- Phone Theft Surveillance: Cameras capture a woman’s phone snatched by a man on a scooter, handed off to another, then placed in a car trunk, leading to arrests via drone tracking in minutes.
- RTIC Program: San Francisco Police Department’s Real Time Investigations Center integrates drones, license plate readers, and private cameras for immediate crime tracking and officer alerts.
- Post-2020 Crime Surge: After George Floyd protests and pandemic lockdowns, calls to defund police and DA Chesa Boudin’s lenient policies contributed to an 11% crime rise in 2021.
- School Board Mobilization: Prolonged school closures, equity debates, and changes to Lowell High admissions activated Asian parents, resulting in a 2022 recall of three board members.
- Boudin Recall Campaign: Anti-Asian hate crimes, including Vicha Ratanapakdee’s murder, fueled Asian voter turnout, leading to Boudin’s 2022 recall by 60%, with Brooke Jenkins appointed as replacement.
- Crime Reduction Efforts: Under Jenkins, prosecutions targeted organized crime rings, reducing car break-ins to 22-year lows and overall crime by 7% in 2023.
- Persistent Drug Market: Open-air fentanyl and meth dealing in Tenderloin and Mission remains unchecked despite raids, with public opinion polls showing it as the top concern.
- Nonprofit Influence: City contracts with groups like Urban Alchemy prioritize harm reduction over enforcement, sustaining drug tourism and homelessness, amid calls for more sober housing options.
A camera surveys a street in downtown San Francisco. It captures a woman walking with phone in hand; a man dressed in red and black approaches her on an electric kick scooter. One can almost see the moment he snatches her phone, but it’s blocked from view for a second by a passing bus.
There is another camera about two-and-a-half blocks away. It records the same thief hand off the phone to another man, before walking around the corner. Yet another camera at the same location captures the scene at a different angle; the second man can now be seen down the street as he puts the phone in the trunk of a car.
The next images are taken from the air. Circling over the Tenderloin, a downtown neighborhood known for larceny and open-air drug dealing, a drone is scanning the sidewalks. It quickly zeroes in on the thief, who is now seated on the pavement. It’s been just a few minutes since he snatched the phone. Five police officers swarm him. The drone then follows the other man who took the phone from the thief. He, too, is swarmed by police and arrested.
The footage is sourced from a new program of the San Francisco Police Department called the Real Time Investigations Center (RTIC). RTIC combines drones, license plate readers, and a network of private cameras throughout the city to track down criminals immediately after they’ve committed crimes and relay that information back to officers on the ground.
In recent years, San Francisco has become famous for its pathological tolerance of crime. RTIC is emblematic of a new political attitude about public safety in the city. While the crime rate has fallen nationwide, the decline has been even more pronounced here, thanks to a fundamental shift away from the ideological radicalism ascendant in city politics just a few years ago. The origins of that shift may be traced to the blowback from the feverish policies of the early pandemic era, in terms of both the Covid response and the national “racial reckoning.”
In other words, there has been a revolt of the political center. Its leaders have emerged not from the world of professional activists, but from regular San Franciscans: parents of kids stuck in virtual learning, Asian families afraid for the lives of their elderly relatives, and people sick of walking through gauntlets of meth smokers. Their anger has led to a sea change in how the city practices law enforcement, leading to a historic drop in property crime rates. But it has yet to make an appreciable impact on the biggest problem the city faces: the open-air drug market.
The Roots of Disorder
Following the killing of George Floyd, San Francisco, like many liberal American cities, experienced a season of intense political protest in 2020, often against the very idea of law enforcement. Even the mayor was calling to “defund the police.”1 Months into the lockdown, the outburst was naturally experienced as cathartic by the activists and sympathizers who participated in it. But it heralded an enormous crime wave across the country. In San Francisco, that wave had been even more pronounced than in other cities, rising 11 percent over the year 2021, more than twice the increase in New York City.2 “There was a massive social upheaval,” SFPD Commander Tom McGuire told me. “It led to violence and there were a lot of opportunists out there committing a lot of crimes and robberies and burglaries and auto burglaries.”
One of the factors contributing to the exceptionally large rise in San Francisco was its district attorney at that time, the famously soft-on-crime Chesa Boudin. The new DA, who won his office in 2019 on the third round of ranked choice voting, could hardly be characterized as reflective of mainstream San Francisco voters. “Boudin got in almost by accident,” Frank Noto of the organization StopCrimeSF told me. Nevertheless, he exercised the powers of his office as if he had a sweeping mandate. He assumed a highly adversarial posture toward the San Francisco Police Department, unsuccessfully prosecuting one of its officers with manslaughter over a 2017 shooting, and blaming the department for the city’s rising crime rate.3 And as promised, he aggressively pursued a policy of decarceration, reducing the jail population by sending many more suspects into diversion programs or putting them on ankle monitors.4 “People were essentially entering jail and walking right out of jail,” Commander McGuire said.
With the institution of policing under sustained public attack from politicians, activists, and the media—and with a DA reducing the impact of arrests to near zero while pledging to prosecute cops for any hint of misconduct—San Francisco police officers simply stopped enforcing laws. In the eyes of many officers, there was only a downside to doing their jobs.
It wasn’t long before criminals recognized that, in San Francisco, crime had become a risk-free enterprise. “There were stories of police officers transporting someone to jail, and saying, ‘Hey, I don’t give a shit. I’m calling Chesa,’ with a smile on their face, and laughing about it,” Commander McGuire told me.
For many San Francisco families, however, an even bigger concern than rising crime was the prolonged school closures from Covid. As schools began reopening across the country, including in Democratic cities like Atlanta, San Francisco’s school district stuck stubbornly to online teaching. Parents began to get frustrated, especially in the city’s large ethnic Asian population, where education is a prized virtue. “Your whole mission in life is to make sure your kids have a better life than you,” said Forrest Liu, a Stop Asian Hate activist, of Asian American parents. “Education is what we see as our roadway to get there.”
Asian parents who had rarely participated in local politics began showing up to school board meetings on Zoom to find out when their kids would be able to return to in-person learning. “These are people who, if you think your time is valuable, their time is valuable,” said Liu. “Their time is dedicated to making money, taking care of their family, right? They started showing up to the meetings, and they were probably very innocent, like, hey, I just want to know, when’s the school going to reopen? They get to the meetings, and it was just the wildest, unimaginable stuff they were talking about.”
At the time, the school board was consumed by a fiery controversy over a set of murals at a San Francisco high school that depicted black slaves and a dead American Indian, which some believed caused psychological harm to students of color. Then, the board latched onto another social justice crusade, one aimed at renaming dozens of schools named after newly disfavored historical figures, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. “You could see the parents like, ‘what the fuck?’” said Liu, who attended some of the meetings. They seemed to be talking about everything but reopening schools.
“It really showed how misguided the school board was,” Nancy Tung, the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, told me. “It just made everyone take a look at what was happening, and thinking, ‘What is wrong with my government?’ Parent advocacy organizations were cropping up. Teachers wanted to teach outdoors, but the school board prevented it from happening. So, families started to focus on what the government was delivering for them.”
Word spread, and more Asian parents started showing up to school board meetings. Conducting the meetings on Zoom “increased access to things,” said Tung, as did the idle time forced by the lockdowns. “Since nobody is doing anything else, it allowed people to participate on [a] level we had not had in years past.” And as their numbers grew, the school board moved onto the next item on its equity agenda: changing the admissions criteria for Lowell High School.
Lowell is San Francisco’s elite public high school, where students are selectively admitted based on grades and test scores. Its student body fluctuates around 50 percent Asian. In 2020, the school board declared that the admissions process “perpetuates the culture of white supremacy and racial abuse towards Black and Latinx students,” and voted to replace it with a lottery-based system. Later, old tweets were surfaced of one of the school board members accusing Asian Americans of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”
To Asian families in San Francisco, the message was clear: there are too many of your kids at the best school in the city, and we’re going to replace them. This, more than anything else the school board had done, galvanized Asian voters. When a petition circulated to recall three of the board members, it caught fire in the city’s Asian neighborhoods. In 2022, voters approved the recall in a landslide.
The Tide Begins to Turn
The next politician to find himself in the crosshairs of the newly activated Asian electorate was Boudin. During the pandemic, a rash of anti-Asian hate crimes swept San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.5 The most famous of them was the senseless, vicious murder of an eighty‑four-year-old Thai man named Vicha Ratanapakdee by a young black man named Antoine Brown. After fatally body slamming Ratanapakdee against the sidewalk, Brown went to his parked car, got his phone, walked back to Ratanapakdee’s lifeless body and took pictures of it.
In a New York Times article about the killing, Boudin said there was no evidence that the attack had any racial motivation.6 “It appears that the defendant was in some sort of a temper tantrum,” he said. It was a phrasing that struck many San Franciscans as dismissive. Boudin had already gained a reputation for being unduly sympathetic toward the perpetrators of crimes and indifferent to their victims. “He had no empathy,” Dion Lim, a local TV journalist who was the first to report on Ratanapakdee’s murder, told me. The “temper tantrum” remark infuriated Ratanapakdee’s family and ignited an embarrassing news cycle for the DA.7
As more attacks on Bay Area Asian elders went viral, the callousness Boudin showed toward the Ratanapakdees appeared to become a pattern.8 Asian voters in San Francisco, already attuned to what appeared to be anti-Asian bias from the school board, saw more of the same in Boudin’s lackluster response to the attacks on their community.9 “People who had loved ones who were victims of crime would message me on social media, worrying that there wouldn’t be any justice,” Lim said. “It was coming at an incredibly fast pace. ‘I’m not hearing anything from the DA. Are we ever going to get some answers, some kind of closure?’”
Soon, a petition was circulating for Boudin’s recall. The recall campaign, which was chaired by an Asian American veteran Democratic Party activist, targeted Asian voters and enlisted Asian volunteers. “Voting was not something that we participated in as a family,” Lim recalled about her cultural upbringing in an Asian household. “I have many relatives who aren’t even registered. It’s keep your head down, try to make a living, care for your family.” But between the prolonged school closures and the surge in crimes against Asians, “that reticence was out the window,” Lim said.
Asians started engaging in the local political process like never before. “At a certain point, it was like Lord of the Rings, where we were just like, digging them out the mud, slap the white hand of Sauron on them, and send them off, right?” recalled Liu. One of Boudin’s assistant district attorneys, Brooke Jenkins, had quit the DA’s office in protest over his lenient policies and joined the recall movement. “I was organizing in the recall,” Liu said. “I’d be around with Brooke, and she would see all these Asian people just coming out the woodwork.”
The campaign was wildly successful. In 2022, when the recall election took place, it passed by 60 percent. Two-thirds of ethnically Asian voters supported it.10 But Asians weren’t the only ones: in Bayview–Hunter’s Point, home to the highest concentration of black people in San Francisco, 60 percent of voters supported it.
Jenkins went on to be appointed Boudin’s replacement and then won at the ballot box that November in an election that also brought in a moderate majority to the Board of Supervisors. The biggest upset in that election was in a majority-Asian west side district that for two decades had been represented by supervisors of Asian descent. There, Joel Engardio, a moderate white man with little name recognition who had supported Boudin’s recall, defeated the incumbent, Gordon Mar, a veteran Asian American progressive politician who had opposed it.
Jenkins, who remains the DA today, pledged to stop the attacks on Asians, and the attacks on Asians have, indeed, stopped. This is, in part, because Asian voters have shifted the politics in San Francisco such that city leaders cannot afford to have any tolerance for these crimes. “The Asian American community, and young Asian Americans in particular, have become so strong and focused on organizing around these issues, that there is a sentiment in the city that if an Asian attack did happen, you would have like a thousand young Asian activists down your throat,” Jay Cheng, a political strategist with Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, told me.
But the new DA’s impact on crime went well beyond attacks on Asians. Jenkins’s approach to prosecutions is that of a traditional district attorney: collaborating with police, building cases, seeking convictions. Cheng described it as “building larger cases, organized cases, and going farther with them.” She approached the explosion in property crimes in San Francisco, like smash-and-grab burglaries and car break-ins, not as a sociological phenomenon, as Boudin did, but as the consequences of an organized enterprise. Jenkins worked with the police to use bait cars to ensnare professional car burglars and then used those arrests to break up crime rings. The strategy has helped push car break-ins to at least a twenty-two year low.11 “Bipping is down,” said Cheng, using the local vernacular for car burglaries. “You can just count that by the amount of glass on the street.” Those crime rings have since moved out of San Francisco to other cities in the Bay Area. “Since she’s taken prosecution up to an organized level,” Cheng said, “well now the higher-ranked people are now in danger of being prosecuted. That’s not acceptable to them.”
In her first full year in office, 2023, crime dropped by 7 percent, according to the SFPD’s CompStat numbers.12 By comparison, in Boudin’s only full year in office during which the city was not in Covid lockdown, crime rose by nearly 14 percent. “We had a pendulum swing,” said Commander McGuire. “Brooke Jenkins came into office and she had a different approach. It’s essentially putting people in jail who need to be, that are not responding to the programs we have in place, which is diversion programs, getting people ways to work their way out of the criminal justice system. Some people don’t respond well to that. And I think those people have been identified.”
The Persistence of the D****rug Problem
A poll over the summer by the moderate advocacy group GrowSF showed a striking change in public opinion.13 The number of San Franciscans listing violent crime as an extremely serious or very serious problem dropped by 21 points in the last two years. Just over half of the city’s residents now believe that San Francisco is moving in the right direction; two years ago, nearly 70 percent of San Franciscans thought the city was on the wrong track.
But the same poll reveals something else: concerns over open-air drug use and fentanyl dealing have barely changed at all. That is a significant exception to the rule of falling crime rates. More than violent attacks, bipping, auto theft, or any other crime, public drug use and drug dealing have always topped the list of San Franciscans’ law-and-order priorities. But they barely even register as “crimes” anymore in San Francisco. In fact, drug dealing and drug use are not even tabulated into the city’s crime statistics. The crime rate in general may be down in San Francisco, but people are committing these particular crimes day and night all over the city in full view of everyone, including kids.
Last November, San Francisco elected a new mayor: Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. Lurie rode into office on a tide of disapproval of the previous mayor and incumbent candidate, London Breed, who had failed to stem San Francisco’s addiction crisis or shut down the open air drug market. Breed’s boldest effort to disrupt the status quo was to establish a supervised drug consumption site—a fenced-in zone where users could smoke and shoot up with Narcan-equipped observers overseeing them—which closed in less than a year in a storm of controversy.14 Lurie, by contrast, committed himself to an agenda that prioritized drug and alcohol treatment for addicts over the laissez-faire “harm reduction” approach the city had been emphasizing for years.15 He won as an outsider running in a change election.
Under Jenkins and the new mayor, things have begun to change, but only incrementally. Speaking of the Boudin years, Commander McGuire said, “In San Francisco, it was pretty much legalized to the point where a drug dealer would laugh in your face if you arrested him. Put him in jail, and then he’s dealing before your shift ends.” Under Jenkins and Lurie, by contrast, there have been large-scale, high-profile drug raids, a novelty for San Francisco.16 The city has also been more aggressive in stopping people from camping on the street. A recent Supreme Court ruling allowed the city to start clearing sidewalks of homeless encampments for the first time in years. But the day-to-day reality of the city’s open-air drug market is not dramatically different from a few years ago. “Depending on where you are in the city the street conditions have improved,” Steve Basio of GrowSF told me. “Where I am near 16th and Mission, it’s way worse.”
In the Tenderloin, during the day, some streets look pristine compared to the cesspools they were just a year ago. “Others are as bad as ever,” Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, told me. But at night, when there’s a lighter police footprint, the drug market comes alive again. The sidewalks are crammed full of dealers and staggering, hunched-over drug addicts. “Only the tents are gone,” said Gina McDonald, a former addict whose daughter was once on San Francisco’s streets. “Now it’s just bodies lying everywhere.”
Meanwhile, the open-air drug market has expanded deeper into SoMa and into the Mission. On Mission between 15th and 16th, dealers openly sell meth and fentanyl across the street from the SFPD mobile command center, Basio told me. All of the attendant petty crimes that come with a population of drug addicts, like curbside markets of random items shoplifted from stores, have exploded in the vicinity.17
“It creates a market for stolen goods,” Commander McGuire said of the open-air drug trade. “It creates retail theft everywhere, you know, every Walgreens and every CVS and every Safeway and Lucky’s and whatnot, and even mom-and-pop stores were just getting picked clean.” Basio’s wife’s bike was recently stolen, and he found a listing of it for sale on Facebook Marketplace just two blocks away.
The blight, crime, and disorder stemming from the open-air drug market has sustained the shift in voter sentiment against the decarceral policies of the last DA. It is also what led to the legislation that created the Real Time Investigations Center.
Treating the Symptoms
With its bright white walls and glassed-in conference rooms, RTIC looks like the headquarters of a tech start-up, because that’s what it used to be. Last summer, the cryptocurrency firm Ripple donated its office space to the SFPD. Chris Larsen, Ripple’s cofounder, has long pushed for the police to adopt surveillance technology. About five years ago, he began paying for private cameras to be installed in public spaces all over the city. Now, Larsen is paying for RTIC.18
Larsen’s partnership with the police has been unpopular with the city’s significant civil libertarian activist base. Brian Hofer, director of the anti-mass surveillance group Secure Justice, told me he has no problem with RTIC using camera footage to investigate crimes. But, he warns, the police share the data they collect freely with other law enforcement agencies, including those that are currently suppressing political protest on behalf of the White House.
“What about when the National Guard is sent to San Francisco?” he asked. “They’re just going to walk into RTIC and say, ‘This is ours.’ San Franciscans aren’t asking themselves, ‘How can these tools be used against me?’”
In 2019, the Board of Supervisors passed a law that prohibited the city from using facial recognition technology, though Hofer warns that the private cameras in RTIC’s network are all “pre-loaded with analytics.” That was before the crime wave that was induced by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Five years later, voters passed Proposition E, which, among other things, simplified the process by which the police could deploy surveillance technologies, making RTIC possible.
For professional crime rings, RTIC has changed the calculus for targeting San Francisco. The day I visited RTIC, the officers there were passing around an episode of a Bay Area hip-hop podcast in which the guest testified to the new reality with license plate readers, cameras, and drones:
Look, soon as you slide past that motherfucker with some stolen plates, they’re going to issue a warning to every SFPD station in that area, if not the entire city, right? And they’re going to start dispatching to that area. . . . And then they’re going to put the drone on you. They’re not going to follow you with no PD car from hella far. They don’t got to do that. No unmarked vehicles. They’re going to set a drone on you. Listen, they’re going to set a drone on you. That’s about a few thousand feet up. And it’s just going to trail you the whole time. And then when you hit a corner or something, they’re going to box your ass in.19
“Just crime in San Francisco, period,” the guest said, a bit earlier in the episode. “That shit over with, brother.”
But RTIC is a less powerful tool when it comes to stopping drug deals. Being monitored has never been a disincentive for San Francisco drug dealers, who peddle narcotics on the streets, in plain view, night and day. The open-air drug market thrives in San Francisco in part because the city’s police, prosecutors, and judges, who are often at war with each other, have failed for years to deter it. But that failure merely exacerbates the more fundamental problem of San Francisco’s bizarre tolerance of public drug use.
The Mission has become a magnet for drug dealers and drug addicts for the same reason the Tenderloin did: because of the high concentration of social services for homeless people there. “The unlawfulness is integral by design,” a neighbor, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation by activists, told me. The area, the neighbor said, is a containment zone for crime and disorder. With careful collaboration between the community and the government, the worst of the fallout can be managed. But it’s always just a band-aid.
Up the street from the anonymous neighbor’s home is the now empty site of Mission Cabins, a tiny home community for homeless people to live in. It’s right next to an elementary school. When the facility was first proposed a few years ago, many of the neighbors opposed it. They thought it would generate more drug activity on a street that already had its fill of it. A committee of neighborhood volunteers spent endless hours negotiating a very specific Memorandum of Understanding with the city. It took five months. Every two weeks they met with the city on Zoom. Twenty faces would appear on screen, from multiple government agencies. The neighbor I spoke to described it as a second job.
But what emerged from it was worth the trouble. Mission Cabins was like a halfway home, the neighbor told me. There were rules, and the residents were, for the most part, sober. Most importantly, Five Keys, the nonprofit that ran the facility, agreed to deploy foot patrols around the neighborhood. Whenever a neighbor saw someone smoking meth, or defecating, or sleeping on the sidewalk, they could text one of the workers on patrol and get a response within minutes. The neighborhood is cleaner now than it was before the facility was erected.
But Mission Cabins recently closed, to be relocated to another part of the district, to make way for the construction of low-income housing. The anonymous neighbor described the moment as an “inflection point.”
The Nonprofit Industrial Complex
To live in the Mission, especially if you have young kids, entails constantly checking which streets the drug activity is concentrated on every time you leave the house and plotting out your walking routes to avoid them. The city has been more aggressive under Mayor Lurie at clearing hot spots of drug users. But whenever one block or alley is cleared, the addicts just gather at another, just as the users in front of Mission Cabins were pushed onto somebody else’s sidewalk. It’s like a never-ending traveling circus of chaos and despair. “They’re addressing the mosquitoes but the swamp is still there,” the neighbor told me.
That “swamp” is the plethora of free services available to homeless addicts, including housing and health care, and the city’s hospitality toward those who choose to live on the streets, which includes passing out free pipes, foils, and straws to smoke fentanyl with.20 “While we make more arrests, City Hall policies still encourage drug tourists to come to San Francisco,” said Shaw.
There are other obstacles to shutting down the open-air drug market, such as gross police understaffing and judges who are ideologically opposed to incarceration, even of professional drug dealers. But the underlying issue is one of incentives. San Francisco has a reputation across the country of being a place where anyone can fully indulge in their drug addiction.
An addict can live on the street or in a rent-free room. He or she can get meals for free, buy drugs on demand at any time of the day or night, can consume them openly on the sidewalk without fear of arrest. One doesn’t even have to learn any criminal skills to get the money to buy drugs, for merchandise can be taken easily from any store and sold to a fence two blocks away. The storekeepers won’t stop the crime and the police will likely not arrest the perpetrator, if they’re even called in the first place. Clean new drug paraphernalia are also handed out free of charge, delivered to addicts on the curb they are loitering on. If they overdose, they can be revived with Narcan by another user or by a paramedic, and they will go right back to using again.
As long as such conditions remain, the open-air drug market will have oxygen to breathe. But voters may not tolerate it for much longer. The Mission is full of progressive-minded people, even by San Francisco standards. But they’re fed up, the neighbor told me. It’s not so much a political issue anymore as a matter of just living a normal life. The committee that negotiated the MOU over Mission Cabins included many far-left people, including an anarchist. But a change in voter sentiment alone isn’t enough. For public opinion to matter, government institutions need to be responsive to it. And right now, in San Francisco, they’re beholden not to constituents, but to their own contractors.
At first glance, one might assume that the nonprofit groups that San Francisco hires to provide the city’s homeless services are subordinate to the politicians and agency heads who issue those city contracts. But that network of groups has become so vast and so insinuated into the apparatus of government that it’s often the other way around. In San Francisco, working for a progressive nonprofit doing public service work for the city is a steppingstone into politics. It’s like a farm team system. “You can see that in the bios of basically every progressive who’s been elected, they come either from legislative staff or from the nonprofit world,” said Tung.
Out of the incestuous relationship between elected officials, agency heads, and nonprofit contractors has emerged a political machine that is far more responsive to the needs of the nonprofit industry than to regular voters. To take just one example, the city pays Urban Alchemy, a group that does homeless outreach and civilianized police work in neighborhoods consumed by the open-air drug market, tens of millions of dollars a year in contracts. Last year, the nonprofit knowingly overspent its budget by $800,000, according to a financial analyst for the Board of Supervisors, who characterized the conduct as “extreme.”21 But that hasn’t stopped the city’s homelessness department from asking the Board of Supervisors to extend Urban Alchemy’s contract and increase its budget.
The organized political influence of these nonprofit contractors often exceeds the diffuse power of San Francisco voters. The Coalition on Homelessness, which acts as the industry’s grassroots activism and lobbying firm, successfully sued San Francisco to prevent it from clearing homeless encampments, despite a majority of San Franciscans supporting homeless sweeps.22
Nonprofit leaders have even questioned the public’s right to know how they’re spending their money at all. When the San Francisco Examiner reported on her $220,000 yearly salary in 2022, Urban Alchemy’s CEO wrote to the paper: “How is it helping society or the story to tell the whole world what I make? What is the purpose, so everyone can decide if it’s enough or too much? It’s just messy.”
Marc Solomon compared San Francisco’s government to a colonial empire, in which the neighborhoods of the Tenderloin, SoMa, the Mission, and Bayview-Hunter’s Point are the colonies, and the rest of the city is the metropole. “The nonprofits are the colonial administrators,” he said.
Strides have nevertheless been made toward aligning the city’s policies with the interests of voters rather than with those of nonprofit contractors. Last year, the United States Supreme Court overturned the appellate court ruling upon which the injunction banning sweeps of homeless encampments in San Francisco depended. The Tenderloin’s sidewalks are now more or less tent-free.
But there have also been steps backward. In October, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed state legislation drafted by a San Francisco assembly member that would have funded more sober housing for recovering addicts. (That bill was also opposed by the Coalition on Homelessness.) In response to the veto, some of San Francisco’s supervisors are now pushing for a local law to prohibit new funding for supportive housing that permits drug use.
“What we want is a balanced system,” UC San Diego Sociology Professor Neil Gong, who wrote a book on the subject,23 told me. “There should be housing for people not ready for sobriety, as well as orderly, sober housing for the many who want it.”
With Mission Cabins and its foot patrols gone, there is no such balance left in the neighborhood that had surrounded it. Recently, residents on the block heard gunshots outside. A car was driving the wrong way down the one-way street, shooting at someone who ran into the elementary school while kids were arriving, one neighbor said.
Emily Gasner, who has a ten-year-old at the school, told me she has to routinely walk her son past clouds of meth or fentanyl smoke at drop‑off. In between ushering kids across the intersections, she said, crossing guards clear the sidewalks of drug addicts, and regularly call the city to have human feces removed. Once, a gunfight broke out a block away from the bus stop where Gasner and her son were waiting after pickup. Another time, someone jumped out of an alley and threatened to kill her while she was with her son. Her son has nightmares about being attacked by addicts with knives.
Gasner loves the school and feels safe almost anywhere else in San Francisco. But the area around where her son spends the majority of his waking hours has been effectively made into a sacrifice zone. Now, the city is building affordable housing on a lot next to the school, which will include permanent supportive housing, likely for drug addicts. Neighbors only expect the problems to get worse.
With conditions like these as the daily reality for people who live in San Francisco’s sacrifice zones, progressive ideology starts to fade into the background as a north star for people’s political choices. The vast majority of San Francisco’s voters lie somewhere between hard left-wing and moderately liberal. There is zero chance, especially with Trump as president, that the city will shift to anything resembling, by national standards, “the Right.”
But not wanting your kid to inhale meth smoke on his way to school, or fearing that your Asian grandmother might be randomly assaulted while taking a walk, aren’t really ideological issues. They’re just a matter of living in a sane world. What should count as insane, however, has become normal in pockets of the city. The more progressives in San Francisco line up to support or defend those conditions, the further voters are pushed toward what, by the city’s standards, constitutes “the center.” And that center is in revolt.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 211–25.
Notes
1 Alix Martichoux and Cornell Barnard, “San Francisco Mayor London Breed Announces Cuts to Police in New City Budget,” ABC 7 News, July 31, 2020.
2 Robert Pozarycki, “Crunching the NYPD Numbers: Major Crimes Up over 5% as NYC Entered Final 12 Days of 2021,” AMNY, December 28, 2021.
3 CBS San Francisco, “Embattled DA Chesa Boudin Places Blame for San Francisco Crime on Poor Police Follow Up,” CBS News, May 24, 2021.
4 David Sjostedt, “Explainer: DA Boudin Is Sending More Defendants to Diversion. Here’s What That Means,” San Francisco Standard, March 28, 2022; Mallory Moench, “S.F. Uses Ankle Monitors to Keep Defendants Out of Jail. But Does the System Work?,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2021.
5 Thomas Fuller, “Fear, and Discord, among Asian Americans over Attacks in San Francisco,” New York Times, July 18, 2021.
6 Thomas Fuller, “He Came from Thailand to Care for Family. Then Came a Brutal Attack,” New York Times, February 27, 2021.
7 “Family Outraged over SF DA’s Description of 84-Year-Old Asian Man’s Suspected Killer,” ABC 7 News, March 2, 2021.
8 NBC Bay Area staff and Sergio Quintana, “SF Resident Sues DA’s Office Following Mishandling of AAPI Hate Crime,” NBC Bay Area, January 25, 2022.
9 CBS San Francisco, “Victim in ‘Brutal’ Chinatown Attack Sues San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin amid Shocking Jump in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes,” CBS News, January 25, 2022.
10 Claire Wang, “How San Francisco’s D.A. Recall Election Shows a Rift in the Asian American Community,” June 10, 2022.
11 Danielle Echeverria, “Reports of San Francisco’s Most Notorious Nuisance Crime Are at a 22-Year Low,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 2025.
12 “Crime Data,” San Francisco Police Department, accessed October 2025.
13 “Tracking SF’s issues: July 2025 Poll Results,” Grow SF, August 22, 2025.
14 Michael Schellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse, “Exclusive: It Was Supposed to be a Facility to Put Addicts in Touch with Rehab Facilities but We Reveal How Drug-Swamped San Francisco Is in Reality Operating a Secret and Illegal Drug Use Site,” Daily Mail, January 21, 2022.
15 Lyanne Melendez, “San Francisco Faces Obstacles to ‘Recovery First’ Housing,” ABC 7 News, June 18, 2025.
16 Suzanne Phan, “Dozens of Drug Dealers Arrested in Overnight Raid at SF’s Jefferson Square Park, Police Say,” ABC 7 News, February 27, 2025.
17 Leighton Woodhouse, “The Criminal Order Beneath the ‘Chaos’ of San Francisco’s Tenderloin,” RealClear Investigations, June 16, 2022.
18 Nellie Bowles, “Why Is a Tech Executive Installing Security Cameras around San Francisco?,” New York Times, July 10, 2020.
19 Adam 22, host, “Dreamllife Rizzy on EBK Jaaybo Beef, Swamp Storiez, Bay Area Politics & More,” No Jumper, September 2, 2025.
20 Leighton Woodhouse, “‘It’s Neighbourhood Destruction’: San Franciscans Sue City over Drug Zones,” Times, August 29, 2025.
21 Michael Barb, “Urban Alchemy Gave Pay Bumps to Homeless Shelter Staff in Defiance of S.F., Analyst Says,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 2025.
22 Jeff Elder, “Urban Alchemy: A Rapid Rise with Rampant Risks,” April 12, 2022.
23 Neil Gong, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).
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