new counts of burglary and theft; most of those charges were dismissed and he was released on probation. It really didn’t inspire confidence that the city was taking any of this seriously.

Boudin’s defenders liked to dismiss his critics as whiny tech bros or rich right-wingers. One pro-Boudin flyer said stop the right-wing agenda. But the drumbeat of complaints came from plenty of good liberals, and so did the votes against him. If it were only the rich, well, the rich can hire private security, or move to the suburbs. And many do. They’re not the only people who live here, and they’re not the only ones who got angry.

It may not have been so clear until now, but San Franciscans have been losing patience with the city’s leadership for a long time. Nothing did more to alienate them over the years than how the progressive leaders managed the city’s housing crisis.

Consider the story of the flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street. It slopes down 2.2 acres in the sunny southern end of the city and is filled with run-down greenhouses, the glass long shattered—a chaos of birds and wild roses. For five years, advocates fought a developer who was trying to put 63 units on that bucolic space. They wanted to sell flowers there and grow vegetables for the neighborhood—a kind of banjo-and-beehives utopian fantasy. The thing they didn’t want—at least not there, not on that pretty hill—was a big housing development. Who wants to argue against them? In San Francisco the word developer is basically a slur, close to calling someone a Republican. What kind of monster wants to bulldoze wild roses?

Decades of progressive governance in San Francisco yielded a thicket of regulations—safety reviews, environmental reviews, historical reviews, sunlight-obstruction reviews—that empower residents to essentially paralyze development. It costs only $682 to file for a discretionary review that can hold up a construction project for years, and if you’re an established club that’s been around for at least two years, it’s free. Plans for one 19-unit-development geared toward the middle class were halted this year because, among other issues raised by the neighbors, the building would have increased overall shadow coverage on Dolores Park by 0.001 percent.

landscape picture of decaying gardens and homes
The flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street
The cost of real estate hit crisis levels in the 2010s, as ambitious grads from all over the world crammed into the hills to work in the booming tech industry. Soon, there was nowhere for them to live. Tech workers moved into RVs, parked alongside the poor and unhoused. Illegal dorms sprang up. Well-paid young people gentrified almost every neighborhood in town. In 2018, when London Breed was elected mayor at the age of 43, she had only just stopped living with a roommate; she couldn’t afford to live alone.

Existing homeowners, meanwhile, got very, very rich. If all other tactics fail, neighbors who oppose a big construction project can just put it on the ballot. If given a choice, who would ever vote to risk their property value going down, or say “Yes, I’m fine with a shadow over my backyard”? It doesn’t happen.

Rage against this pleasant status quo has come from a faction of young renters. I once went to a training session in the Mission District run by a pro-housing group called YIMBY—for “Yes in My Backyard.” I watched a PowerPoint presentation (“And here’s another reason to be mad at your grandparents! Next slide.”) and then joined the group for drinks.

“The elderly NIMBYs literally hiss at people,” said Steven Buss, who now runs a moderate organizing team called GrowSF, about the tension at community housing meetings. (One foggy night, at one of those meetings, I heard the hissing, and it was funny, and the project they were talking about never got built.)

Gabe Zitrin, a lawyer, popped in: “Like 770 Woolsey. I love kale too, but you could house 50 kids and their families on that site. It’s about priorities. They want a farm. They’re selfish and they’re vain. A farm does not serve the common good. I can’t tell them not to want it—but I can tell them that housing is what we need more. I don’t want to end up surrounded by a bunch of super-rich people and a farm.”

The city’s progressives seem to feel that it is all just too beautiful and fragile to change. Any change will mean diminishment; any new, bigger building means the old, charming one is gone, and the old, charming resident is probably gone too. The flow of newcomers is out of control; they should just stop coming here. The community gardens have to stay, along with the sunlight spilling across the low buildings. No one thinks about it as damning teachers and firefighters to mega-commutes. No one thinks of it as kicking out the middle class. Given the choice between housing people in sidewalk tents or in new buildings that might risk blocking an inch of their view of the bay, San Franciscans, for years, chose the tents.

The anger directed at Chesa Boudin probably could have been contained. The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasn’t what lit the city up for revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but it’s been that way for more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the school board. And the population ready to rage was San Francisco’s parents.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee.

Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.

“My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”

Someone else called in, identifying herself as Cindy. She was calling to defend Brenzel, and she was crying. “He is a gay father of a mixed-race family,” she said.

A woman named Brandee came on the call: “I’m a white parent and have some intersectionality within my family. My son has several disabilities. And I really wouldn’t dream of putting my name forward for this.” She had some choice words for Cindy: “When white people share these kinds of tears at board meetings”—she pauses, laughing—“I have an excellent book suggestion for you. It’s called White Tears/Brown Scars. I’d encourage you to read it, thank you.”

Allison Collins, a member of the school board, dealt the death blow: “As a mixed-race person myself, I find it really offensive when folks say that somebody’s a parent of somebody who’s a person of color, as, like, a signifier that they’re qualified to represent that community.”

Brenzel remained mostly expressionless throughout the meeting. He did not say a word. Eventually the board agreed to defer the vote. He was never approved.

The other big debate on these Zoom calls was whether to rename schools named for figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, the first female mayor of San Francisco. The board labeled these figures symbols of a racist past, and ultimately voted to rename 44 “injustice-linked” schools—though after a backlash, the board suspended the implementation of the changes.

The board members were arguably doing what they had been put there to do. Collins and her two most progressive colleagues were elected in 2018, the year before Boudin, and it was a headier time, when Trump’s shadow seemed to loom over even the smallest local office. Collins had a blog focused on justice in education, and there was a sense that she would champion a radical new politics. But during the endless lockdown, enthusiasm began to wane, even among many people who’d voted for her. They found themselves turned off by the board’s combative tone—as well as by its actual ideas about education.

students outside of Lowell high school
Students outside of Lowell high schol.
In February 2021, board members agreed that they would avoid the phrase learning loss to describe what was happening to kids locked out of their classrooms. Instead they would use the words learning change. Schools being shut just meant students were “having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” Gabriela López, a member of the board at the time, said. “They are learning more about their families and their cultures.” Framing this as some kind of “deficit” was wrong, the board argued.

That same month, the board voted to replace the rigorous test that screened applicants for Lowell, San Francisco’s most competitive high school, with a lottery system. López had explained it this way: “Grades and standardized test scores are automatic barriers for students outside of white and Asian communities.” She said they “have shown to be one of the most effective racist policies, considering they’re used to attempt to measure aptitude and intelligence. So the fact that Lowell uses this merit-based system as a step in applying is inherently racist.”

Collins echoed that: “‘Merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing.”

If you didn’t like these changes, tough. A parent on Twitter accused López of trying to destroy the school system, and she replied with the words “I mean this sincerely” followed by a middle-finger emoji. In July, on the topic of the declining quality of life in San Francisco, she wrote, “I’m like, then leave.”

Gabriela López must have thought that history was on her side. Boudin, too. But things are turning out differently. If there was a tipping point in this story, it was when the city’s Asian American parents in particular got really, really mad.

As Allison Collins’s profile rose during the pandemic, critics started looking through her old tweets. There were bad ones. In 2016, she had written: “Many Asian Americans believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS. In fact many Asian American teachers, students and parents actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”

She also complained about Asian Americans not speaking out enough about Trump: “Do they think they won’t be deported? Profiled? Beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You’re still considered ‘the help.’”

The San Francisco Bay Area is 52 percent white, 6.7 percent Black, and 23.3 percent Asian. And many Asian San Franciscans were horrified by the tweets.

“Her comments deeply insulted my family and the entire Chinese community in San Francisco,” Kit Lam told me. Lam is an immigrant from Hong Kong with two children in public school. He works for the school district, in the enrollment department, though he just learned that his job will be eliminated next month. He said he knew what richer parents were doing during the pandemic because he saw the paperwork: They were pulling their kids out and sending them to private schools. Lam didn’t have that choice.

In April 2021, he started going on 1400 AM, the Bay Area’s Chinese-language radio station, to express his outrage. He spoke out against school closures and the decision to get rid of the admissions test for Lowell. Asian students have traditionally been overrepresented at Lowell; getting in is one of the best ways for high-achieving poor and middle-class kids in San Francisco to rise up the economic ladder.

Many people from his community agreed with him. They began gathering signatures and raising money for a campaign to recall Collins, López, and another progressive board member, Faauuga Moliga. Siva Raj, one of the recall organizers, told me that roughly half of those volunteering for the campaign spoke Chinese.

After the tweets came to light, a member of the board asked Collins to voluntarily step down. But she refused. Instead, she sued five of her fellow members. She also sued the district. She asked for $87 million, citing, among other afflictions, “severe mental, and emotional distress,” “damage to self-image,” and “injury to spiritual solace.”

Her case was tossed. And in February 2022, San Franciscans voted decisively to remove all three from the board. A landslide 76 percent voted to recall Collins, and the other two were recalled by about 70 percent each. They have been replaced by moderates, appointed by the mayor. Collins and López slammed their opponents as agents of white supremacy, but the turnout was diverse, and impressive, especially for a special election: More people voted to recall the board members than had cast votes for them in the first place.

Boudin’s opponents, likewise, came from all over the city. He liked to say they were funded by elites, and the recall campaign did raise about twice as much money. But wealthy people have donated to the pro-Boudin campaign, too. The racial group that was most likely to say they wanted Boudin recalled? Asian Americans. Their allies included many from the remnants of the city’s middle class, as well as the same sort of swayable liberals who went from voting for Collins to recalling her.

a man pulls down his pants on a sidewalk
A man outside the City Hall campsite.
Diptych: a parent on a bike pulls a child on roller skates; a sign reads danger google it
Left: A father and daughter ride through Golden Gate park. Right: Street sign.
Now a number of groups are trying to address quality-of-life issues in the city. There is the new California Peace Coalition, which opposes the open-air drug markets, and includes parents of drug users who are at risk of or have died from overdose. There’s Innovate Public Schools and Stop Crime SF, which are self-explanatory. Shine On SF is “reigniting civic pride” by cleaning up the city’s streets. SF.Citi is advocating for the interests of tech workers.

For a long time, says Michelle Tandler, a start-up founder who documented downtown’s collapse on Twitter, “San Francisco progressives and Democrats were so focused on Trump that they weren’t paying attention.” Suddenly, they’re paying attention.

And Mayor Breed is responding. She was elected during the Trump administration, like Boudin and the school board, and her approval numbers are also faltering. But she’s in a different mold. Breed is a canny politician who knows which way the wind is blowing, and is open to changing course depending on the results.

Just a few years ago, she had proudly embraced the “defund the police” movement; no longer. This spring, after the city’s gay-pride parade banned police officers from marching in uniform, Breed announced that out of solidarity, she wouldn’t march either.

I took a stroll with her back in February. She had just given a press conference on anti-Asian hate crimes outside a senior center in Chinatown. As in places like New York, the city had seen a spike in the reporting of hate crimes against Asians. People were scared. Breed grew up in the city’s projects and knows residents who have had family members shot and killed recently. “I know a lot of people who supported Chesa because there was a strong push for criminal justice,” she told me. “I don’t think people believed that it meant that justice would not occur.” She added, “That’s not justice reform, if everyone who commits the crime is getting off for the crime.” Now she’ll have a chance to replace him.

As we talked, we walked through Chinatown, then up past the $7 million homes of Russian Hill and down into North Beach. The bay lay ahead; the cable-car drivers waved to the mayor; the city’s problems seemed far off. But Breed was angry, disappointed with the progressive faction and how it had let the city down. A few months earlier, Breed had announced a new approach to crime, starting with the Tenderloin, whose streets and sidewalks are full of fentanyl’s chaos. She declared it to be in a state of emergency and approved three months of funding for increased law enforcement there.

The order was mostly symbolic—the drug problem isn’t limited to a few bad blocks. Often a sweep of the homeless just means pushing the tents and dealers down the road. And anyone who lives in San Francisco knows the Tenderloin has been an emergency for years. But it allowed the mayor to trot out some new rhetoric: “What I’m proposing today and what I will be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and I don’t care.” It was time, she said, to be “less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

people relax at sunset in a park
Sunset at Alamo Square Park
My hometown isn’t turning red on any electoral maps. But the shift is real. The farm at 770 Woolsey? The developer finally has approval to turn it into housing. If progressives have overplayed their hand, gotten a little decadent in culture-war wins and stirring slogans, without the good government to back them all up, San Francisco is showing the way toward an internal reformation.


Before the school-board vote, the last local recall in San Francisco was in 1983. There has not been this level of conflict at farmers’ markets, where dueling signature-gatherers face off across from the organic-dog-treat kiosk, in almost 40 years. This is, in part, because until recently many San Franciscans were afraid. If a tech worker complained, they were reviled. If an aging hippie complained, they were a racist old nut. It was easier to blame all of our issues on outsiders—those Silicon Valley interlopers who came in and ruined the city. The drugs, the homelessness, the crime—blame the Google employees who skewed the city’s condo market and brought in their artisanal chocolates, their scooters, their trendy barbers. If not for them and the inequality they created, San Francisco would still be good.

There’s some truth to that: You cannot tell the story of the housing crunch without the tech boom. But people started looking at City Hall, and at the school board. They realized there were no tech bros there. The fentanyl epidemic and the pandemic cracked something. With the city locked down endlessly, with people dying in the streets, with schools closed, it was slowly becoming okay to say Maybe this is ridiculous. Maybe this isn’t working.

Of course, it’ll take more than a couple of recall votes to save San Francisco. When I asked Breed about the new center for addicts in the plaza—the creation of which she supported—she seemed a little uncomfortable and soon after wanted to wrap up our interview. She said something vague about how not all change can happen at once.


NIMBYism and fentanyl are as much a part of the San Francisco landscape now as the bridge and the fog. And the school board is still school-boarding. At the end of May, it announced that the district would no longer use the word chief in any job titles, out of respect for Native Americans (despite the fact that the word actually comes from the French chef).

The other day I walked by Millennium Tower. Once a symbol of the push to transform our funky town into a big city, it’s a gleaming 58-story skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco, and it’s been sinking into the ground—more than a foot since it was finished in 2009. A group of men in hard hats was just standing there, staring up at it. The metaphor is obvious, but San Francisco has never been a subtle city. I’d like to believe those guys finally had a plan to fix the tower. At least they seemed to accept that it needed fixing.

For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? … Am I responsible? Is this my fault?’”

San Franciscans are now saying: We can want a fairer justice system and also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: It’s not white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned.


San Franciscans tricked themselves into believing that progressive politics required blocking new construction and shunning the immigrants who came to town to code. We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.

Because Herb Caen was right. It’s still the most beautiful city you’ll ever see.

Nellie Bowles, the author of a forthcoming book of essays, writes a column in the newsletter Common Sense.



理念
旧金山如何成为一个失败的城市
以及它如何能够恢复

作者：Nellie Bowles
摄影：Austin Leong
6月8日，2022年
分享到
关于作者。内莉-鲍尔斯是即将出版的一本散文集的作者，在通讯《常识》中开设专栏。

1846年，旧金山被美国征服，两年后，美国人发现了黄金。我的祖先就是在那时来到这里的--我的德国曾曾曾祖父在杰克逊街的一家肉店工作。黄金枯竭了，但仍有太多的年轻人怀着离奇的梦想。这个容易发生地震和火灾的小城市不断发展。诗人来了，然后是嬉皮士；这个地方的莫须有和傲慢仍然存在。

我的祖母最喜欢的侮辱是说某人呆板。我很小的时候就知道，当一个赤身裸体的人经过时，指指点点是不礼貌的，他手里拿着杂货。如果有人想骑独轮车旅行，或做一个留着辫子的白人，或在一群同性恋中共同抚养孩子，或住在船上，或开一家听起来很可笑的公司，那也是可以的。在我姨妈家的珠帘之间，我了解到你必须让你的奇怪之处呼吸。


它总是很奇怪，总是有点危险。有一次，在我很小的时候，一个无家可归的人抓住我的头发，把我举到空中一会儿，然后那人就把我扔下了，我爸爸大叫起来。多年来，我告诉任何愿意听的人，我被绑架了。但旧金山要求的每一次妥协都是值得的。山路非常陡峭，我直到高中才学会骑自行车，但每天我都能看到海湾，以及水面上滚滚而来的凉爽的雾气。当青春期到来时，我要求巴士司机在女同性恋者所在的地方让我下车，他照做了。一位乘客喊道，他希望我找到一个漂亮的女朋友，我回过头来挥手，微笑着，嘴里满是牙套和橡皮筋。

关于这个城市的美丽和神话已经写了很多，也许在账本上再加一点也是多余的。如果他有一天上了天堂，这个城市心爱的老编年史家赫伯-卡恩（Herb Caen）曾经说过，他会环顾四周并说："这并不坏，但它不是旧金山。" 悬崖、台阶、寒冷的清洁空气、日落区的低矮之美、隐藏在狭窄街道上的咖啡馆，然后是金门公园把你从城市的中心一直吸引到海滩。它是如此该死的异想天开、鼓舞人心和温和；充满了红木和野生鹦鹉以及杂草和酸面团的气味，油漆鲜艳的房屋和后院的鸡，排队买牡蛎的人和在皮革节上穿短裤的华丽男人。但这是令人抓狂的，因为美丽和神话--珍贵和自律--是几乎杀死它的部分原因。而我，现在已经步入中年，有时希望它根本就不是那么好。

一个女人倒挂在树上的吊环上
华盛顿公园的表演者
两名男子裸体走过一个食品摊贩的街景
两名裸体主义者走过一辆食品车
但我确实需要你像我一样有点爱旧金山，以便听一听我的城市如何分崩离析的故事--以及它如何可能开始重新振作起来。

因为昨天，旧金山的选民决定将他们的地区检察官切萨-布丹赶下台。他们这样做是因为他似乎不在乎他正在使我们城市的公民遭受痛苦，为一种在任何地方都有意义的意识形态服务，但在现实中。不过，这不仅仅是关于布丹的问题。有一种感觉是，从住房到学校，旧金山已经迷失了方向--这里的进步领导人一直都在玩弄左翼价值观，而不是努力创造一个宜居的城市。许多旧金山人已经受够了。

不久前，在一个寒冷而阳光明媚的日子里，我去看了该市在市场街为吸毒者新建的Tenderloin中心。该中心位于市中心，是一个露天的铁链围墙，以前是一个公共广场。在它周围的人行道上，人们躺在地上，抽搐着。这里有一个免费的移动淋浴、洗衣和浴室站，上面印有车轮上的尊严字样。一个年轻人躺在旁边，嗑着药，他的衬衫被撑起来了，他的脸浮肿，被晒伤了。在围墙内，服务被分发出去：食物、医疗护理、清洁注射器、住房介绍。这基本上是一个安全的射击空间。市政府说它正在努力帮助。但从外面看，这里看起来就像年轻人在人行道上被缓缓送入死亡，周围是吃了一半的盒饭。

推荐阅读

追寻棒球成绩的 "圣杯
本-罗文
一个破裂的储蓄罐
年薪35万美元，勉强度日
ANNIE LOWREY

赞助内容
为您打造的小企业主街
FACEBOOK, INC.
几年前，这是一个充满游客和上班族的十字路口，不知为何，他们与庞大的、无处不在的流浪者群体共存。我已经走过这个角落一千次了。现在只剩下无家可归者和那些关心无家可归者的人了。

在大流行病的第一部分，旧金山县每20个居民中就有一个人死亡，我自己就是其中之一。这个城市大流行病衰落的迹象随处可见--被钉死的商店、幽灵般的市中心、营地。但走在这些街道上，我才意识到，即使在冠状病毒袭击之前，旧金山已经变得多么糟糕，我已经认为有多少痛苦和肮脏是正常的。

踏过人们的身体，模糊我的眼睛，以避免看到一根根钝针在脚趾间刺来刺去--这使我变得粗暴。我已经习惯了这样的想法：有些人就是想这样生活。我甚至有点为它辩护。嘿，这是美国。这是你的选择。

如果这些想法看起来很肤浅或反常，那么，它们并不是我唯一怀有的想法。在我离开之前，我已经习惯了这样的想法：住房太贵了，就像某种自然法则一样，一旦有了孩子，就会迫使夫妇们离开这里。现在，旧金山是美国所有大城市中人均子女最少的城市，对于一个四口之家来说，117,400美元的工资也算作低收入。


安妮-洛瑞。在NIMBYs中的四年

我已经习惯了犯罪，很少有暴力，但往往是厚颜无耻的；习惯了把车空着，门不锁，这样小偷至少可以不打破我的窗户。很多人在玻璃上留下纸条，写着 "车内无物。不要打碎车窗。有一次，有人砸了我们的窗户，只是为了偷一条围巾。有一次，当我在散步时，一个人把我的外套从我背上撕下来，拿着它冲刺而去，我甚至没有大声呼救。我很尴尬--我算什么，一个游客？生活在一个失败的城市，对你来说是很奇怪的事情。当时正常的做法是大喊大叫，试图寻求帮助--甚至，我敢说，从警察那里--但这感觉有些蹩脚，也许还有种族歧视。

透过铁链围栏看到市政厅前地上的床垫。
市政府在市场街为吸毒者新建的Tenderloin中心。
一个家庭走过一个躺在人行道上的男人身边
一个家庭从一个躺在人行道上的人身边走过
几年前，我的一个朋友看到一个男人踉踉跄跄地走在街上，血流不止。她认出他是经常在附近睡在外面的人，于是拨打了911。救护人员和警察赶到并开始治疗他，但一个无家可归者权益团体的成员注意到并进行了干预。他们告诉该男子，他不必上救护车，他有权拒绝治疗。所以他就这么做了。护理人员离开了；活动家们也离开了。该男子独自坐在人行道上，仍然在流血。几个月后，他在一个街区外死去。

在熙熙攘攘的工人和游客中，忽视这种痛苦是比较容易的。你总是可以转移视线，看一看你周围美丽的城市。但在封锁状态下，这种美丽变得令人厌恶。城市无法让孩子们回到教室；那么多人流落街头；小规模犯罪猖獗。我曾经告诉自己，旧金山的政治是古怪的，但这个城市在努力--真的在努力做好。但现实是，凭借最聪明的头脑、大量的资金和最美好的愿望，旧金山成为一个残酷的城市。它变得如此教条地进步，以至于维持政治的纯洁性需要接受或至少忽略破坏性的结果。

但这种教条主义可能会在现实的压力下屈服。今年早些时候，旧金山的选民以压倒性优势召回了学校董事会主席和她的两位最进步的同事。这些人也把布丹拒之门外；早期结果显示，约60%的选民选择召回他。

阅读。为什么加州要召回其最进步的检察官？

居民们曾希望布丁能改革刑事司法系统，并更人性化地对待低级别罪犯。相反，批评者认为，他的政策使受害者受害，允许罪犯自由地重新犯罪，并没有帮助城市中最脆弱的人。为了理解鲍丁的失败有多么值得注意，请记住，旧金山只有极少数的共和党人。这场斗争是关于左派与自由派的斗争。这是关于那些认为完美世界触手可及的理想主义者--它只需要多一点时间，多一点承诺，多一点资金，永远如此--以及那些厌倦了的人。

如果你想死在街上，旧金山是个不错的地方。雾气使事情变得温和。世界上没有任何地方有更美的风景。市政工人和志愿者给你带来食物和毯子、针头和帐篷。医生们来看看芬太尼的进展情况，并确保你的其他部分在你走的时候一切正常。

2021年2月，在可爱的Japantown社区的一个角落，离一栋很快就能卖到480万美元的房子只有几英尺，一个名叫达斯汀-沃克的37岁无家可归者死在路边。他的尸体在那里至少躺了11个小时。他穿着蓝色的短裤，即使在死亡时也紧紧抓住他的背包。

我忍不住想，他在那个角落里躺了多久，死了多久，在我们这个被认为是温和的城市里，这是多么正常的事情。圣弗朗西斯科人小心翼翼地使用以人的人性为中心的语言--你不会说 "一个无家可归的人"；你会说 "正在经历无家可归的人"--然而我们生活在一个许多人死在路边的城市里。

以下是一些与城市合作的组织的名单，这些组织与吸毒过量作斗争，并普遍使街上的人生活得更愉快。街头危机反应小组、EMS-6、街头过量反应小组、旧金山无家可归者外展小组、街头医疗和庇护所健康、DPH移动危机小组、街头健康反应小组和同情替代反应小组。该市还资助了数千张收容所床位和许多无预约诊所。

多年来，用于解决无家可归问题和提供支持性住房的预算一直在成倍增长。2021年，该市宣布在未来两年内将为这个问题投入超过10亿美元。但仍有近8,000人流落街头。

公共卫生局的发言人艾莉森-霍克斯说，花在无家可归者福利上的钱用在了好地方。许多人 "最终仍留在街上，但处境更好。他们的直接需求得到了满足"。

但是，许多人的处境显然是很糟糕的。旧金山在2015年出现了92起毒品死亡事件。2020年大约有700人。作为比较，这一年，261名旧金山人死于COVID。

阅读："我不知道我甚至会把它称为冰毒了。

当然，你不能把冰毒和阿片类药物的瘟疫归咎于我的故乡。芬太尼是一场全国性的灾难。但沉迷于毒品的人来自全国各地，部分是为了旧金山提供的服务。除了广场上的监督吸毒设施外，旧金山还有一个特别认可的、由城市维护的贫民窟，离市政厅只有一个街区，那里的食物、医疗和咨询都是免费的，而每顶帐篷每年大约要花费纳税人6万美元。对芬太尼上瘾的人也来了，因为在这里购买和使用毒品非常容易。2014年，州法律第47号提案将持有毒品从重罪降级为轻罪，布丁说他不会投入资源来起诉这一罪行。

这种处理毒品使用和无家可归问题的方法具有明显的圣弗朗西斯科风格，将同情心驱动的进步主义与加州自由主义相融合。这种信仰体系的根源可以追溯到60年代，当时嬉皮士们在街上搭起了帐篷和大麻。这座城市一直对流浪者情有独钟，对关怀而非惩罚的关注令人钦佩。政策制定者和居民在很大程度上接受了一个令人兴奋的想法，即人们应该能够做他们想做的任何事情，包括住在帐篷里，享受毒品带来的乐趣，并做出自己的医疗决定，即使他们有时失去了理智。但后来芬太尼来了，越来越多的人开始死在这些帐篷里。当大流行开始时，毒品危机变得更糟。

2019年，有人在一个名为B.A.R.T. Rants & Raves的Facebook群组中发布了一张照片，人们在那里抱怨地区交通系统的状况。照片上是一个年轻男子，瘫倒在火车上。人们都在讨论这个城市是多么的糟糕。

一位名叫Jacqui Berlinn的女士在评论中简单地写道："那是我的儿子"。

他的名字叫科里-西尔维斯特，今年31岁。她张贴了一张他清醒时的照片。"愿他早日回到那里"。

柏林有五个孩子，也在抚养希尔维斯特的女儿。自从她发布那条评论后，她就成了一名活动家，呼吁市政府打击毒品销售，把毒贩子关进监狱，并逮捕她的儿子，让他被迫在监狱里变得清醒，她认为这是挽救他生命的唯一方法。她告诉我，她觉得旧金山让他这样的人失望了。"所做的一切都无法改善情况"。她说，她的工作是无党派的，但 "如果我不说我真的想看到布丁被召回，那就是在撒谎。"

不久前，我们在市政中心的一个门槛上见面，她的儿子以前经常在那里玩。她已经几个月没有见到他了，但她定期与他交谈。当她谈到他的毒品之旅时，她哭了。她说他是一个海洛因成瘾者。他在监狱里呆了一段时间后就会清醒过来，但这并不持久。"我有时会看到他，他看起来没有那么糟糕，这就是10年来的情况，"她告诉我。"但后来毒贩子开始在所有东西中加入芬太尼，服用芬太尼后，他就变了，迅速恶化......以前，他看起来很健康，面带微笑。而现在他有了这个弯腰。他几乎以40度角行走，像个老人。

他被刺伤过两次。他的拇指被感染了，她认为他可能会失去这只手。"他们需要停止忽视这样一个事实：这里有人在街上卖芬太尼，"她说。"当它只是海洛因时，我不敢相信我在说'只是海洛因'。芬太尼是不同的。我们正在使人们的死亡正常化。"

有一天，Berlinn在Tenderloin社区寻找Corey时，遇到了别人的儿子。"他在Safeway公司门口赤身裸体......他说他是上帝，他在吃一个纸板箱。"

她报了警。警察赶到，但说他们无能为力；他说他不想要帮助，他也没有伤害任何人。"他们说，裸体并不违法；人们在卡斯特罗一直都是裸体的......他们只是让他裸体在Safeway门口的街上吃纸板。"

发生在Safeway的那个人身上的事情，发生在Dustin Walker身上的事情--这些都是某种进步-自由主义虚无主义的寓言，相信任何必须强加在一个脆弱的人身上的干预都是有根本缺陷和问题的，最好的事情就是什么都不做。任何被痛苦的景象所冒犯的人都只是在评判一个有精神健康问题的人，而任何认为国家可以而且应该控制一个处于毒品和精神病的人的自由主义者基本上都是共和党人。如果这个脆弱的人死了，那是他的选择，而在旧金山，我们祝贺自己非常接受这种选择。

木板店
市区一家被木板封住的商店
去年，我在离我童年的家几个街区的一家漂亮的小古董店给我妻子买了她的结婚戒指。12月底，它被洗劫一空。摇摇欲坠的店主发布了一段视频；展柜里空空如也，整个地方都被玻璃覆盖。


你可以花几天时间来讨论旧金山的犯罪统计数据及其意义，很多人都这样做。它的暴力犯罪率相对较低，与类似规模的城市相比，它是凶杀案发生率最低的城市之一。但是，这个城市已经变得臭名昭著的是商店盗窃和汽车闯入等犯罪行为，而数据显示，这种声誉是赢得的。自2019年以来，入室盗窃案增加了40%以上。闯入汽车的案件最近有所下降，但旧金山遭受的闯入汽车案件--以及总体上远多于亚特兰大和洛杉矶等城市的财产盗窃--按人均计算。

CVS Health的有组织犯罪部门负责人称旧金山是 "有组织零售犯罪的中心之一"。旧金山沃尔格林的盗窃案是全国平均水平的四倍。商店正在减少营业时间或关闭。从去年11月到今年2月，有7家沃尔格林关闭，一些人指出盗窃是其原因。该市对此采取的措施少得惊人。2011年，旧金山约有70%的入店行窃案件以逮捕告终。2021年，只有15%的案件是这样。

安妮-洛瑞：人民与切萨-布丹的关系

在旧金山，入店行窃非刑事化的运动始于2014年的47号提案，该州法律将持有毒品降级，还将盗窃价值低于950美元的商品重新归为轻度犯罪。2019年，随着布丹当选为地区检察官，这种情况加速发展。


现在很难记得，但布丁的选举对这个城市来说是激动人心的。它发生在对唐纳德-特朗普总统的愤怒的高峰期，当时越来越多的人开始意识到警察对黑人的暴力行为，并要求进行刑事司法改革。该市第一位黑人女市长伦敦-布瑞德(London Breed)希望有一个自由主义的温和派来担任检察官，但布丁作为一个激烈的进步主义思想家向左竞选，他的世界观是由他被监禁的父母--地下气象组织成员塑造的。他是一名公设辩护人，根本不是一名检察官。他曾在委内瑞拉工作，并在2009年祝贺前独裁者乌戈-查韦斯废除了任期限制。布丹是一个有魅力的人物。他的竞选经理称他是 "全国运动的候选人"。

据《旧金山观察家报》报道，警官协会对他进行了激烈的斗争，花费了40万美元进行了大量的攻击广告。这些广告并没有起到作用。在鲍丁的选举聚会上，一位市议员带领人群高呼 "去他妈的警察协会"。在竞选期间，布丁说他不会起诉生活质量犯罪。他希望通过解决犯罪的社会原因--贫困、吸毒成瘾、精神健康问题，来 "打破累犯的循环"。布丁在推销革命，而旧金山已经准备好了。在理论上。

但事实上并非如此。因为事实证明，左派的人也拥有财产，而且普遍认为商店应该为他们出售的商品付费。

在旧金山，看到有人偷东西已经不是什么大事了。有关犯罪过程的视频经常在网上流传。去年的一个视频显示，一群人在光天化日之下带着货物逃离了Neiman Marcus。还有一些视频显示，人们从药店抢走了他们能抢到的东西，然后走了出去。当盗窃发生在沃尔格林或CVS时，没有什么大的追捕。收银员们对此也很淡定。一条又一条的除臭剂和洗发水通道被锁住了。按一下按钮，服务员就会给你拿洗碗皂。

对布丹的愤怒与那块上锁的肥皂有关，但它远远超出了这个范围。

在布丹的领导下，该市的检察官不能再利用某人过去曾被定罪的事实来要求延长刑期，"特殊情况 "除外。Boudin终止了现金保释，并限制使用帮派增强条款，这些条款允许对与帮派有关的重罪进行更严厉的判决。在大多数情况下，他禁止检察官在小规模交通检查中发现毒品和枪支时寻求指控。"我们不会对被确定为种族主义借口拦截而导致找到违禁品的案件提出指控，"地区检察官的通信主管Rachel Marshall告诉我。

Boudin是 "协作法庭 "的忠实拥护者，这些法庭注重康复而不是监禁时间，例如退伍军人司法法庭和行为健康法庭，在他的任期内，他们审理的案件比以前更多。2018年，不到40%的小偷案件被送往这些项目，而去年的比例超过70%。马歇尔说，是法官决定哪些案件要转移，而不是布丹，而且近年来合作法庭的资格规则已经松动了。但批评者也指出，布丁总体上获得的定罪率较低：2021年为40%，而其前任的定罪率约为60%。

自布丹上任以来，约有60名检察官离职，接近其团队的一半。一些人退休或被解雇，但其他人辞职以示抗议。我与两名加入罢免运动的人进行了交谈。其中一位名叫布鲁克-詹金斯（Brooke Jenkins）的凶杀案检察官告诉我，她离开的部分原因是鲍丁向一些律师施压，要求他们将重大罪行作为较轻的罪行进行起诉。(马歇尔说这是 "谎言"。）她不能成为其中的一部分。"受害者感到无望，"詹金斯告诉我。"他们觉得他已经失去了他们伸张正义的机会。现在他们所看到和感受到的是，他唯一关心的是犯罪者"。(我不会对詹金斯自己竞选检察官感到惊讶，尽管这还不是她所提出的事情。）

2020年，来自Tenderloin警察局的一条推特捕捉到了官兵们的沮丧情绪。"今晚，18个月内第15次，20天内第3次，我们将同一个嫌疑人以盗窃机动车的重罪收监。"

布丁的下巴线条粗犷，对批评者的回答快速而紧凑。他的办公室坚决拒绝了他在解决犯罪方面做得不够的说法。"马歇尔指出："在警方提交给我们办公室的重罪毒品销售和为销售而持有的案件中，检察官对大约80%的案件提出了指控。毕竟，只有当警察逮捕他们时，他才能起诉他们，而在他的任期内，逮捕率直线下降。所以这怎么可能是他的错呢？但为什么逮捕率会急剧下降？大流行病是一个原因。但也许也是因为检察官从一开始就说他不会优先考虑起诉较低级别的犯罪行为。警察一般不会逮捕他们知道地方检察官不会起诉的人。

空荡荡的店面，挂着出租的牌子
市区一家待租的商店。
双联画：人们在汽车被砸后打扫卫生，一名男子看着手机从一群流浪汉身边走过。
左图：在Tenderloin，一辆汽车被砸后，一名男子正在清扫碎玻璃。右图。公民中心。
2020年，我在为《纽约时报》撰写一篇报道时采访了布丹。当我们谈到为什么他对起诉生活质量犯罪不感兴趣时，他解释说，与他想关注的高层问题相比，街头犯罪只是小事一桩。("Kilos, not crumbs "是他最喜欢的一句话。)他曾提出，旧金山的许多毒贩子本身就是弱势群体，需要保护。"他在2020年的一次虚拟市政厅中说："在旧金山销售毒品的人中有很大比例--也许多达一半--是来自洪都拉斯的。"我们需要注意我们的干预措施所产生的影响......这些年轻人中有些是在死亡的痛苦中被贩卖到这里的。他们中的一些人在洪都拉斯的家人已经或将受到伤害，如果他们不继续向人贩子付钱的话"。

阅读：他的父亲得到了一个宽恕的机会。然后他的孩子出生了。

当然，布丹想做的事有其好处。没有人希望人们被监禁的时间长短不公。没有人希望移民的亲属被MS-13杀害。Boudin的政策想法中，很少有个别的，有时还有合理的限制，是无法辩护的。(例如，对真正的轻罪终止现金保释，可以保护人们在监狱里不会失去工作和更多的东西。） 但与无家可归一样，该市对刑事司法改革的总体看法已经远远超出了常识的范畴。上个月，一名从2002年到2019年被判定犯有15项入室盗窃和偷窃相关重罪的男子因16项新的入室盗窃和偷窃罪名被再次逮捕；其中大部分指控被驳回，他被缓刑释放。这确实没有激发人们的信心，认为该市正在认真对待这一切。

布丁的辩护人喜欢把批评他的人说成是发牢骚的技术兄弟或富有的右翼分子。一份支持布丁的传单上写着：停止右翼议程。但是，抱怨的鼓点来自大量善良的自由主义者，反对他的票也是如此。如果只是富人，那么，富人可以雇佣私人保安，或者搬到郊区。而且很多人都这么做了。他们不是唯一住在这里的人，他们也不是唯一感到愤怒的人。

直到现在，人们可能还不太清楚，但圣弗朗西斯科人对这个城市的领导层失去耐心已经有很长一段时间了。多年来，没有什么比进步的领导人如何管理城市的住房危机更能疏远他们。

考虑一下伍尔西街770号的花卉农场的故事。它在阳光充足的城市南端倾斜了2.2英亩，到处都是破旧的温室，玻璃早已破碎--鸟类和野玫瑰的混乱局面。五年来，倡导者们一直在与一个试图在这块青翠的土地上建造63个单元的开发商斗争。他们想在那里卖花，为社区种植蔬菜--一种班卓琴和蜜蜂的乌托邦式的幻想。他们不想要的东西--至少不是在那里，不是在那座漂亮的山上--是一个大型的住房开发项目。谁想反驳他们呢？在旧金山，开发商这个词基本上是一种污蔑，接近于叫某人为共和党人。什么样的怪物想用推土机推倒野玫瑰？

几十年来，旧金山的渐进式管理产生了大量的法规--安全审查、环境审查、历史审查、阳光下的阻碍审查--这些法规使居民有权从根本上瘫痪发展。申请酌情审查只需花费682美元，就可以将一个建设项目搁置数年，如果你是一个已经存在了至少两年的老牌俱乐部，那么就可以免费申请。今年，一个面向中产阶级的19个单元的开发计划被叫停，因为在邻居们提出的其他问题中，该建筑将使多洛雷斯公园的整体阴影覆盖率增加0.001%。

腐烂的花园和房屋的景观图
伍尔西街770号的花卉农场
房地产的成本在2010年代达到了危机水平，因为来自世界各地的雄心勃勃的毕业生们都挤在山上，在蓬勃发展的科技行业工作。很快，他们就没有地方可住了。技术工人搬进了房车，停在穷人和无家可归者身边。非法的宿舍出现了。收入丰厚的年轻人几乎把城里的每个社区都绅士化了。2018年，当43岁的伦敦-布雷德当选为市长时，她才刚刚停止与室友一起生活；她无法负担独自生活。

与此同时，现有的房主则变得非常、非常富有。如果所有其他策略都失败了，反对大型建设项目的邻居们可以直接把它放在选票上。如果可以选择，谁会冒着财产价值下降的风险投票，或者说 "是的，我的后院有阴影也没关系"？这是不可能的。

对这种令人愉快的现状的愤怒来自一派年轻的租房者。我曾经参加过一个由支持住房的团体YIMBY在Mission区举办的培训课程--"在我的后院是的"。我看了一个PowerPoint演示文稿（"这是另一个对你的祖父母生气的理由！下一张幻灯片。"），然后加入了这个团体的饮料。

"关于社区住房会议上的紧张气氛，现在经营着一个名为GrowSF的温和组织团队的史蒂文-巴斯（Steven Buss）说："那些年长的NIMBYs简直是在对人们嘶吼。(在一个大雾弥漫的夜晚，在其中一个会议上，我听到了嘶嘶声，这很有趣，他们所讨论的项目从未被建造。）

Gabe Zitrin，一位律师，突然出现了。"就像770号伍尔西。我也喜欢羽衣甘蓝，但你可以在那个地方安置50个孩子和他们的家人。这是关于优先权的问题。他们想要一个农场。他们是自私的，他们是虚荣的。农场并不为公共利益服务。我不能告诉他们不要农场，但我可以告诉他们，住房是我们更需要的东西。我不想最终被一群超级富豪和一个农场所包围。"

这个城市的进步人士似乎觉得，这一切都太过美丽和脆弱，无法改变。任何变化都意味着减弱；任何新的、更大的建筑都意味着旧的、迷人的建筑消失了，旧的、迷人的居民可能也会消失。新人的流动已经失去了控制；他们应该停止来这里。社区花园必须留下来，还有洒在低矮建筑上的阳光。没有人认为这是对教师和消防员的巨大通勤的损害。没有人认为这是把中产阶级踢出去。在选择将人们安置在人行道上的帐篷里，还是安置在可能会阻挡他们一寸海湾景色的新建筑中，多年来，旧金山人选择了帐篷。

针对Chesa Boudin的愤怒可能已经得到了控制。轻微的犯罪令人沮丧，但这并不是点燃城市革命的原因。住房拥挤是悲惨的，但这种情况已经持续了十多年。点燃这一切的火花是学校董事会。而准备发怒的人群是旧金山的父母。

该市的学校在2020-21学年的大部分时间里被关闭--比其他大多数城市的学校要长，比旧金山的私立学校要长很多。在大流行病期间，由于没有真正的重新开放计划，学校董事会会议成为重大事件，听众人数超过1,000人。董事会没有单方面的权力来重新开放学校，即使它想这样做--这取决于学区、市政府和教师工会之间的谈判，但许多家长震惊地发现，董事会成员似乎并不想多谈让孩子们回到教室的问题。他们不想谈论学习损失或出勤率和功能的问题。他们似乎对通风这样的话题不屑一顾。相反，他们想谈谈白人至上主义。

2021年的一个晚上，会议持续了7个小时，其中一个小时专门用来确保一个叫塞斯-布伦泽尔的人不参加家长委员会。

Brenzel是一名音乐教师，当时他和他的丈夫有一个孩子在公立学校读书。委员会有八个席位空缺，Brenzel被其他委员会成员一致推荐。但有一个问题：Brenzel是白人。

"我的名字叫玛丽，"一位与会者说。"我是一个公开的有色人种家长，使用他们/她们的代名词。" 他们指出，家长委员会已经太白了（在10个现任成员中，3个是白人）。这 "真的，真的有问题"，他们说。"我敢打赌，我们可以找到有色人种和同性恋的家长......QTPOC的声音需要在白人同性恋的声音之前首先被引导。

还有人打电话进来，自称是辛迪。她打电话来为Brenzel辩护，而且她在哭。"她说："他是一个混合种族家庭的同性恋父亲。

一位名叫Brandee的女士打来电话。"我是一个白人家长，在我的家庭里有一些交叉性。我的儿子有几种残疾。我真的不敢奢望我的名字会出现在这里"。她对辛迪说了一些好话："当白人在董事会上分享这些眼泪时"--她停顿了一下，笑着说："我给你提了一个很好的书建议。这本书叫《白色的眼泪/棕色的伤痕》。我鼓励你去读它，谢谢。"

学校董事会成员艾莉森-柯林斯(Allison Collins)给予了致命一击。"作为一个混血儿，我发现当人们说某人是某个有色人种的父母时，我真的很反感，就像，他们有资格代表这个社区一样。"

布伦泽尔在整个会议期间基本保持面无表情。他没有说一句话。最终，董事会同意推迟投票。他从未被批准。

这些放大电话的另一个大辩论是，是否要重新命名以亚伯拉罕-林肯和旧金山第一位女市长戴安娜-范斯坦等人物命名的学校。董事会将这些人物称为过去种族主义的象征，并最终投票决定对44所 "与不公正有关的 "学校进行重新命名--尽管在出现反弹后，董事会暂停实施这些改变。

可以说，董事会成员是在做他们被派去做的事情。柯林斯和她的两位最进步的同事是在2018年当选的，也就是布丁的前一年，那是一个更令人头疼的时期，当时特朗普的阴影似乎笼罩着最小的地方办公室。柯林斯有一个专注于教育正义的博客，有一种感觉是她将倡导一种激进的新政治。但在无休止的封锁期间，人们的热情开始减退，甚至在许多为她投票的人中也是如此。他们发现自己被董事会的战斗性语气以及它对教育的实际想法所拒绝。

洛厄尔高中外的学生
洛厄尔高中外的学生。
2021年2月，董事会成员同意，他们将避免用学习损失这个短语来描述被锁在教室外的孩子们的情况。相反，他们将使用学习改变这个词。当时董事会成员加布里埃拉-洛佩斯（Gabriela López）说，学校被关闭只是意味着学生 "拥有与我们目前所衡量的不同的学习经历"。"他们正在学习更多关于他们的家庭和他们的文化。" 董事会认为，将这一问题归结为某种 "赤字 "是错误的。

同月，董事会投票决定用抽签制度取代筛选申请入读旧金山最具竞争力的高中--洛威尔的严格考试。洛佩兹曾这样解释。"对于白人和亚裔社区以外的学生来说，成绩和标准化考试分数是自动的障碍。" 她说，它们 "已被证明是最有效的种族主义政策之一，考虑到它们被用来试图衡量能力和智力。因此，洛厄尔用这种基于成绩的系统作为申请的一个步骤，这本身就是一种种族主义。"

柯林斯对此表示赞同。"'优点'是一个固有的种族主义构造，是以白人至上主义的框架为中心设计的。"

如果你不喜欢这些变化，那就难办了。一位家长在推特上指责洛佩斯试图破坏学校系统，她回答说："我是真心的"，后面是一个中指表情符号。7月，关于旧金山生活质量下降的话题，她写道："我想，那就离开吧。"

加芙列拉-洛佩斯一定认为历史是站在她这边的。布丹也是如此。但事情的结果是不同的。如果说这个故事有一个转折点，那就是当这个城市的亚裔美国人的父母特别生气时。

随着艾莉森-柯林斯的形象在大流行期间的上升，批评者开始翻看她的旧推文。有一些不好的消息。在2016年，她曾写道。"许多亚裔美国人认为他们从'模范少数民族'的说法中受益。事实上，许多亚裔美国人的老师、学生和家长积极推动这些神话。他们利用白人至上主义思想来同化和'出人头地'。"

她还抱怨说，亚裔美国人对特朗普的发言不够多。"他们认为他们不会被驱逐出境吗？被歧视？被殴打？作为一个家庭的n****r仍然是一个n****r。你仍然被认为是'帮助'。"

旧金山湾区的白人占52%，黑人占6.7%，亚裔占23.3%。而许多亚裔旧金山人对这些推文感到惊恐。

"她的言论深深地侮辱了我的家人和整个旧金山的华人社区，"林杰告诉我。林杰是一位来自香港的移民，有两个孩子在公立学校读书。他在学区的招生部门工作，尽管他刚刚得知他的工作将在下个月被取消。他说，他知道较富裕的父母在大流行期间在做什么，因为他看到了文书工作。他们把自己的孩子拉出来，送到私立学校。林没有这个选择。

2021年4月，他开始在湾区的华语广播电台1400 AM上表达他的愤怒。他大声疾呼，反对学校关闭和取消洛厄尔的招生考试的决定。亚裔学生在洛厄尔的人数历来过多；对于旧金山成绩优异的穷人和中产阶级的孩子来说，进入洛厄尔是提升经济地位的最佳途径之一。

他所在社区的许多人同意他的观点。他们开始收集签名并为罢免柯林斯、洛佩斯和另一位进步的董事会成员法乌加-莫利加的运动筹集资金。罢免运动的组织者之一西瓦-拉吉告诉我，在自愿参加运动的人中，约有一半人讲中文。

推文曝光后，董事会的一名成员要求柯林斯自愿下台。但她拒绝了。相反，她起诉了她的五位同事。她还起诉了该区。她要求赔偿8700万美元，理由包括 "严重的精神和情感痛苦"，"自我形象的损害 "和 "精神慰藉的伤害"。

她的案子被驳回了。而在2022年2月，圣弗朗西斯科人果断地投票决定将这三人从董事会中除名。76%的人投票罢免柯林斯，另外两人分别以约70%的比例被罢免。他们已被市长任命的温和派人士取代。柯林斯和洛佩斯抨击他们的对手是白人至上主义的代理人，但投票率是多样化的，而且令人印象深刻，特别是对于特别选举而言。投票罢免董事会成员的人数超过了当初投票给他们的人数。

布丁的反对者同样也来自全市各地。他喜欢说他们是由精英资助的，而罢免运动确实筹集了大约两倍的资金。但有钱人也给支持布丁的竞选活动捐了款。最有可能说他们希望召回布丹的种族群体是？亚裔美国人。他们的盟友包括许多来自该市中产阶级残余的人，以及从投票给柯林斯到召回她的那种容易动摇的自由派。

一名男子在人行道上拉下裤子
市政厅营地外的一名男子。
双联画：一个骑自行车的家长拉着一个穿旱冰鞋的孩子；一个牌子上写着危险google it
左图：一对父女骑车穿过金门公园。右图。街头标志。
现在，一些团体正试图解决该市的生活质量问题。有一个新的加州和平联盟，它反对露天毒品市场，并包括有可能或已经死于吸毒过量的吸毒者的父母。还有 "创新公立学校"（Innovate Public Schools）和 "停止犯罪"（Stop Crime SF），这些都是不言自明的。Shine On SF是通过清理城市的街道来 "重燃公民自豪感"。SF.Citi正在为科技工作者的利益辩护。

米歇尔-坦德勒(Michelle Tandler)说，在很长一段时间里，他是一位创业公司的创始人，他在推特上记录了市中心的崩溃，"旧金山的进步人士和民主党人都非常关注特朗普，他们没有注意到。" 突然间，他们开始关注了。

而市长Breed正在作出回应。她是在特朗普政府时期当选的，就像布丁和学校董事会一样，她的支持率也在下降。但她是一个不同的模式。布雷德是一个聪明的政治家，知道风向，并愿意根据结果改变路线。

就在几年前，她还自豪地拥护 "取消警察经费 "的运动；现在已经不是了。今年春天，在该市的同性恋大游行禁止警察穿制服游行后，布瑞德宣布，出于团结，她也不会游行了。

早在2月份，我就和她一起散步了。当时她刚刚在唐人街的一个老年中心外举行了一个关于反亚裔仇恨犯罪的新闻发布会。与纽约等地一样，该市针对亚裔的仇恨犯罪报告激增。人们很害怕。布里德在该市的项目中长大，他知道最近有家庭成员被枪杀的居民。她告诉我："我知道有很多人支持切萨，因为他们大力推动刑事司法，"她说。"我不认为人们认为这意味着正义不会发生。" 她补充说："这不是正义的改革，如果每个犯罪的人都因犯罪而脱罪。" 现在她将有机会取代他。

我们一边交谈，一边穿过唐人街，然后经过俄罗斯山的700万美元的住宅，进入北滩。海湾就在前方；缆车司机向市长挥手致意；城市的问题似乎离我们很远。但布瑞德很生气，对进步派以及他们如何让城市失望感到失望。几个月前，布瑞德宣布了一项新的犯罪处理办法，从Tenderloin开始，那里的街道和人行道充满了芬太尼的混乱气息。她宣布该地区处于紧急状态，并批准了三个月的资金用于加强那里的执法工作。

这项命令主要是象征性的--毒品问题并不局限于几个糟糕的街区。扫荡无家可归者往往只是意味着把帐篷和毒贩子推到路上。任何住在旧金山的人都知道，Tenderloin地区多年来一直是一个紧急情况。但这也让市长有机会发表一些新的言论。"我今天提出的建议和将来提出的建议会让很多人感到不舒服，我不在乎"。她说，现在是时候 "减少对破坏我们城市的所有废话的容忍"。

人们在公园的夕阳下放松
阿拉莫广场公园的夕阳
我的家乡并没有在任何选举地图上变成红色。但这种转变是真实的。伍尔西770号的农场？开发商终于获得批准，将其变成住房。如果进步人士已经玩过头了，在文化战争的胜利和激动人心的口号中变得有点颓废，而没有良好的政府来支持他们，那么旧金山正在为内部改革指明方向。


在校董会投票之前，旧金山的上一次地方性罢免是在1983年。在农贸市场上，近40年来没有出现过这种程度的冲突，在那里，一对签名采集者在有机狗食亭对面对峙。部分原因是，直到最近，许多圣弗朗西斯科人还在害怕。如果一个技术工人抱怨，他们就会被谩骂。如果一个年老的嬉皮士抱怨，他们就是一个种族主义的老疯子。把我们所有的问题都归咎于外来者--那些硅谷的闯入者，他们的到来毁了这个城市，这是很容易的。毒品、无家可归、犯罪--都归咎于谷歌的员工，他们扭曲了城市的公寓市场，带来了他们的手工巧克力、滑板车和时尚的理发师。如果不是他们和他们造成的不平等，旧金山仍然会很好。

这话有一定的道理。没有科技的繁荣，你就无法讲述住房紧缩的故事。但人们开始关注市政厅和学校董事会。他们意识到，那里没有技术兄弟。芬太尼的流行和大流行病破解了一些东西。随着城市被无休止地封锁，人们死在街头，学校关闭，慢慢地，人们可以说也许这很荒谬。也许这不起作用。

当然，要拯救旧金山，需要的不仅仅是几张罢免票。当我问Breed关于广场上新的吸毒者中心--她支持这个中心的建立--她似乎有点不自在，不久后就想结束我们的采访。她含糊其辞地说，不是所有的变化都能一下子发生。


NIMBY主义和芬太尼现在就像大桥和雾一样是旧金山景观的一部分。而学校董事会仍在进行校内培训。五月底，它宣布，出于对美国原住民的尊重，该区将不再在任何工作头衔中使用酋长一词（尽管这个词实际上来自法国厨师）。

有一天，我走过千禧塔。它曾经是推动我们这个时髦小镇转变为大城市的象征，是旧金山市中心一座闪闪发光的58层摩天大楼，自从2009年完工以来，它一直在向地面下沉--超过了一英尺。一群戴着硬帽的人就站在那里，仰望着它。这个比喻很明显，但旧金山从来就不是一个含蓄的城市。我愿意相信那些人最终有一个计划来修复这座塔。至少他们似乎接受了它需要修复的事实。

长久以来，旧金山一直过于自满，没有解决其每一个机构的缓慢腐烂问题。但没有什么比愤怒和召回更让我感到希望。"旧金山人感到羞愧，"米歇尔-坦德勒告诉我。"我认为人们第一次觉得，'等等，什么是进步人士？...我有责任吗？这是我的错吗？""

圣弗朗西斯科人现在正在说。我们可以想要一个更公平的司法系统，同时也想让我们的车窗不被砸坏。还有。希望学校继续开课，希望老师教孩子们，而且，是的，希望他们进行测试，看看这些孩子学到了什么，这不是白人至上主义。


圣弗朗西斯科人欺骗自己，认为进步的政治需要阻止新的建筑，并回避那些来镇上打码的移民。我们欺骗自己，认为人行道上的精神病和毒瘾只是这个城市多样性的一部分，即使无家可归者和住房价格赶走了这个城市的实际多样性。现在，居民们正在清醒地认识到这一点。召回意味着我们会让这个伟大的城市衰败到什么程度是有限度的。感谢上帝。

因为赫伯-卡恩是对的。它仍然是你所见过的最美丽的城市。

内莉-鲍尔斯是即将出版的散文集的作者，在通讯《常识》上写有专栏。