Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
I'm honestly wondering how the state legislature even has the political cover to do this.
I guess they're figuring that NIMBYism is mostly a low-intensity thing for most people
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Scott Wiener, the state Senator whose bill this is, is gay and represents San Francisco. Formerly, he was a city supervisor representing the Castro District. He is somewhare unusual being, though a Democrat, a relatively conservative (for SF) Democrat. Recall that the Castro, though an iconic gay neighborhood, consists these days of multi-million $ renovated Victorian homes.
Anyway, as a centrist gay Democrat from SF, he has a lot of political cover on other grounds. We'll see whether he has enough. There is indeed a lot of screaming about this on the far left in SF (here, to be pro-development is seen as to be pro-developER which means pro-business, pro-monied elite etc etc) and Wiener may well have leftward primary opposition on a host of issues when he runs for re-election. The hope, though, is that San Francisco politics is being changed by the influx of well-aid, non-native techies displacing (and out-voting) some of the more radical elements. "Progressive" politics still holds sway in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and Haight, but Wiener, as a state senator, now runs city-wide.
Meanwhile, the state legislature as a whole is not so left-leaning as outsiders may think. Though perpetually controlled by Democrats these days, a lot of those Democrats are from Southern CA including SoCal suburbs where there is considerable hostility to downtowners and their issues. There is a long list of issues the state legislature has passed that run counter to downtown politics. The best known and most upsetting to San Francisco "Progressives" may be the "Ellis Act" which allows a landlord who desires to get out of the business of rental housing to evict all his tenants and put the property to a different use. In a city where tenants have sacred rights, this is seen as the ultimate landlord option. And, while the city has passed measures forbidding conversion to condos and sale of the property as such being one of the uses to which the landlord may put the property, people get away with a lot after "Ellising" their tenants.