[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 121 (Thursday, July 25, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4944-H4946]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          SAVING SAN FRANCISCO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California 
(Mr. Kiley) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, I rise today with an update on the 
condition of San Francisco, a city whose fate has been largely shaped 
by several politicians of prominence here in Washington, D.C. Foremost 
among them are Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Emerita Nancy 
Pelosi.
  I think it is important for all Americans to understand the tragedy 
of San Francisco and what has happened to one of America's most 
beautiful cities because the same radical failed policies that have 
caused San Francisco's decline and collapse are gaining increasing 
traction in Washington, D.C.
  I want to go over just a few of the reasons why it is that as the San 
Francisco Chronicle put it last year, this city is ``on the verge of 
collapse.''
  Indeed, in many ways, my entire State of California offers a preview 
of where our country has been headed, but San Francisco offers an even 
starker warning. It is the part of our State where failed policies, 
radical politics, and public corruption are in their most advanced 
stage and where residents are most rapidly fleeing.

  In an article headlined ``San Francisco Falls Into the Abyss,'' UCLA 
economics professor Lee Ohanian writes: ``No major American city has 
failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 
million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today. Move over Detroit, here 
comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 
2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any 2-year period in 
Detroit's history and unprecedented among any major U.S. city.''
  The city is declining faster than any major U.S. city in the history 
of our country. The reasons they are not a misery, foremost among them 
are crime, drug addiction, homelessness, waste, unaffordability, and 
failing schools, all a result of failed governance.
  Let's just start with the crime situation in San Francisco, which is 
a city that has had a progression of self-described progressive 
prosecutors starting with now-Vice President Harris who has used that 
term to describe herself, progressive prosecutor, followed by others in 
her mold, George Gascon and then Chesa Boudin, who was ultimately 
recalled from office by voters.
  On a State level, California law has essentially legalized many forms 
of crime, making theft of merchandise below $950 a misdemeanor, as well 
as the possession of even class A drugs.
  In practice, this means offenders are rarely, if ever, prosecuted, 
and, in many cases, businesses have stopped even reporting losses.
  San Francisco's anti-law enforcement policies have compounded these 
problems. For example, a few years ago in 2020, San Francisco defunded 
the police shifting $120 million away from law enforcement. If you park 
your car while in the city, the advice is just to leave the doors open 
and make sure there are no valuables inside. That will at least spare 
you the cost of replacing your windshield.
  Last year, the Castro Merchants Association, representing 125 
businesses wrote a scathing letter regarding the city's failure the 
address the lawlessness around them. One said: We are just seeing 
constant vandalism, constant drug use in public, people passed out on 
the sidewalk, people having psychotic breakdowns, it is just not 
something a small business owner should have to deal with.
  On top of these general problems relating to crime, retail theft, and 
car thefts is the issue of drug use. Walking through San Francisco you 
will see open drug use and drug dealing with an open-air drug market 
scene that is so rampant that even last year Governor Gavin Newsom sent 
in the National Guard ostensibly to get it under control.
  While California has among the highest rates of illegal drug use in 
the country. San Francisco is well above the national average with 22 
percent of the population in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont area 
using an illegal drug in the last year. Tragically, the number of 
overdose deaths has skyrocketed from 222 to now 647 in a given year.
  Things only got worse during the COVID shutdowns as far more people 
in the city died from overdoses than from COVID. Facing one of the most 
punishing lockdowns in the country, emergency room mental health visits 
increased substantially, especially for young people.
  It certainly doesn't help matters that the supply of drugs is 
abundant thanks to the crisis at our border, largely overseen by this 
administration's border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris.
  It should be noted that San Francisco declared itself a sanctuary 
city long before California became a sanctuary State.
  On that note, the current Vice President also played a starring role 
when she was district attorney abiding by the city's sanctuary 
policies. Then when she was the State's attorney general, she actually 
paved the way for California to become a sanctuary State by opposing a 
Federal law meant to stop sanctuary jurisdictions.
  A third issue that one will confront immediately in San Francisco is 
the explosion of homelessness. This is very much connected to the 
crisis of crime, drug use, and mental health.
  Once again, while California leads the Nation in homelessness, San 
Francisco is worst of all. Between 2005 and 2020, the number of 
homeless increased from 5,404 to 8,124. During that same period, 
homelessness declined significantly nationwide. Within a 3-year span, 
complaints of homeless encampments to the city's 311 line increased 
from 2 to 62 each and every day. Meanwhile, the share of the homeless 
population that is unsheltered has also gone up in recent years.
  Fourthly is the waste situation. Between 2014 and 2018 in San 
Francisco, calls about human feces doubled to 20,933. $100 million was 
spent on street cleaning in 2019 alone. In a 3-year span, the city 
replaced 300 lampposts corroded by urine. The overall condition in many 
areas is something that no American should ever have to experience, 
especially kids walking to school.
  Speaking of kids, the San Francisco Unified School District has the 
second widest achievement gap of any school district in California with 
over 5,000 students. A CalMatters investigation from 2017 found that 
San Francisco had the worst Black student achievement rate of any 
county in California. Just 19 percent of Black students in San 
Francisco passed the State's reading test compared with 31 percent 
Statewide. This was before COVID. While California was last in the 
Nation in

[[Page H4945]]

getting students back to school, San Francisco was worst of all, 
keeping schools closed not only in 2020 but through the end of the 
2020-2021 school year.
  While they refused to actually operate schools, the district instead 
spent time on a commission to rename them, even proposing taking 
Abraham Lincoln's name off of an elementary school. The district then 
came up with a scheme to scam the State by pretending to open for the 
last 2 weeks of the school year in order to get millions of dollars in 
extra funding. Predictably, test scores have since plummeted even 
further.
  The citizens of San Francisco, by the way, responded by recalling 
three of the school board members from office, each by over 70 percent 
of the vote.

                              {time}  1330

  A fifth issue is bureaucracy. It costs an estimated $100,000 to build 
one tiny home for the homeless, 10 times more than even other places in 
the bay area. Almost $1.2 million is the cost to build a single unit of 
affordable housing.
  This is the city where it takes 87 permits, a thousand days of 
meetings, and $500,000 in fees to build residential housing projects. 
San Franciscan politicians boast that they brought home the bacon when 
they brought home a $1.7 million taxpayer-funded toilet.
  As the San Francisco Chronicle puts it: ``San Francisco's bureaucracy 
isn't just incompetent and comically inefficient. It is a corrupting 
force in our city life.''
  They say: ``Spiritually, yes. But also literally.'' They call it 
``corruption born of needlessly complicated government bureaucracy.''
  The public transportation system is a model of mismanagement, with 
the Bay Area Rapid Transit facing a $1.1 billion deficit over 5 years 
with trains that are dangerous to ride and that rarely show up on time. 
No wonder ridership has plummeted and they are projecting a $728 
million deficit for the city as a whole over a span of 2 fiscal years.
  Finally, there is the cost of living. A survey from the Economist 
Intelligence Unit found that San Francisco is 1 of the 10 most 
expensive cities to live in, in the world. The average rent for a one-
bedroom apartment is over $3,500. According to data from the California 
Association of Realtors, a San Franciscan needs to make nearly $400,000 
to buy a median-income home. The cost of utilities, groceries, and 
other goods is also well above the national average.
  The city has simply become unaffordable for far too many people.
  Now, this is the political situation. This is the reality on the 
ground in San Francisco, and it is directly linked to the political 
culture of radicalism that has developed in that city over the course 
of the last, say, one and a half decades. What is truly alarming is 
that many of the people who have had positions of leadership, like 
Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi, have assumed greater 
power over our State and over our country.
  Indeed, California has seen its own population decline significantly. 
In fact, we led the Nation in outbound U-Haul rentals over the course 
of 4 years. Many of those problems I just discussed for San Francisco 
started to become problems for the entire State and are indeed now 
starting to become problems for the entire country.
  I personally believe it is not too late to turn that particular city 
around. For proof, look at the communities of my district. While 
California as a whole is declining and 53 out of 58 of its counties are 
declining, the vast majority of my district is growing. Placer County 
and Folsom, for instance, are growing as much as anywhere in the State. 
Our communities are rated among the best in California to live, raise a 
family, and retire.
  While California, as I said, leads the Nation in U-Haul departures, 
Roseville is the second-place city in the entire country in U-Haul 
arrivals. Many of the people leaving San Francisco, in fact, come to my 
district for safer communities, a more affordable cost of living, 
better schools, and an overall quality of life.
  We still face headwinds of misguided policies enacted on the State 
level, but we strive to use the tools of local governance and community 
partnerships to do what is best for our citizens. This is the model 
that our State should strive for, and it is the model that many other 
States are following. It is the model for our country to reverse the 
policies that have gotten us so off track in 3 years.
  If we are going to get ourselves back on the right trajectory as a 
country, then we should, indeed, look to San Francisco as a model, but 
it is a model of precisely what not to do.


                        Addressing Homelessness

  Mr. KILEY. Mr. Speaker, I share some news out of California just 
today where Governor Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order for 
State officials to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments 
on State properties and also encouraging local jurisdictions to do the 
same thing.
  Mr. Speaker, this is in response to the Supreme Court's recent 
decision in the Grants Pass case. I asked the Supreme Court to do what 
it did in an amicus brief--that is to say, overturn a misguided Ninth 
Circuit decision and give our communities back the power to deal with 
homeless encampments and to have commonsense limits on the public 
spaces where they can be.
  It is important to note that Governor Newsom did not join me in those 
efforts. He did file his own brief, but he explicitly opposed 
overturning this lower court decision that has handcuffed our local 
communities' ability to deal with homelessness.
  I am glad to see now that the decision came out as it did and the 
Court sided with my view as opposed to his, he is seeing the benefits 
of the decision and is apparently ordering the State to deal with 
homeless encampments in as much as it can within its jurisdiction and 
encouraging local jurisdictions to do the same.
  I know that, in my district, we already have had communities that 
have done a very good job limiting homelessness within the constraints 
that they have, but this decision is going to provide a new set of 
tools to address the problem in a more comprehensive and compassionate 
way.
  There are other parts of California, such as San Francisco, where the 
homeless situation has gotten totally out of control. At least to their 
credit, some of the political leaders there have now realized that they 
no longer have an excuse now that the Supreme Court has ruled.
  Mayor London Breed of San Francisco has announced she will be 
undertaking ``very aggressive'' sweeps of homeless encampments in that 
city. We are also hearing of action coming soon potentially in Oakland 
and in other cities across California.

  I did an amicus brief in this case, calling on the Court to rule as 
it did because I believed it could be a new day for California. The 
issue of homeless encampments on our streets and sidewalks, in our 
parks, and on the paths of families walking their children to school or 
going to the grocery store has been one of the biggest problems facing 
our State. It has been causing communities to deteriorate. It has been 
associated with crime, sexual assault, waste, fires, disease, and many 
other problems.
  It has also manifested a complete lack of compassion for the homeless 
individuals themselves who oftentimes don't go to shelters when 
available because they are struggling with substance abuse issues and 
mental health issues.
  This Court decision is giving back to our communities the ability to 
place commonsense restrictions on where homeless encampments can set up 
in order to protect order, safety, and public health while also 
allowing the tools to connect these individuals with the services they 
need to turn their lives around, whether that is substance abuse 
treatment, mental health treatment, other forms of counseling, family 
reunification, job training, and the like.
  It has been shown time and time again that that is the way to help 
people turn their lives around and get back on their feet, whereas 
allowing people to simply live, fester, and all too often tragically 
die on our streets has proven to be a disastrous policy. Indeed, it has 
gotten to the point where California, at this time, has about half the 
unsheltered homeless in the entire country.
  I do believe that this Court decision that has just come down, 
combined with our efforts to restore consequences for criminal activity 
with

[[Page H4946]]

what is now being called Prop 36, really can be a path back to sanity 
and a new day for California.
  I am glad to see that the Governor has at least recognized the 
potential of this Court decision, and I encourage him to make good on 
these promises to deal with the State's own issues when it comes to 
State property and provide encouragement for local jurisdictions to do 
the right thing while respecting their autonomy and flexibility to meet 
the needs of their communities as they see best.


                          Honoring Lou Conter

  Mr. KILEY. Mr. Speaker, a few months ago, we lost a true hero in my 
district, Lou Conter, who passed away at the age of 103 and was the 
last survivor of the attack on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.
  I have just introduced legislation to honor the memory of Commander 
Conter by naming the Department of Veterans Affairs community-based 
outpatient clinic in Auburn, California, as the Lou A. Conter VA 
Clinic.
  I will share with folks in my district and across the country, since 
this is a true American hero, the text of this resolution.
  ``Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled, Congress finds the 
following:
  ``Louis `Lou' Anthony Conter was born on September 13, 1921, in 
Ojibwa, Wisconsin.
  ``Lieutenant Commander Lou Conter, the last remaining survivor of the 
attack on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, was an American hero.
  ``On that fateful day, Petty Officer Conter helped evacuate shipmates 
who were blinded, wounded, or burned, even restraining some of his 
fellow shipmates from jumping overboard into the burning sea.
  ``In the days after the attack, he helped with recovering bodies and 
putting out fires. Lou Conter's heroic actions saved the lives of many 
of his shipmates on December 7, 1941.
  ``Following Pearl Harbor, Conter continued serving during World War 
II in New Guinea and in Europe as an enlisted naval aviation pilot 
assigned to VP-11, a `Black Cat' Squadron.
  ``Lou Conter would be awarded with the Distinguished Flying Cross for 
actively taking part in the rescue of 219 Australians trapped by 
Japanese troops in New Guinea.
  ``Later, in the Korean war, he served on the USS Bon Homme Richard as 
both an intelligence officer and a Navy aviation pilot. Following his 
service in the Korean war, he served as a military intelligence adviser 
to three Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon 
B. Johnson.
  ``During the 1950s, Lou Conter played a prominent role in the 
establishment and development of the Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance 
and Escape training program.
  ``In addition to the Distinguished Flying Cross, he was awarded the 
Navy Commendation Medal and became the first recipient of the USS 
Arizona Medal of Freedom.
  ``Louis Conter retired from the Navy in 1967 after serving 28 years 
as a lieutenant commander.
  ``Following his retirement, he generously gave his time to share his 
personal experiences at veterans' ceremonies and by giving lectures to 
students.
  ``Lieutenant Commander Conter's lectures were popular with 
generations of local students who were equally fascinated and 
enthralled by his first-person accounts.
  ``He is eminently deserving of recognition for his decades of service 
to a grateful nation.
  ``Lieutenant Commander Conter passed away in Grass Valley, 
California, on April 1, 2024.
  ``The Department of Veterans Affairs community-based outpatient 
clinic in Auburn, California, shall after the date of the enactment of 
this act be known and designated at the `Louis A. Conter VA Clinic.' 
Any reference to such clinic in any law, regulation, map, document, 
record, or other paper of the United States shall be considered to be a 
reference to the Louis A. Conter VA Clinic.''


                           Commending Interns

  Mr. KILEY. Mr. Speaker, on National Intern Day, I recognize my three 
summer interns, who graciously came all the way from the great State of 
California to our Nation's Capital to serve in my Washington, D.C., 
office.
  Amelia Sanchez recently graduated from Long Island University and was 
also a student athlete who shares a passion for public service. I 
commend her for the hard work that she has done, and I wish her all the 
best in her future endeavors.

  The second intern I commend is Kevin Scanlan from Grass Valley, 
California, who recently completed his freshman year at Harvard. He 
previously distinguished himself as one of my top-performing interns 
during my 2022 election campaign for the House. His outstanding 
contributions were recognized statewide in California, culminating in 
the 2023 Kinder Award for exceptional campaign internship experience.
  Following his graduation from Forest Lake Christian High School, 
Kevin pursued his studies in economics and government at Harvard 
College. He is deeply passionate about local governance and remains 
dedicated to fully representing and advocating for constituents to the 
best of his abilities.
  Finally, I commend one of my longest-serving interns, Raghava 
Kodavatikanti. Raghava is a resident of Folsom, California, and 
recently wrapped up his freshman year at UCLA.
  Even throughout his academic success, Raghava interned with my office 
while I was in the California Legislature and served in my district 
office last summer.
  I truly could not be prouder of these three young men and women who 
have been outstanding public servants and have done such a tremendous 
job for our office. They have tremendously positive attitudes. They are 
smart. They are dedicated. They understand the importance of the work 
they do, the responsibility that comes with working for a congressional 
office, and the responsibility that runs between us and constituents.
  I look forward to hearing all about their academic success and look 
forward to following what is to come next in their respective futures.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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