On a Friday evening in mid-April, housing activists swirled around a San Francisco ballroom in suits and gowns.
The annual YIMBY (Yes, in My Backyard) Gala, a blowout for the pro-housing movement, also draws developers, urban designers, politicians and bureaucrats. Partygoers sipped on “Upzoni” Campari cocktails, traded planning-commission war stories and vented about NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) stalling tactics. As part of the evening’s fundraiser, men dressed as former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, the Los Angeles mayoral candidate who has criticized the state’s efforts to increase housing density, and celebrity chef Thomas Keller, who spoke up against a Napa Valley workforce housing project, egged on the crowd to donate.
A bumblebee mascot named “Nimbee” posed for photos with guests. Then, as a city council hopeful from San Rafael was unleashing on his incumbent opponent’s opposition to growth, a political organizer leaned over to him. “Scott Wiener just walked in,” he said.
Wiener, the state senator from San Francisco, is hard to miss. His 6-foot 7-inch frame often puts his pale, bearded face a full head and shoulders above the room. Yet, his height hardly matters here. At this party, the jubilant manifestation of a political movement he stoked more than 10 years ago, Wiener is an A-list celebrity.
On stage, Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action and one of its earliest activists, told the audience the organizing network now has 87 chapters across 27 states.
“We’ve won the ideas battle,” Foote said, pointing out that more politicians have aligned with the YIMBY position, and the Senate had recently passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which she called the “most ambitious” federal housing law in a generation.
But the ground game was about to have an overdue shake-up, she said. Wiener is in a tightening race to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi as San Francisco’s next representative in Washington D.C. As Wiener navigated toward the stage, Foote said the YIMBYs couldn’t wait to “release him on Congress.”
“They are so not ready for him,” Foote told the applauding crowd.
In the tradition of Bay Area politicians, Wiener has championed progressive causes from health care access to LGBTQ rights. But across California and beyond, his name has become synonymous with YIMBYism, the latest export of San Francisco politics. YIMBYs argue that shelter is a human right, and that the housing affordability crisis is foremost a housing shortage. Solving it, they say, begins with making it easier to build, which means knocking down bureaucratic and political barriers. (This is not always a natural fit with other progressive causes but Wiener seems to thrive in the sometimes unusual coalitions.)
“All of the distortions that have been put into the law,” Wiener said on stage, pointing to technical reviews and the state’s environmental impact rules, “have made people’s lives worse.”
But this isn’t just about laws, Wiener went on. “It is about real live human beings who deserve a place to live … lifting up the middle class and working class people … [and] saving our democracy.”
“They are so not ready for him.”
Just last year, Wiener’s state capitol politicking brought the movement to new heights. One of his bills upzoned all property along major transit lines in the state’s population centers; another dismantled California’s landmark environmental law, which had long slowed development projects. Other Wiener joints over the years eliminated single-family zoning statewide, stripped local politics from the permitting process for affordable homes and leveraged the state government’s power to increase and enforce housing production mandates in every California city and county.
Along the way, the symbiotic relationship between Wiener’s legislative success and the YIMBYs’ growth has spread their ideology from coast to coast, into both red and blue states. Wiener became the steward, which gave him a national platform unusual for a state senator.
Despite his strong resume in Sacramento, Wiener faces familiar skepticism. Congress is more divided than the California state capitol, where Democrats have held a supermajority and the governorship for years. He also needs to fend off two challengers to his left in the June primary, one of whom has union support and the other a Bernie Sanders worldview. Congress also doesn’t really do housing. But, a decade ago, neither did California’s state government, and few believed it could.
So while Wiener may be the hero of the policy wonk, the past few years have thrown the limits of legislation into sharp relief. In California, complex regulations have been toppled, knotty politics smoothed over, and yet new housing remains rare, existing housing expensive. Nationally, home starts are flat and new permits are dropping. Though going to Washington may be the obvious next step for an admired state senator, a spot in Congress might not guarantee better tools or a more opportune economy for spinning policies into new places for Americans to live.
The YIMBY Godfather
Wiener, 55, has towering genetics. His mother was 6 feet by the age of 12, and his cousins could fill out the big-man rotation for a professional basketball team. As a child, Wiener opted for the pool over the court, but diving frightened him so much that he chose the backstroke, the only race that begins in the water. After his parents took him to a hypnotist, the fear suddenly vanished. The remedy may have been permanent. Colleagues say he jumps into the political melee head-first.
New Jersey bred, Wiener went to Harvard for law school. When he arrived in San Francisco in 1997 to join firm Heller Ehrman as a commercial litigator, the city’s housing supply was already struggling beneath the weight of the dot-com boom. Open-house lines for rentals sometimes stretched around the block, and Wiener competed against tenants willing to bribe landlords.
As he settled into the city, Wiener took on pro-bono work. One of his first clients, a gay retiree with HIV, faced eviction because the owner of his rent-controlled apartment wanted to move in. The client was unsure he could otherwise afford to remain in San Francisco. Wiener, who came out as gay in college, identified with the man.
“He said he could either go back to the South, where he’s from, and live with his family but have really bad HIV care, or he could stay in San Francisco, have the best HIV care in the world, but be homeless,” Wiener said. “That’s when I began to see that there’s something very broken here.”
By the time Wiener was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2010, the anecdotes of a housing system gone awry had built up, but the Great Recession and the lending pullback that followed put new development on the backburner. Politicians and activists seemed to treat rent control and subsidized housing as the only solutions.
In 2011, a new wave of start-ups swept the city into another economic expansion, and new arrivals seeking tech riches exacerbated the affordability crisis. Yet, Wiener watched the city still erupt into one “nuclear war” over an approved 12-unit apartment building in the Mission, and another over a project that proposed 1,500 permanently rent-controlled units in a 7,200-unit redevelopment. The latter narrowly received a green light, but the conditions placed on the development have kept it from breaking ground.
“I started seeing the ridiculousness of how we do housing,” Wiener said. “How the rules aren’t really the rules and even if you meet all the rules in a city and get an entitlement, that doesn’t get you your permit, it just means you enter the political mosh pit and maybe your project will live, or maybe die, or maybe get chopped in half.”
About the same time, a small group of young people began showing up to San Francisco City Hall, asking the same question as Wiener: Why is the government making it so difficult to build housing?
“The fact that Scott was on the board to receive our public comment as someone who was in politics and was loud and proud about housing was absolutely huge,” Sonja Trauss, one of the founders of YIMBYism, said. Trauss now serves as head of the movement’s legal arm, YIMBY Law. “I don’t know what would have happened to our little nascent movement if I was trying to organize people to go to city council meetings and absolutely no elected officials agreed with us.”
In Wiener, Trauss had an ally with a vote; in Trauss, Wiener recognized the inklings of a political movement that needed nurturing. He would call the young activists for one-on-one meetings in his city hall office, telling them things like, “This is the issue of our time, and you’re being called.”
“I think there is a misconception that this pro-housing wave was already happening and Scott rode it,” said Annie Fryman, one of the early YIMBYs who went on to become Wiener’s housing policy aide. “But when all of us had different jobs and careers, he was the one sitting us down and saying, ‘If you’re really going to do this, let’s do this together.’ Frankly, he was the one mentoring us in movement building.”
As the upstart coalition grew, so did the ambition of Wiener’s proposals. His bills legalized ADUs in the Castro neighborhood and eliminated conditional use permits for 100 percent affordable housing projects.
For years, the left in San Francisco pushed back against development, worrying about gentrification and the environment. In 2015, the pro-housing stance of a San Francisco supervisor running for California Assembly was widely viewed as a political liability. When Wiener ran for state senate a year later, the politics, he said, “really flipped” in favor of housing supply.
“So when I won, and got to the state senate, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to go,’” Wiener said. Still, he couldn’t have predicted the impact. “I had no clue that housing would be the issue I’m so broadly known for,” he said.
Sacramento slugger
Each October, after all votes in Sacramento have been cast and all bills signed or vetoed, a coterie of roughly 30 housing developers, policy wonks and advocates gather inside a hotel — most recently in Venice Beach — to strategize for the upcoming legislative session. Over a few days, this informal group, known as the Homebuilders Alliance, decides what kinds of housing policies to push and which legislators to pitch.
Every marquee piece of housing legislation over the past five years has been discussed in these sessions, said Corey Smith, the executive director of Housing Action Coalition, a statewide industry group.
“If we have a hard fight on a major bill in front of us, we want Scott leading it,” Smith said.
From a laundry list of housing fixes — a building code amendment here, an overhaul of the state’s decades-old environmental protection law there — the senator and his staff refine and decide which bills to carry.
“Other [legislators] might read these proposals and be like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to piss off labor,’ or ‘I don’t want to piss off the environmentalists,’” said Krista Pfefferkorn, Wiener’s chief of staff who has worked inside the state capitol for 30 years. Not Scott.
The political risk-taking is contagious. Buffy Wicks, an assemblymember from Berkeley, met Wiener during his 2016 senate campaign. Wicks, then the state director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, learned about Wiener’s market-rate-housing push and wanted her boss to endorse his campaign.
At the time, politicians would acknowledge the affordability crisis but only supported building-subsidized units. No one, Wicks remembered, pitched market rate housing as a solution.
“I wouldn’t have taken the same risks had I not watched Scott do it first,” Wicks said.
Wiener admits he is not immune to the doldrums of the political arena. He’s faced death threats, regular heckling and spiked bills. He’s developed his own trick to keep going.
“I sit in front of a mirror and say to myself, ‘Wiener, you were elected to represent a million people in the state senate. You are the only state senator who represents San Francisco, the whole city, the greatest city on the planet, and they have selected you to represent them,’” Wiener said. “‘How many people would crawl over cracked glass to have the opportunity to be able to get up on the senate floor and speak on behalf of the people of San Francisco? Snap out of it.’ That gets me out of it every time.”
In 2017, while still figuring out where the capitol’s bathrooms were, he authored SB 35, an opening salvo heard ’round the state.
For nearly 40 years, the state government handled housing largely through the Regional Housing Needs Assessment. In eight-year cycles, the state determined how many new homes cities and counties needed to permit, across a strata of affordability, to keep up with demand. The local governments had to prove their zoning would allow for the new units, but they maintained full discretion over whether to approve or deny developments. The effect was a shortage of 3.5 million homes, according to a 2016 McKinsey report.
“The rules aren’t really the rules and even if you meet all the rules in a city and get an entitlement, that doesn’t get you your permit, it just means you enter the political mosh pit and maybe your project will live, or maybe die, or maybe get chopped in half.”
The legislature’s passage of SB 35 pulled the rug out from almost every local government. Suddenly, jurisdictions lagging behind on their housing mandates — 95 percent of all cities and counties at the time — lost significant local control in approving projects. The worst offenders, which was most of them, were required to rubber stamp any project that kept at least 10 percent of units affordable and met local design and zoning standards.
The following year, Wiener’s SB 828 ratcheted up the amount of housing each city and county had to produce in the next eight-year cycle, in some cases by an order of magnitude. Carmel-by-the-Sea’s mandate jumped from 31 to 349; San Francisco’s from 29,000 to 82,000. City halls across the state fell into a frenzy.
State lawmakers went on to dismantle local control further.
Alongside Gov. Gavin Newsom, Wiener is the face of that regime.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” Wiener said. “California had a housing system that was designed to fail.”
For developers, uncertainty is an expensive variable. Wiener’s bills have minimized the previously hard-to-manage risk of local politics, said Enrique Landa, of San Francisco-based developer Fifth Space, which is redeveloping the Potrero Power Station into a massive mixed-use community.
“There’s now a predictable path of getting your project approved,” Landa said. “It has drastically reduced the cost of housing and the availability to add more supply.”
While playing Wiener’s game, the legislature has: eliminated single-family zoning by allowing ADUs on all residential lots, automatically upzoned property along major transit lines, defanged environmental protection laws as a tool to stop development, banned parking minimums for some new developments and allowed faith-based institutions to permit affordable housing, by-right, on their land.
Yet production is nowhere near state goals. Between 2010 and 2018, the state added 520,000 new homes. Then, in 2018, Newsom campaigned on the 3.5 million-new-home-by-2025 platform. Between 2017 and 2025, the state added just 850,000 units to its housing supply.
“You can keep telling me that it’s interest rates, constrained capital markets, the cost of construction, the supply chain and the Suez Canal,” Aaron Peskin, a former San Francisco supervisor who served alongside Wiener in the 2010s, said. “Whatever, that’s all true, but what has he done to make any of that different?”
“He’s just managed to race to the bottom,” with deregulation, he added.
Wiener’s willingness to fight doesn’t make him immune to compromise. Legislators in California often tack union or prevailing wage requirements onto theoretically pro-housing bills in order to get votes. This can choke a project’s ability to pencil, said Bill Witte, the former CEO of Related California who started his career in then-San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein’s housing department. “There is no magic bullet” for housing in California, Witte said. But he believes Wiener has achieved something deeper and more sustainable than just policy work.
“You have to change the mindset, and I think the mindset in California is starting to change,” Witte said.
Republican and Democrat gubernatorial candidates are prioritizing reform and deregulation, and more local boards are swinging toward YIMBYish ideology. “How we get to more housing remains to be seen,” he said. “But this is a very different mindset in the state compared to 10 years ago.”
A federal approach to housing
The primary for California’s 11th congressional district is June 2, and Wiener’s progressive opponents have been gaining ground as the date nears. Saikat Chakrabarti, a tech centimillionaire and former staffer to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who hasn’t endorsed him) is behind by only five points, according to an April poll he financed. San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who has Sen. Adam Schiff’s endorsement, is polling third. Both have attacked Wiener as the status quo, using a clapback familiar to YIMBYs: that he’s in the pocket of developers. He opposes both wealth taxes that will appear on ballots in June: a one-time tax on billionaires statewide, and a local San Francisco proposition that would tax ultrawealthy CEOs of large companies.
Wiener’s housing platform is by far the most detailed and comprehensive of the San Francisco congressional candidates, yet it contrasts sharply to the top-down pressure strategy that made him notorious in Sacramento.
Wiener wants 8 million homes built across the country by 2037. Beyond his more commonplace ideas of boosting funding for subsidized affordable housing, Wiener believes the country should raise $1.2 trillion — largely through peeling back tax cuts on the wealthy — to pay cities and counties $10,000 per housing unit built. (The per-unit cost of multifamily developments can range from $200,000 for garden-style apartments in Arizona, to $1 million for high rises in San Francisco and New York City.)
Foote said she and Trauss had been pitching the pay-to-build incentive for years. The cash could encourage cities to lighten the fees they charge to new developments to offset the impact to local infrastructure, for example. These kinds of soft costs are some of the major strains on a developer’s bottom line, said Andrew Justus, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based centrist policy think tank The Niskanen Center.
“Wiener’s idea is in the mold of trying to encourage local governments to make the decision that they want more housing,” Justus said.
Justus said Wiener could tie the money to the passage of foundational pro-housing policies, such as allowing ADUs on every lot, and eliminating parking minimums. “If the spending side of the policy goes away in the future, then all these places will have still enacted all these pro-housing local rules that would be sustained.”
“Any kind of incentive is interesting, and so I think that’s an idea we should debate,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, the former mayor of Long Beach who now chairs the congressional YIMBY Caucus. “We need new ideas.”
Wiener said he has mulled whether Congress could be “more heavy-handed.” Expanding federal fair housing laws is tempting, but the politics are “very, very, very tricky,” he said. He believes that some local zoning rules are “inherently civil rights violations.”
“The level of segregation, and how people are denied the ability to live in high opportunity areas, it’s very harmful,” he said.
Among Wiener’s campaign refrains is that the housing squeeze propped up President Donald Trump. Unaffordability pushes people into risky behavior, he said, and high prices and overregulation in blue states have caused population — and potentially Congressional seats — to migrate to red states.
Still, there’s evidence that a national conversation is worth having, and Wiener and the YIMBYs have already put housing creation into the zeitgeist for local lawmakers. Conservatives in Indiana have approved a pro-housing omnibus, liberal gubernatorial candidates in California are calling for deregulation and Congress is showing rare glimpses of bipartisanship over the issue.
That doesn’t mean his journey east will be easy. “There are complexities that exist only in D.C., and there is a level of toxicity that has been building for a while that does make things harder,” he said. “But building coalitions and building power require the same skill sets.”
It’s a heady image for the YIMBYs, their homegrown ideas gaining power on a national stage, even if it means Wiener relinquishing the local movement. Years ago, Foote, the executive director of the activist arm, urged him not to leave local San Francisco politics for the state capitol, calling Sacramento a “garbage hole.”
But now Foote sees things differently. Wiener’s ascent to Washington D.C. would be a gain for the movement at large, she said.
“There is a real hope that Congress can get on the housing issue, literally right now,” Foote said. “We need people like Scott there.”