Forbes: California State Senator Scott Wiener: 'San Francisco's Progressives Lost Their Way On Housing'

By Scott Beyer

Back in 2012, while spending a summer in San Francisco, I would attend the city's Board of Supervisors meetings on a weekly basis. The big ongoing topic back then, like today, was the city's housing shortage, and how it was escalating prices. It was amazing to hear the wave of counterproductive, even clueless, solutions that 10 of the 11 supervisors would suggest for the problem. These ranged from decreasing building densities, to strengthening bureaucratic review, to placing construction moratoriums on certain neighborhoods, to strengthening tenant protections that are already strict, and that have led landlords to abandon between 10,000 and 30,000 units citywide.

But there was one supervisor who would always make the point--loudly and clearly, as banal as the point itself might seem--that more housing construction should be included among the solutions. This would elicit sneers not only from the audience, but sometimes from the press and other Supervisors, one of whom accused him of pushing "Reaganomics" onto the city. Four years later, however, his political courage has landed him in the state senate, where he has advocated for more housing construction across California. In the process, he has become the political representative of a grassroots movement called Yimbyism, and is slowly redefining what it means to be a California progressive.

The senator’s name is Scott Wiener. He grew up in Philadelphia and studied at Harvard University, before moving to San Francisco in 1997 to work as an attorney. He was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2010, representing the district that includes The Castro and surrounding neighborhoods. Along with advocating for more transit funding and HIV prevention measures, he immediately became the public face of San Francisco's pro-housing movement. He introduced different legislation that would allow, respectively, micro-units, more student housing around universities, extra in-law units for existing homes, and density bonuses for new projects.

This didn't mean even remotely that he was a market fundamentalist--he has also, in various contexts, advocated for rent control, solar panel mandates on housing, and affordability set-asides. But the sheer fact that he endorsed new construction at all made him a radical by San Francisco standards.

“For the first few years I was on the board, it was a little lonely,” Wiener said by phone. “The advocacy in city hall was very one-sided. People were coming out to oppose housing for a million different reasons.”

But around that time another political force was emerging in San Francisco, the SF YIMBY Party. As I wrote recently for Forbes, this is a grassroots political movement in the Bay Area consisting of several area non-profits who advocate for more subsidized and market-rate housing. The movement began as an internet chat group, roughly around the time that Wiener became supervisor. It has since become a coherent group of political organizers, who file lawsuits, distribute literature, organize rallies and more.

It seems that both pro-housing entities—Wiener and the YIMBY party—have risen together, fueled by the increasingly national media focus on the Bay Area’s housing crisis. In November of 2016, Wiener was elected to the state senate, representing San Francisco and San Mateo Counties. And the Yimby Party has assisted him along the way, hosting events and consulting with him on legislation. Wiener even hired one Yimby party member, Annie Fryman, of the organization GrowSF, as a staffer.

“I am thrilled” about the Yimby movement, he said. “It filled a significant void in terms of pro-housing activism, particularly pro-housing activism by young people, who are the people most impacted by our failure to create enough housing.”

~~He said that the movement's youthful nature gives it a progressive quality--marked by its many Bernie Sanders supporters--that has broken “the mold of traditional San Francisco political categories." Wiener, meanwhile, represents a rare type of San Francisco Democrat--a social, and in many ways fiscal, liberal who's lived for two decades in The Castro, yet views economic growth and deregulation as one path to achieving social justice, especially for housing. Such notions are considered right-wing here.

“San Francisco’s self-described progressives—the people who are trying to monopolize that moniker—they lost their way on housing at some point," he said, "and started aligning themselves with people who wanted no housing. And it exacerbated the problem. And it screws low-income people, it screws seniors and it screws young people. And so we’re trying to readjust and make very clear that supporting new housing is a progressive position.”

Of course, Nimbyism remains strong in San Francisco, and Wiener wouldn't speculate on how long it might be before the pro-housing stance becomes mainstream progressive consensus. But he’s at least trying to spread the concept throughout California; one month after being elected senator, he authored a bill that would ease the development process statewide. It mirrored an unsuccessful by-right housing proposal made last year by Governor Jerry Brown. If successful, Wiener’s bill would codify a pro-housing momentum that, 7 years ago in San Francisco, only he seemed to be championing.

Scott Beyer is traveling the U.S. to write a book on reviving cities through Market Urbanism. His blog is BigCitySparkplug.com and his Twitter handle is @sbcrosscountry.