The pervasiveness of untreated mental illness on the streets of blue cities – about 20 percent of the homeless population in the United States is severely mentally ill – is a glaring feature of the urban landscape. So we invited sociologist Neil Gong, the author of an eye-opening book, Sons, Daughters and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, to join us on this latest BCB episode to talk about his observations of how class dynamics drive radically different social expectations of how to address this problem.

Gong spent years observing public outreach and treatment efforts directed at the mentally ill in Los Angeles, first with the homeless on the gritty streets of Skid Row, and then in the city's tony private pay clinics where wealthy families sent their mentally ill relatives. His book insightfully unpacks the complicated – and often counterintuitive – ways that social inequality shapes not only how we address, but also how we think about, mental illness in urban America.

We dig in with Gong on the “two different worlds” that exist in LA for handling mental illness. The public system for the homeless focuses on what Gong terms “tolerant containment.” This is the effort, born of civil libertarian ideas about the personal autonomy of the mentally ill combined with a woeful lack of public resources, to accept the problematic behaviors of the mentally ill so long as they remain out of public view in subsidized apartments or flophouses. But Neil contrasts that with the “concerted constraint” work of private clinics that, driven by the concerns of the patients’ families and loved ones, limit the freedoms of their clients as they intensively work to make them as high functioning as possible.

In the latter part of the conversation we talk about what we should be doing to improve our response to mental illness in American cities. Gong argues we don't need new approaches, but rather greater investment in a more balanced system that combines a variety of approaches, from sober housing to intensive residential programs to in patient hospitalization capacity that compliments the existing, clearly inadequate, post-deinstitutionalization community care system.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Outside sources:

Neil Gong, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

About Blue City Blues:

Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer. America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, as rising tribalism and growing polarization constrained discourse and reinforced cosmopolitan progressive groupthink among educated urban elites. Blue City Blues aims get beyond that conventional wisdom in offering a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Through conversations with a diverse array of smart thinkers and expert guests, we're committed to expanding the horizons of dialogue about the challenges blue cities face.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com

We invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities.

Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, along with many short stories, essays and poems, Sherman has spent his life, and much of his writing, negotiating the boundaries between vastly different cultural communities: after growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the child of alcoholic parents, he went on to become an “urban Indian” in cosmopolitan Seattle as his highly lauded body of work catapulted him into the rarefied ranks of the literary elite.

Much of Alexie’s recent writing has been on Substack, where he has a large and devoted following. That work touches, in layered and nuanced ways, on the beliefs and the failings of blue city urban cultural, intellectual and activist elites. Alexie, sometimes subtly and obliquely and sometimes more directly, questions the assumptions of the self-righteous, puncturing the sense of certitude and moral perfection that has gripped much of the educated left.

In our conversation, Alexie tells us why, drawing on a terrifying youthful encounter with a budding murderer-in-training on the reservation, he felt compelled to question the abolitionist pieties of Ivy League academics, why he now has a complicated relationship with leftist politics, and why he describes himself as “artistically a libertarian” and has come to believe that “every writer is an individual who owes loyalty to nobody.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

About Blue City Blues:

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.
America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming.
Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com

This week we take a close look at the damning decline in the quality of public education in progressive cities where, as Sandeep puts it, the "glaring contradiction" between a fixation on equity and shockingly inequitable results "drives me bat shit crazy." Our guest, Kelsey Piper, formerly at Vox and now a staff writer with The Argument, doesn't pull any punches either, arguing that "illiteracy is a policy choice.”

In a series of cogently argued recent pieces (links below), Piper has provided yeoman service in jump starting a debate, largely dormant during the years of the Great Awokening, among left-of-center commentators about the declining quality of public education in blue jurisdictions. Her work details how Mississippi went from dead last to near the top of the nation in fourth-grade reading scores – demonstrating particular success with poor and minority children – via a combination of mandated phonics-based curriculum, teacher training, and accountability measures, including the controversial rule that holds back third-grade students who fail to demonstrate basic reading proficiency.

Rather than joining her call to follow Mississippi’s lead, some prominent thought leaders on the left have instead worked overtime to try to discredit the success that Mississippi (and several other Southern states) has achieved. But Piper’s defense of the underlying data supporting “the Southern surge” in test scores is convincing.

Beyond the Mississippi Miracle, we go deep with Piper on other misguided pedagogical trends that have emerged out of progressive education circles, like the move away from tracking and the push to eliminate gifted and talented programs, as well as rampant grade inflation and the lowering of standards in the name of equity. And we delve into the history of education reform in recent decades, and why the accountability ideas that were ascendant in the Clinton, Bush and Obama years have fallen into such disrepute on the left.

Drawing on a shocking recent UC San Diego report acknowledging a massive surge in admitted students requiring remedial math instruction despite boasting stellar high school transcripts with A’s in higher level math classes, Piper explains how a cynical focus on credentials over competence — giving kids a passing grade instead of making sure they reach basic competency — is a catastrophic mistake that only delays accountability, putting students at a profound disadvantage in the real world.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Outside references:

Kelsey Piper, “Illiteracy Is a Policy Choice: Why Aren’t We Gathering Behind Mississippi's Banner?” The Argument, Sept. 25, 2025

Karen Vaites and Kelsey Piper, “Is Mississippi Cooking the Books? No, the Skeptics Are Wrong. The Southern Surge Is Real,” The Argument, Oct. 7, 2025

Kelsey Piper, “Education Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game: The Strange Equity Crusade Against Algebra,” The Argument, Nov. 3, 2025

Kelsey Piper, “When Grades Stop Meaning Anything: The UC San Diego Math Scandal Is a Warning,” The Argument, Nov. 18, 2025

And ICYMI, previously on BCB: "Whitney Tilson on Why Kids in Blue City School Districts Are Being Left Behind," Oct, 9, 2025

About Blue City Blues:

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.
Ame

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com