Ok, heard about this book a few times and finally got around to it.
The title is pretty self-explanatory, and to me, as someone from the UK, it was quite interesting because we now also have more issues with thieves not being arrested for shoplifting and more random street druggies, although we don't have a proper skid row type deal.
It also went into details about the homeless industrial complex and the differences in drug and homeless treatment in Portugal and Holland V the US.
Here's a little summary from the book
How and why do progressives ruin cities? So far we have explored six reasons. They divert funding from homeless shelters to permanent supportive housing, resulting in insufficient shelter space. They defend the right of people they characterize as Victims to camp on sidewalks, in parks, and along highways, as well as to break other laws, including against public drug use and defecation. They intimidate experts, policy makers, and journalists by attacking them as being motivated by a hatred of the poor, people of color, and the sick, and as causing violence against them. They reduce penalties for shoplifting, drug dealing, and public drug use. They prefer homelessness and incarceration to involuntary hospitalization for the mentally ill and addicted. And their ideology blinds them to the harms of harm reduction, Housing First, and camp-anywhere policies, leading them to misattribute the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homeless crisis to poverty and to policies and politicians dating back to the 1980s.
Generally, I find it all frustrating because it seems so common sense that none of this should ever be allowed, and yet, here we are in crazy land, but as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.