You’ll be San Fran if you are not careful.
How the demise of a once great American city is a policy lesson for us here in Britain.
Last year I read the second book from celebrated American author, Michael Shellenberger, entitled San-Fransicko. It charts the demise of San Francisco from being a vibrant city at the heart of the incredible tech phenomenon, to the place it is today – lawless, where an amnesty towards the illegal drug trade has resulted in the proliferation of open drug markets, daylight overdoses occurring regularly, crimes going unreported, homelessness exploding, and an anti-social behaviour epidemic that means people often have to side step needles and faeces on the sidewalk.
While reading the book I got lost in the real stories of people who live in downtown San Francisco and face this reality daily. Much of it is captured on social media. Little of it is suitable for young eyes. It is truly shocking. Click here to see the reality for kids growing up in downtown San Francisco.
Shellenberger points the finger at a generation of progressive lawmakers in SF who have taken hold of elected offices and pursued an agenda of effectively decriminalising illegal activity. Police officers have been instructed to stop intervening when they come across someone using drugs in public. Drug gangs operate without any fear of police reprisal. Open drugs markets grew. Particular ire is reserved for Chesa Boudin, Attorney General in San Francisco from 2020 to 2022, who used his own experience of the criminal justice system (his parents were jailed for murder in the 80s) to question the notion that law and order can be enforced at all.
A lot of the city’s problems are related to the US-wide Fentanyl epidemic. However San Francisco is faring much much worse than other comparable cities. 80% of drug related deaths in the city this year are related to Fentanyl. In the 5 months to June 1st, there were 275 deaths related to fentanyl overdoses. This is in line with the past three years where there have been approximately 2 deaths related to drug overdoses a day1.
Source: https://sf.gov/resource/2020/ocme-accidental-overdose-reports
In 2020 data shows San Francisco behind more traditional rust-belt cities of Columbus, Indianapolis and Milwaukee. But far ahead of more comparable towns such as New York, LA, Boston, Dallas and Austin.
Source: https://drexel.edu/uhc/resources/briefs/BCHC%20Drug%20Overdose/
It came as little surprise therefore when I opened the paper this week to a story of a multinational property conglomerate defaulting on its ownership of an office building in downtown San Francisco2. This was a huge company worth many billions of dollars and making many millions of dollars effectively giving a building to the bank and vacating their responsibility to find either tenants or a buyer. The news story outlined how property companies in San Francisco were coming to terms with corporates leaving California and workers choosing not to return to their office in the city, because the state of the city was just too unpleasant to bear. Proximity to Google, Apple or Facebook south of the city was no longer relevant. Hoteliers, retailers, even Twitter had decided to default on either loan payments or rental payments, as fewer people wanted to spend time in a city where there were “concerns over street conditions”.
I don’t think you can overplay the vast economic power that the San Francisco city region held just a decade ago. In 2021 the San Jose-Santa Clara metro area and San Francisco-Berkley metro area were the ranked 1 and 2 highest for household income in the country. Higher than leafy Greenwich Connecticut (home to East Coast hedge fund community) or the Boston-Cambridge Massachusetts area. And while it was 6th most populous city for Fortune 500 company HQs, the area is well-known home to Silicon Valley.
But that is the reality of the ‘Doom Loop’ as Substack legend Noah Smith (see here) calls it. As failed public policy allows for a drug related crime wave across the city, so fewer people want to visit or live there, local businesses (large and small) suffer, city tax revenue declines, and the support programmes needed to tackle problems related to drugs, crime, homelessness, and anti-social behaviour go unfunded, causing those problems to get worse. And so the cycle starts again. As Smith calls it, San Francisco is a once great city now in decline.
You’d be remiss not to take a moment to think through how this impacts us in the UK. There are conflicting stories related to crime in the UK. The Crime Survey of England and Wales shows a consistent downward trend in the estimated number of crimes committed since the early 90s. The CSEW estimates there has been a 50% reduction in number of incidents over the last 3 decades. Police recorded crimes, a completely different measure, describes a different story across the UK, showing a consistent number of crimes over the last couple of decades.
And if you look at the crime rate (per 1000 people) you see a disturbing upward trend in recent years. In 2015 the total rate of recorded crimes in England was 63.2. In 2019 this had risen to 88. By 2022 the police recorded 93 crimes per 1000 people in England. The overall rate and rise in crime in urban areas is (unsurprisingly) more acute. In Greater Manchester it rose from 76.8 in 2015, to 128 in 2022. In Merseyside it rose from 95.4 to 120.2. The West Midlands Police Force recorded a rise of 62.5 from 63.3 to 125.8. That is to say, the rate of crime has doubled in Birmingham in just 7 years3.
Social media is again flush with evidence that some parts of Britain’s cities have become visibly more dangerous in recent years. It’s easy to find footage of young people (and they are young) breaking into high street mobile phone outlets, clearing out the shelves of supermarkets or taking an industrial cutter to a bike locked against a bike rack. The mainstream media picked up on a particularly disturbing trend that saw one boy – named Mizzy – perform ‘pranks’ that verged on assault in cases, whether it was stealing a woman’s dog in the park, breaking into a family home or harassing members of the public.
The progressive passivity towards crime that has defined the policy approach for nearly a decade in San Francisco is not really evident in the UK. The Conservative Government remains a party of law and order despite a patchy record on their performance. And none of the elected PCCs have exhibited notions that the police are there to prevent harm or reduce demand on either court time or the prison estate. The drug legalisation movement is confined to celebrities and a counter culture.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/864736/knife-crime-in-london/
But we should be aware that public policy, crime and long-term prosperity are clearly linked. Big cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Newcastle and smaller regional towns like Norwich, Colchester, Mansfield and Doncaster are critical for the long-term future of our country’s economy. The Levelling Up agenda may have ended as a slogan with Boris Johnsons Premiership, but the need to ensure our towns and cities remain a place students want to study, businesses want to set up in, people want to visit, and companies want to invest in, hasn’t. The risk of a doom loop is most pertinent in London, not just an economic mega hub in Britain, but across Europe and the world. Yet knife crime in the capital increased by more than 50% between 2015 and 2019.
If San Francisco can lose its economic edge, so can London and so can Britain.
https://sf.gov/resource/2020/ocme-accidental-overdose-reports
https://www.ft.com/content/d0c0fd7b-e2fc-4da3-a698-4b959efa1bfd?shareType=nongift