San Francisco needs more 'Unpoliticians'

San Francisco has no shortage of politicians.

From those currently occupying City Hall to others who emerged from The City and now help lead our state and national government, those in the political class like saying San Francisco politics is a “knife fight in a phone booth.”

But in 2023, and soon in 2024, poll after poll shows that San Franciscans feel The City is headed in the wrong direction and want something more.

Hey progressives, shouldn’t we actually achieve progress?

Hey moderates, why not actually work with all sides?

Hey conservatives, there aren’t many of you here in The City, but care to conserve core San Francisco values like equity and opportunity for all?

Instead of more politicians, I’m convinced San Francisco needs more Unpoliticians.

Let me explain.

An Unpolitician believes that government can and should solve many pressing problems but that the act of playing politics often blocks real solutions. To create meaningful change, the political culture first has to change.

The Unpolitician recognizes that if we keep doing what we’ve been doing — essentially small variations of the same failed approach — we will keep getting the same disappointing results.

The Unpolitician is a radical pragmatist: They subscribe to the notion that solving our most perplexing problems may require a radical shift from the status quo — as well as the pragmatic idea that the programs that clearly don’t work need to be immediately cut and replaced.

The Unpolitician knows that achieving results on tough issues like homelessness and the fentanyl crisis isn’t just about solving problems but also about optimizing solutions.  If tiny houses, for instance, have the potential to quickly create more temporary and permanent housing for the homeless, how can we better avoid on-site challenges and cost-overruns that have plagued prior attempts?  Plenty of potential fixes that would be good policies at X cost are horrible policies at 10 times X. An Unpolitician is laser-focused on making policy implementation better or cheaper or both.

An Unpolitician is also an unabashed proponent of sustainability — not only regarding the environment but also in how it relates to the operation of a city like San Francisco. City programs must be inherently sustainable so that the positive and measurable return on investment, in good times and in bad, always exceeds the cost of inaction.

An Unpolitician is adaptive.  Rather than presume that they know the entire solution in advance, the Unpolitician naturally iterates, often at lightning speed, in response to new data and evidence.

From homelessness in Houston to San Diego’s affordable housing successes, the Unpolitician recognizes that cities that have made significant headway in tackling really difficult problems share four key characteristics:

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United.

Most really hard problems won’t be solved by a single department, entity, or government agency.  The Unpolitician knows that we must work together across the public, private, and non-profit sectors — plus across departments of city government — with a united purpose and shared vision.

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Focused.

To solve complex, multifaceted problems, we must resist the temptation to bite off more than we can chew.  The Unpolitician focuses on the aspects of the problem with clear and direct solutions and saves the rest for Phase 2.

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Simplified.

Even if a program or plan is brilliant in theory, if it has too many moving parts that require perfect execution, it won’t be achievable by a government bureaucracy.  The Unpolitician simplifies it to improve it.

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Cost-efficient.

There are multiple ways to tackle a problem, but the most cost-efficient options will always rise to the top.  Because governance is about making priorities and seeing them through, the Unpolitician recognizes that if we’re cost-efficient, we can always accomplish more with less.

As I said, San Francisco has plenty of politicians.

But where are my Unpoliticians at?
Ben Kaplan is a Harvard-trained economist and the founder of WE — a community-led movement to solve San Francisco’s biggest challenges. Listen to his WE ARE SAN FRANCISCO podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.  His column appears weekly on Sundays, and you can reach Ben on Twitter/X at @benjaminkaplan or ben.kaplan@wesanfrancisco.org.