” Most things in San Francisco can be bought or taken.”
—Dashiel Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
Hammett’s 1920s cynicism of fictional San Francisco has been superseded by the 2020s reality facing voters this November: the simultaneous buying and taking of the city by a handful of billionaires. These billionaires’ intent is not only controlling the city’s politics, but also in replacing most of its current residents with folks more like them—wealthy and conservative.
This assault on the current residents of San Francisco is based, in part, on Yimby lies about housing policy, lies endorsed by the Breed administration. And the irony of ironies is that it is her “loyalty” to this agenda that has so weakened her among San Francisco voters that some of her wealthy backers have dropped her like a stone.
Breed has now been officially discarded by the very “moderates” she has courted with her pro-Yimby density/displacement plans and her hard right turn on crime and police. Parts of the big tech/real estate coalition have now formally endorsed Mark Farrell, saying that Breed has not “demonstrated an ability to govern with the degree of persistence and consistency necessary to solve San Francisco’s problems.”
The media-declared “moderate sweep” in the March election was supposed to improve Breed’s chance of re-election by virtue of the success of a conservative slate taking control of the Democratic County Central Committee and the victory of two propositions linking city assistance to drug testing and granting sweeping powers to the police department.
The “moderate” DCCC doesn’t seem to be able to investigate sexual harassment without embarrassing its own allies nor even conduct a simple mayoral debate with functioning lights and sound. It’s not clear that Breed will get the first-place endorsement of the moderates in the DCCC given that the principal contributors to their election have already abandoned her.
Her campaign has wobbled from one contradictory position to another (“compassion is killing people” a year ago to “all the other candidates make you want to feel bad about San Francisco” two weeks ago). Her scatter shots at revitalizing the economy have taken some severe hits.
No sooner than she announced her poll-driven attempt to curry favor with Chinese voters by getting pandas from China than the Chronicle exposed disarray at the Zoo including low morale of the staff, raising questions about the ability to keep the animals safe. The Mayor’s Office had nothing to say.
The Aquarium by the Bay had to fire its executive director for a series of huge expenditures undertaken by him while the then-board chair stood by and let it happen, resulting in the loss of accreditation for the aquarium and an open revolt of the workers. The then chair had been appointed by Breed as chair of the Entertainment Commission. (Again, no announcement by the Mayor’s Office to correct such spending excesses.)
The mayor’s half-hearted attempt (a single letter) to get UCSF to relocate downtown was rebuffed by the university with not a word from the Mayor’s Office in response, nor any proposal by her staff to assist and expand the five existing colleges already downtown.
But perhaps most devastating to her PR oriented attempts at the city’s revitalization was the total collapse of a $1.5 billion regional transportation funding measure in May. Muni was counting on it going on the ballot this November and submitted a budget to the mayor assuming it would pass. Breed had left the critical issue in her ally state Sen. Senator Wiener’s hands, and Wiener simply failed to reach agreement with his regional colleagues, blowing up the measure.
Muni has announced that the ballot measure’s failure means that it will cut services. Once again Breed has been silent on the issue and has announced no initiatives to fund Muni nor to avoid transit cuts.
A functioning and growing Muni is absolutely critical if her plans for a huge increase in residential density are to happen without the city being choked by car traffic as affluent car-driving residents replace existing residents in Breed’s new San Francisco.
But these repeated examples of the inability of the mayor and her staff to administer the city, devise equitable solutions to problems, and respond to serious municipal infrastructure challenges do not form the heart of the mayor’s problems.
At the heart of Breeds political problem is her deep support of Yimby development policy.
In her first election as mayor in 2018, she had the full support of the Yimbys and their allies in tech and real estate. Breed has been unerring in her support for their program: reduce public voices in planning decisions, cut affordable housing and transit fees devised to cushion the impact of market-rate housing on what is essentially a moderate income, transit-riding city, minimize demolition controls, and increase the allowable density of new market-rate development in neighborhoods to a level making it potentially wildly profitable to buy and then demolish existing buildings, displacing current residents and small businesses.
More and more folks understand that displacing current residents, intended or not, will be the impact of her policies. It is not a popular program. And it’s why, as more San Franciscans face these irrational and divisive policies, Breed’s popularity deciles.
What objective evidence do we have that the central concepts of what Yimbys call a “housing policy” (when, in fact, it’s a real estate development scheme unable to house most existing San Francisco residents) are simply untrue?
First, let’s outline the basic tenets if Yimbyism and then see if they are fact based or simply talking points aimed at deceiving.
Deception is key to the Yimby scheme, because if high-density residential development actually worked as they claim, then the two highest density cities in the country, New York and San Francisco, would have the lowest housing costs in the nation instead of the highest.
The first and most pervasive argument is that there is a vastly powerful movement of the currently housed whose aim it is to stop new housing approvals to protect their own investment, views, and or racial status. These “Nimbys” (a term used originally by power companies to describe neighbors opposed to nuclear power plants being proposed in their “back yards”), have simply stopped new housing approvals in San Francisco by cleverly devising restrictive zoning, public hearings, and restrictive approval requirements, all of which create an unbroken web of entanglements snaring housing approvals.
There are several untruths in this formulation.
First, according the City Planning Department Annual Housing Inventory, in San Francisco, from 1960 to 2010, developers built 1.4 housing units for each new resident (64,561 new residents, 91,933 new housing units).
Second, according to city planning data, between 2015 and 2022 (inclusive) 6,324 housing permits (the vast majority being multi-unit proposals) were approved without formal opposition, out of a total of 7,764 submitted (82 percent). Of the 1,440 formally appealed, the vast majority were approved after a single public hearing.
Third, currently, there are 73,776 units that the city has approved but have never been built.
So, where is the evidence of successful Nimby opposition? In what sense has resident opposition stopped housing approvals or construction in San Francisco? What justifies legally banning local public approval of housing proposals, as is done in numerous state housing laws, giving developers and developers alone sole ability to determine what is built in San Francisco?
The answer is nothing.
But why do we have 73,776 approved housing units still un-built?
That’s the financial decisions of developers. Nowhere in Yimby thinking is there a consideration that the capitalist housing market might find it more profitable not to build than to build.
Indeed, Yimbys and their allies in office actually oppose legislative attempts to require that if a developer takes advantage of density bonuses and reduced local regulations, they must actually build the housing in a timely manner. These “use it or lose it” requirements are opposed as simply another “local regulation” that somehow impedes the construction of housing—even though they actually mandate that construction.
In 2017 the United Nations issued a report “on the ‘financialization’ of housing and its impact on human rights,” which calls upon “states to redefine their relationship with private investors and financial firms so that they may reclaim housing as a social good…”
The report found a worldwide problem that has led to “forced mass evictions to make way for luxury developments, to nameless corporations purchasing real estate from remote board rooms…the repercussions have been felt across the globe.”
Some 34,531 units that have been approved in San Francisco but not built are in large projects. More than 60 percent of them are in three projects: Hunters Point Shipyard (9,637units), Parkmerced (5,312 units) and Treasure Island (6,532 units).
These all were approved 15 or more years ago. Not one of these 21,000 units have been stopped by either a selfish neighbor or a local regulation. Developers have been in charge and the developers have simply made a series of market decisions not to proceed.
Neither the Yimbys nor their ally Senator Wiener has ever proposed any legislation to cause these private developer stalled projects to move forward. While Yimbys and Wiener have repeatedly called for state investigations of the Board of Supervisors’ actions, these projects have been ignored by the supposed “housing for all income levels” lobbyists.
The reason for this is that these folks have no interest in going after market-rate developers. They know that market rate developers, using various financial instruments, have found a way to make money on “entitled projects” without actually building housing. Neither the Yimbys nor Wiener want to interrupt the money machine developers have created.
Approved projects, especially large ones, can be sold to new partners, can be borrowed against creating financing for other projects, and can be used to provide tax write offs protecting profits from other projects. All without building a single home. No Yimby law even attempts to address this reality.
The second great lie that is at the heart of Yimby housing policy is that by allowing unlimited market rate housing development anywhere a developer wishes to build, the “market” will automatically adjust and actually lower housing costs because of the increase in supply.
This process is known to capitalist economists at “filtering,” and it’s supposed to happen anywhere the housing market is freed from Nimby opposition and needless regulation. It is the mechanism by which market-rate housing built for the rich creates affordable housing, as rich folks move to the new units, freeing up the older units they once occupied which are then offered at “affordable” rates.
In 2020 the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation studied filtering to see if the theory was born out by the data. Turns out filtering does not lower housing costs in high value markets like San Francisco and much of California .
The study found “a strong geographic variation in filtering rates …and strong differences in average filtering rates over time.”
In high income areas, filtering rates—the cost of housing—actually increase, not decrease. In San Francisco the study found that over a 40 year period filtering rates increased by 33 percent, making housing even more expensive.
This is the reality in San Francisco, where older buildings often sell or rent for the same or, depending on the neighborhood, more than a new 1,500-square-foot-one bedroom unit in a 150-unit condo box.
The third lie at the heart of the Yimby argument is that new, high-density market rate development actually creates opportunities to keep people in the city, reducing gentrification By increasing the supply of housing, even market-rate, new housing opportunities are presented, which overcomes displacement and population loss.
Earlier this year, the Journal of the American Planning Association published a study that to see if actual data was consistent with the claim. The study was of the recent housing development occurring in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The study looked at both market-rate development and subsidized housing development in each city. What it concluded was that in San Francisco, market-rate development created “higher move out rates than move-in … with higher housing prices and rents, higher price appreciation, population growth and inequality, new market rate construction was not as successful at stabilizing communities and overcoming exclusion.”
The arguments at the heart of the Yimby case—that Nimbys stop housing approvals and a shortage of approvals restrict supply, causing high housing costs; that “filtering” will create affordable housing as affluent consumers move out of “old building” into new market rate causing the prices of the old building to drop to affordable levels; and that building market rate-housing does not cause displacement of lower income residents—are simply factually unsupportable. Any housing policy built around them will, in fact, make matters worse not better.
The saga a proposed project at 469 Stevenson revealed for all who cared to look was the absolute falseness of the Yimby narrative.
As folks may remember, the Board of Supervisors was excoriated in 2021 by the Chronicle, the Sentinel and the Examiner and the Yimbys for “turning down” a 27-story, 494-unit project proposed for an empty lot used for parking behind Nordstrom’s.
The only problem with the charges was that the Board did not turn down anything but required an amended Environmental Impact Report on the impacts the project would have on the neighborhood. The applicant, BUILD Inc., already was holding (that is not building) a fully approved 319-unit project at Market and Van Ness with plans to offer it to another developer.
Some supervisors were questioning approving another project to the same developer, fearing yet another bait and switch. Yimby Law, headed by Sonja Trauss, sued the city.
Trauss, Breeds pick to represents San Francisco on ABAG Board of Directors, voted for the absurd requirement of some 80,000 units to be built in San Francisco imposed by ABAG. In April, the case was settled against Yimby Law which was required to pay the city some $32,000 in costs after having each of its four claims denied by the court.
In April, the Planning Commission accepted the amended EIR and again approved the project again in the expectation that it would be built. And then, two months later BUILD came back to the commission for a third time asking for a permit to postpone the constriction and return the use of the lot BACK TO BEING A PARKING LOT.
Yimby San Francisco has not opened its mouths about the developer’s delay of an approved 494-unit building, as they have kept their mouths shut on the developer-induced delay at Treasure Island, the Shipyard and Parkmerced. No word from Trauss and Yimby Law about suing these developers either.
It is these facts that lie at the heart of London Breeds political dilemma. Most San Franciscans know that Breed’s housing program, based on un-truths and outright lies, won’t work for them. Indeed, many believe that her headlong embrace of the high-density, market-rate developer-controlled scheme will actually displace their neighbors, drive out neighborhood businesses that serve them, and result in housing that they and their children can neither afford nor want, leaving no room for them in Breed’s vision of the future.
It is at the very heart of why the vast majority of residents, according to polls, say the city is on “the wrong track.”
In Hammett’s 1920s formulation the ambitious could either buy OR take most things in San Francisco. In San Francisco in the 2020s the ambitious both buys AND takes most things (or thinks they can).
No one familiar with the political history of San Francisco is shocked at the sight of well-heeled developers using their money to guarantee access to the mayor. San Francisco’s City Charter gives mayors substantial power, particularly over the approval of real estate proposals. Developers understand that it is far easier to gain access to a single person—the mayor—than to get reliable access to six or eight supervisors to get their projects approved.
Buying access is a civic tradition in San Francisco, especially around development issues, and that reality lies at the heart of municipal politics. Land use fights between developers (private or governmental) and residents have dominated San Francisco politics from the very beginning of San Francisco as an developed city.
The outright taking of power and influence is far more rare. The most significant example of simply taking power in San Francisco is the rise of the Committee of Vigilance (the vigilantes) in 1851 in response to the “crime wave” caused by the well-organized Sydney Ducks gang in the 1850s. The committee simply seized people, took them to their headquarters, questioned them and then jailed them.
The committee, without benefit of legal legitimacy, then beat, hung, deported, and banned folks they simply took off the streets. By the late 1850s the committee formed a political party that aligned itself with the Republican Party, eventually electing a mayor. At its height, the committee armed itself after seizing arms intended for the state militia, setting up its own militia.
William T. Sherman, the Civil War general famous for great victories against the southern pro-slavery army, was at the time a businessman in San Francisco and wrote of the Vigilantes in an observation that reverberates in today’s San Francisco:
As the vigilantes controlled the press, they wrote their own history and the world generally gives them credit of having purged San Francisco of rowdies and roughs; but their success has given great stimulus to a dangerous principle that would at any time justify the mob seizing all the power of government; and who is to say that the Vigilance Committee may not be composed of the worst, instead of the best, elements of the community.” (Memoirs of W.T. Sherman, page 150)
Since the rise of the tech investor as a political player in San Francisco under Mayor Ed Lee, their role has shifted from self-interested political contributor much like the standard real estate developer to one far more menacing.
Ron Conway was the first venture capitalist to play a major role in the Mayor’s Office. But he was simply pushing his own agenda, much as real estate developer and Democratic Party money bags Walter Shorenstein did with the late Mayor Joe Alioto. For Conway, it was making San Francisco safe for Airbnb, his primary investment.
Lee delivered. Airbnb was allowed to flourish with Mayor Lee actively intervening against it having to pay any Hotel Tax and ensuring the Planning Commission didn’t get in the way. But again, Conway was an old school self-interested rich guy only concerned with getting his project juiced by the Mayor.
It wasn’t until the 2022 recall of the District Attorney Chesa Boudin that the new type of venture capitalist showed up. These folks were far more interested in much bigger things that pushing access for a single investment. The recall was about dictating ongoing public policy, not influencing a one-and-done decision. It was certainly not only about replacing a progressive district attorney, which is how Boudin and his allies argued..
The personification of this new type OF venture capitalist political player is Michael Moritz. Moritz has a much larger vision than Conway, and much deeper pockets. For Moritz the game is about taking over the entire city (or creating a new one in Solano County), or at least the parts of interest to him.
He understands the importance of (or more correctly the appearance of) community organizing, learning from the success of the progressive movement in San Francisco. He spends his money to position these “grassroots” organizations one or two steps ahead of the normal election cycle. He created Neighbors for a Better San Francisco to free himself from a particular office holder and a specific election cycle. NBSF claims to be “focused on supporting and empowering…neighborhood focused leaders and organizations” a claim yet to be achieved except as a public relations exercise, using as many progressive sounding words as possible.
In fact, the record shows that what Moritz and his group are focused on exerting Moritz influence over entire policy areas—substance abuse, police practices, public education and , as always in San Francisco, land-use policies—ahead of election cycles and independent of any elected official.
NBSF announced itself in leading the 2022 recall of Chesa Boudin. Breed’s heavy-handed intervention in 2019—appointing her favored candidate to interim DA—angered many voters, both left and right, and after a race which saw the conservatives split the vote, Boudin won a narrow victory
Moritz had already launched a digital newspaper, The SF Standard, which joined the voices claiming that San Francisco was in the midst of a “crime wave” even though statistics showed a decline in crime.
Two reveling facts from this period need to be remembered, since they reveal an ongoing style of a Moritz operation.
The first involves NBSF and its related political action committee hiring (for some $120,000) former Assistant District Attorney Brooks Jenkins during the recall campaign. Jenkins quickly became a leading voice in the recall, using her former status in the DA office as credibility. Moritz ability to hire and then feature Jenkins in ads attacking Boudin became critical in her rise as a replacement for Boudin.
The Standard ran an article in October, 2022, one month before the vote for DA, stating that Jenkins was “the only leader in City Hall with a positive approval rating.” The poll slammed Breed, showing that she has “slipped precipitously to just 39%” approval rating. Using the poll to advance one candidate while attacking another is old school politics. What was new was that Moritz had been allies to BOTH.
Then in quick succession Moritz followed up with various campaigns: jumping in to the school board re-call that, while initially successful finally resulted in a continued progressive bent to the board. Moritz then launched a campaign that went after Breeds drug policy (to the degree that there ever really was one) with the bizarrely conceived “fentalife” poster campaign calling for a “get tough’ policy with cynical and untrue assertions; then campaigned for drug screening for public services and an unfettered police force and spent a ton of money electing a “moderate slate” to the Democratic County Central Committee. According to Mission Local Moritz and has donor allies have spent nearly $9 million through NBSF in San Francisco politics since the DA recall. But the vast majority was spent on issues (including the recall), not candidates.
That Moritz and his allies are more interested in the “taking” part than the “buying” part of the Hammett formulation about San Francisco was finally made clear when late June NBSF announced it would not back Breed for re-election but instead went with the fellow venture capitalist Mark Farrell.
The reason cited was Breeds inability to “solve San Francisco’s problems,” a rather remarkable statement given that for the last two years Breed has done exactly what Moritz and NBSF has said should be done: backed both recalls, and appointed Brook Jenkins interim DA, cracked down on drug users, and bolstered the police even over her own Police Commission.
Her chief of staff, Shawn Elsbernd, sat on the board of a non-profit tha issued a report, which Moritz commissioned, which looked at San Francisco’s government structure. This study is the basis for a charter amendment paid for by Moritz for this November’s ballot that will reduce the number of citizen commissions AND dramatically increase the power of the Mayor’s office.
But even more remarkable is that the campaign for the measure, facilitated by Breeds own chief of staff, is now being used to by Moritz to fundraise for the Farrell for Mayor campaign. This perhaps sets a new record for political ineptness by a serving Mayors Office( Farrells big money). He not only is not buying access to a mayor that bent over backwards to accommodate his every desire, he has decided to dump her in favor of a fellow venture capitalist.
It could be that Breeds dismal poll numbers are a result of her slavish following of the Moritz line. But the political reality is that Breed was always a marginal candidate. Her two victories for supervisor were surprisingly close. Her defeat of Dean Preston for re-election as Supervisor in 2016 was fewer than 2,000 votes and her win for mayor in 2018 in which the progressive candidates split a vote sufficient to defeat her: 122,000 votes (combined for Jane Kim and Mark Leno) to 92,000 for Breed.
In each case, Breed’s development policy was an issue. It seems clear that little has changed.
What is clear is that even if Moritz and his allies choose not to say it Breeds embrace of Yimby policy is deeply unpopular with San Francisco voters.
Breed’s attachment to Yimby development policy, while acceptable to Moritz and his fellow tech capitalists, has created such deep opposition to her in nearly every neighborhood in the city that her re-election as mayor is in question.
Her hypocrisy on the issue is made clear by her repeated use of the refrain of every YIMBY candidate: “I support building housing for all income levels” which is an artfully crafted slogan which in fact means “I support only market rate housing.” To truly support the development of housing “for all income levels” in a high density hot-market town like San Francisco means taking affirmative action to preserve existing housing, ban demolitions of existing housing, and providing developmental subsidies for affordable housing.
Instead what we get from Breed and the Yimbys is the removal of all protections from demolitions and evictions, the reduction of affordable housing requirements on market-rate developers projects, and the removing linking of new housing development to the funding of new civic infrastructure such as Muni, schools, parks, water, and utilities.
When all public processes, all affordability requirements and all linkages to public infrastructure investment are removed from the development approval process, only market-rate housing will be built. Indeed, only luxury housing will be approved when only developers control the process. Most folks in San Francisco understand that simple fact—and that’s why London Breed is in political trouble.
