News media coverage about Lurie’s upzoning plan misses the most important player

The Chron and the Examiner both have big stories today about the anger over Mayor Daniel Lurie’s plan to increase housing density on the West Side of town. People are angry; Lurie is facing hostile crowds at town halls, and the Ex ran a piece saying that the city’s future is at stake:

What’s at stake is not just zoning, but the future of San Francisco’s historic neighborhoods, parks, public vistas and architecture — the international character that draws millions of visitors. Tourists don’t come to see a wall of anonymous mid-rises; they come for the distinct scale, green space and beauty that make San Francisco instantly recognizable. Upzoning risks erasing that identity. Once lost, it cannot be replaced.

Lurie is telling people he agrees:

Lurie has pushed back by pointing out that if San Francisco fails to adopt a state-compliant plan to allow for 36,000 units, the state would essentially take hold of every aspect of new housing, giving builders free rein to build as tall and dense as they want wherever they want.

Which is true.

But both papers have missed the larger political point here: This is not just Lurie or former Mayor London Breed doing what developers want. When the bulldozers destroy small businesses and the towers rise, the person most responsible has largely been left out of the stories.

That’s state Sen. Scott Wiener.

The reason the city has to allow market-rate developers to avoid local zoning laws is that Wiener, who is tenacious and has the support of not just the Yimby movement but the real estate industry, has pushed a series of bills through the Legislature that screw San Francisco. He has completely signed on with the Yimby narrative that allowing more housing for very rich people will eventually bring prices down. The title of his new bill that will handcuff any effort to limit luxury housing in San Francisco is the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act.

Very little of this new housing will be affordable—unless you believe that in today’s late-stage capitalism, when all decisions on building housing are made on the basis of maximizing profits for speculative capital, somehow massive amounts of high-end housing will bring prices down.

Also: Transit is collapsing, with BART and Muni running out of money, and nothing in the bill adds state finding to pay for transit for the new residents, who instead will likely take Uber and Waymo vehicles, making traffic even worse. When I asked Wiener about that, he said, in effect: I don’t care.

Wiener said the same thing in an interview with Joe Eskenazi at Mission Local:

For the better part of seven years, he attempted, Sisyphus-like, to roll a transit-oriented development bill into law that would rezone much of California in one fell swoop.

Finally, on Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 79. It was as if Sisyphus rolled his boulder all the way up the hill — and over anyone in the way.   

So, when asked how he felt about other politicians claiming their hands are tied and rendering him the Darth Vader of upzoning, Wiener’s answer was unambiguous: “Oh, I don’t care.” 

With a democratic socialist about to get elected mayor of New York, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a state senator from San Francisco, with the clout of Wiener, say: “I am going to address economic inequality by raising taxes on the rich, and if the billionaires are unhappy, I don’t care.”

Instead, we have someone who wants to get elected to Congress telling not the developers, not the billionaires, but a huge chunk of the voters that he doesn’t care what they think.

What’s remarkable to me is that so much of the debate over the Lurie plan is aimed at the mayor and the district supervisors (one of whom lost his job in part because of this) and so little of the media coverage points to Wiener as the primary driver of what some see as the pending destruction of city neighborhoods.

It’s not enough to say “Sacramento” is mandating these rules. Let’s be real: Scott Wiener is mandating them.