{"id":54179,"date":"2025-11-15T06:57:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T06:57:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/54179\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T06:57:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T06:57:24","slug":"scott-wiener-defeated-californias-nimbys-can-he-fix-americas-housing-crisis-mother-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/54179\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Wiener Defeated California\u2019s NIMBYs. Can He Fix America\u2019s Housing Crisis? \u2013 Mother Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tGet your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.<\/a><\/p>\n

For a moment, it looks like California\u2014maybe the whole country!\u2014is doomed.<\/p>\n

Usually, the last days of a legislative session in Sacramento are a blurry schlep through hundreds of votes as both sides of the Capitol try to get bills onto the governor\u2019s desk. Today, a strikingly pretty Friday in mid-September, it\u2019s time for a bill called SB 79<\/a>, authored by a state senator from San Francisco named Scott Wiener.<\/p>\n

He has been trying to pass a version of this bill for nearly a decade. Simply, it overrides city land use rules and not-in-my-backyard procedural objections to allow big apartment buildings near public transit. The theory is that more housing brings down costs\u2014but it\u2019s more totalizing than that. Denser housing helps fight climate change and racism, enlarges tax rolls, helps fund public transit, reduces traffic congestion, and adds voters who\u2019ll give Democrats more power in Congress. So it\u2019s worth pissing off some of the people who live near the places these buildings will go. It is controversial. Wiener has done a Triple Crown\u2019s worth of horse trading to get to this vote.<\/p>\n

All he needs is a thin majority, just 21 green Y\u2019s to show up on the big red screen behind the president pro tem\u2019s podium. They start to tick in. Two powerful committee chairs who initially opposed the bill, fellow Democrats, are now yeses. Pro-\u00adhousing senators: Yes. A few rural Republicans: Yes. A dozen, 20, and then\u2014blackjack!<\/p>\n

Except\u2026wait. Laura Richardson, representing a stretch of South Los Angeles, was a yes vote, but then indicates she meant to \u201clay off\u201d\u2014to abstain. Wiener has been prowling the floor and lopes over to her chair\u2014he\u2019s an ectomorphic 6-foot-7, practically stepping over other senators\u2019 desks to get there, like a giraffe crossing the veldt. Senate arcana won\u2019t let Richardson switch from a yes to an abstention; now she\u2019s a no. To make matters worse, Wiener had been counting on a yes from Lena Gonzalez, from the district right next door to Richardson\u2019s, but she\u2019s out sick.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s it? Rents stay high, transit systems collapse, everyone moves to Texas\u2026it\u2019s Armageddon?<\/p>\n

Wiener steps up to the president\u2019s podium. Will he hold the vote open a little while longer? The chamber has a lot of business, but everyone\u2019s been waiting for this vote. The reporters in the press gallery are making little hissing and eeking noises. But wait! Shannon Grove, a Republican from Bakersfield, realizes she hasn\u2019t voted\u2014and she\u2019s a yes. The green Y goes on the board. The gavel cracks. A tectonic rumble in California politics almost a decade in the making has just become a full-on earthquake. The ground has shifted.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took us eight years to get that done,\u201d a visibly elated Wiener tells me a few minutes later. In four of six committees, SB 79 passed by a single vote. It passed the Assembly by two votes. And now, in the Senate, it passes by one vote<\/a>. \u201cThe bill is like the cat with nine lives,\u201d Wiener says. \u201cBut I\u2019ll take it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a moment that could literally redraw California\u2019s map. Yet for Wiener, it was, in a sense, just another Friday. In 2025 alone, Wiener pushed through controversial, hard-fought bills regulating artificial intelligence<\/a>, funding and permitting public transit<\/a>, barring federal agents from wearing masks<\/a>, capping insurance copays for insulin<\/a>, protecting the privacy of people who undergo gender transitions<\/a>\u2026phew. He works on thorny issues of policy and politics with a wonk\u2019s focus and a jock\u2019s tenacity. As a legislator, Wiener is, for certain values of the term, effective.<\/p>\n

\"AState Sen. Scott Wiener speaks at a press conference announcing revisions to SB 50, the \u201cMore Homes Act,\u201d in 2020 in Oakland, California.Aric Crabb\/MediaNews Group\/The Mercury News\/Getty<\/p>\n

Outside California, Wiener is probably best known for social media scraps with folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called Wiener, who is gay, a \u201ccommunist groomer.\u201d But for those who pay attention to housing issues, he\u2019s something of a celebrity\u2014especially in the liberal deregulatory\/abundance\/anti-NIMBY crossover universe. Back in 2023, Wiener talked policy on the podcast<\/a> of New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who then brought the intra-left debate over housing regulation into the mainstream via his bestseller Abundance (co-authored with Derek Thompson). Progressive superstars like Elizabeth Warren and Zohran Mamdani have embraced aspects of housing policy that Wiener helped pioneer. And Wiener, soon to be term-\u00adlimited out of the state Senate, is now running for one of the highest-\u00adprofile seats in Congress\u2014the one Nancy Pelosi has been parked in since 1987.<\/p>\n

So Wiener\u2019s more than just an interesting lawmaker from America\u2019s third-\u00adweirdest city. His nose-to-grindstone, hardcore policy approach could be a key to a political realignment\u2014a long-overdue recognition that addressing housing is necessary for the survival of the Democratic Party. \u201cThe plate tectonics of this issue have shifted,\u201d Klein told his listeners, \u201cand Wiener was a big reason for that.\u201d Assuming that a towering, gay, Jewish, dealmaking machine can bring a technocratic, get-things-done approach to politics outside California.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sitting in a coffee shop with Wiener in the Castro District\u2014his neighborhood, the core of his electoral base\u2014means a stream of interruptions. He\u2019s easy to spot (the height thing again), and folks keep wanting to just say hi or thanks. Today, a couple of weeks after the housing bill vote, is the annual Castro Street Fair, so the roads outside are blocked off and filling with families and young folks looking at clothes and tchotchkes alongside a smattering of drag queens in full regalia and naked men in cock rings\u2014ironic, since one of the things that marked Wiener as a \u201cmoderate\u201d early in his term on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was his sponsorship<\/a> of a city ordinance making public nudity illegal, except at sanctioned events like this one. The Scott Wiener booth is tucked between those for \u201cQueens of the Castro\u201d LGBTQ youth scholarships and GT\u2019s Synergy raw kombucha. It\u2019s the kind of thing Wiener doesn\u2019t skip. \u201cIf you\u2019re an elected official, you really need to enjoy people. And I do,\u201d Wiener says. \u201cI get really anxious if I\u2019m not at enough community events.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day of the vote, Wiener was wearing a lapel pin\u2014a Star of David in the pastel colors of the transgender rights flag. On social media, he\u2019s been a staunch defender of Israel as a Jewish homeland\u2014but has also called for an end to Israeli attacks on Gaza. So I ask how all those politics overlap. He points back to his adolescence in 1980s rural New Jersey, where Jews were so rare that folks asked him where his horns were. Wiener\u2019s family and a few others, spread out across the region, cobbled together a Conservative synagogue that met in a Lutheran church, with an Orthodox rabbi hired from a few towns away.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere I am, a Jew in an extremely non-\u00adJewish, antisemitic area, a closeted gay kid, terrified of coming out, and it was a mass die-off. That\u2019s how I came of age,\u201d Wiener says. \u201cTo me, being Jewish, being gay, like being in any minority group, is inherently political\u2026because for people in marginalized communities, elections aren\u2019t just about whether you like the person or don\u2019t like the person who won, or if some government service is going to run better or worse. It\u2019s about life or death\u2026not just for Jewish people and gay people, but Black people and immigrants and trans people. It\u2019s very real.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wiener came out while he was at Duke, then went to Harvard Law\u2014classmates with Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sen. Ted Cruz. His sense of politics had translated to LGBTQ activism and, as he says, \u201cliving a full-fledged gay life.\u201d He moved to San Francisco after graduation, doing community work and private litigation before eventually joining the city attorney\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

But then one of his mentors, a community activist named Mark Leno, got appointed to the famously contentious Board of Supervisors. Leno\u2019s move into electoral politics got Wiener thinking about it, too. \u201cI sensed that I had something to add to the community,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I always said to myself, if I\u2019m just occupying space, I don\u2019t want to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2010, Wiener ran for supervisor of District 8, the bull\u2019s-eye in the center of the city. Besides the free-for-all of the Castro, the district comprises the more conservative Diamond Heights and parts of the more working-class, Latino Mission District. San Francisco is dominated by Democrats, broadly liberal and personally permissive, but it\u2019s also small and libertarian-coded, and nearly every neighborhood is an ideological microclimate speckled with rich people. Politics there is a knife fight in a phone booth, as the old clich\u00e9 goes, but weird technolibertarians aside, the combatants run a narrow gamut from\u2014you\u2019re going to laugh\u2014\u201cprogressive\u201d to \u201cmoderate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you talk about young people being disillusioned, housing is one of the ways things are the most fucked up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wiener would be identified as pretty far to the left in most places; in San Francisco, he\u2019s deemed a moderate. As a supervisor, he supported removing tent encampments and struck a more laissez-faire posture on regulating burgeoning tech companies like Uber and Airbnb\u2014plus, he was taking meetings with leaders of the nascent Yes In My Backyard movement.<\/p>\n

In the face of the city\u2019s ideological diversity (stop laughing!), Wiener was a forthright campaigner, honest about his moderation, and as inexhaustible as the Terminator. \u201cHe door-knocked every door in District 8 either twice or three times,\u201d says Todd David, his longtime adviser. \u201cWhen he\u2019s having anxiety, we give him a packet and say, \u2018Go door-knock, Scott. Here\u2019s a list.\u2019 The guy is a machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

It worked. \u201cScott started in San Francisco as the moderate\u2019s moderate,\u201d David says. \u201cHe has built this political brand of working hard and doing the hard, principled thing.\u201d Wiener\u2019s base was the more conservative west side of his district, and his campaign coincided with new tech money arriving in the late 2000s, one of those booms San Francisco depends on like floods on the Nile. Big donations<\/a> from real estate and tech folks, capitalists whom progressives typically regard with suspicion, began flowing his way.<\/p>\n

He went gunning for big policy game. \u201cI want to pick issues that are going to make people\u2019s lives better,\u201d Wiener says, \u201cin areas that others aren\u2019t working on.\u201d Gun safety didn\u2019t need him. But housing policy? That was wide open.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The US has a shortage of homes people can afford, especially in cities with bustling economies. The shortage is particularly bad in California, though nobody quite agrees<\/a> how bad. The high-end estimate of the number of new units the state would need to add to accommodate everyone is 3.5 million. (State officials estimate 2.5 million.) Construction of both single-family homes and multifamily buildings hasn\u2019t kept up with population for decades, and it fell off a cliff after the economic crash of 2008.<\/p>\n

The reasons why would fill several books, but the ultra-abbreviated version is, in the late 19th century, San Francisco was among the first<\/a> to wield land use laws to keep nonwhite people from living near white people. Legal and policy fights over how to say that without, you know, saying it, eventually coalesced into the laws and regulations cities use across the country to determine what kind of buildings go where, which we know as zoning. The classic version keeps noxious uses like factories away from homes and protects neighborhoods from the bulldozer. But Bay Area cities invented an approach that permitted only single-family homes and, in practice, excluded nonwhite people. Those California innovations spread across the country to protect postwar suburban lifestyles everywhere.<\/p>\n

Mostly locked out of building new homes in denser city centers, developers instead built them in sprawling, car-\u00addependent exurbs, while cities made multiunit residential buildings illegal, or mired them in bureaucracies so convoluted that few could afford the time and the endless series of meetings required.<\/p>\n

Los Angeles in the 1970s had a population of around 2.8 million people and a theoretical capacity for 10.5 million under its zoning rules. So the city changed them. New cap: 4.1 million. Today, the population of Los Angeles is 3.9 million. San Francisco adopted similar restrictions at about the same time that voters passed a statewide referendum called Proposition 13, a cap on residential property taxes that means dwellings get reassessed only when a home is sold. As a result, more than anywhere else in the country, people\u2019s homes became a primary store of wealth\u2014a disincentive to allowing anything that might reduce their value, including building more homes. The point is, California has a lot to atone for here.<\/p>\n

\"AAndrew Rae<\/p>\n

Everyone agreed that California needed to build new homes. But not if they were too big. Or too small, or were out of character with the architecture of the neighborhood. Or replaced an older building, or replaced empty green space, or cast a shadow, or reflected too much sunlight, or burdened aging infrastructure, or called for construction of new infrastructure, or slowed first responders, or worsened traffic congestion, or opened up access to more streets, or closed off streets, or reduced access to free on-street parking, or included a big parking lot.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not progressive to oppose new housing, and it\u2019s very progressive to accelerate new housing. And I think we\u2019re seeing a generational change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many cities\u2019 approval processes for new construction required community meetings, at which angry neighbors would complain. They didn\u2019t want market-rate housing that would enrich developers, nor affordable housing that would bring in renters who wouldn\u2019t have a \u201cconnection\u201d to the community. If badgering local officials didn\u2019t work, they\u2019d sue. NIMBYs even used the revolutionary California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed in 1970, to argue that new buildings and people damaged the environment. Lowering the cost of housing polls incredibly well; building new homes next door to me does not.<\/p>\n

Politically minded young people started to see the lack of housing as not just a cause of homelessness, a driver of inequality, and a factor in societal loneliness and political polarization, but as a thing that was making their lives, specifically, worse. Cities stopped time when it came to building new homes, freezing out the younger, poorer newcomers who keep any city vibrant. Today, the median sale price of a home in San Francisco is $1.4 million; as Klein pointed out in his interview with Wiener, the owner of a home in the city either arrived a long time ago or is wealthy. \u201cThe Mission looks the same as it did when I moved here 15 years ago,\u201d says Brian Hanlon, one of the founders of the modern YIMBY movement. \u201cSan Francisco had this long habit of working to protect ugly buildings, and in the process, we\u2019d lose beautiful people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early YIMBYs thought they could fight for new homes one project at a time\u2014literal house-to-house battles. \u201cI never thought that local action would not solve the housing crisis,\u201d Hanlon says. But it didn\u2019t work. In cities with a lot of renters, maybe renters could achieve political power and get apartments built. But in Beverly Hills or the wealthy enclaves of Silicon Valley? \u201cPlaces with tons of high-paying jobs and a massive housing shortage, they\u2019re not going to do that themselves,\u201d Hanlon says. \u201cYou need to do that at a higher level.\u201d<\/p>\n

In April 2017, Hanlon met a couple of allies at Terroir wine bar in San Francisco and, over the course of five bottles, pitched a new idea: Close loopholes in state laws so that individuals and localities would no longer have the power to arbitrarily nix housing construction.<\/p>\n

An early memo that Hanlon wrote laying out the details had two core components: First, state-level zoning to make denser housing legal near high-capacity transit stations, like for trains and subways. And second, make housing exempt from spurious challenges under CEQA.<\/p>\n

\"AThen\u2013San Francisco Mayor London Breed (center), Wiener (right), and GrowSF\u2019s Steven Buss react to results at an election night watch party in San Francisco in March 2024.Scott Strazzante\/San Francisco Chronicle\/AP<\/p>\n

\u201cI actually kind of fucked up, because I was brand new at this,\u201d Hanlon says. \u201cAs an advocate, if you have an idea, you\u2019re only supposed to talk to one legislator at a time, because what happens if they both say yes?\u201d But Hanlon didn\u2019t know that. So he took his idea for making transit-oriented development the law of the land to Berkeley state Sen. Nancy Skinner and to Scott Wiener, newly elected to the legislature after a punishing race against a progressive San Francisco supervisor.<\/p>\n

Skinner was already working on something else behind the scenes, though she signed on as a co-author. \u201cScott responded, \u2018I\u2019ll take it,\u2019\u201d Hanlon says.<\/p>\n

The bill that Hanlon helped draft, SB 827<\/a>, attracted national attention, and intense pushback. The mayor of Berkeley\u2014now Wiener\u2019s fellow state senator\u2014said the bill was a declaration of war. A Los Angeles City Council member said it would make West LA look like Dubai. The only way to see this clearly is through the old lenses\u2014ensconced homeowners, at best, thought that big new buildings would jeopardize the value of their houses, and at worst, they didn\u2019t want to live near poor or nonwhite renters. The old-school, anti-\u00adcapitalist left, meanwhile, didn\u2019t want the greedy developers from The Goonies tearing down the community center and gentrifying the neighborhoods, hoping instead for Singapore-style LEED Platinum social housing funded by a carbon tax. And everyone shared an abiding dread that new homes might make it more difficult to find on-street parking.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t pretend the bill will be in its pristine form by the end,\u201d Wiener told me back then. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not by any stretch of the imagination guaranteed to pass.\u201d<\/p>\n

It did not. It was radioactive. But in losing, that 2018 bill provided cover for Wiener and other YIMBY urbanists to spend the next decade rewiring the circuitry of land use policy. Right at the top, SB 827\u2019s companion bill, an adjustment to how cities calculate the amount of housing they\u2019re supposed to build, did pass\u2014and today those rules have enough teeth that if cities don\u2019t hit their numbers, giant buildings get automatically approved, no opposition allowed, under the so-called builders\u2019 remedy.<\/p>\n

The year prior, Skinner had worked on streamlining the permitting process for accessory dwelling units<\/a>\u2014a.k.a. granny flats, in-law apartments, casitas. More than 80,000 have been permitted since then. Skinner and her policy adviser on ADUs, Denise Pinkston, used the SB 827 fight to drive through even more subversive bills. \u201cDenise and I were like, okay, look at the trouble Scott\u2019s getting into. What can we do to be sneakier?\u201d Skinner tells me. \u201cWe thought, what if we do a bill that says, if you submit a permit and it\u2019s for something that meets the zoning rules, the city can\u2019t say no?\u201d They set limits on the number of public meetings and a whole bunch of other ways cities were slow-walking proposals.<\/p>\n

\u201cScott\u2019s flamethrower bill gave us the window,\u201d Skinner says. \u201cWho would pay attention to something like granny flats when Scott\u2019s doing a thing to put a 25-story building next to you?\u201d<\/p>\n

This became a pattern. Wiener tried again the next session with a similar transit-\u00adoriented development bill, adjusted to try to catch a few more votes. This one was more popular, but still didn\u2019t get off the Senate floor. Pieces of it, though, along with other less showy, more granular changes to housing policy, made their way into legislation that did become law\u2014limits, mostly, on what cities and citizens could do to veto new housing construction. Another YIMBY-aligned state representative, Buffy Wicks, started getting CEQA exemptions written into law\u2014most recently for \u201cinfill housing,\u201d homes built in existing residential neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

A movement that had begun with young professionals angry that they couldn\u2019t find an apartment was becoming much more than that. Even in red states, cities often voted blue. But cities weren\u2019t building housing, and Democratic jurisdictions were losing voters. Left-leaning environmental and working-class defenders fought development to prevent environmental degradation, gentrification, or displacement, but all those things kept happening anyway. Cities like San Francisco had become de facto gated retirement communities. The boomers and Gen Xers who\u2019d bought homes kept them, but their children\u2014burdened with more educational debt, more health care debt, more car debt, more everything\u2014moved away and couldn\u2019t afford to return.<\/p>\n

Something had to give. Even politicians could see it. In the second half of 2022, states passed<\/a> 10 bills aimed at increasing housing supply; in the first half of 2025, they passed 104. These are laws that fundamentally give states control over land use: ADU deregulation, and multifamily buildings in commercial zones and near transit, even laws getting into the weeds of building codes\u2014like ending the requirement for more than one costly, space-\u00adsucking stairwell<\/a> in a building. Montana allowed denser residential construction to protect its open spaces from sprawl in a campaign that explicitly warned that otherwise, the state would become another California. The issue had gone national, for both sides; in 2020, President Donald Trump campaigned on the NIMBYish idea of protecting suburbs from upzoning, and, four years later, suggested getting rid of rules designed to prevent racial segregation in housing\u2014even as he proposed selling federal land<\/a> to housing developers. Now the no-new-housing-in-cities side was Trump-adjacent. \u201cSB 827 was a BC\/AD event for housing policy in America,\u201d Hanlon says. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to solve this through marginal tax credit, low-income housing projects. No. You just need to legalize fucking apartment buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even so, the YIMBY folks still hadn\u2019t landed the big one\u2014connecting dense, urban home construction to trains and high-capacity buses. In 2024, Hanlon went back to Wiener and asked if they might take another crack. \u201cI was skeptical at first,\u201d Wiener says. \u201cI had battle scars.\u201d But the state legislature had a lot of new members, and housing costs were even higher. Plus, Los Angeles had expanded its transit \u00adnetwork. \u201cMore transit in Southern California meant there was more support,\u201d he says. And their side had another secret weapon: a realignment of deep green environmentalists like Bill McKibben<\/a> and young, otherwise mostly apolitical folks toward a more deregulatory approach to homebuilding. \u201cWhen you talk about young people being disillusioned,\u201d Wiener says, \u201chousing is one of the ways things are the most fucked up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sure, the 2025 version came with even more compromises. Wiener built in union protections to keep the powerful Building Trades Council from opposing him (as it usually does). Counties with fewer than 16 high-use transit stops are exempt, which means the wealthy Marin County and the very suburban Contra Costa County, on the east side of the bay, are out. In cities with less than 35,000 people, the distance from transit stops affected by the new, taller buildings shrinks from half a mile to a quarter-mile.<\/p>\n

But still! \u201cYou solve what you can solve that doesn\u2019t harm the policy,\u201d Wiener says. \u201cAnd there are times you will give in ways that may harm the policy in a limited way you can live with.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After coffee, Wiener and I grab a Muni tram toward SF\u2019s downtown proper. Civic Center Plaza, a massive, sycamore-bordered open space in front of City Hall, has been given over to an event called the Longest Table. Around the country, people are bringing potluck lunches to a long table to try to foster community; here, the table snakes into switchbacks, seating 1,000 residents from 50 different neighborhoods. Wiener\u2019s Senate district isn\u2019t confined to his old supervisor seat bull\u2019s-eye; it\u2019s the whole target and then some\u2014covering the entirety of San Francisco and some of the industrial, middle-\u00adclass cities to the south, roughly a million people in all. The table turns all those political microclimates into a walkable map. Everyone has turned out in traditional cultural attire. Folks from the Castro are in sparkly hats and fishnets; Noe Valley natives are in technical pants and linen polo shirts.<\/p>\n

Lots of folks just want to say hi. (\u201cOh, Scott\u2019s here! Yay!\u201d one fan squeals.) But there\u2019s dissent. A hunched elderly woman in a fleece jacket makes her way to Wiener slowly; he folds himself almost double to get face to face. She\u2019s worried that the city is taking in too many new people and wants to know how tall he thinks buildings should be and whether the new housing he\u2019s working on will be low cost.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to build just more housing,\u201d Wiener tells her. \u201cThe Bay Area stopped building housing in the 1970s, and it\u2019s just gotten worse and worse, so we have to step in to make some basic rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wiener accepts a fragment of a fancy doughnut and declines a mimosa. A fan stops him to shake hands and points to a construction crane visible behind the Asian Art Museum on the next block. \u201cWe need more of those,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

While a couple of constituents take a selfie with Wiener, a well-dressed, middle-\u00adaged white guy standing off to the side spots my notebook. \u201cI campaigned for him when he first ran,\u201d the guy says, \u201cand now I can\u2019t stand anything he does.\u201d It\u2019s the housing thing. \u201cIt\u2019s unconstitutional. It\u2019ll go to the Supreme Court. And we don\u2019t need it, especially since we\u2019re losing population.\u201d<\/p>\n

This approaches the progressive critique of Wiener-style YIMBYism. It goes well beyond conservative-coded whining about home values or neighborhood character and says that San Francisco is already quite dense with housing, thank you, and \u00adanyway, what keeps costs down are things like rent control and government-subsidized \u00addevelopment, not the unregulated construction of luxury condos that displace working-class and nonwhite people.<\/p>\n

\u201cA significant majority of San Franciscans want more housing. You can mislead yourself to then think that means they want anything you impose on them and don\u2019t want to be consulted,\u201d says Aaron Peskin, who spent almost 20 years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was a frequent opponent of Wiener\u2019s. \u201cWiener has unfortunately created and exploited a divisive narrative that says, \u2018You\u2019re either with us or against us,\u2019 and it\u2019s a disservice to San Francisco and a disservice to the political discourse.\u201d What gets housing built, Peskin says, is a booming economy and low interest rates and construction costs, or money from the state and the feds. Wiener\u2019s ideas are just wainscoting. \u201cIf we were doing performance metrics, the answer would be, \u2018Hey, my friend, none of this has amounted to a hill of beans,\u2019\u201d Peskin says. \u201cWhich has not deterred him.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the walk back to Muni, I tell Wiener about unconstitutional housing guy. \u201cDoing politics in San Francisco is incredibly hard and incredibly rewarding, because people know what\u2019s going on. There\u2019s no bullshitting,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you\u2019re going in to have everyone like you or not be mad at you, you\u2019re not doing very much.\u201d<\/p>\n

At which point, a woman stops him to say hi. \u201cIf House Speaker Pelosi decides to step back,\u201d she says, \u201cI hope you run.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Every year, the Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University calculates \u201cstate legislative effectiveness scores\u201d for nearly every state-level lawmaker in the US. It\u2019s Moneyball for politics, combining factors like the number of bills a lawmaker proposes, how far they get, and how \u201csignificant\u201d they are\u2014media pickup, policy-\u00adchanging oomph, etc. For the California Senate\u2019s 2023\u20132024 session, the single most effective legislator was Wiener.<\/p>\n

In his first term in the state Senate, Wiener was the fifth-most effective legislator, according to Craig Volden, CEL co-director. Since then, he\u2019s been first twice and third once. \u201cThe thing that pushes him well above the average is the kind of bills he is putting forward,\u201d Volden says. Of the 39 bills Wiener sponsored in his third term, 21 became law, and of those, seven were \u201csubstantive and significant\u201d by CEL calculations. \u201cThat\u2019s four times the average majority-party senator,\u201d Volden says. \u201cHe\u2019s just tackling four or five times as many big issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

State legislatures all work differently, so it\u2019s hard to compare Wiener across state lines, Volden says. But how often is someone in the top five in their state in their first four terms? \u201cThe answer is, that\u2019s very, very rare,\u201d Volden says. It\u2019s fewer than 1 percent of all state lawmakers.<\/p>\n

\"AWiener rides in the 2025 San Francisco Pride Parade.Arun Nevader\/Getty<\/p>\n

The legislators who pop as most effective on Volden\u2019s big board tend to be coalition builders\u2014their bills tend to have co-\u00adsponsors from across the aisle. They tend to specialize in two or three specific policy areas. \u201cWe also have some evidence that people who are more effective are better able to raise campaign funds,\u201d Volden says. All that describes Wiener.<\/p>\n

Those criteria tend to leave out lawmakers who are good at things like bringing money back to their districts or running justice-getting oversight committees. What about the ones with a knack for raining publicity-getting fire on their opponents? Wiener can\u2019t match Eric Swalwell or Adam Schiff in that department. Wiener doesn\u2019t have the charisma of a Zohran Mamdani or an Alexandria Ocasio-\u00adCortez\u2014and he\u2019s 20 years older besides.<\/p>\n

And of course, making laws doesn\u2019t matter if the laws don\u2019t do much. It\u2019s true that ADU laws have gotten more actual homes built than any of Wiener\u2019s policy changes\u2014so far. \u201cIf you take all of his legislation\u2014which there is a lot, frankly\u2014no offense, he doesn\u2019t have much to show for it,\u201d Peskin says. \u201cHe gutted the California Environmental Quality Act. He has preempted virtually every local government from making the decisions they\u2019ve made for over 100 years, and the reality is that tens of thousands of [housing] units and the affordability he says drives him have not been realized, because his religious fanaticism does not look at the fact that that\u2019s not how the fucking market works.\u201d<\/p>\n

Economists continue to bicker about whether adding market-value housing actually reduces prices\u2014let alone whether it also alleviates homelessness, traffic congestion, urban ennui, and everything else its advocates tout. A 2023 meta-analysis of related literature found that, in the long term, allowing denser residential construction produces new homes, largely raises property values, and may decrease rents, whereas stricter rules about what can be built lead to fewer homes and higher prices. Wiener admits that it\u2019ll be years before SB 79 makes a measurable difference. Yet he is undeterred. \u201cThe idea that being pro\u2013housing construction is moderate and anti\u2013housing construction is progressive, that completely flips reality on its head. It is not progressive to oppose new housing, and it\u2019s very progressive to accelerate new housing,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I think we\u2019re seeing a generational change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that tens of thousands of units and the affordability he says drives him have not been realized, because his religious fanaticism does not look at the fact that that\u2019s not how the fucking market works.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wiener had made no secret that he was contemplating Congress\u2014he had a committee and was raising money\u2014but he\u2019d promised he wouldn\u2019t run for Pelosi\u2019s seat until she retired. In October, he changed his mind. That might have been because Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff to Ocasio-Cortez flush with his own tech money (he was a founding engineer at Stripe), had gotten into the race<\/a>. Once in, Wiener scored an endorsement from California Attorney General Rob \u00adBonta\u2014\u201che takes on big, tough issues,\u201d Bonta told\u00a0Politico. But, after Pelosi announced she wouldn\u2019t run, San Francisco\u2019s former Mayor London Breed, historically allied with Wiener, said she was going to \u201cseriously consider\u201d jumping in; Connie Chan, a supervisor with a record of hostility to new development, might, too. Housing issues have already scrambled old San Francisco political coalitions, and all these players could make for a bruising primary. Still, Wiener has some advantages. He has won bruising races before. And his two decades in local politics have given him name recognition, a formidable fundraising network, and a phalanx of former staffers and allies spread throughout the region. The real question is, if he emerges on top, will his technocratic and aisle-crossing skills feel out of place in a Congress that doesn\u2019t seem to actually, you know, do things?<\/p>\n

Back at the Castro Street Fair, it\u2019s mid\u00adafternoon and the sun is below the hills. Another happy customer comes by, toasts Wiener\u2019s cup of coffee with a beer, and says, \u201cThanks for this\u201d\u2014Wiener\u2019s work on \u201centertainment zones\u201d made it legal for bars and restaurants to sell booze during street fairs, an economic gift to the city and a typical wonky-but-needle-moving Wiener policy tweak.<\/p>\n

Looking at the Muni stations and the densely packed two- and three-story Victorians that line the streets, I realize that possibly no neighborhood in the state is more liable to be transformed by Wiener\u2019s transit development bill than his own. And he\u2019s more than good with that; to someone who loves not only his own city, but the whole idea of cities, the distinction between progressive and moderate, or Democratic and Republican, might be less important than urban vs. pastoral.<\/p>\n

An underappreciated consequence of a housing crisis is that it closes the gates to newcomers\u2014like Wiener 30 years ago. Cities are supposed to be transformative. Every quirk of San Francisco made it a place that Wiener could come and flourish; that kind of experience makes some people want to preserve their cities in amber and makes others into fierce defenders of the ability of cities to absorb and protect other people who also need to remake themselves. They\u2019ll all need someplace to live.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s effective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-54179","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}