Will SF go from Pelosi the power player to Wiener the housing wonk in Congress?

Will the only congressional district entirely within the City of San Francisco go from power player to policy wonk?

That will be the case if State Senator Scott Wiener–perhaps the most effective legislator of the past generation on reshaping the state’s housing policy–has his way.

Power player Nancy Pelosi threw the door open on the 11th District seat she has held since the 1980s, a decision that came after years of speculation over her future, and amid growing discontent over the median age in Congress, and fresh signs of generational upheaval in political leadership.

The pending exit by Pelosi–the first woman to serve as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a two-time holder of that gavel–may have been expected. Wiener threw his hat in the ring last month, weeks before Pelosi’s plans were clear, and her official announcement now clears the biggest hurdle from Wiener’s path. 

Wiener’s impact stretches from putting teeth in the state’s local housing mandates in 2017, to successfully leading a bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last month to upzone property along transit lines in the state’s most populous counties. 

Wiener told CBS this week that, among other priorities in healthcare and energy, he wants to get the federal government back into helping to solve the nation’s housing crisis — a similar mission he carried at the state level in Sacramento. 

The state senator is so far up against Saikat Chakrabarti, a self-funded progressive candidate who has been campaigning for months. Chakrabarti’s bid picks up some significant cachet owing to his prior service as chief of staff to U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New Yorker who has become a leading next-generation progressive with the Democratic Party.

One of Wiener’s marquee accomplishments in his state legislative tenure was to require cities and counties throughout California to permit significantly more housing construction. In San Francisco, that state is requiring the city to make room for 82,000 new housing units by 2031. To accomplish that, local lawmakers are mulling a plan to upzone neighborhoods across the city. 

Introduced by Mayor Daniel Lurie, the Family Zoning Plan is slowly making its way through the approval process. However, as talk about upzoning grows, so, too, do displacement fears. In response, the San Francisco Planning Commission on Thursday unanimously supported reinforced tenant protections and new restrictions on housing demolitions as a way to preserve existing levels of affordable and rent controlled housing throughout the city. 

The effort is classically San Franciscan, with local lawmakers taking existing state law and turning it up a few notches. For instance, the state’s Housing Crisis Act of 2019 requires property owners who demolish affordable or rent protected units to replace them with the same number of bedrooms. If this new round of tenant and demolition protections pass for San Francisco, not only will the replacement units need the same number of bedrooms, as state law requires, they will also need the same number of full bathrooms and 90 percent of the original square footage.