Excerpt from Chronicle coverage of Lurie/Mahmood proposal to repeal Prop I transfer tax.
Passed by a wide margin of SF voters, Prop I has raised over $500 million by taxing the ultra-wealthy to fund affordable housing.
Mayor Lurie and Sup. Mahmood announced today their plan to repeal Prop I to give tax breaks to billionaires.
The Safeway development proposals are strikingly similar. Yet the responses from YIMBY politicians are polar opposites, siding with neighbors in the Marina while ignoring neighbors’ pleas in the Fillmore.
This is exposing the racism, classism, and hypocrisy at the core of SF’s housing discourse.
As socialists score electoral wins across the US, San Francisco's billionaire backed "moderates" have seized government control, with disastrous results. For working-class San Franciscans, their rule has only made life harder.
Check out my new piece in Bay Area Current
The real story of the upzoning debate in SF right now is that the mayor and the YIMBY supervisors don’t have the courage (or interest) to take on wealthy single family home owners in rich white neighborhoods (upzone Pac Heights, etc) so they are upzoning demolitions of rent controlled homes instead.
When I was in office we fully funded a right to counsel for tenants, passed eviction bans, and launched the biggest local rent relief program in US history. Evictions hit all time lows.
Now evictions are surging. What will today’s Mayor and Board of Supervisors do to stop evictions? 1/4
In case you were wondering, the solution to all this is NOT more neoliberalism, abundance bros, mass incarceration, meeting Nazis in the middle, deporting people, coddling billionaires, or throwing trans people under the bus.
@ezrakleinbot.bsky.social
YIMBY Supervisor has introduced legislation to block new homeless shelters across his district.
Mahmood’s ordinance would ban new shelters, outpatient clinics, residential care and treatment facilities, and transitional housing across D5, including much of Hayes Valley, NOPA, and Haight Ashbury.
San Francisco could be 5 years into the boldest local social housing program in the nation. Instead, a YIMBY mayor for years blocked the funds voters and legislators had approved. Now, with a new Mayor at the helm, the City has a second chance to lead the nation. Will Mayor Lurie set things right?
Idea: If you stand to profit off increasing rents, you don’t get to set housing policy.
At the urging of their big donors, Democrats in 2024 explicitly avoided populism and instead touted the "abundance agenda" - and they lost the election to Donald Trump.
It's interesting that this basic indisputable fact is nowhere to be found in today's Abundance™ Discourse.
This is an outrageous and illegal assault on civil rights, free speech, and the rule of law. Speak out in every possible way to make it clear that we will not stand for this.
Many of the criticisms of socialism I’ve heard over the years are exactly what capitalism is bringing us today: high poverty rates, a surveillance state, restrictions of our civil liberties, and authoritarianism.
Our system is controlled by a handful of incredibly wealthy individuals, many hailing from the tech capital of SF. They are clamoring at the chance to join Trump’s plutocracy.
Billionaires should be taxed out of existence. Until that happens, they should be kept far from levers of government power.
The City should acquire the Fillmore Safeway lot for a grocery store & affordable housing, as I have called for alongside community leaders. Eminent domain was used to destroy this community and could be used now to benefit the community. The City should do right by the Fillmore and buy the lot now.
With a new mayor, San Francisco can finally honor the will of voters (Prop I and Prop K) and our unanimous Board of Supervisors resolution and build 10,000 units of municipal housing, as we also push for federal and state affordable housing investments
My own views on housing have shifted. Zoning does matter, but I don't see it as the only factor. Tenant rights, public investment, & decommodification loom larger for me, so I'm more aligned with Dean.
But with his record so distorted, we didn't have an honest policy debate about those priorities.
The main accusation of blocking housing—GrowSF's billboard—was made up whole cloth. The Chron debunked it, but too close to the election to make a difference.
Other accusations blamed only Dean for supermajority votes and didn't distinguish between rich Nimbys and tenants fearing displacement.
Dean also nagged the DMV to build housing on its Panhandle site until it finally agreed, and he backed housing on Parcel K that Nimbys wanted to block to keep the temp Proxy space.
None of these efforts were acknowledged in Yimby world, so I agree with Dean the housing attacks were disinformation.
Dean later proved to be pragmatic about market-rate housing, too. He struck a deal for a stalled market-rate tower to go taller, in return for a dedication of a new affordable housing site; the developer expected this deal to allow the project to pencil.
I went from skeptical to strong supporter of Dean as I saw him demonstrate over and over that he *was* pro-density, willing to buck neighborhood groups in calling for 730 Stanyan housing to be 8 stories, not the 5 a neighborhood group called for, or Mayor Breed's initial compromise of 6.
Dean's 2020 opponent ran a single-issue campaign of demagoguery against homeless people. Even if she was ostensibly more aligned with me on development, this was a dealbreaker for me, and I felt it should've been for SF Yimby, too. I was a member but left that year partly over this.
Folks, we're living in a Second Gilded Age.
It can be easy to feel discouraged, but the First Gilded Age teaches us lessons on how we can fight back. Watch.
We are 10 years into the failed YIMBY project, and it’s clear that the for profit real estate industry is not coming to the rescue to deliver housing for the working class.
Disaster capitalism won’t deliver the housing we need. Social housing will.
I requested an audit of SFPD overtime last year and the audit was released today. I knew it would be bad, but not this bad. The violations of law, the lack of oversight, and the abuse of overtime are alarming and require immediate intervention.
The people of SF deserve better from our government.
Don’t get it twisted — Jackie is a thoughtful democratic socialist and that IS pragmatic and common sense. It’s not bomb throwing to take on innately unfair capitalism and want to help your constituents with their everyday issues. For the record that’s what Dean did too.
