Wiener, Chan, Chakrabarti Clash on Housing and Zoning

As pints of Guiness flowed from the bar inside the United Irish Cultural Center on Wednesday, hundreds of people listened on as the three candidates vying to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi talked about everything from HIV medical care to the rise of authoritarianism.

In San Francisco, a place as blue as a major U.S. city gets, distinguishing candidates by their stances on broad, bread-and-butter liberal issues can be nearly impossible. But when the conversation turns to housing, and local zoning in-particular, divisions become clearer.

Moderator Ben Trefny of KALW Public Media polled the congressional hopefuls directly on a key piece of housing policy recently put into play in the city:Who supports Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan?

Approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in December, the Family Zoning Plan is the first approved citywide upzoning in decades. The land-use overhaul came in direct response to the state government’s requirement that San Francisco permit 82,000 new housing units by 2031. The plan allows for taller buildings and denser development in areas of the city that haven’t updated their zoning rules since the previous century.

In a display of legal irony, the Family Zoning Plan is being held up in court thanks to two lawsuits: one from a pro-housing coalition that argues the effort doesn’t go far enough, and one from an anti-growth coalition for whom the upzoning goes too far.

“I voted against Mayor Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan because of the fact that it doesn’t have any protection for our small businesses, and it doesn’t have protection for our tenants,” said Connie Chan, who sits on the city’s board of supervisors that approved the plan. “What we actually have to do is make sure we have federal investment to build housing that people can afford, to create and provide rental subsidies.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener, whose own policies at the state capitol put San Francisco under the current 82,000-unit mandate, said “San Francisco has to comply with the law and build the housing we so desperately need.”

“We are absolutely harming ourselves when we don’t have enough housing for people who need it,” Wiener said. “Putting federal money in and then saying we’re not going to zone for the housing and make it hard to build it, that’s called self-sabotage.”

Saikat Chakrabarti, a former staffer for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, did not directly say whether or not he supports Lurie’s plan. He said a shortfall of subsidized housing is what’s causing a lot of California’s housing pain. He called for more federal investment, and bans on investor-owned housing.

“The only way we’re going to get structural changes done is, in this moment … we have to challenge the corporate democrats who are standing in the way so we go into 2028 with a big vision on housing,” Chakrabarti said, directing his comments at Wiener, who he has characterized as a status quo candidate.

The primary is on June 2, and recent polling put Chakrabarti only 5 points behind Wiener, the frontrunner.

The robots are here

Not too long ago, robotics was a fairly niche industry, even in the Bay Area. But the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has elevated robots from tools for the assembly line into humanoids that clean our homes.

In just the last five years, the footprint of robotics production in the Bay Area has jumped by a factor of 15, from 500,000 square feet in 2020 to 7.6 million square feet by the close of 2025, according to new numbers published by real estate services firm JLL this week.

Alexander Quinn, research analyst with JLL, told The Real Deal that robotics companies had already signed onto 970,000 square feet of flex office space within the first three months of 2026.

Tesla recently signed onto 276,000 square feet of flex office space near its Fremont Tesla factory, where it will focus on developing its Optimus robot. Boston Dynamics – whose videos of its militaristic humanoid and dog-like robots have been causing an online frenzy for years – leases an office and testing ground in Mountain View. The newer 1X Technologies has been developing its own anthropomorphic robot, Neo, out of offices in Palo Alto.

“Robotics isn’t a new industry, but we’re dealing with robots that want to be intelligent,” Quinn said. “So they need to be near AI companies as well.”