By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Wiener, Ting, and Haney bills undermine ‘all that is sacred’ in San Francisco. Do they know what the fuck they are doing?…

It’s pretty stunning, when you think about it, how the people San Franciscans elected to represent them in Sacramento have worked to undermine the rights of San Francisco to protect tenants and vulnerable communities.

Assemblymembers Matt Haney and Phil Ting and State Sen. Scott Wiener are the lead authors of a series of bills that not only make life easier for big developers but dramatically cut what’s left of the city’s ability to fight wholesale displacement…

The problem, Peskin said: The city can demand that ADUs are subject to rent control, but the state legislation pre-empts that, allowing projects to go forward with state authorization that do not include any rent-control requirements. Peskin:

I just want to say this for the record, so people that are watching, and I consider [Ting] to be a friend, that all of the things that we hold sacred in San Francisco are being undermined by the State of California by our own elected legislators.

So now the Planning Commission is being asked to give away much of its existing authority. There’s not a lot of office space proposed these days; most of the serious issues planning deals with are housing-related.

If the commission goes along with the concept, “it will be signing its own death warrant,” Peskin said. There won’t be much need for a Planning Commission, and there won’t be much opportunity for the public to challenge bad actors who are trying to get permits for dubious projects.

That, apparently, is how our state legislators and our mayor want it.

I just wonder, as Peskin says, if they know what the fuck they are about to unleash on San Francisco.

Unfortunately they probably do. Hope someone will conduct an interview or debate with the Wiener wannabes? Looks like we will need to hold our nose to vote him out. But, voting him out will send a powerful message to Sacramento politicians that SF hates his politics. Maybe give some credence to our demands that they change their tunes and return power back to the local communities that preserved our state in a more pristine manner for most of its history. Between our state leaders we have lost more individual power than we had under Reagan. Reagan gave us CEQA at least.