HOW IT STARTED: San Francisco billboards warn tourists of “dirt cheap” fentanyl sold in open market.

—KTVU, April 4th, 2022.

How It’s Going: SF Travel launches $6M ad campaign with first-ever commercial, starring local talent.

—SFGate, Wednesday.

And while in San Francisco, be sure to visit nearby tony Marin County: Mile-long RV encampment in Marin Co. symbolizes growing housing crisis in Bay Area.

—ABC-7 News, Thursday.

Regarding that last item, As the great Thomas Sowell wrote in 2014, it’s “The Housing Price of Liberalism:” in action.

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.”

And speaking of “the housing price of liberalism:” San Francisco Homeowners Lose $260 Billion In Value.