By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Board members asked for a modest delay to consider the mayor’s amendments to a complex housing bill. The Chron talks of “Nimbys.”

I should know better than to take seriously any analysis of the city’s housing crisis coming from the Office of State Sen. Scott Wiener and SPUR, and I would rather just ignore this Chronicle oped, which is headlined “Why SF NIMBYs are about to lose all their power to stop housing.”

Fact: SF Nimbys, such as they exist, are not stopping housing right now; the Federal Reserve and the preferences of speculative capital are. The city has approved tens of thousands of housing units that could break ground today, no Nimby opposition, no frivolous lawsuits … they have building permits.

But there’s not enough return on investment to make those units profitable, which is what developers care about.

There are also thousands of empty units so the market is not clamoring for more of the same overpriced, little units in the sky, with or without views.

Back to the point:

Annie Fryman, a former Wiener staffer who now works at SPUR, characterizes a hearing on Mayor London Breed’s recent housing bill as “dry policy” that was “sensationalized.”…

I watched every minute of the hearing. Her account is just wrong.

The supervisors weren’t “posturing.” They were doing what we elected them to do: Evaluating a piece of legislation that may have sounded “dry” but will actually have a significant impact on the local housing market—and is strongly opposed not by Nimbys (I didn’t see a single person who could be identified by that term at the hearing) but by every single tenant group in town and the broad Race and Equity in All Planning coalition…

Nobody from the Mayor’s Office showed up. A Planning Department staffer had no answers for many of the questions—but he did present a long list of new amendments that the supes hadn’t seen…

The reason I bother with this is because it’s important. As I predicted, the entirely reasonable response of the supes to this legislation is going to be a tool of the right-wing folks like Elon Musk and Michael Moritz who want to destroy progressive power in San Francisco.

They are using classic political strategies developed by the right over the years: Pick on one politician (it used to be Chesa Boudin, now it’s Dean Preston), and find one or two complex issues (crime, housing), simplify them to slogans (“public safety, Nimby”) and use that as a wedge to get people who are friendly to the billionaires into power.

There’s a reason that the neoliberal policies that have created the worse economic inequality in US history have succeeded. The people who profit from those policies have worked the Big Lies, and the news media has gone along.

And now, here we go again. …(more)