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To understand this, you need to realize that San Francisco politics is a perpetual no-holds-barred fight between two factions within the local Democratic Party:
by pcwalton 7y ago
To understand this, you need to realize that San Francisco politics is a perpetual no-holds-barred fight between two factions within the local Democratic Party: the "Moderates" and the "Progressives" (although the Progs also contain some members of other parties, like the Greens and the DSA). The Progs hate the Mods with a burning passion and are constantly trying to undercut them. Generally, Moderates tend to win city-wide races, while Progressives tend to win district supervisor races. Right now, the mayor's office and all state-level seats--including Scott Wiener, who authored the bill in question--are occupied by Mods, while the Progs have a veto-proof supermajority on the Board of Supervisors.
The Progressives tend to lean more NIMBY than their Moderate counterparts, and some of this opposition is certainly the result of that. (Gordon Mar, the president of the Board, is probably the biggest NIMBY of all the supervisors at the moment, possibly excepting Aaron Peskin.) But most of this opposition is purely tribal: the Progs on the board just want to snipe at Scott Wiener. Progs are not categorically opposed to housing: as others have pointed out, when Brisbane was waffling on approving market-rate housing just to the south of San Francisco, Jane Kim, a Progressive, threatened to annex the city!
Most of this anti-SB-50 resolution is properly understood as San Francisco tribalism more than any sort of policy grievance. SB 50 doesn't even have much if any of an effect on a lot of the districts these supervisors represent, either because they're exempted as "sensitive communities" (e.g. much of the district I live in, D10) or because the districts are already upzoned (e.g. the Mission).
- thebradbain 7y agoThat instance of Jane Kim threatening to annex Brisbane came off more as “everyone ELSE should build more housing so we don’t have to” than anything else to me, personally. They’re not wrong that other cities also need to build more housing, too, but SF equally needs to. They’re the city, not the suburb.
- ianmobbs 7y agoBeing progressive and being a NIMBY aren’t compatible ideologies.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoThank god people act rationally when it comes to their professed ideology
- doublement 7y agoWhen it comes to big-money issues like housing, self-interest takes precedence over professed ideology. Ostensibly liberal California not only has rampant NIMBYism, but is also in contention for the most regressive property tax policies on Earth via Proposition 13.
- lsiebert 7y agoYeah Prop 13 passed when the state was much more republican leaning. Remember both Nixon and Reagan were from California and Schwarzenegger won the governor's race. Arguably the state only went democratic because anti immigrant efforts, particularly prop 187 in 94, pushed moderate latino and asian voters to vote democratic.
- t-writescode 7y agoAnd yet they haven’t undone it, so the majority of the people actually in power must like it
- lsiebert 7y agoThere are costs to changing it, just like there are costs to rewriting an app in a new language. Only rewriting something from php to python 3 doesn't potentially leave senior citizens on fixed income homeless. That doesn't mean people like it, or think it's not problematic, but there has to be an upgrade path that's viable.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
- ksec 7y agoA brilliant summary for those not following closely. And then I look at the username to see who wrote this, turns out it was an immediately recognisable Rust and Compiler expert.
- sartethought 7y ago>Progressives tend to lean more NIMBY Take it from a progressive: this is false. We lean towards stability for low-income populations. An ability to live somewhere, accumulate relationships, and find a stable job, without being thrust into homelessness any moment at the will of enterprise. Above all else, we support real public housing, maintained by democratic institutions. Our numbers are growing at record rate lately, so if you want to build density, do it like this. Our armies of enthusiasm will be right by your side.