Don’t Call It Progress
Watching California State Senator Scott Wiener dice up his discredited SB50 as a nine-bill salad, I’m struck by the pass he gets — not just from think tanks like SPUR and the Terner Center, but from YIMBY tweeters: “Scott Wiener is a progressive and the SB50 salad is progress defined” is their consensus. (See the notes below for details on the legislation.)
But Wiener has opponents on his left. As the San Francisco Tenants Union notes, he leads the pack in taking funding from real estate and developer interests. SFTU questions if SB50’s intent is to bolster housing affordability or repay those donors by forcing higher density development on California cities and towns by overriding local zoning.
SB50 is based on the trickle-down theory that adding to the market-rate housing supply will result in greater affordability, SFTU explains. SPUR also subscribes to this theory and is all-in, but SFTU is skeptical. It’s also wary that forcing communities to rezone for higher density will displace minority owners and tenants. It cites NYC’s experience as the reason for its concern. This view is corroborated by U.C. Davis Professor Fred Block:
Developers continue to focus on high-income customers, and those of low and moderate income face an ever more difficult housing market. The only market-type mechanism available in this context is gentrification. Both smaller developers and families purchase homes in some predominantly low-income neighborhoods and invest in upgrading the houses.
Wiener’s opponent in November is Jackie Fielder, a Democratic Socialist in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Representative for New York’s 14th Congressional District. Fielder has opposed corporations’ dodging their need to pay their fair share of the public realm they impact. It’s telling that Wiener opposed San Francisco’s Prop. C, which would have taxed corporations in the city to help pay for below-market housing and homeless services. (Seattle also tried this; Jeff Bezos defeated it.)
It probably takes a Democratic Socialist to spot a Left Coast progressive poseur, but Scott Wiener is in the grand tradition of neoliberalism, so adept at changing its stripes to keep its project on track: “to become broadly embodied in belief systems about what is possible, what is realistic, what is efficient, what is economic … until it can be hard to imagine an alternative.” (Tessa Holland, 2017, page 18.) And why? So “a handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life … to maximize their personal profit.” (Robert W. McChesney, 1999.)
Wiener’s legislative program tracks his donors’ interests. (His donors also include the cannabis industry and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Neoliberal Michael Bloomberg gives his profit-making activities a wrapping of “good causes” like gun control and limiting consumer access to sugared drinks and tobacco products. Of these, Wiener picked tobacco.) Wiener’s approach to housing aligns with this —he proclaims it as the route to housing affordability, pushing market-rate housing, which benefits his donors, while ignoring the below-market categories where the real shortages are.
The Green New Deal that Representative Ocasio-Cortez helped put together calls for federally funded renovation of some 1.0 million public housing units. That’s the kind of progress that will start to address our below-market shortages. In California, we also need the State to restore the funding for below-market housing production that then-Governor Jerry Brown slashed in 2008. Despite our recovery, those funds have never been restored. Without them, the acute shortage of below-market housing will continue.
To the extent that the SB50 salad displaces mostly minority households by giving developers free rein, the shortage could actually get worse. Trickle-down is part of neoliberal magic thinking, like Ronnie’s Laffer Curve and Maggie’s selloff of Council Housing. Call it what it is. It’s not progress.
Notes:
On the SB50 salad: Here are three summaries: from SPUR; from Embarcadero Institute; and from Livable California.
On neoliberalism: Tessa Holland, Navigating Slow, ‘fast’ and crafted knowledges, Ph.D. Thesis, Newcastle University, December 2017, pages 18–22. She cites McChesney, from his introduction to Noam Chomsky’s 1999 Profit over People, page 7.
On Bloomberg’s good causes: Of course they’re good causes, but they amount to motherhood for most people, and draw attention away from the activities that are Bloomberg’s main gig. Wiener’s causes and the way he pursues them are crafted similarly.)
