[wahern]

Complaining that the only thing SF does to address homelessness is clear out homeless encampments is exactly what the left does 24/7 in this city. Then they demand that the city double-down (for the umpteenth time) on all the other programs that the city dumps billions into.

And the whole corporate conspiracy canard simply doesn't work in this city, either. All the "pro corporate" reforms from the past decade were responses to the city absolutely freaking out about companies fleeing and the city losing the billions in revenue it relies upon for its social program expenditures, which on a per capita basis might exceed even most European cities, let alone other cities in the U.S.

But you're absolutely correct that the one thing the left doesn't do is the one thing that would help the most: reduce the cost of housing development. (As opposed to what the city has done and continues to do--create tens of thousands of 100% publicly funded units for the homeless, which because even the city is obliged to follow its own anti-housing policies, results in unfathomably poor RoI for the already unfathomably huge sums of money dumped into these projects. And which because it's become a drug addict mecca, generates homeless addicts faster than it can house them. Though, to be sure, the city has been this way regarding drugs for decades. My mother does in-home care with older drug addicts in assisted living facilities, and stories about how they got sucked into the SF drug culture in the 1970s and 1980s are common. Though unlike today, Marin was also an epicenter of predatory drug culture, the human detritus--and I mean that to insult Marin, not the individuals who suffered and continued to suffer--of which typically ended up in SF.)

[Apocryphon]

All of that goes to show that the left/right dichotomy breaks down and is rendered meaningless in San Francisco. It's more of an issue of those who are willing to contest the entrenched landowner interests against those who are not. In that, the NIMBY/YIMBY/PHIMBY debate is rivened by sniping from all sides. One needs only glance over at the corresponding social media flamewars to realize how much of mess it is.

[wahern]

That sad thing is that SF is a very liberal and compassionate city. Voters perennially approve increased taxes to fund homeless, drug, and housing initiatives. By any standard except the extreme radicalism of today's culture warriors, achieving a workable, productive, and liberal consensus should be trivial.

The majority of SF residents are renters. And a good number of homeowners would be happy to relinquish some control regarding zoning to improve the bureaucratic situation--certainly anyone who has owned property in this city for any significant length of time has come to appreciate the excessive cost in both time and money of doing anything to their properties.

But national politics has completely overshadowed local politics. Renters oppose easing development costs (even when they come with extraordinary dislocation protections, such as mandatory, multi-year rent cost reimbursements) because the national political ideology of the left has daemonized any and all development as gentrification, which is intrinsically evil. It's a sister phenomenon to anti-corporatism--corporations are intrinsically evil, and therefore anything which might benefit corporations is to be rejected. No wonder politics on the left has become performative--that's exactly what the ideology and its advocates now demand. (The same is true of drug policy--precisely nobody in SF, or perhaps most of the U.S., IMO, opposes "harm reduction" as a primary consideration and target for drug and homelessness policies. But the left has transformed "harm reduction" into a rigid set of performative policy mandates.)