In This Issue

IN THE LATE 1960s, then-governor Ronald Reagan announced a plan he described as a compassionate solution to mental illness. He was going to "deinstitutionalize" the mentally ill, move them from the isolation of state hospitals back to their communities, where they could be closer to their families and receive more appropriate treatment. The problem was he didn't want to spend the money to provide that treatment (that might have meant asking for more taxes from the rich) – so instead, thousands of mentally ill people were dumped into cities like San Francisco that didn't have the resources to take care of them. Just walk around the streets these days and you can see the results.

Gavin Newsom is running for mayor on a very similar platform. In the name of compassion ("Care, not cash"), he wants to cut off welfare payment to homeless people and ban them from panhandling. But he won't commit to raising the tax money to provide the services that would replace cash grants.

That's going to create a disaster. And it's typical of the utterly backward approach to poverty that's become almost mainstream thinking in this supposedly liberal city.

As we report in this special anniversary issue, there's widespread poverty in this wealthy city, from the Potrero Hill housing projects to the Tenderloin to the streets and parks where homeless people are forced to sleep. It's not a mystery why this is happening, why a city like San Francisco has far more homelessness and poverty than similar cities in other Western countries. The government – at the federal level, the state level, and yes, the local level – has abandoned poor people, refused to spend the money it would take to provide decent education, welfare, and especially affordable housing to keep human beings from sleeping in makeshift shelters on the sidewalks.

And Newsom and his allies are acting as if the victims are at fault.

In San Francisco, we've found, housing is one of the keys to poverty: when a minimum-wage job doesn't come close to paying the rent and leaving enough money for food, people starve, sleep on the streets, or live crammed together in tiny, substandard dwellings. That's at least partially city hall's fault – for years, San Francisco officials refused to protect affordable housing stock, control rents, or slow gentrification. If we can stop Newsom, maybe we can start to turn that around.

Tim Redmond