Belief | Are Liberal Guidelines Hurting the West Coast?

To the Editor:

Re “What Have We Liberals Carried out to the West Coastline?,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, June 16):

As a Ga indigenous who has lived in California for much more than two decades, I made use of to acquire pleasure in returning to my home state with what felt like a a lot more enlightened and progressive worldview. Nevertheless, at my modern significant faculty reunion, I could rarely protect from the chorus of previous classmates who experienced legitimate arguments versus the liberal policies of my state (“so individuals just stroll in a retailer and steal things in San Francisco without repercussions?!”).

Mr. Kristof’s column elucidates how West Coast liberals are undertaking hurt to some of the very will cause they are meant to champion. I hope the leaders of Western blue states — from governors to town councils to university boards — will realign their policies with pragmatic, widespread-perception regulations that embody the spirit of the Democratic Occasion without the insanity!

We all need to demand from customers improved oversight and outcomes, not just effectively-meant promises.

Susan George
Mill Valley, Calif.

To the Editor:

Nicholas Kristof’s current critique misses the mark. He should really spend much more time in Portland, Ore., wherever final results-centered folks are successfully addressing a homeless and behavioral health disaster on our streets just about every working day. In response to a nationwide disaster, Portland is marrying pragmatism with our progressive values to put into action successful solutions to hard challenges.

Many thanks to these concerted efforts, ground breaking guidelines and sturdy partnerships, criminal offense prices are down 43 % yr above yr downtown. More than 5,000 individuals in the Portland location have been put into housing. This isn’t about ideological purity it’s about apparent, empirical progress.

When there is even now substantially function to be accomplished, these final results display our city’s potential to handle intricate social problems in a pragmatic way without abandoning our values. You may possibly get in touch with it “West Coast liberalism,” but in Portland, we connect with it crafting powerful, new remedies to intractable difficulties.

Ted Wheeler
Portland, Ore.
The writer is the mayor of Portland.

To the Editor:

Kudos to Nicholas Kristof for holding his personal political party’s toes to the hearth. His essay is an correct and essential analysis of West Coast policies that are more worried with ideological purity than practical and efficient methods.

Mr. Kristof does an excellent task of juxtaposing East Coast and West Coast liberal policies. And what he finds, maybe to the chagrin of some progressive purists, is that acquiring each key functions have some sway in the discussion and sausage-making (as they do on the East Coast) ordinarily prospects to good, measurable results for constituents. The tension of opposites seems to aid locate a center floor that does the greatest fantastic for the citizens.

We live in a dangerous and usually ineffectual political local climate exactly where just about every side is more intrigued in successful social media skirmishes than really developing truthful but pragmatic legislation. Amid these political failures, Mr. Kristof details out that there is reason for hope.

States together the Pacific experienced the maturity to see their shortcomings and are self-correcting. As Mr. Kristof notes, Oregon ended its disastrous drug decriminalization efforts. California and Oregon are in the process of rising the housing source, and homicides have dropped in San Francisco.

Let us hope far more of this brutal honesty carries on to aid push plan and laws that build cities and states that are protected, nutritious and sustainable for the citizenry.

Matt Tanguay
Ann Arbor, Mich.

To the Editor:

I read Nicholas Kristof’s column with desire and then dismay. Mr. Kristof discusses quite a few essential problems, yet blames liberalism for these difficulties when their root causes are evidently owing to anti-liberal free market place ways favored by those people whose mantra is “starve the beast.”

Mr. Kristof is suitable when he states that the “basic rationale for homelessness on the West Coast is an great scarcity of housing.” Even so, he mistakes the lead to if he blames West Coastline liberalism.

Homelessness and the extreme housing shortages in California can be largely blamed on 1) the curtailment of governing administration subsidies for housing beginning with President Ronald Reagan and 2) the subsidies to incumbent householders that arrived with Proposition 13 — which decreased turnover in households by capping property tax growth, and penalizes new potential buyers by reassessing property tax at present-day market values when home turns about.

The decimation of general public training, mental well being expert services and other govt providers also commenced with Mr. Reagan, and was accelerated by the drastic drop in house tax earnings due to Proposition 13.

Jim Fox
Palo Alto, Calif.

To the Editor:

As a fellow West Coaster, I consider that Nicholas Kristof’s examination of the Democratic Party’s failure to address our state’s major, longstanding difficulties is very well founded. In accordance to a modern study, 34 % of the state’s households do not earn sufficient money to meet their standard desires.

Taking into consideration California’s financial system is the fifth most significant in the planet, these high charges of struggling households are not only problematic, but inexcusable as very well. Right after all, the Democratic Occasion has preserved regulate of the California Condition Legislature for almost all of the past 50 many years. There is absolutely nothing to halt it from enacting the transformative policies it has campaigned on. And however … 34 p.c.

To Mr. Kristof’s level, perhaps a healthier Republican Party would foster additional political competitors and stress Democrats to fulfill their guarantees. On the other hand, as partisan polarization carries on to rise, an increasingly conservative Republican Bash is unlikely to achieve a great deal floor in this sort of a famously liberal point out.

So, as a substitute of hoping the two-bash system will organically average itself, Californians must do what we do most effective: innovate. A multiparty technique would do a substantially far better career of symbolizing our state’s many varied communities and responding to their vital requirements.

If we want a lot more functions, we need to start seeking at electoral reforms like proportional representation as promising structural options to our democracy’s antiquated, unrepresentative two-bash issues.

Caledon Myers
Grass Valley, Calif.
The writer is govt director of ProRep Coalition.

To the Editor:

Nicholas Kristof missed the major rationale that homelessness is higher on the West Coastline than the East Coast. As another person who has lived on the two coasts, I can explain to you it isn’t politics or housing shortages that helps make the West Coastline more desirable to the homeless it’s the climate!

John Davison
New York