Public Disorder & the Decline of Vancouver's Livability

[Vin]

Compelling excepts from the article (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/) :

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.

San Francisco thus booted out useless District Attorney Boudin, so who can we boot out here?