Wiener, Chan advance to November in CA-11 housing showdown

After a primary race that saw housing affordability and supply occupy an unusually prominent place for congressional campaigns, voters advanced two candidates to the November general election that mirror San Franciscans’ conflicting views on the issue.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, whose pro-growth bills have changed the way California approaches housing, breezed through the primary. With 41.6 percent of the vote share as of Saturday evening, Wiener, who represents the entire city in the state legislature, won a large majority of precincts. Chan took 29 percent of the popular vote, and found most of her success along the city’s western reaches — a more residential side of San Francisco where Chan’s name recognition as a county supervisor and her opposition to the proposed citywide upzoning found purchase.

Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive political operative who used his own exorbitant wealth to pump nearly $9 million into his campaign, ended in third with 16.6 percent of the vote.

The primary now pits two divergent views of San Francisco housing and growth.

Wiener has positioned himself as the candidate of change — at least when it comes to the city’s physical realm. He is widely credited with fomenting the pro-growth YIMBY movement from city hall into a statewide and national powerhouse that advocates for pro-housing policies. His bills have eliminated single-family zoning across California, 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. He knocked down parts of CEQA, and up-zoned private property around the transit networks of California’s major cities. His congressional platform included a proposal to roll back Republican tax cuts and pay U.S. cities $10,000 per new unit of housing built.

Wiener will have to work to convince San Francisco’s more old-school progressive voters that his pro-development stance best suits the city’s interests. Chan is cut from that deep blue cloth, where pro-growth spells gentrification and developer greed and union labor protections are black-and-white issues. She was one of the loudest opponents to Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan, which up-zoned large swaths of the city for the first time in decades. The plan, which is in direct response to some of Wiener’s housing bills, is held up in court. In the weeks leading up to the election, Chan said almost any new housing built in San Francisco should be subsidized affordable housing.

In the run up to the primary, many developers and housing advocates The Real Deal spoke with saw the congressional race as Wiener’s to lose, given his success at the state legislature. He also attracted nearly all of the real estate industry’s money in the race.

The Tuesday primary also showed that money isn’t everything, whether it’s personal wealth or the full-wallet backing of an industry. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, the real estate industry’s pick, whose war chest included $1.5 million from Southern California mall magnate Rick Caruso, couldn’t make up for his late entry and milquetoast campaign strategy in the race for California governor. Minutes after the polls closed on Tuesday and the first early voting results came in, Mahan conceded, failing to break even 5 percent of the popular vote.

As of this writing on Friday, the race for the top two slots in the California governor’s primary remains too close to call. We know that Xavier Becerra, the former California attorney general who has vowed to go after cities and counties who fail to meet the state’s housing production goals, has advanced to November.

His opponent is still up in the air. Republican Steve Hilton, who wants housing built upon the undeveloped land at the outskirts of cities and counties, is, for now, leading Tom Steyer, the progressive billionaire who has promised to build one million homes over the next four years. The November field may not be set until next week.