For a moment, it looks like California—maybe the whole country!—is doomed.
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’s desk. Today, a strikingly pretty Friday in mid-September, it’s time for a bill called SB 79, authored by a state senator from San Francisco named Scott Wiener.
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—but it’s 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’ll give Democrats more power in Congress. So it’s 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’s worth of horse trading to get to this vote.
All he needs is a thin majority, just 21 green Y’s to show up on the big red screen behind the president pro tem’s podium. They start to tick in. Two powerful committee chairs who initially opposed the bill, fellow Democrats, are now yeses. Pro-housing senators: Yes. A few rural Republicans: Yes. A dozen, 20, and then—blackjack!
Except…wait. Laura Richardson, representing a stretch of South Los Angeles, was a yes vote, but then indicates she meant to “lay off”—to abstain. Wiener has been prowling the floor and lopes over to her chair—he’s an ectomorphic 6-foot-7, practically stepping over other senators’ desks to get there, like a giraffe crossing the veldt. Senate arcana won’t let Richardson switch from a yes to an abstention; now she’s a no. To make matters worse, Wiener had been counting on a yes from Lena Gonzalez, from the district right next door to Richardson’s, but she’s out sick.
So that’s it? Rents stay high, transit systems collapse, everyone moves to Texas…it’s Armageddon?
Wiener steps up to the president’s podium. Will he hold the vote open a little while longer? The chamber has a lot of business, but everyone’s 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’t voted—and she’s 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.
“It took us eight years to get that done,” 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. “The bill is like the cat with nine lives,” Wiener says. “But I’ll take it.”
It’s a moment that could literally redraw California’s 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, funding and permitting public transit, barring federal agents from wearing masks, capping insurance copays for insulin, protecting the privacy of people who undergo gender transitions...phew. He works on thorny issues of policy and politics with a wonk’s focus and a jock’s tenacity. As a legislator, Wiener is, for certain values of the term, effective.
Outside California, Wiener is probably best known for social media scraps with folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called Wiener, who is gay, a “communist groomer.” But for those who pay attention to housing issues, he’s something of a celebrity—especially in the liberal deregulatory/abundance/anti-NIMBY crossover universe. Back in 2023, Wiener talked policy on the podcast 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-limited out of the state Senate, is now running for one of the highest-profile seats in Congress—the one Nancy Pelosi has been parked in since 1987.
So Wiener’s more than just an interesting lawmaker from America’s third-weirdest city. His nose-to-grindstone, hardcore policy approach could be a key to a political realignment—a long-overdue recognition that addressing housing is necessary for the survival of the Democratic Party. “The plate tectonics of this issue have shifted,” Klein told his listeners, “and Wiener was a big reason for that.” Assuming that a towering, gay, Jewish, dealmaking machine can bring a technocratic, get-things-done approach to politics outside California.
Sitting in a coffee shop with Wiener in the Castro District—his neighborhood, the core of his electoral base—means a stream of interruptions. He’s 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—ironic, since one of the things that marked Wiener as a “moderate” early in his term on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was his sponsorship of a city ordinance making public nudity illegal, except at sanctioned events like this one. The Scott Wiener booth is tucked between those for “Queens of the Castro” LGBTQ youth scholarships and GT’s Synergy raw kombucha. It’s the kind of thing Wiener doesn’t skip. “If you’re an elected official, you really need to enjoy people. And I do,” Wiener says. “I get really anxious if I’m not at enough community events.”
The day of the vote, Wiener was wearing a lapel pin—a Star of David in the pastel colors of the transgender rights flag. On social media, he’s been a staunch defender of Israel as a Jewish homeland—but 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’s 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.
“Here I am, a Jew in an extremely non-Jewish, antisemitic area, a closeted gay kid, terrified of coming out, and it was a mass die-off. That’s how I came of age,” Wiener says. “To me, being Jewish, being gay, like being in any minority group, is inherently political…because for people in marginalized communities, elections aren’t just about whether you like the person or don’t like the person who won, or if some government service is going to run better or worse. It’s about life or death…not just for Jewish people and gay people, but Black people and immigrants and trans people. It’s very real.”
Wiener came out while he was at Duke, then went to Harvard Law—classmates with Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sen. Ted Cruz. His sense of politics had translated to LGBTQ activism and, as he says, “living a full-fledged gay life.” He moved to San Francisco after graduation, doing community work and private litigation before eventually joining the city attorney’s office.
But then one of his mentors, a community activist named Mark Leno, got appointed to the famously contentious Board of Supervisors. Leno’s move into electoral politics got Wiener thinking about it, too. “I sensed that I had something to add to the community,” he says. “But I always said to myself, if I’m just occupying space, I don’t want to do this.”
In 2010, Wiener ran for supervisor of District 8, the bull’s-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’s 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 cliché goes, but weird technolibertarians aside, the combatants run a narrow gamut from—you’re going to laugh—“progressive” to “moderate.”
“When you talk about young people being disillusioned, housing is one of the ways things are the most fucked up.”
Wiener would be identified as pretty far to the left in most places; in San Francisco, he’s 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—plus, he was taking meetings with leaders of the nascent Yes In My Backyard movement.
In the face of the city’s ideological diversity (stop laughing!), Wiener was a forthright campaigner, honest about his moderation, and as inexhaustible as the Terminator. “He door-knocked every door in District 8 either twice or three times,” says Todd David, his longtime adviser. “When he’s having anxiety, we give him a packet and say, ‘Go door-knock, Scott. Here’s a list.’ The guy is a machine.”
It worked. “Scott started in San Francisco as the moderate’s moderate,” David says. “He has built this political brand of working hard and doing the hard, principled thing.” Wiener’s 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 from real estate and tech folks, capitalists whom progressives typically regard with suspicion, began flowing his way.
He went gunning for big policy game. “I want to pick issues that are going to make people’s lives better,” Wiener says, “in areas that others aren’t working on.” Gun safety didn’t need him. But housing policy? That was wide open.
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 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’t kept up with population for decades, and it fell off a cliff after the economic crash of 2008.
The reasons why would fill several books, but the ultra-abbreviated version is, in the late 19th century, San Francisco was among the first 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.
Mostly locked out of building new homes in denser city centers, developers instead built them in sprawling, car-dependent 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.
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’s homes became a primary store of wealth—a disincentive to allowing anything that might reduce their value, including building more homes. The point is, California has a lot to atone for here.
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.
“It is not progressive to oppose new housing, and it’s very progressive to accelerate new housing. And I think we’re seeing a generational change.”
Many cities’ approval processes for new construction required community meetings, at which angry neighbors would complain. They didn’t want market-rate housing that would enrich developers, nor affordable housing that would bring in renters who wouldn’t have a “connection” to the community. If badgering local officials didn’t work, they’d 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.
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. “The Mission looks the same as it did when I moved here 15 years ago,” says Brian Hanlon, one of the founders of the modern YIMBY movement. “San Francisco had this long habit of working to protect ugly buildings, and in the process, we’d lose beautiful people.”
Early YIMBYs thought they could fight for new homes one project at a time—literal house-to-house battles. “I never thought that local action would not solve the housing crisis,” Hanlon says. But it didn’t 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? “Places with tons of high-paying jobs and a massive housing shortage, they’re not going to do that themselves,” Hanlon says. “You need to do that at a higher level.”
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.
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.
“I actually kind of fucked up, because I was brand new at this,” Hanlon says. “As an advocate, if you have an idea, you’re only supposed to talk to one legislator at a time, because what happens if they both say yes?” But Hanlon didn’t 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.
Skinner was already working on something else behind the scenes, though she signed on as a co-author. “Scott responded, ‘I’ll take it,’” Hanlon says.
The bill that Hanlon helped draft, SB 827, attracted national attention, and intense pushback. The mayor of Berkeley—now Wiener’s fellow state senator—said 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—ensconced homeowners, at best, thought that big new buildings would jeopardize the value of their houses, and at worst, they didn’t want to live near poor or nonwhite renters. The old-school, anti-capitalist left, meanwhile, didn’t 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.
“I don’t pretend the bill will be in its pristine form by the end,” Wiener told me back then. “And it’s not by any stretch of the imagination guaranteed to pass.”
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’s companion bill, an adjustment to how cities calculate the amount of housing they’re supposed to build, did pass—and today those rules have enough teeth that if cities don’t hit their numbers, giant buildings get automatically approved, no opposition allowed, under the so-called builders’ remedy.
The year prior, Skinner had worked on streamlining the permitting process for accessory dwelling units—a.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. “Denise and I were like, okay, look at the trouble Scott’s getting into. What can we do to be sneakier?” Skinner tells me. “We thought, what if we do a bill that says, if you submit a permit and it’s for something that meets the zoning rules, the city can’t say no?” They set limits on the number of public meetings and a whole bunch of other ways cities were slow-walking proposals.
“Scott’s flamethrower bill gave us the window,” Skinner says. “Who would pay attention to something like granny flats when Scott’s doing a thing to put a 25-story building next to you?”
This became a pattern. Wiener tried again the next session with a similar transit-oriented development bill, adjusted to try to catch a few more votes. This one was more popular, but still didn’t 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—limits, 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—most recently for “infill housing,” homes built in existing residential neighborhoods.
A movement that had begun with young professionals angry that they couldn’t find an apartment was becoming much more than that. Even in red states, cities often voted blue. But cities weren’t 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’d bought homes kept them, but their children—burdened with more educational debt, more health care debt, more car debt, more everything—moved away and couldn’t afford to return.
Something had to give. Even politicians could see it. In the second half of 2022, states passed 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—like ending the requirement for more than one costly, space-sucking stairwell 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—even as he proposed selling federal land to housing developers. Now the no-new-housing-in-cities side was Trump-adjacent. “SB 827 was a BC/AD event for housing policy in America,” Hanlon says. “We’re not going to solve this through marginal tax credit, low-income housing projects. No. You just need to legalize fucking apartment buildings.”
Even so, the YIMBY folks still hadn’t landed the big one—connecting 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. “I was skeptical at first,” Wiener says. “I had battle scars.” But the state legislature had a lot of new members, and housing costs were even higher. Plus, Los Angeles had expanded its transit network. “More transit in Southern California meant there was more support,” he says. And their side had another secret weapon: a realignment of deep green environmentalists like Bill McKibben and young, otherwise mostly apolitical folks toward a more deregulatory approach to homebuilding. “When you talk about young people being disillusioned,” Wiener says, “housing is one of the ways things are the most fucked up.”
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.
But still! “You solve what you can solve that doesn’t harm the policy,” Wiener says. “And there are times you will give in ways that may harm the policy in a limited way you can live with.”
After coffee, Wiener and I grab a Muni tram toward SF’s 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’s Senate district isn’t confined to his old supervisor seat bull’s-eye; it’s the whole target and then some—covering the entirety of San Francisco and some of the industrial, middle-class 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.
Lots of folks just want to say hi. (“Oh, Scott’s here! Yay!” one fan squeals.) But there’s 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’s 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’s working on will be low cost.
“We want to build just more housing,” Wiener tells her. “The Bay Area stopped building housing in the 1970s, and it’s just gotten worse and worse, so we have to step in to make some basic rules.”
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. “We need more of those,” he says.
While a couple of constituents take a selfie with Wiener, a well-dressed, middle-aged white guy standing off to the side spots my notebook. “I campaigned for him when he first ran,” the guy says, “and now I can’t stand anything he does.” It’s the housing thing. “It’s unconstitutional. It’ll go to the Supreme Court. And we don’t need it, especially since we’re losing population.”
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 anyway, what keeps costs down are things like rent control and government-subsidized development, not the unregulated construction of luxury condos that displace working-class and nonwhite people.
“A 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’t want to be consulted,” says Aaron Peskin, who spent almost 20 years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was a frequent opponent of Wiener’s. “Wiener has unfortunately created and exploited a divisive narrative that says, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ and it’s a disservice to San Francisco and a disservice to the political discourse.” 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’s ideas are just wainscoting. “If we were doing performance metrics, the answer would be, ‘Hey, my friend, none of this has amounted to a hill of beans,’” Peskin says. “Which has not deterred him.”
On the walk back to Muni, I tell Wiener about unconstitutional housing guy. “Doing politics in San Francisco is incredibly hard and incredibly rewarding, because people know what’s going on. There’s no bullshitting,” he says. “If you’re going in to have everyone like you or not be mad at you, you’re not doing very much.”
At which point, a woman stops him to say hi. “If House Speaker Pelosi decides to step back,” she says, “I hope you run.”
Every year, the Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University calculates “state legislative effectiveness scores” for nearly every state-level lawmaker in the US. It’s Moneyball for politics, combining factors like the number of bills a lawmaker proposes, how far they get, and how “significant” they are—media pickup, policy-changing oomph, etc. For the California Senate’s 2023–2024 session, the single most effective legislator was Wiener.
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’s been first twice and third once. “The thing that pushes him well above the average is the kind of bills he is putting forward,” Volden says. Of the 39 bills Wiener sponsored in his third term, 21 became law, and of those, seven were “substantive and significant” by CEL calculations. “That’s four times the average majority-party senator,” Volden says. “He’s just tackling four or five times as many big issues.”
State legislatures all work differently, so it’s 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? “The answer is, that’s very, very rare,” Volden says. It’s fewer than 1 percent of all state lawmakers.
The legislators who pop as most effective on Volden’s big board tend to be coalition builders—their bills tend to have co-sponsors from across the aisle. They tend to specialize in two or three specific policy areas. “We also have some evidence that people who are more effective are better able to raise campaign funds,” Volden says. All that describes Wiener.
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’t match Eric Swalwell or Adam Schiff in that department. Wiener doesn’t have the charisma of a Zohran Mamdani or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—and he’s 20 years older besides.
And of course, making laws doesn’t matter if the laws don’t do much. It’s true that ADU laws have gotten more actual homes built than any of Wiener’s policy changes—so far. “If you take all of his legislation—which there is a lot, frankly—no offense, he doesn’t have much to show for it,” Peskin says. “He gutted the California Environmental Quality Act. He has preempted virtually every local government from making the decisions they’ve 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’s not how the fucking market works.”
Economists continue to bicker about whether adding market-value housing actually reduces prices—let 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’ll be years before SB 79 makes a measurable difference. Yet he is undeterred. “The idea that being pro–housing construction is moderate and anti–housing construction is progressive, that completely flips reality on its head. It is not progressive to oppose new housing, and it’s very progressive to accelerate new housing,” he says. “And I think we’re seeing a generational change.”
“The 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’s not how the fucking market works.”
Wiener had made no secret that he was contemplating Congress—he had a committee and was raising money—but he’d promised he wouldn’t run for Pelosi’s 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. Once in, Wiener scored an endorsement from California Attorney General Rob Bonta—“he takes on big, tough issues,” Bonta told Politico. But, after Pelosi announced she wouldn’t run, San Francisco’s former Mayor London Breed, historically allied with Wiener, said she was going to “seriously consider” 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’t seem to actually, you know, do things?
Back at the Castro Street Fair, it’s midafternoon and the sun is below the hills. Another happy customer comes by, toasts Wiener’s cup of coffee with a beer, and says, “Thanks for this”—Wiener’s work on “entertainment zones” 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.
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’s transit development bill than his own. And he’s 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.
An underappreciated consequence of a housing crisis is that it closes the gates to newcomers—like 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’ll all need someplace to live.
That’s effective.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.