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   his only concern is the criminal offender.” (I wouldn’t be surprised to   
   see Jenkins run for D.A. herself, though this isn’t something she’s   
   floated yet.)   
      
   A 2020 tweet from the Tenderloin police station captured the frustration   
   of the rank and file: “Tonight, for the fifteenth (15th) time in 18   
   months, and the 3rd time in 20 days, we are booking the same suspect at   
   county jail for felony motor vehicle theft.”   
      
   Boudin has a rugged jawline and fast, tight answers for his critics. His   
   office vehemently rejected the argument that he wasn’t doing enough to   
   tackle crime. “The DA has filed charges in about 80 percent of felony   
   drug sales and possession for sales cases presented to our office by   
   police,” Marshall pointed out. After all, he could prosecute people only   
   if the police arrested them, and arrest rates had plummeted under his   
   tenure. So how could that be his fault? But why had arrest rates   
   plummeted? The pandemic was one reason. But maybe it was also because   
   the D.A. said from the beginning that he would not prioritize the   
   prosecution of lower-level offenses. Police officers generally don’t   
   arrest people they know the D.A. won’t charge.   
      
   In 2020, I interviewed Boudin while working on a story for The New York   
   Times. When we talked about why he wasn’t interested in prosecuting   
   quality-of-life crimes, he explained that street crime is small potatoes   
   compared with the high-level stuff he wants to focus on. (“Kilos, not   
   crumbs” is a favorite line.) He has suggested that many drug dealers in   
   San Francisco are themselves vulnerable and in need of protection. “A   
   significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco—perhaps   
   as many as half—are here from Honduras,” he said in a 2020 virtual town   
   hall. “We need to be mindful about the impact our interventions have …   
   Some of these young men have been trafficked here under pain of death.   
   Some of them have had family members in Honduras who have been or will   
   be harmed if they don’t continue to pay off the traffickers.”   
      
   Read: His dad got a chance at clemency. Then his baby was born.   
      
   Of course there is good in what Boudin was trying to do. No one wants   
   people incarcerated for unfair lengths of time. No one wants immigrants’   
   relatives to be killed by MS-13. Few of Boudin’s policy   
   ideas—individually, and sometimes with reasonable limitations—are   
   indefensible. (Ending cash bail for truly minor offenses, for instance,   
   protects people from losing their job and more while in jail.) But as   
   with homelessness, the city’s overall take on criminal-justice reform   
   moved well past the point of common sense. Last month a man who had been   
   convicted of 15 burglary and theft-related felonies from 2002 to 2019   
   was rearrested on 16 new counts of burglary and theft; most of those   
   charges were dismissed and he was released on probation. It really   
   didn’t inspire confidence that the city was taking any of this   
   seriously.   
      
   Boudin’s defenders liked to dismiss his critics as whiny tech bros or   
   rich right-wingers. One pro-Boudin flyer said stop the right-wing   
   agenda. But the drumbeat of complaints came from plenty of good   
   liberals, and so did the votes against him. If it were only the rich,   
   well, the rich can hire private security, or move to the suburbs. And   
   many do. They’re not the only people who live here, and they’re not the   
   only ones who got angry.   
      
   It may not have been so clear until now, but San Franciscans have been   
   losing patience with the city’s leadership for a long time. Nothing did   
   more to alienate them over the years than how the progressive leaders   
   managed the city’s housing crisis.   
      
   Consider the story of the flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street. It slopes   
   down 2.2 acres in the sunny southern end of the city and is filled with   
   run-down greenhouses, the glass long shattered—a chaos of birds and wild   
   roses. For five years, advocates fought a developer who was trying to   
   put 63 units on that bucolic space. They wanted to sell flowers there   
   and grow vegetables for the neighborhood—a kind of banjo-and-beehives   
   utopian fantasy. The thing they didn’t want—at least not there, not on   
   that pretty hill—was a big housing development. Who wants to argue   
   against them? In San Francisco the word developer is basically a slur,   
   close to calling someone a Republican. What kind of monster wants to   
   bulldoze wild roses?   
      
   Decades of progressive governance in San Francisco yielded a thicket of   
   regulations—safety reviews, environmental reviews, historical reviews,   
   sunlight-obstruction reviews—that empower residents to essentially   
   paralyze development. It costs only $682 to file for a discretionary   
   review that can hold up a construction project for years, and if you’re   
   an established club that’s been around for at least two years, it’s   
   free. Plans for one 19-unit-development geared toward the middle class   
   were halted this year because, among other issues raised by the   
   neighbors, the building would have increased overall shadow coverage on   
   Dolores Park by 0.001 percent.   
      
   The cost of real estate hit crisis levels in the 2010s, as ambitious   
   grads from all over the world crammed into the hills to work in the   
   booming tech industry. Soon, there was nowhere for them to live. Tech   
   workers moved into RVs, parked alongside the poor and unhoused. Illegal   
   dorms sprang up. Well-paid young people gentrified almost every   
   neighborhood in town. In 2018, when London Breed was elected mayor at   
   the age of 43, she had only just stopped living with a roommate; she   
   couldn’t afford to live alone.   
      
   Existing homeowners, meanwhile, got very, very rich. If all other   
   tactics fail, neighbors who oppose a big construction project can just   
   put it on the ballot. If given a choice, who would ever vote to risk   
   their property value going down, or say “Yes, I’m fine with a shadow   
   over my backyard”? It doesn’t happen.   
      
   Rage against this pleasant status quo has come from a faction of young   
   renters. I once went to a training session in the Mission District run   
   by a pro-housing group called YIMBY—for “Yes in My Backyard.” I watched   
   a PowerPoint presentation (“And here’s another reason to be mad at your   
   grandparents! Next slide.”) and then joined the group for drinks.   
      
   “The elderly NIMBYs literally hiss at people,” said Steven Buss, who now   
   runs a moderate organizing team called GrowSF, about the tension at   
   community housing meetings. (One foggy night, at one of those meetings,   
   I heard the hissing, and it was funny, and the project they were talking   
   about never got built.)   
      
   Gabe Zitrin, a lawyer, popped in: “Like 770 Woolsey. I love kale too,   
   but you could house 50 kids and their families on that site. It’s about   
   priorities. They want a farm. They’re selfish and they’re vain. A farm   
   does not serve the common good. I can’t tell them not to want it—but I   
   can tell them that housing is what we need more. I don’t want to end up   
   surrounded by a bunch of super-rich people and a farm.”   
      
   The city’s progressives seem to feel that it is all just too beautiful   
   and fragile to change. Any change will mean diminishment; any new,   
   bigger building means the old, charming one is gone, and the old,   
   charming resident is probably gone too. The flow of newcomers is out of   
   control; they should just stop coming here. The community gardens have   
   to stay, along with the sunlight spilling across the low buildings. No   
   one thinks about it as damning teachers and firefighters to   
   mega-commutes. No one thinks of it as kicking out the middle class.   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)