San Francisco supervisors want you to know they are very concerned. But not too concerned.
In January, a resolution was introduced trying to address medical services to underserved residents in the city. Helpfully titled “Urging Pharmacies and Medical Providers to Address Pharmacy Deserts by Expanding Services in Underserved Neighborhoods,” the resolution tries to pressure companies to spend their money where they can’t make enough to make it worthwhile.
Like much legislation it begins with a chain of “whereas” statements, declaring that access to pharmacies is essential to public health, that closing pharmacies “disproportionately affects low-income residents, seniors, individuals with disabilities, and those with limited mobility.” It also states that “Walgreens has announced the closure of 12 store locations across San Francisco,” including two areas in District 10, “effectively turning these neighborhoods into pharmacy deserts.”
It goes on, tying in progressive buzzwords and phrases like “racial and economic equity” and “marginalized communities.” So then, after calling the pharmacies essentially plutocratic racists, it “urges Walgreens and other major pharmacy chains to reconsider planned closures, extend their operating timelines where possible, and work collaboratively with city officials to ensure a smooth transition for affected residents.”
If this were 1803 and it took two hours to get to the nearest general store, only to have to wrassle with the Old Prospector for the remaining bottle of peppermint oil, that would be a hardship.
It concludes by urging that “copies of this resolution be sent to the leadership of Walgreens, CVS, Target, Safeway, Lucky’s, and other pharmacy providers, as well as the San Francisco Department of Public Health and local healthcare organizations including Kaiser Permanente, UCSF, Sutter Health, Dignity Health, North East Medical Services, urging them to take immediate steps to prevent further pharmacy deserts and safeguard equitable access to healthcare in San Francisco.”
The resolution was sponsored by Shamann Walton, Jackie Fielder, Chyanne Chen, Connie Chan, Rafael Mandelman, Joel Engardio, and Myrna Melgar. It was passed by the supervisors at their Feb. 4 meeting, only to be returned unsigned by Mayor Daniel Lurie.
What to do, what to do
I’ll admit, I’m not sure I’m on board with the idea of “food deserts” or “grocery deserts” or “pharmacy deserts” in the first place. It sounds a bit like the left making up definitions for something that’s not really a problem. If this were 1803 and it took two hours to lead your donkey several miles away to the nearest general store, only to have to wrassle with the Old Prospector for the remaining bottle of peppermint oil, then the closing of that general store would indeed be a huge blow to anyone who needed its products. They would now have to wait for the stage coach to come through and hope the coach wasn’t robbed by bandits before it got here.
But, you might say, I’m being unfair to the poor. To use the left’s own favorite lingo, I’d say such claims are pretending the poor don’t have any agency.
When I was very little and my recently divorced mother was trying to raise four young children, we were for a brief time on food stamps. There was no grocery store down the block, nor down the next block nor many blocks beyond that. We had to drive to a grocery store several miles away. Was it a hardship? Well, no. It was a three mile drive. If we hadn’t had my mother’s aging Ford Fairlane station wagon, we would have had to take a bus. Would that have been a hardship? No. So why are various retail “deserts” declared and action being demanded that they sprout commercial establishments by city council fiat?
But let’s take the resolution’s sponsors seriously and assume they really care about people — perhaps especially those who have no access to cars, buses, the internet, or friends and family and nonprofit services providers — who no longer have a Walgreen’s within a short walk. That’s probably a fairly small number of people out of the city’s roughly 800,000 population, but it’s kind to think that the supervisors really care about them.
Except I’m not sure that they do.
If they did, they might have tried to do something about retail crimes that have made Walgreen’s nationally famous as a repeat crime scene. I once had a San Francisco Lyft driver tell me about being in a Walgreen’s when someone walked into the store, jumped over the checkout counter and just started taking things. I’ve seen people numerous times grab stuff and just walk out of the stores. At least those weren’t violent examples — but there are violent examples of retail theft in this city. If you had family or friends who worked in those stores, wouldn’t you like to think they could call on the police for help? That the perpetrators would be taken off the street? That they wouldn’t lose their jobs when the chain pharmacy or grocery store finally gives up and closes down the location?
If the supervisors cared, they might at least pass a useless nonbinding resolution demanding more policing and a crackdown on crime. But they won’t do that; that would call their own bluff, because they could actually do something about it by hiring more police and changing the way the city fights crime.
So instead they pass a nonbinding resolution telling private companies to fix a problem the supervisors themselves could address but won’t. If Walgreens, CVS, Safeway, and the others ever receive a copy of the resolution, they should simply respond with “Nuts.”
