What Does San Francisco’s Recall Mean For Housing?

After last month’s recall of San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin, prognosticators, advocates, and journalists across the country were trying to figure out what it meant for that city, other cities, and for American politics broadly. The defenestration of one district attorney will not change the country; but does it indicate a shift in big cities enamored of an ideology and politics that Robespierre might have praised? I doubt it. There are a couple of takes on the election in San Francisco that I recommend reading, and then I’ll give my reasons why I think when it comes to housing, we have a long way to go before big cities and the country correct course.

Nellie Bowles is a San Francisco native and writes evocatively about her childhood in the Atlantic in an article that conjures up the films of Wes Anderson. San Francisco, she writes, “was always weird, always a bit dangerous.” It’s a description of the city I resonate with. When I was 17, I persuaded my parents to fund a trip to the city for my friend and I, on our own, at the end of our senior year. Coming from the horizontal orientation of Albuquerque, we were memorized by the city’s verticality, its intensity, and, yes, it’s weirdness along with its style and wealth. It did feel dangerous, but that danger was not mortal. I’ve been there just about every year since.

Bowles is no right-wing Republican or any kind of Republican. She, like most people in and from the city considers herself a progressive. She describes an incident when she was attacked and her jacket was stolen.

“I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed—what was I, a tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it, from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.”

It was all just part of the show. But something changed. The title of her article is “How San Francisco Became a Failed City,” and seems to come around to a fundamentally different way of thinking about the cities problems. She assesses the recall of Boudin this way:

“San Franciscans tricked themselves into believing that progressive politics required blocking new construction and shunning the immigrants who came to town to code. We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.”

This last paragraph is a hopeful one, because Bowles sums up the paradigmatic dichotomy at the center of progressivisms past approach to “homelessness.” New people are all white brogrammers, the dogma goes, and it isn’t mental illness and chemicals that lead to people living on the street, it’s corporate greed. More new housing means gentrification that will turn the city white. When it comes to housing, these bromides have kept the development of helpful policy at a standstill, with cities favoring doing nothing and trying to raise taxes on “the rich” with no apparent effect.

Katya Sedgwick is a Bay Area resident who writes on a variety of platforms and is active on Twitter (@KatyaSedgwick). Sedgwick is unique. Among other things she is a conservative, influenced by having grown up in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the old USSR. I’ve enjoyed our conversations because we’re close in age, and I always think back to my days in Carter and Reagan’s America as being her days in Brezhnev’s and Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. This gives her a different take on most things American and especially the Soviet like take on things like homelessness and gender.

Sedgwick is skeptical of the vote, pointing out that “the anger that fueled the vote has yet to morph into a full-fledged political movement with a coherent ideology capable of delivering true change in education, law enforcement, or any other sphere of city life.” People still overwhelmingly support Nancy Pelosi as a representative and Gavin Newsom as Governor. Sure, maybe they were fed up with Boudin, but did the vote represent an ideological shift? That is, did people in the vote associate the failure of Boudin as a failure of his ideas that they supported when they put him there in the first place? Or has this whole mess just become embarrassing? What happened to the Cool Gray City of Herb Caen? How did The City become a place where Tony Bennett would have his heart stolen out his parked car?

Sedgwick concludes in The American Conservative, that,

“We need to realize that the movement to declaw criminal justice is far from over. It is well oiled and well organized. They will regroup. In the last decade, George Soros spent just $40 million electing racialist prosecutors. Considering that his resources are, for practical purposes, infinite, Soros can continue spending on this crucial electoral position. Moreover, he can draw candidates from an equally endless list of employees enjoying comfortable careers in his “non-profits.” They can easily commit a couple of years to “public service” before safely returning to the Tides Foundation.”

I think Sedgwick’s skepticism is founded. I’m concerned about housing. I wish I could say that like Bowles, people in San Francisco and other progressive cities like Seattle and Los Angeles could get the connection between opposing permits for housing and high prices. I wish that people in Seattle, for example, realized that someone living in a tent under a bridge didn’t wind up there this week because he lost his job at BoeingBA
last week and that a key to an apartment subsidized with a brogrammer tax won’t solve his problems.

We had an election last year in Seattle in which we elected an actual Republican as City Attorney. I wrote about what I thought this meant here in a post titled, “What Does The Election In Seattle For Housing? Unfortunately, Not Much.”

There are many downsides to growing old, but some upsides too. One of the upsides is that I’ve watched many elections cycles in the city of Seattle. What I have found is that when things are going fine, the Mayor and members of the City Council get a pass; reelection is assured after the first win at the polls. When things get chaotic, whether its riots or inclement weather, people lash out, but not for ideological reasons or because the target of their venom has the wrong view of economics, but because they want someone to run the city in a way in which they won’t notice it’s there.

This is rational. Most people, whether they worry about Big Bird’s gender or think the last national election was stolen, have pretty minimal expectations of city government; fill pot holes, send the police when I need them, keep the parks safe and clean, and deal with weird weather. Oh, and sure, a resolution calling for the removal of salmon killing dams in Eastern Washington or in support of Tibet are fine. Just get those other things done. When this pact is broken, the voters fire elected officials. Their replacements are generally the undeserving beneficiaries of the termination. Again, people aren’t looking for an ideological shift, just someone who believes the stuff they do, but doesn’t make a mess of things.

Will we arrive at a place where lefties realize that strangling housing production because people make money at it hurts the poor? Maybe. But such shifts are generational not seasonal and I expect that if things calm down, people in big cities will return to the comfort of their Trump hating, read the New York TimesNYT
, and continue worrying about the “housing crisis.” It’s going to take more than one election to get their attention.