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JUNE 9, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Why the Spin on the California Primaries Is Largely Wrong

It's not so much the crime as the homelessness.

By now, the Association of Armchair Analysts has promulgated its take on
Tuesday's elections in San Francisco and Los Angeles: The Democrats
are perceived as soft on crime and that's what brought them down.

That analysis isn't wholly wrong, of course, but it misses more than
it sees. Yes, the rate of some serious crimes is up in L.A. and SF, but
it's just as up in the rest of California where the district attorneys
are Republicans. Coming out of our first pandemic in a century, the rate
of crime and anger and distemper is up everywhere; it pervades daily
life in a myriad of ways.

Besides, Chesa Boudin is hardly the only progressive DA to have faced
the voters. The first of this new generation of progressive big-city
prosecutors, Philadelphia's Larry Krasner, won re-election last year
in a city where brotherly love has long been hard to come by. Philly's
cops hate Krasner every bit as much as San Francisco's cops hate
Boudin. So what's the difference? What pushed San Francisco liberals
over the edge when Philly's characteristically grumpy voters were okay
with Krasner?

Homelessness.

Even when a San Franciscan hasn't become a crime victim, it's almost
impossible for that person not to have encountered in their daily rounds
the disorder and frequent distemper of homeless encampments and
non-encampments. When simply traversing a sidewalk seems to present a
risk-even if that risk is magnified in the mind of our representative
pedestrian-then a sense of pervasive disorder, with all of its real
and assumed threats, settles in.

Philadelphia is not the kind of place where the homeless monopolize the
sidewalks. In summer and winter, any option is preferable. In San
Francisco and L.A., with their more temperate climates, outdoor
homelessness is way more pervasive.

Indeed, a poll in the

**Los Angeles Times** on the eve of the primary found that local
voters' number one concern was homelessness, though a substantial
number also listed crime.

That made L.A. mayoral candidate Rick Caruso the luckiest guy in
American politics. Caruso's calling card to voters is that he's
known as the creator of the sanitized shopping mall. Go to the Grove or
Palisades Village, and you're in an almost Disney-like environment
(but more upscale), the very antithesis of a city street or sidewalk or
back alley where the homeless reside. That doesn't mean that Caruso
has any viable ideas about what to do about L.A.'s homelessness, but
as the creator of its symbolic antidote, he doesn't have to.

When Michael Harrington wrote

**The Other America**in the early 1960s, he began by noting a
historically new phenomenon: Amid the broadly shared prosperity and the
rise of suburbia in postwar America, the poor had largely become
invisible to the great middle class. Today, however, in cities like L.A.
and SF, the most desperate and marginal subgroups of the poor constitute
a disproportionate share of the homeless, and they're unavoidably
visible.

So what should Democrats do about all this? At the most macro of scales,
they need to become the affordable-housing party, as the one thing that
unites the homeless with a vastly larger constituency is that the rent
is too damn high. This is a problem the market won't solve, and calls
upon Democrats to advocate for massive social housing on the same scale
that the greatest of all Democratic senators, New York's Robert Wagner
(about whom historian Michael Kazin wrote

recently in the

**Prospect**), once championed-and succeeded in getting a lot of it
built. Karen Bass, the liberal Democrat L.A. mayoral candidate who'll
be running off in November against Caruso, should take a look at the
social-housing plans drawn up by the greatest of all L.A. architects,
Richard Neutra, for a never-built project in the late 1940s.

But macro solutions take time-years to enact the policies and, in this
case, more years to build the housing. A quicker semi-fix could involve
that staple of municipal law: zoning. I guess I'm deviating from some
current urban progressive practice here, but when cities can't find
dwellings to house the homeless, they should designate particular
outdoor areas in which the homeless can pitch their tents and restrict
their dwellings to those areas. It should be easier to provide social
services and limit the incidence of disorder and outbursts when the
homeless are more easily accessible, as they would be when living in
such areas.

What urban progressives can't electorally survive is indifference to
the public's right to public space. This is a fraught and tricky
issue, as I'm acutely aware, but liberals ignore it at their own
peril, and their hold on elective office and the broad range of public
policy is imperiled if they do.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Will AIPAC Crush One of Congress's Most Prominent Jewish Democrats?

Former union organizer and synagogue president Andy Levin is being
challenged by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, largely over his
progressive views. BY ALEXANDER SAMMON

Labor's John L. Lewis Moment

Will today's unions invest big-time in the young workers now beginning
to rebuild American labor? Or will they remain AWOL and ensure the
movement's continued decline? BY STEVEN GREENHOUSE & HAROLD MEYERSON

Biden's New Favorite Industrial-Policy Tool Isn't Funded

The DPA has become the president's pet executive authority, and could
kick-start American energy manufacturing. But funding is scant and
largely controlled by the Pentagon. BY LEE HARRIS

Inflation? Abortion? Which Matters More in Swing States?

In Nevada and Arizona, unions and progressive groups are beginning to
walk precincts, and finding an electorate up for grabs. BY HAROLD
MEYERSON

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