The Real Source of San Francisco’s Strife (Why Michael Moritz is Profoundly Wrong)
The Latest SF-Bashing Screed Blames Democracy for The City’s Ills
By Christopher D. Cook
Like most American cities, San Francisco is home to brutal struggles for survival in streets that can be grisly and unsafe. For all our city’s glitter and glories, and it’s phenomenal wealth, there’s crime, drug addiction, chronic homelessness, people clinging to dear life against cold winter rains and deadly fentanyl, among other perils.
Despite this suffering, San Francisco bears little resemblance to the distorted, factually challenged descriptions peddled by billionaire tycoon Michael Moritz in his Feb. 26 New York Times essay. Following a well-worn, much-debunked narrative that does Fox News proud, Moritz — a venture capitalist who owns The San Francisco Standard and has financed groups and campaigns (including Together SF and Neighbors for a Better SF) aimed at undermining progressive policies here — bizarrely lays the blame for the city’s strife at the feet of a handful of progressives who have minimal power.
Like so many such reactionary screeds before it, Moritz’ piece is based on profound misconceptions about who holds power in San Francisco and on the sources of the city’s struggles.
Imagine scanning the multilayered socioeconomic crises plaguing major cities across the U.S. and blaming San Francisco’s version on the “tyranny of the minority,” emphasizing one city legislator who happens to be a democratic socialist. The facile villain here, Supervisor Dean Preston, represents one district of eleven citywide, in a town with a “strong mayor” charter that empowers the executive branch. Imagine not even apportioning some blame to the city’s mayor, who sets the budget, appoints department heads, appoints a majority of city commissioners, and who benefits from a far bigger staff, bully pulpit, and corporate-interest backing. I smell a rat.
Like its many regrettable predecessors, Moritz’ op-ed urges us to believe that the principal causes of San Francisco’s homelessness, drug addiction, and other tragedies lie with a tiny minority of relatively powerless local legislators, and, oddly, too many democratic checks and balances. Moritz fingers dubious culprits. The “core of the issue,” Moritz gripes, “is that government is more malleable at the city level than at higher levels of government.” Bizarrely, Moritz protests the rise of district-level legislators and ranked-choice voting — two democratic features that give voters and less-wealthy politicians more of a voice in politics.
The progressive “minority” that Moritz and others decry has had its moments of effectiveness, no doubt: over the past 20 years, they’ve passed measures to expand affordable housing; boost supportive housing and other services to diminish homelessness; protect renters from evictions that create homelessness; passed a living wage ordinance to help lower-income workers; created and expanded Healthy SF’s universal healthcare access; created free MUNI public transit for youth; and much more. That’s their record. All those initiatives have, at minimum, added a measure of equality, affordability, and justice to this city’s highly askew playing field.
Blaming too much democracy and this progressive agenda for San Francisco’s ills is not only empirically mistaken — it’s a harmful distraction from the real causes of the strife in the streets. Moritz and others are inviting us to look away from the real root causes — namely, near-unrivaled economic inequality (San Francisco is the nation’s third-most unequal place), surging corporate power over city and regional politics and economics, and broader national neoliberal policies that have created more poverty and displacement while slashing public investments in affordable housing. The city’s richest five percent make eleven times more than the bottom 20 percent; meanwhile, a United Way analysis found a minimum wage worker would need to toil 161 hours a week to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment.
It’s no surprise that Moritz might want such distractions. He’s neither new to nor neutral in these battles — he has played a major role by financing groups and campaigns that have sought to undermine progressive measures on homelessness, inequality, and affordable housing.
As journalist Julia Carrie Wong reported in 2016, “Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz, tech angel investor Ron Conway, and hedge-fund investor William Oberndorf have donated $49,999 apiece to a divisive ballot measure intended to clear San Francisco’s streets of homeless encampments, according to campaign filings.”
In 2018, Moritz promoted and funded opposition to Proposition C, a measure to tax wealthy folk like himself (and the initiative’s co-author, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff) to fund more supportive housing and services for homeless people; city voters approved the legislation. No wonder Moritz’ only other substantive policy grievance is his protest of business tax increases.
There is one point on which Mr. Moritz and I agree: the need for change. But Moritz lies regrettably closer to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson with his prescriptions of reviving machine politics, lowering business taxes and opposing funds for homeless services and affordable housing. The real solutions lie in addressing the profound inequities that Moritz helps create with his immense wealth (estimated at roughly $4 billion). We can make San Francisco a national bellwether of sanity and compassion — by doing far more of what Moritz opposes, and less of what he supports.
What’s really causing the misery and mayhem on some of the streets of San Francisco is neoliberalism, extreme wealth and inequality, and decades of public disinvestment in affordable housing, treatment for mental illness and substance addiction, and The City’s grotesquely unaffordable housing prices (a median home price of $1 million-plus, and average rent of $3000 for a one-bedroom).
What would actually help address the very problems Moritz and others gripe about is to vastly expand and improve the city’s current offerings for supportive housing for homeless people; revive and expand treatment on demand for substance addiction; invest in creating more immediately accessible living-wage jobs to help people stay off the streets; immediate approvals of all usable vacant buildings for 100% affordable housing; and more. That’s the real change this city needs, not more old-school machine politics, less democracy, and letting billionaires like Moritz off the taxation hook. My message to Moritz and his fellow centrist crew: spend less time trashing San Francisco and the handful of progressives who’ve helped diminish harm, and spend more time (and your money) creating real solutions like affordable supportive housing and living wage jobs for the people truly suffering in our streets.
Christopher D. Cook is a San Francisco-based author and award-winning journalist. He has lived and worked in the city for 30 years. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Economist, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Nation, and elsewhere. He is former city editor of The San Francisco Bay Guardian. You can reach him through www.christopherdcook.com.
