By Brittany
Bernstein
Sunday, May 15,
2022
Michael Shellenberger believes he, as a progressive Democrat turned independent, is the only one who can save California from its own wokeness.
“California is in chaos. An intervention is required,” Shellenberger wrote in a recent column. “I am that intervention.”
Shellenberger first ran in an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2018 as a Democrat with a focus on nuclear energy. Now, after spending the pandemic extensively researching the issue of homelessness for his latest book, San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities, he believes he is uniquely qualified to bring Democrats and Republicans together to treat the major issue plaguing California’s cities.
While Shellenberger is not as progressive as he once was, he is still not a conservative by any means. Yet he believes this mix of views will be advantageous in a state that is filled with liberals, but where homelessness remains a top concern for many residents.
In a Substack post explaining why he decided to run, Shellenberger reminds voters just how liberal he still is: “Newsom and the interest groups that control him will no doubt attempt to demonize me with liberal voters, but I have long supported LGBTQ rights, the right of women to make their own decision on abortion, strong gun safety laws, universal health care, decriminalized marijuana and psychedelics for medical and spiritual purposes, and strong action on climate change…”
Yet he also advocates for more funding for the police, the continued operation of California’s last nuclear plant, and mandatory treatment of addicts and the untreated mentally ill homeless as an alternative to jail or prison when they break the law.
“Republicans can’t do it, Republicans also just more practically, they can’t win in California,” Shellenberger told National Review in a recent interview. “Republicans thought that Larry Elder, who ran in the recall, was going to shake up the system. But he was just too conservative.”
But Shellenberger believes he has a winning — if not against-the-grain — position on homelessness that will be more palatable for liberal Californians coming from a more moderate figure.
Californians are largely united in their concern about the state’s growing struggle with homelessness. A Public Policy Institute of California poll taken in March revealed that 68 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Independents say that homelessness is a “big problem” in their part of California.
“The way that I see myself leading and building consensus is from the public’s own will,” Shellenberger said, suggesting that the current model of governing involves the governor having to “brown nose” existing political leaders. “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in building consensus on things that we already agree on, like laws should be enforced.”
He believes there is bipartisan agreement that people who commit crimes for addiction or mental illness should get the option of medical care or addiction care, rather than “being thrown away in a prison for decades.”
However, he adds: “We’re not going to do this thing anymore, where you become addicted to drugs, move to California, become homeless in LA, or Sacramento, or San Francisco, or Fresno or anywhere else, and then soon you can get your own apartment. That’s not fair to taxpayers.”
Even liberals, he says, want law-and-order for themselves. But they have “let their own wokeness and victim ideology get in the way of that for other people, in terms of demanding defunding the police, for example.”
One distinguishing factor between Shellenberger and the progressives with whom he used to identify is that, while he believes everyone has a right to shelter, he does not believe people have a right to their own house.
“Housing should be earned, shelter should be an entitlement,” he said. “It should be earned with sobriety, with making progress on a personal plan, with working.”
He believes liberals can agree that the goal is to see people becoming independent so they can “achieve their full human potential” and not “simply treated as vegetables to be getting palliative care in the form of heroin or fentanyl or whatever.”
Shellenberger’s plan for attacking the problem centers on the establishment of a centralized statewide system called Cal-Psych. He argues the problem can’t be solved at the county level and must be solved at the state level.
“This has been failing at the county level, the local level,” he said. “Because you have gaps in the system, somebody gets out to rehab or psych hospital, goes on the street, overdoses and dies, there’s no connectivity between shelter or rehab or long-term care and then eventually becoming an independent person — if that’s possible.”
He said in researching the state’s homelessness problem, it became clear to him that coordination is key, but that coordination between the different agencies is impossible because they operate as “fiefdoms.”
Shellenberger’s plan for Cal-Psych, as he laid out in May 2021 long before he announced his gubernatorial run, would be a system built as a “skunkworks, wholly separate and superior to existing institutions, including health departments and health providers.”
The system would be a mobile and digital agency with a CEO who would report directly to the governor. The proposal would include Cal-Psych vans with “DMV embeds, tele-psychiatry, the ability to prescribe methadone or Suboxone, and instant access to psychiatric beds and drug treatment facilities.”
Cal-Psych vans would arrive immediately after people overdose from drugs to provide treatment. Cal-Psych would also have the power to purchase psychiatric beds, board and care facilities, and treatment facilities across the state.
The system, in Shellenberger’s view, would launch in one city before expanding throughout the rest of the state and “gradually replacing various institutions that are currently doomed to failure.”
Cal-Psych would establish both voluntary drug treatment and psychiatric care, but would also work alongside the courts and law enforcement to enforce involuntary care through assisted outpatient treatment and conservatorship, according to Shellenberger’s proposal.
Along with Cal-Psych, Shellenberger think it will take a crackdown on open-air and online drug markets, a ban on illegal camping, and some “tough love” to fix the problem.
He says he pitched Newsom the idea of creating Cal-Psych last fall. While the governor seemed interested, the administration never followed up on the idea.
For his part, Newsom, who was able to pull in $39 million in donations to fend off recall vote last year, recently proposed a new plan to create mental-health courts in each of the state’s 58 counties. Called CARE courts, they would bring treatment to those with severe mental illness through a court-mandated plan.
“We’re coming up with a completely new paradigm,” Newsom said when announcing the plan. “It’s a new approach.”
The measure would still need to be approved by the state legislature, after which all counties would be required to launch a mental-health branch in civil court and to provide comprehensive and community-based treatment to those suffering from debilitating psychosis. If approved by the court, the participants would be required to accept care, lest they face any pending criminal charges they may have incurred or become subject to an involuntary psychiatric hold or conservatorships.
“At this point there are a million questions and a million things that could go horribly wrong,” said Kevin Baker, director of government relations for ACLU California told PBS. He attributed the problem to skyrocketing housing costs and argued, “We won’t solve homelessness, mental health, or substance abuse problems by locking people up and drugging them against their will.”
Meanwhile, experts have noted other potential flaws with the CARE court plan, with Cal Voices assistant director Matt Gallagher telling ABC 10 that things with the courts “are not cheap, they’re not efficient and they don’t happen very quickly.”
Even if the plan worked exactly as intended, it would be just a drop in the bucket of the homelessness issue, getting only 12,000 people off the street. That is how many people are living on the streets with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders, according to California secretary of health and human services Dr. Mark Ghaly. That is just 7 percent of the state’s homeless population, which sits at around 161,000, according to the most recent count from 2020.
Ghaly has said the program will serve between 5,000 and 12,000 people, according to ABC 10.
Meanwhile, a recent San Francisco Chronicle investigation underscored just how badly the current policies are failing. The report chronicles the shortcomings of a $160 million program called permanent supportive housing, which aims to help people rebuild their lives after time living on the streets.
Participants are sheltered in hotel rooms that the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) pays nonprofit groups to provide, along with aid. Nonprofits typically lease the 70 single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs, from private landlords, the report says. City leaders have neglected the hotels and failed to regulate the nonprofits, according to the report.
The program has not been a success by any measure: of 515 tenants the government tracked after they left the program in 2020, a quarter died while in the program, thereby “exiting” the program by passing away, according to the report. Meanwhile, another 21 percent became homeless again while 27 percent left for an “unknown destination.”
Just one quarter of participants tracked found stable homes, most of which moved in with friends or family or into another taxpayer-subsidized building.
San Francisco’s homelessness problem has only grown since city leaders launched the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing in 2016. The city’s homeless population has grown by 56 percent in the time since, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, with some 19,000 people experiencing homelessness in the city at some point in 2020.
One of those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco is Pauline Levinson, who has been living in a hotel in the Tenderloin that is so rat-infested and run-down that she has pitched a tent inside her room, according to the report. Residents at the hotel have “threatened each other with knives, crowbars and guns, sometimes drawing police to the building several times a day,” the report adds. At least nine people have died of drug overdoses at the hotel since 2020.
In his time researching homelessness, Shellenberger said he discovered that “so much of the reason that progressives have made the problem worse, arguably just created the problem in the first place . . . is victim ideology” that traces back to the 1960s, or even earlier.
He lambasted the idea progressives have “that you can divide the world into victims and oppressors in that to victims, everything should be given enough and required”
“That is so toxic and disempowering for both mentally ill and addicted people, because everybody needs to be challenged, everyone needs to be held accountable,” he said.
While Shellenberger and many others were briefly heartened to see San Francisco mayor London Breed call for a crackdown on open-air drug-dealing and a dose of “tough love” in December 2021, she quickly failed to meet expectations.
Breed followed her announcement up by “secretly and illegally” creating a supervised fentanyl and meth-use site in United Nations Plaza in downtown San Francisco, Shellenberger said.
However, he suggested the tide is starting to turn and liberals are coming to the realization that people on the street are not just there because they can’t afford rent but because there is a “serious drug and illness problem.”
He cited the increase in drug deaths from 17,000 deaths in 2000 to 105,000 last year, calling it “a failure of leadership at almost every level of our society,” going all the way up to President Biden and Vice President Harris.
And while Shellenberger says he has a “much better understanding of what it takes to solve California’s problems” now than he did during his first run, he acknowledges that he is indeed an underdog in the race.
“But I am not a longshot,” he argued in his explanatory Substack post. “I would not have decided to run again if I didn’t feel we could come in second place in the open primary election on June 7, proceed to the November 8 general election, and defeat Newsom. By then, I will have won a mandate to implement Cal-Psych and finally solve the homeless crisis which Newsom has, over the last 20 years, made worse.”
But Shellenberger would need only to come in second in California’s nonpartisan, top-two primaries to advance to the general election. After that, he hopes to win the support of centrist and conservative voters to propel him to victory in November.
He claims Republicans “have a lot of reasons” to vote for him, including his stance on protecting nuclear power and his views on law-and-order issues — with the caveat that addicts and mentally ill people “do better” with rehab and psychiatric care than with prison and that the GOP “sometimes advocates for overly long prison sentences.”
As the son of two public-school teachers and a supporter of school choice, he sees common ground with conservatives on education, supporting, for example, a significant expansion of charter schools. He says he would stand up to teachers’ unions in a way Democrats have been unable to and that teachers should not be protected “from the consequences of their own bad teaching.”
Shellenberger says his new status as a “no party preference” candidate is simply saying, “Let’s meet in the middle.”
“I’d like for some Republicans to come and meet me in the middle. I’d like for some Democrats to come and meet me in the middle,” he said. “You know, Cal psych, centralized addiction and psychiatric care, I don’t think that’s a left to right thing. I think it’s just moving forward.”
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