Scott Wiener’s so-called “housing” bills are classic Sacramento overreach: YIMBY for the rich and their tech backers, NIMBY for ordinary neighborhoods and the working poor—while delivering precious few actual homes and stripping away the local control that communities need to shape their own futures.
Fernando Marti’s piece (originally in the San Francisco Bay Guardian) lays it out plainly. Wiener has spent years pushing state legislation that overrides local zoning and planning, yet the results on the ground are abysmal. San Francisco completed nearly 5,000 units in 2017—before his big statewide “wins.” By 2024 that had cratered to roughly 1,400 completed units, even as “approved” projects climbed and a huge backlog of approved-but-unbuilt projects piled up. Streamlining and upzoning measures like SB 35, SB 828, and SB 79 jacked up approval numbers and land values for speculators, but private capital—not state mandates—still decides whether anything actually gets built.
Laws alone don’t build housing; investment does.
This track record goes way back. As a San Francisco supervisor, Wiener co-sponsored efforts to convert thousands of rent-controlled units into luxury condos. He backed measures to criminalize street homelessness. He opposed Prop F, which would guarantee tenants legal counsel. He aligned with real-estate interests against Costa-Hawkins repeal. He voted no on Prop C’s homelessness plan, including subsidies, Housing First, and mental-health support. When it came to protecting poor and working-class people, he was a reliable “no.”
The pattern is clear: these bills, long championed by the YIMBY apparatus and bankrolled by tech billionaires and real-estate interests, hand giveaways to land speculators and pander to the libertarian fantasies of the donor class. They raise land values and push density into transit-adjacent neighborhoods. Those areas are often working-class and already struggle with displacement. They leave local officials and residents less able to influence character, infrastructure, and equity. Transit-equity concerns in places like Bayview, Potrero Hill, and the Excelsior get short shrift. Public financing and genuine affordable housing are sidelined in favor of another decade of deregulation that primarily benefits the well-connected.
For years, groups like Ours Neighborhood Voices have warned that state housing bills are written and funded by tech billionaires. They seek to dictate local land use from Sacramento. Marti’s critique confirms it: Wiener’s record shows the “abundance” rhetoric delivers for the rich while ordinary neighborhoods lose local democratic control—and still don’t get the homes they need. Real solutions start with protecting community decision-making, not more top-down overrides that pad speculative profits.
