The post Former Director of the ACLU LGBT Project Matt Coles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maybe I’ve been watching too many old movies.

Or maybe the body snatchers are back.

We’ve seen them twice before in my home state of California. Both invasions—of pod aliens, who secretly arrive from outer space to make our bodies their own—may have been interstellar, but they showed up first as attacks on local communities, forcing local governments to handle the response.

Neither our institutions nor our officials were up to the challenges back then. Today, with the body snatchers back, and not just in the Golden State, local governments seem less prepared than ever to fight back and defend themselves against these insidious enemies and the existential threat they pose to human survival.

The first invasion came in 1956, in Santa Mira, California—though you won’t find the city on any map—and no one was ready. Yes, several townspeople noticed that their relatives and friends, who looked and sounded the same, no longer seemed to be quite themselves. Only a local health official, Dr. Miles J. Bennell, investigated. But by the time he figured out what was up, there were no humans left in town to believe him. The pod people had taken over their bodies. He fled.

Then, in 1978, the body snatchers arrived in San Francisco. Only a San Francisco County health inspector, Matt Bennell (no obvious relation to the Santa Mira doctor), recognized the problem. But he and the local health bureaucracy couldn’t keep up with the pod people. In just a few days, the aliens, demonstrating an otherworldly commitment to using the Bay Area’s famously disjointed transit system, replaced virtually all the humans across the region.

Now, at this point I must confess that not everyone believes these body snatchers were real. Many people maintain they were just the villains in two different classic horror films, both named Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And perhaps the body snatchers were just cinematic.

Or perhaps that’s what the pod people want us to believe.

Regardless, cultural pundits have seized on possible larger meanings of the body snatcher invasions, and how they reflected the political and cultural fears of their respective eras.

Critics suggested the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was about how McCarthyism had seized our minds, transforming many Americans into paranoid, red-hating anti-communists. “I’ve been gone for five years. I feel like a stranger in my own country,” says one Santa Mira resident who suspects that their neighbors are no longer the people he once knew.

The 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, set in gritty San Francisco, was said to be about the alienation created by that decade’s violence, urban chaos, pollution, and the loss of social trust. Adding to the anxiety of the era, the film appeared in theaters just three weeks after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

“It’s like there’s some kind of hallucinatory flu going around,” says a San Francisco psychiatrist, who looks a lot like Leonard Nimoy. The health inspector Bennell, the spitting image of Donald Sutherland, says, “I know I feel like I’ve been poisoned today.”

While watching these two films during the scarily hot and fear-filled summer of 2024, I found them timely, relevant—and real.

Today, our neighbors and friends don’t seem quite themselves. It’s as if they have been taken over by loneliness. It’s as if their once-open minds have been seized by conspiracies or political extremism.

Is the unusual heat of this summer the reason why so many people don’t move like they usually do? Or have the pod people taken over their bodies? Are the people we encounter online real humans, or digital replicants, created by AI? And are those really conservative Supreme Court justices who keep taking away our rights over our own lives and bodies, or just pod people in black robes?

The pod people don’t want us to ask these questions. “Don’t be trapped by old concepts, Matthew,” says one pod person to the health inspector in the 1978 film. “You’re evolving into a new life form.”

But the power of body snatchers stories is more than metaphorical. These movies are also straightforward stories of local officials just trying to do their jobs against overwhelming odds. And that’s the really scary thing: our local governments are nowhere near strong enough to protect us from planetary threats—be they climate change, disease, or even pod people from outer space.

The trend lines on local power aren’t good. The second time the body snatchers showed up, in 1978, was also the year that voters passed Proposition 13, taking taxing power from California’s local governments. Today, those governments, after flailing through the pandemic, are even weaker. Local health departments have been gutted, and our municipalities are unable to solve, or even much reduce, persistent homelessness.

In the final scene of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the health inspector Bennell walks toward the San Francisco City Hall, that domed symbol of self-government. The audience thinks he might be going to help the few humans who have hidden themselves in the city. But it turns out that the health inspector’s own body has already been snatched, and the Bay Area’s remaining humans must survive on their own.

The post Who Will Defend Us From the Body Snatchers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t worry, America.

We got this.

By “we,” I mean California.

By “this,” I mean this presidential election.

And by “got,” I mean that we are sending you the best possible candidate to weather whatever the next three-plus months hold.

Now let’s be honest about Kamala Harris. We’re not giving you our most charismatic public speaker. Harris’ sentences are sometimes as awkward as Joe Biden’s. She has a bad habit of fusing her talking points into word salads.

We’re not giving you our most disciplined politician. She’ll crack a joke when she shouldn’t or make a mistake in a meeting or at the border that requires political clean-up.

What we are giving you is our most enduring political escape artist. We are giving you someone who can emerge improbably triumphant from losing situations.

But, most of all, we are giving you someone who will take more crap than anyone possibly could, and never quit.

The best way to understand Kamala Harris, if you care to understand the person who (non-Trumpian God willing) will be our next president, is through a classic movie quote, courtesy of a prominent San Francisco political consultant named Eric Jaye.

The movie is The Shawshank Redemption, released in 1994 and based on a Stephen King novella that owes a debt to the French writer Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, a classic story about a prison break and unexpected revenge.

Years ago, Jaye suggested Kamala Harris was the California equivalent of the movie’s main character, Andy Dufresne, a falsely convicted banker who escapes Shawshank Prison through a 500-yard-long sewage pipe.

“Andy Dufresne,” Jaye said, quoting Morgan Freeman’s character in the movie, “who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.”

Because Americans don’t know Harris this way, they are underestimating her. Just like they underestimate California.

Contrary to the stereotypes, 21st-century California is not soft or easy. It’s a crowded, crazily competitive place where everything is a struggle. It’s next to impossible to get into the school you want, or get a job that pays enough, or find an affordable place to live.

The real California made Harris tough. It helps that she grew up in a tough place and time—the madness of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Berkeley and in Oakland, which might be California’s toughest city. Her parents were scholars—not the toughest of professions—but they were immigrants, from India and Jamaica, who experienced tough adjustments to American life. And after their divorce, when Harris was still very young, she and her sister were raised almost entirely by their mother.

As a mixed-race kid, Harris struggled to fit in, at a newly integrated elementary school, and at both a Hindu temple and the 23rd Avenue Church of God. In her early teens, she was relocated to a foreign city, Montreal. She attended law school not in the leafy Ivy League like that supposed working-class hero JD Vance but at the UC Hastings, in the middle of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhood, the Tenderloin. And she worked as a prosecutor in Alameda County and then San Francisco, on the sorts of cases—sex crimes and child abuse—that can harden people.

She launched her political career in the hyper-competitive political culture of San Francisco, which forged many of our state’s toughest pols—Willie Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Phil and John Burton. Her first election, for San Francisco district attorney, was one she should have lost, because it was the trickiest challenge in politics—beating an incumbent who was also her boss. Somehow, she escaped with victory in a three-way race when she’d started in third.

Then Harris, still little known, ran statewide, for California attorney general—against a popular Los Angeles Republican named Steve Cooley who had the state’s law enforcement community behind him. On election night, she appeared to have lost. But when all the votes were counted three weeks later, she had squeaked through.

When a U.S. Senate seat opened in 2016, Harris was hardly the most popular Democrat in the state. But she jumped into the race early and managed to scare off other contenders and win the seat over another Democrat.

Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was a disaster. She started strong in debates but didn’t make it to the Iowa caucuses, alienating both progressives and moderates. But even after that embarrassing campaign, she found a way through, convincing Biden to make her vice president.

Media and public reviews of her vice presidency have been dicey. She had too much staff turnover. Biden gave her impossible issues to manage, mainly immigration. For the first three years, her approval ratings and polling were lower than the president’s. She was cited as the reason he couldn’t retire after one term. But all those things turned. Her performance improved. And now Biden has bowed out and endorsed her for president because she looks like the stronger candidate.

She doesn’t have the nomination yet of course. She may have to go through a contested convention. And if she earns the nod, she’ll face a former president who is ready to attack.

Democrats are worried. Because Donald Trump is a constant font of lies and accusations. His strategy, as the now-imprisoned Trump advisor Steve Bannon has famously said, “is to flood the zone with shit.”

But this time, his opponent is Kamala Harris. She survived all the BS of San Francisco and California and national politics. She’s heard every disgusting sexist insult. She sloughed off slurs against two different races.

She’s about to be submerged in it all again. Because American politics is a river of you-know-what.

Which is why this is her moment.

Who is better equipped to navigate us through all the crap, and to the cleaner other side, than Kamala Devi Harris?

The post California Has Got This, America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Except for a fortunate few who got to see Willie Mays play in person, most Americans of my generation fell under his almost mesmerizing spell while watching him on TV.

Mays’ unmatched skills—and the unaffected, nearly childlike exuberance he brought to the game of baseball—quickly won a multitude of white fans, even in the South where I grew up amid angry calls for “massive resistance” to school desegregation. It’s fair to ask whether Mays could have managed this so readily had his early career not coincided so closely with the emergence of television as a national medium. Mays, his biographer James Hirsch explained, “always saw himself as an entertainer first,” and television “gave him the ideal stage” for the amazing things he did—on the field and later off of it, as a sought-after guest on popular programs from Today and The Tonight Show to The Donna Reed Show and Bewitched. A surge in TV ownership, from 9% of American households in 1950 to 65% in 1955, gave millions of Americans their first chance to see the miracle of Willie Mays with their own eyes. What they saw on their screens helped to blur the color line at a crucial point in our history.

Until the mid-1950s, most Americans could find live baseball only on their radios. The 1947 World Series pitting the New York Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers and featuring MLB’s first Black player, Jackie Robinson, was the first to be televised—but only in Washington, D.C., and three select urban markets in New York and Pennsylvania. Only one in 10 American homes had a TV in May 1951, when Willie Mays made his New York Giants debut. By that point, 16 black players had already appeared in a major league uniform and more than a third of teams were integrated. The color barrier had been breached, but the great majority of fans still couldn’t see the results for themselves.

This was true especially in rural areas. Scarcely 5% of households in the rural Georgia of my youth had television sets in 1950. Everyone knew that Jackie Robinson was Black—but radio broadcasters rarely identified any players by race.

One of my great uncles was known both for his love of baseball and his hostility to Black people. Family legend has it that listening to Giants games on the radio left him quite a fan of outfielder Monte Irvin, one of two Black players who joined the team in 1948. When a mischievous family member asked him if he realized Irvin was Black, the old man flew into an apoplectic rage at the broadcasters, for concealing this critical information from him.

This was but one of many tragicomic absurdities wrought by the Jim Crow mindset in the South of my boyhood. Still, the episode foreshadowed the importance of television in allowing white Southerners to see the reality of racial integration in their most beloved sport.

Seeing integration didn’t mean all whites in the South or elsewhere were ready to accept it, but Willie Mays was about to make that easier for many of them. Giants fans sensed his enormous potential in 1951, but he missed the next two seasons due to military service. By the time he returned in 1954 to bat .333 and hit 41 home runs, fans across the country could take in his dazzling feats at the plate, in the field, and on the basepaths courtesy of ABC’s “Game of the Week.” Many of the record 23 million viewers who watched NBC’s broadcast of the 1954 World Series between the Giants and the Cleveland Indians were seeing Willie Mays play for the first time. He did not disappoint.

In Game 1, after a long rundown and over-the-shoulder-grab of a blistering Vic Wertz liner, Mays pivoted on a dime and made a laser-beam throw to the infield to hold a Cleveland runner at third. All of this made for a stunning visual that was vintage Mays, down to losing his cap and coming to rest sprawled on the outfield grass. What would soon be known simply as “The Catch” became one of the most replayed film clips in sports history.

Mays thought he had made better catches, including a couple of barehanded grabs during his rookie season. But with millions watching, “The Catch” made the 23-year-old Mays an instant—and enduring—legend. It also marked him as the ideal athlete for the television age: The things Mays did had to be seen to be fully appreciated. Radio play-by-play simply could not do justice to his on-field artistry. Al Helfer, the veteran calling the 1954 series for the Mutual Radio Network, could only describe Mays’ play on the Wertz drive as “a beautiful, beautiful catch.”

I did not see “The Catch.” It would be another year before my parents could afford even the cheapest Emerson TV. I was only 8, but I had already listened to enough Giants games on the radio and devoured enough box scores to qualify as a prepubescent Willie Mays groupie. Stuck out in the country with no siblings to distract me, I rarely missed the CBS “Game of the Week,” anchored by the impressible Dizzy Dean and his broadcast partner Buddy Blattner. Chances were good that I’d be tuned in regardless of the matchup, but I was certain to be glued to the screen whenever the Giants were playing.

In the rural South of that era a little white boy who openly sang the praises of any Black man was enough of a rarity to attract some teasing from friends. But my mother loved Willie too, and other adults seemed to assume that my ardor would cool as I grew older and wiser to the racial proscriptions of the “Southern way of life.” That would not happen: My shame at boarding a school bus while the Black kids who lived nearby trudged a mile or so up the road to their weathered two-room schoolhouse assured that much.

Though few of Mays’ fellow Black players seemed to begrudge his fame and stature, some challenged him to make better use of the bully pulpit they afforded him. As the first Black major leaguer in 1947, Jackie Robinson had run the gauntlet of racial abuse, both physical and psychological. He redirected some of his smoldering resentment at Black players who did not join him in openly attacking racial discrimination. Mays’ enormous popularity made his reluctance to mount the soapbox even less forgivable to Robinson, who stopped just short of calling him an ”Uncle Tom,” but reminded Mays of how much he had benefited from the “battles fought by others” before him, and accused him of turning his back on the suffering inflicted on Blacks during his boyhood in Birmingham.

Neither charge was accurate, nor fair. Willie Mays needed no reminder of what Blacks were up against in Birmingham.  He got a very personal taste of that in October 1951 when Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s notoriously racist police commissioner, waited until the very last second to pull the permit for a long-planned “Willie Mays Day” parade honoring the National League’s Rookie of the Year. He was the biggest star in baseball 12 years later when a Birmingham TV station refused to air a documentary on him.

Robinson surely had it worse, but Mays was no stranger to the segregated restaurants, hotels, and buses that still awaited Black players in some major league cities well into the 1950s. Even after the Giants moved to San Francisco, Mays had to stubbornly stand his ground until the owner who initially refused to sell him the house he wanted in a white neighborhood finally relented.

Still, rather than attack discrimination publicly, he pursued Black advancement in his own understated and indirect way, steering younger Black and Latino players—from Willie McCovey to Bobby and Barry Bonds—clear of pitfalls that might derail their careers.

Biographer Hirsch suggests that seeing Mays become an overnight sensation prompted other franchises to add Black players to their rosters. Three years after he joined the Giants, the number of teams with Black players had doubled, from six to 12. The boyish, down-to earth superhero often seen playing stickball with Black kids in the streets of Harlem might not have been grooming future activists, but he sent a message that humility and openness were neither signs of weakness nor detriments to getting ahead. Former president Barack Obama thought Mays’ easy rapport with white fans had “change[d]  racial attitudes in a way political speeches never could” and credited Mays’ exemplary career for allowing “someone like me to even consider running for president.”

Bull Connor was not there to thwart last month’s planned three-day salute to the old Negro leagues at Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field, which was to conclude with a game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals on June 20. Yet the real highlight of the affair promised to be an expected appearance by Mays, whose professional baseball career began at Rickwood in 1948 with the Birmingham Black Barons.

A heartbroken Mays revealed on June 17 that his health would not allow him to be there. When he died the next day, the salute to the Negro leagues blossomed into a full-blown celebration of his life and career.

But the most fitting tribute came from the 2.4 million television viewers, a huge audience for a Thursday night game, who tuned in to bid Willie Mays farewell through the medium that first brought his magic into the lives of so many Americans, including my own.

The post How Television Made Willie Mays a Star appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve never much cared for San Francisco International Airport—until SFO decided to take a courageous stand for truth and accuracy in airport names.

Last month, SFO’s leaders filed a lawsuit to stop the Port of Oakland from changing Oakland International Airport’s name to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.”

Author and Oakland native Gertrude Stein famously said “There is no there there” of her hometown. Which is perhaps why the Oakland Port Commission justified the name change by saying it wanted to educate travelers unfamiliar with California that Oakland is an actual place that sits on the bay. I also believe that Oakland may have been combating a widespread misperception among Star Wars fans that it’s on Planet Tatooine; after all, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) was a native Oaklander.

Fortunately, SFO saw through the Oakland’s airport Jedi mind trick. The lawsuit accuses its East Bay competitor of trademark infringement as part of a grab for more air traffic. SFO also alleges that the name change creates the impression that Oakland is in San Francisco, which it is not.

I admire SFO’s bold commitment to defending geographic integrity. Which is why I’m so excited to see the airport take the next logical step in advancing the same principle, by changing its own inaccurate name.

I can hear it now: My Southwest Airlines pilot asks me to return my seat back to its full upright position—and then welcomes me to San Mateo County International Airport.

Because SFO, just like Oakland, isn’t in the City or County of San Francisco. It’s in an unincorporated corner of northeast San Mateo County, south of San Francisco.

As a lifelong SFO passenger, I can testify that taking San Francisco out of SFO’s name would be a service to the flying public.

Because it’s actually quite difficult to get into or out of San Francisco via the airport with San Francisco in its name.

SFO’s problems start with flight delays. For years, it’s had among the highest rates of delayed flights in the United States. Other badly delayed airports typically have snow or severe winter weather. Of course, SFO has fog, but fog alone doesn’t make so many flights late. It’s the poor organization of the airport itself. Its two main, parallel runways are too close together to permit landings at the same time. So, when visibility is low, there are delays. This year, a construction project has been creating still more backups.

And if fog and poor organization don’t trap you at SFO, the airport’s design will. Today’s SFO was largely created 20 years ago, via an expansion that was hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. The project left the airport feeling overbuilt and bloated, with too much distance between ground transportation and gates.

Today, getting to your flight at SFO requires taking slow rides on an internal Air Train (whose construction was dogged by corruption allegations) and taking long walks through large, glassy, and often empty halls. Even when security lines are short, walking alone can add 20 minutes to your trip. Travel websites routinely advise SFO passengers to arrive at the airport two or more hours early.

And the transportation options outside the airport are no picnic, either. SFO sits at a traffic chokehold point, with crammed freeways and dead-end streets. Public buses stop at the terminals, but the main line, SamTrans 292, only shows up every 30 minutes or so. And Caltrain, the peninsula commuter line, doesn’t stop at the airport.

BART trains have a station inside the airport, which is nice. But many trains on that line don’t go into the airport, ending their routes four stops earlier at Daly City instead. And there are so many BART stops along the 13 miles between SFO and downtown San Francisco that the trip can take nearly an hour.

When I need to go to downtown San Francisco, I fly into Oakland. It’s faster, less likely to experience delays, and more reliable. And the airport’s two terminals are small and efficient, so that it’s just two minutes from my gate to ground transportation. The airport also has a connector train to BART that can take you into San Francisco in just five stops, or down to Fremont and San Jose with ease.

You might even say that Oakland is a better San Francisco airport than San Francisco’s airport.

Of course, I would never say that. No way. Because your truth-telling columnist is 100 percent behind SFO’s righteous defense of geographic accuracy in airport names.

But I will say this: Until this cross-bay airport dispute is over, and until SFO follows its own principle and changes its name to San Mateo County International, I am changing my own name to honor the Bay Area airport I actually enjoy flying into.

So, for the time being, you can call me San Francisco Bay Joe.

The post Can the Real San Francisco Airport Please Stand Up? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the U.S., there is a chasm between what the labor laws say and what workers experience as their everyday realities. That’s because employment here is based on private contractual law, or agreements between two parties—and the deeply misguided assumption that those two parties have equal bargaining power.

We need to bridge that chasm. Doing so will require stronger unions; more aggressive legislation by Congress; more resources for, and enforcement by, local and federal agencies; and changes in our courts, which have been hostile to labor enforcement and unions.

Until all that happens, the best model we have for enforcing labor laws is in California.

You could call it the California Model of Co-Enforcement. Or you might call it the San Francisco Model, because that’s where it started. Whatever you call it, the idea is this: Since governments lack the capacity to enforce the laws by themselves, they must work in tandem with entities that have long histories of efforts to empower workers, like S.F.’s Chinese Progressive Association and Filipino Community Center.

Through co-enforcement, government agencies enable the worker centers to pursue the pay, rights, and fair treatment workers are entitled to under the law, but that they don’t always get in employer-friendly legal systems.

The co-enforcement model did not appear overnight. It took years of workers organizing, building, and winning to create it. Co-enforcement supplemented the state’s Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), passed in 2003, that “gives workers a fighting chance in court” to confront their employers’ wrongdoing, according to a UCLA Labor Center report.

Now, the model is threatened. Business groups have bankrolled a ballot initiative that would all but eliminate workers’ rights under PAGA. If the initiative were to pass, it would deaden the state labor agency’s ability to contract with non-governmental entities or attorneys to enforce worker protections against violating employers. And that would not only threaten the progress workers have made under PAGA—it would threaten the co-enforcement model itself.

The story of the California Model starts at the turn of the 21st century, with the closure of San Francisco garment factories. Community organizations that had focused on organizing these factories, especially the Chinese Progressive Association, began reaching out to workers in other low-wage job sectors. Realizing the common struggles across trades, the city’s worker centers banded together and fomented a movement that led San Francisco voters to approve a local minimum wage law in 2003.

The minimum wage catalyzed San Francisco’s development into the site of the broadest range of worker protection laws of any municipality in the United States. Among the city’s worker mandates are paid sick days, a health care coverage mandate, protections for formerly incarcerated workers, secure scheduling, paid parental leave, pay equity, and time and space for lactation.

To enforce these new laws, San Francisco extended investigative and enforcement powers to its Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, known as OLSE. But even with a staff that had grown to two dozen, OLSE couldn’t investigate and enforce every violation of these labor standards. So, in 2006, the city established its novel model of co-enforcement, a series of formal collaborations with community partners that had a history of supporting workers, such as the Chinese Progressive Association.

The idea behind co-enforcement was simple. Community partners already served as important anchors for marginalized workers. Now, they could build on that past work and train those workers to identify, report, and fight back against wage theft and other violations. OLSE had a particular interest in empowering low-wage, immigrant, and limited-English-proficiency workers to target their efforts in communities where wage theft is most likely to occur.

As OLSE created and boosted funding for these contracts with community partners, the initiative became known as the “community collaborative.” I was once involved in overseeing these contracts and the network of partnerships. The partners included the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Dolores Street Community Services (which had a long history of assisting refugees, homeless people, AIDS patients and LGBT people), Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, Young Workers United, La Raza Centro Legal (a half-century old advocate for the Bay Area’s Latinos), and the Filipino Community Center, which had been founded in 2004 to support Filipino airport screeners who had been laid off.

One of the victories that emerged from San Francisco’s co-enforcement model was a $4.25 million settlement with the popular dim sum restaurant Yank Sing, which was forcing workers to work 10-plus hour days without breaks, stealing tips from workers, and belittling an otherwise vulnerable workforce almost every day. With help from the Chinese Progressive Association, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, and UNITE HERE Local 2, which assisted with strategic research, the workers not only won unpaid wages but also achieved a workplace transformation for the restaurant’s nearly 300 employees.

The changes included meal and rest breaks, paid sick days, wages higher than the local minimum (including a 5% raise for non-tipped workers), non-mandated holiday pay and vacation pay, full health coverage with no deductibles, and the right to take up to four weeks of approved time off without risking their jobs—something many workers needed in order to visit families in China. The settlement even included an apology.

Since then, San Francisco’s co-enforcement approach has spawned imitators. Beginning in 2013, several other cities (among them New York City, Seattle, Oakland, San Jose, and Emeryville) developed offices similar to OLSE, and seeded co-enforcement partnerships with local community organizations.

In 2016, the state got in on the co-enforcement action. The California Labor Commissioner’s Office—then led by the pioneering labor lawyer Julie Su, who is today the acting U.S. labor secretary—formed the California Strategic Enforcement Partnership. Rather than wait for the long and often futile process of filing complaints, and conducting hearings and trying to collect judgments for unpaid wages, the state began using co-enforcement to target wage theft in six low-wage industries: agriculture, car washes, construction, janitorial, residential home care, and restaurants.

The state partnered with the National Employment Law Project and 14 workers’ rights and legal advocacy organizations. Among the initiative’s most publicized successes were enforcement actions for harsh treatment and illegally low pay at the Los Angeles-area car washes.

This new model of workers’ rights enforcement has made California a labor enforcement laboratory, and at the right time. As other major California cities have followed San Francisco’s lead—passing minimum wage laws and other worker protections and supporting enforcement—they have empowered workers, influenced industry practices, and found ways to build a more sustainable enforcement system throughout the state.

Co-enforcement is necessary because of weak federal labor laws, and dangerously low rates of unionization. (One study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that less than 2% of the nearly $50 billion in wages stolen annually is ever recovered by workers.) The co-enforcement models have inspired other vehicles for worker empowerment.

When the pandemic hit, it was the S.F. co-enforcement model that inspired the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency (LWDA) to partner with 61 community organizations throughout the state and create the COVID-19 Workplace Outreach Project (CWOP). This government-community partnership deployed “trusted messengers” to those frontline workers, to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of all citizens. Similarly, the Domestic Worker Rights Education and Outreach Program (DWEOP) ensures that housekeepers and nannies—workers who unfortunately do not enjoy the right to unionize—nevertheless can be educated about and trained in their labor rights and their employers’ responsibilities.

The co-enforcement model has some challenges. Building relationships between workers and the officials of government agencies—both of whom are busy working, and not in the same places—can be hard. Government procedures that require confidentiality can be difficult to square with the community’s desire for transparency. But the deeper the co-enforcement model has taken root, the better the outcomes that have emerged—for business, consumers, the agency, and for workers themselves.

There have been many promising lessons. One is that such collaborations render government officials more knowledgeable about labor violations, and sophisticated in their approach to enforcement. The second is that the state agency can only fulfill its mission with the support of community partners (which is why the November 2024 ballot initiative to gut the Private Attorneys General Act is such a threat). The most important aspect of a co-enforcement model is that it enables an organized and informed workforce to demand and attain compliance with the labor standards to which they are entitled under law.

Co-enforcement provides direct connection, funding, and legitimacy that can be game-changing for empowering workers. It also provides enforcement agencies with a trove of new education and connections to the underground economy. Co-enforcement is a win-win-win for workers, for community organizations, and for government agencies seeking effective and efficient ways to enforce laws in the low-wage sectors.

We need this California model of win-win-win to go national.

The post How San Francisco Became a Labor Enforcement Laboratory appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For a young bookworm like me in 1960s New Jersey, almost nothing was more exciting in elementary school than ordering my own paperbacks from the Scholastic Book catalog. I would carefully select books from a paper form distributed in class. A few weeks later, paperbacks arrived at school in wondrous boxes. Best of all, they usually had nothing to do with schoolwork. I read them in bed or in a park, on winter nights or summer days.

Those novels took me places, out of my crowded, insular hometown. My family often visited nearby Manhattan but that was still off-limits for solo wandering. Children’s and young adult literature let me imagine independence—meeting new people and exploring different places on my own. One book in particular, Mystery of the Green Cat by Phyllis A. Whitney, led me to develop an affection for that distant, hilly city on the Pacific coast: San Francisco.

The little paperback’s romantic portrayal of the City by the Bay grabbed me and never let go. It’s a depiction that pushes back against the rampant San Francisco bashing in vogue today. I fear that San Francisco has gotten such a bad rap—borne of an often brutal, and mainly conservative, narrative about the city—that people have lost sight of its unerasable allures, and its irreplaceable spot in American history and culture. It’s important to remember the things that made, and make, San Francisco great—not for the sake of nostalgia or adolescent literature, but to ensure that a dark fog of disdain doesn’t block out everything else.

Of course, parts of downtown San Francisco do face huge social problems—homelessness, drug addiction, shoplifting invasions. But Fox News, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and many other critics persistently push an exaggerated portrait of the city as a hellhole, where car thefts and fentanyl deaths, corporate flight, and retail closings fuel a so-called Doom Loop. As the city loses tax base and tourist revenues while gaining pathologies and street crime, they predict the end is near.

Too many seem to gleefully dance on what they hope will be the grave of a city they always resented for the scary things it represented politically, sexually, artistically. San Francisco is home to beat poetry, hippies, gay libs, Big Tech, Nancy Pelosi, political correctness, and pricey and beautiful architecture that made its critics’ own pale hometowns look like dumps—so now is the time to avenge all that.

They never mention that San Francisco rebuilt itself, heroically, after the 1906 earthquake and fires that had leveled it. It re-emerged as a magnet and cradle for talent and creativity, punching above its weight in music, art, literature, technology, medicine, alternative lifestyles, and stupendous business success.  It can survive its current troubles.

It may sound childish to inject a middle-grade mystery book into a debate about today’s painful, intractable issues. Still, in gentler times, Mystery of the Green Cat, first published in 1957, celebrated San Francisco. Whitney, writing for kids all over the country, displayed a skill, unburdened by kneejerk politics, that unearthed the magic of the place.

Whitney presents a vision of a pre-hippie S.F. that is obsolete, or maybe never existed. Still, who could resist it? Was it real? At least some of it was and is.

Recently, I decided I wanted to revisit that place, and I went looking for Whitney’s book. My original copy was long lost, but I ordered a used one from an online book dealer. I re-read its 188 pages, in large typeface. It was an odd time-traveling experience, allowing me to consider my own pre-teen brain and realize how little of the book I accurately remembered other than its general vibe.

In the book, a widow and her two young daughters move to San Francisco to live with her new husband, a widower, and his two pre-teen sons. Family conflict ensues. Meanwhile, in the spooky Victorian house just up Russian Hill, two elderly and mysterious sisters keep a bunch of Asian relics and a batch of secrets. The frailer sister keeps asking for her missing green cat, which turns out to be a little statue containing a life-changing note from her long-dead husband.

Its plot is underwhelming to the Adult Me, but then the plot was never important to me as a kid. The book’s real star is the city itself. I loved the way its young characters explored San Francisco’s foggy beauty and pastel ethnic neighborhoods. Eleven-year-olds hike around Chinatown and Coit Tower, ride cable cars, and snoop around old mansions, library archives, and antique shops—without grownups. Dramatic hills surrounded by water, tugboat hoots from the bay, and bridges that defy gravity grabbed me.

“The view up here was tremendous,” Whitney wrote of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. “The streets of San Francisco went straight away beneath the tower and straight up the opposite hills, as if somebody had ruled lines on a piece of paper, paying no attention to the heights… The little houses clung to steep cliffs, their gardens gay with birds and flowers. It was like another world – a suspended, arboreal sort of world.”

At Fisherman’s Wharf: “There were so many boats that their spars and masts stuck up like a toothpick forest … Crabs were cooked in kettles right on the walks.”

I first visited S.F. when I was in college, in 1973, as a guest of a Los Angeles friend who drove me up the coast through Santa Barbara, Monterey Bay, Big Sur, and finally across the Bay Bridge. I was far from a country bumpkin, but the sight of the skyline over the water was thrilling. We hiked up hills and clung to poles on cable cars’ outer ledges. San Francisco’s lovely mixture of urbanity and nature seemed more humane than New York’s noisy swagger and scary decay.

Later, my work as a journalist brought me to S.F. many times. I stayed in high rise hotels with views of the bridges, to my delight. Covering higher education, I persisted through interminable University of California regents’ meetings knowing that, after deadlines, I might eat in Chinatown and shop at City Lights Bookstore.

I am always impressed by how there is no place in the nation like San Francisco, a benefit of its unusual topography and its spirit of social openness and innovation. This, with a surprisingly small population of less than 900,000.  Some people tout its European, walkable vibe, an antidote to suburban sprawl. But I would argue that San Francisco is a most American place in its soul. I think about the Midwest servicemen who passed through in World War II and returned for a better and more interesting life. Gold Rush miners, jeans manufacturers, rock and rollers, immigrants from Asia and Latin America, refugees from sexual repression, IT brainiacs—they all embraced San Francisco and many successfully staked their claim on the American Dream.

Of course, my childhood enchantment was somewhat naïve, and my adulthood love for the City by the Bay has been tempered by reality. Over the 1970s and 1980s, San Francisco’s counterculture wilted and darkened. Haight-Ashbury became dangerous. The AIDS epidemic was a horror. Big Tech brought in money, but widened inequities and pushed rents beyond the reach of the artists and writers who had given San Francisco its bohemian flavor. Whitney could not have anticipated the grief of today’s homeless encampments, with so much suffering met with insufficient responses.

Yet, despite its current problems, a wonderful, beautiful city still exists amid the fog. It is worth fighting for. In Whitney’s book, the widow discovers a redeeming message inside the pottery cat statue—a note from the past, delivering solace. More important, for me, are the messages about San Francisco’s allure infused through my little paperback: “Fog drifted through the streets of San Francisco, so that every road looked wavery and mysterious, and even ordinary houses took on a ghostly aspect.”

That still happens. I still love it.

The post Beyond the ‘Dark Fog of Disdain,’ San Francisco Is Still There appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I found out about the restaurant from my brother, who was supposed to work there but had another job. It was only going to be for one day but the owner asked if I could work all week. After that, she hired me and I started working with her regularly as a prep cook in her San Francisco restaurant.

At first, the owner was kind, and there weren’t any issues. But, after about a year of working with her, I noticed things changing. She would yell at me for nothing. There were times when I didn’t receive my breaks and I had been working all day.

Then, she stopped paying us.

That was hard. But trying to get wages that are stolen from you turns out to be even harder.

Initially, the owner started delaying our checks. Supposedly, she was going to give them to us on Mondays, then she changed it to Wednesdays and then to Fridays. Then she started saying, “I’ll pay you the next week,” but it didn’t happen. Still, she kept saying that until it accumulated.

My co-workers and I—there were four of us in the kitchen—kept asking her for our payments and she kept saying she would pay us but she never did.

I thought about leaving but it was the pandemic and there wasn’t much work available, so I stayed. But the whole situation was very stressful. I was very frustrated because, if I already worked for the money, why was I not getting paid?

In October 2021 all of us workers decided we’d had enough. We joined together and told the owner that if the checks did not arrive that day, we would not show up for work. She still did not respond. At this point she stopped coming to the restaurant. At one point, she promised to send the checks with someone else, but we never received them.

We called her and her husband and they didn’t answer us. At one point, the owner’s husband offered to pay a portion of what was owed to us but we declined. We wanted to be paid in full and we were not willing to negotiate that. The owner owes me $12,157.90 in wages, plus penalties for not paying me when I was working for her.

That was when she closed the location, without notice, in December 2021. We kept trying to contact her but neither she nor her husband responded.

It affected me greatly because it was the last few months of the year. I got depressed, I got frustrated, my blood pressure went up, I couldn’t sleep. I was very angry with the owner.

That year was the saddest Christmas I ever had. Christmas without money is very sad. It’s a time of year when you try to send a little extra money back home. I’m 34 years old now. And, in my 10 years of living in the United States, that was the first time I was not able to send a dollar back home to Guatemala.

I send money to my sisters and grandparents, who raised me. I fully support them and the money I send is for everything they need—but in 2021, I couldn’t. My good friend had to lend me money just to be able to settle my bills. I couldn’t do anything and I felt tied by the hands.

My co-workers and I kept looking for someone to help us. We didn’t know what to do. We went to local organizations that can help workers, but they were closed due to COVID-19. Eventually, I came across a church and that’s where someone gave me the phone number for Trabajadores Unidos Workers United.

TUWU, as it’s known, is a worker center, funded by grants and grassroots donations. It finds itself at the intersection of economic justice and immigrant rights—all while holding companies and bosses accountable.

A TUWU organizer talked to me that same day I first called. My co-workers and I were able to share our situation. In time, TUWU helped teach us how to organize.

TUWU helped me prepare a case seeking the wages stolen from me. I filed the case with the San Francisco office of the state’s Labor Commission in February 2022. I wish I could tell you that my case was quickly processed and that I got the money I was owed.

But that’s not how things work.

The Labor Commission, at least its office in San Francisco, has huge backlogs of cases. So, the only thing I’ve received since my filing is the news that the commission has approved my case for a hearing.

That’s right—all I know is that I’ll have a hearing, someday. I haven’t received a date for the hearing. I haven’t been informed if the commission will investigate my claim. This is not uncommon. It typically takes years to receive the money lost in wage theft cases in California.

So, I don’t know if I’ll ever be paid the money I’m owed. But I do know that I’m not going to sit and wait in line for my case to be heard.

I’m continuing to fight for the restaurant owner to pay me back. It’s not easy. She continues to hide from us, even though she still owns a pop-up restaurant in San Francisco, and sometimes appears on TV cooking shows.

Since I became a member of TUWU, we’ve had many meetings and tried many different strategies on how to make the owner accountable. I’m hopeful that some of those will work.

I also learned the word “organize” at TUWU. Along with the word, I’ve learned that, since getting justice takes years, it’s important to organize other workers so that they are aware of their rights and how to move quickly when an employer doesn’t honor those rights.

Now, I know how to advocate and organize with my co-workers. I also feel like a part of the community now and I am able to support other workers experiencing the same situation.

It’s still very discouraging. But I hear from other workers who have had cases with the Labor Commissioner’s Office and eventually had their stolen wages paid.

If I get paid, or I should say when I get paid, I’m going to send money to my grandparents and sisters. I will also save the rest for emergencies because you have to be able to cover any situation that may occur. There are times I worry it could happen to me again.

Early in this process, when I thought of what had happened to me at the restaurant, I would feel like crying. Now, I say that it’s like a mountain and I’m going to keep climbing as high as I can. Why would I not try to reach the peak and get my reward? Now, I share my experience with other workers.

The post My Boss Owes Me Over $12,000 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California saw as much this summer, as our two most distinguished municipalities—Los Angeles and San Francisco—each tore the wrapping paper off a beautiful civic gift.

In the process, they demonstrated how, in spite of the similarities in their progressive politics and obscene wealth, these capitals of Northern and Southern California remain very different places.

Comparisons are instructive because the civic gifts in question are so similar. L.A.’s new Sixth Street Viaduct and San Francisco’s new Presidio Tunnel Tops are both expensive new public spaces that double as bridges and as spectacles, offering signature views of the cities themselves.

L.A.’s new $588 million bridge, paid for with public money, opened first, on the second weekend of July. And it opened hot—too hot. The city was unprepared for the hordes that would descend on this beauty of a bridge, with its unmatched views of the skyline and its “Ribbon of Light” design. Sixth Street is billed as the largest bridge project in L.A. history, and a replacement for a 1932 span that posed too much of an earthquake hazard to be saved.

But the bridge’s massive opening triggered another L.A. danger: the city’s tendency to let its fear gain too much sway. Authorities panicked whenever Angelenos arrived to do what Angelenos do with any new piece of transportation infrastructure—test its limits.

Moped racers did wheelies on the bridge. Groups of truck drivers and bicyclists swarmed, taking over the bridge for brief periods. Taggers added graffiti, and climbers went up the bridge’s steep arches. The response was all too L.A. The authorities, citing “illegal activity” and “unruly crowds,” wound up closing the bridge, repeatedly—four times in one five-day period. And the city announced structural changes to the viaduct—fences to deter climbers, speed bumps to slow down street racers.

In the media, local and national, this inspired another round of the tired tsk-tsking and senseless self-flagellation about the inability of us Angelenos to govern ourselves or behave with any sort of decorum.

C’mon. Our collective lack of decorum is why—as Randy Newman sang—we love it!

That didn’t stop holier-than-thou types in civic life from spewing clichéd nonsense about the supposed crisis of Sixth Street. City Councilmember Kevin De León suggested that Angelenos were overly excited because, he claims, we lack accessible public spaces—which is self-pitying nonsense in a metropolis full of fantastic gathering spots. The L.A. Times editorialized that the bridge, built as a transportation connector between Boyle Heights and downtown, be closed to vehicle traffic. What’s next—closing Dodger Stadium after eight innings because closing pitcher Craig Kimbrel keeps making a mess of the ninth?

A week after the L.A. bridge opening, and 400 miles north, the $118 million Presidio Tunnel Tops, paid for with private donations, opened to the public. It’s essentially a park that’s also a pedestrian bridge over Presidio Parkway, a road taking drivers to the nearby Golden Gate Bridge. More than two decades in the making, Tunnel Tops connects the Main Post section of the Presidio, the military base-turned-national recreation area, to Crissy Field and the beach below.

People enjoy San Francisco’s new Presidio Tunnel Tops, a 14-acre recreation area with meadows, a children’s playground, and views of the city. Courtesy of author.

Tunnel Tops is cool, and not just because of San Francisco’s winds and mild temperatures. It’s got magnificent views of the famous bridge and the skyline, green meadows for picnicking and napping and kite-flying, gardens of native plants, public art, a pretty Field Station building for kids’ science lessons, and an innovative children’s playground called the Outpost.

John King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s brilliant urban design critic, knocked it for lacking a “sense of arrival,” and for broad walking paths and concrete slopes that suggest “crowd control and maintenance needs won out over design intent.” But given what happened in L.A., designing for crowd control seems prescient.

The park is an instant success. On its opening weekend, San Franciscans enthusiastically entered Tunnel Tops even before it was officially open, and crowds were immense. But there were no reports of dangerous incidents, and there was no security crackdown. San Francisco played its new bridge as cool as Los Angeles played its new span hot.

This summer, your columnist has visited and enjoyed each of these new public spaces. Police closures foiled my first three attempts to cross the Sixth Street Bridge. But when I finally made it out there, I felt comfortable and safe. A few passing motorbikes did tricks, but police didn’t stop them. They also didn’t stop pedestrians (your columnist included) when we raced across the traffic and bike lanes to check out different views. My only complaint was the lack of places to sit down. But that should be addressed, in part, as soon as next year, when Los Angeles is scheduled to build a new park under the viaduct.

My visits to Presidio Tunnel Tops were quieter than Sixth Street despite the presence of even more people. The first time, I spent an hour just lounging around on the grass, and in chairs that are set up around the park, enjoying the bridge and city views.

Then I got up to explore the new facility. At one point, in my wandering, I stepped over a low rope to check out some of the plantings in one garden. Within seconds, two people—not security guards, just local folks out enjoying the park—called out, “Sir, please don’t walk around the plants. We’re not supposed to do that.”

I quickly retreated, and then apologized—explaining that I’m from Los Angeles, and don’t know any better.

The post A Tale of Two California Bridges appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

More than half of America’s unsheltered population lives in just three states—California, Oregon, and Washington—and West Coast voters are demanding a response. Homelessness ranked as the top concern in a recent poll of likely voters in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Last year, Seattle residents replaced a long-serving progressive city attorney with a Democrat-turned-Republican who vowed to clear encampments. And San Francisco’s progressive district attorney may be headed for defeat in an upcoming recall election, in part because of spiraling crime rates in neighborhoods with large homeless populations.

Much of the policy debate about homelessness has focused on high costs of living and a lack of public services, while politicians and activists largely have avoided trying to curtail one of the most consequential factors of all: the misuse of drugs. Policymakers don’t seem to want to say it, but going all out to help some homeless people stop using drugs has to rank alongside housing as a top priority.

Chronic drug and alcohol use are major contributors to homelessness. In a 2019 national survey of unhoused people, more than half of respondents reported that “use of drugs or alcohol had contributed to loss of housing.” In Seattle, which conducts a detailed annual census of its homeless population, the top self-reported reason for chronic homelessness—lacking shelter for more than one year—was “alcohol or drug use.” A 2019 analysis found that close to two-thirds of chronically homeless individuals in San Francisco reported misusing drugs or alcohol, and a quarter cited “substance use as the primary cause of their homelessness.” Drug or alcohol overdose was the leading cause of death among homeless people in Los Angeles County in 2020, similar to findings in other major American cities.

Federally-funded permanent supportive housing initiatives are prohibited from mandating sobriety as a condition for shelter. The federal policy known as Housing First, adopted during the George W. Bush administration, prioritizes securing stable housing for homeless people, regardless of their drug use, mental health status, or ability to support themselves, as a prerequisite to solving other problems. Housing First has been effective at keeping people housed for at least a year and reducing emergency medical services use. But there’s little evidence it helps people resolve substance use problems, gain employment, or retain housing over the long term.

Lacking a federal plan for addressing drug and alcohol use among the homeless, cities and states have had to come up with their own strategies—and many have embraced harm reduction, an approach that dovetails with Housing First’s priorities by ameliorating the problems associated with drug use without requiring people to quit. Harm reduction seeks to reduce overdoses and communicable disease by relying on needle exchanges and other initiatives that make drug use safer, rather than punishing users. Public health experts embrace the approach, as do criminal justice reform advocates and proponents of drug decriminalization.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health formally adopted harm reduction as city policy in 2000; it is also the stated policy of L.A. County’s homeless services agency. Proponents say harm reduction is more effective than sobriety-based treatment because it shows respect for drug users’ autonomy and does not rely on law enforcement. Practitioners describe their work as engaging drug users “where they are” and fostering trusting relationships with service providers. During a 2019 presentation about the method, Nathaniel VerGow, now the Los Angeles agency’s deputy chief, reminded participants that “many drug users can be happy, loving, trustworthy, productive people! Many sober people are NOT!”

Harm reduction methods can be effective at keeping drug users alive and stopping the spread of disease. But nowhere have they been shown to help large numbers of problem drug users regain control of their lives. And they’re highly resource intensive. In a recent University of Washington evaluation of JustCARE, a harm reduction homeless services program in Seattle, providers described round-the-clock efforts to placate methamphetamine-using clients “running around naked” and “pounding a door at 3:00, 4:00 a.m.,” or disassembling televisions in the converted hotel rooms where they were being housed.

Leaders grapple with how to afford such service-intensive programs. Fully funded, JustCARE would cost roughly $20 million per year to serve up to 288 people. Since its start in 2020, the program has served 225 participants and moved fewer than one-tenth into permanent housing. There are close to 12,000 homeless people in Seattle and surrounding King County.

Politicians often promise simple solutions with splashy policy initiatives—crackdowns, shelters or, lately, expensive permanent housing. In his most recent State of the City speech, departing L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti reaffirmed the value of a $1.2 billion homeless housing measure passed by voters in 2016. The measure, slated to fund construction of roughly 12,000 housing units by 2027, has been faulted in multiple audits for delays and cost overruns. Still, Garcetti insisted on permanent housing as a solution to homelessness: “[I]f we don’t double down on our housing momentum, the California Dream will be an old chapter in a history book.”

But drug treatment experts say cities need a multipronged approach. Psychiatrist Keith Humphreys, of Stanford University, said research shows that people with substance use problems are best helped with a combination of some harm reduction methods—especially medication-assisted treatment for opioid withdrawal—and an ultimate focus on getting and staying sober.  The odds of recovery from a substance use disorder “are at least 50 percent higher” in sobriety-based programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, he said. Scott Chin, president of the privately-funded Union Gospel Mission in Seattle and a former homeless heroin user himself, said that half of participants in his program, which requires sobriety, graduate and eventually find employment and stable housing.

Humphreys said cities relying solely on harm reduction should be aware of results in Vancouver, Canada, which pioneered the method in North America. The city reported a record number of overdoses last year and its homeless population grew by more than a fifth over the past decade.

There are signs of change. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed what he called a “Care Court” that would compel people with serious mental health or substance use disorders into treatment, for up to two years. The plan was immediately endorsed by a bipartisan group of big-city mayors and opposed by civil libertarians and advocates for the homeless. “We may have to use force to get [people] into treatment,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said, in a recent podcast interview. Preliminary results from an annual nationwide homeless population count suggest that San Francisco’s efforts to battle homelessness have begun to pay off. The city recently reported a 15 percent decrease in its unsheltered population since 2019.

Josephine Ensign, a longtime homelessness researcher at the University of Washington who herself experienced homelessness as a young adult, said that amid all the debate, it is important to recognize two qualities essential to any effort to help homeless people: compassion and a healthy respect for complexity. Many forms of support for homeless drug users—Housing First, harm reduction, 12-step sobriety programs, faith-based services—can improve outcomes and save taxpayers money by keeping people off the streets and out of jail, Ensign said. The key is flexibility—finding the right service for each person and not getting stuck in ideological rigidity.

“Having choices for people is hugely important,” she said. “It’s getting the political will among voters to understand the complexities of homelessness, and address it.” In cities up and down the West Coast, contentious upcoming elections will show whether voters agree.

The post Why Won’t Policymakers Talk More About Drugs and Homelessness? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.