Could Scott Wiener’s approach work in Congress?

from Ben ChristopherCalMatters

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In the shady courtyard of an affordable housing complex in San Francisco in early March, California’s most prolific Yes In My Backyard legislator unveiled his new housing platform for Congress.

For Sen. Scott Wiener, it was all very much on brand.

Flanked by union construction workers, campaign volunteers and some of the YIMBY advocates who have been on “Team Wiener” since his days on the city’s Board of Supervisors, Wiener noted the highlights of housing policy. The package was a mix of overambitious spending proposals — the kind that rarely make it beyond campaign literature — outlandish left-of-center targets and a set of development, deregulation proposals on which Wiener built his political reputation.

Proposals to cut red tape may seem odd to Congress, which has historically shied away from local land use and building rules. Wiener was happy to address the apparent discrepancy.

“It was also an area, first of all, where the state was traditionally not involved – and we changed that,” he said.

Since Wiener joined the state Senate in 2017, the California Legislature has undergone historic housing change. Majorities now embrace the idea, at least rhetorically, that the state should play an active role in encouraging more homes to be built, even if that means imposing on local authorities and neighborhood groups. More than any other legislator, Wiener was the pivot of that center.

The question now is whether Wiener, if elected, could help orchestrate the same feat of political reengineering in Congress, given his long-standing aversion to legislation on a political issue of choice — or, as is increasingly the case, do just about anything.

“Where All Good Things Go To Die”

On the one hand, of course, Wiener wants to go to Washington.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision last year to step aside after holding the seat for nearly four decades, created a once-in-a-generation opportunity in San Francisco, a city full of Democratic political talent and a few empty rungs up the electoral ladder. Wiener has been a professional politician for 16 years and has ambitions for a career as a professional politician. He is also suspended from the state legislature in 2028. When he announced his candidacy last Octoberwas a well known a decision that surprised almost no one in the political world.

On the other hand…really, Congress?

Although the legislative branch of the federal government is not a body known for its productivity, Wiener is an extremely productive legislator. He is the rare California state legislator who can plausibly claim some degree of public name recognition not only outside his district but also outside the state. This is partly due to his ability to get busy searingly contradictorytitle accounts – banning ICE agents from wearing masksdecriminalization psychedelics, AI regulationforcing corporations to publish their carbon footprints and cancellation of activity penalties sex work.

But it’s also because he has a habit of actually going through a lot of them.

The Center for Effective Lawmakingjointly run by the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, regularly ranks legislators on the “State Legislative Performance Score” based on the number of bills introduced, how far those bills go and how substantial they are. In the last legislative session of the California Senate, Wiener was first and spent his entire Senate term in the top five.

Wiener was particularly effective in pushing legislation aimed at encouraging new housing construction. He is the author of bills to speed up the construction of residential buildings, tighten the screws on uncooperative local authorities and limit the environmental review for new development. In an ideological grand finale last year, Governor Newsom signed a bill that Wiener legalizes mid-rise apartments around the main public transport stops. This has been Wiener’s political priority ever since first year in the legislature.

It may be some time before anyone can say definitively whether these bills actually led to significantly more housing being built or whether the state became more affordable as a result. But love him as the state’s most prolific housing champion or hate him as a dumbass developer — there are plenty of people who fall into both camps — no one can deny that Wiener’s bills are getting passed.

Congress, where he hopes to serve, does not.

By some measures, 2025 could be among the least productive years in recent times, congressional memory and legislative productivity have been at a downward slope for decades. That makes it an odd place for Wiener to take his next career step.

“I gave him the same speech when he was running for state Senate,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action and a longtime Wiener ally, describing Wiener’s 2016 run while still on the San Francisco board. “I was like, ‘Scott, the state is a scumbag.’ You’re going to leave us here when we’re actually making some progress here locally. You will go to the state level, where all good things will die.

“So there’s a lesson learned,” she said.

Wiener rejected the caricature of a “do-nothing” Congress, pointing to an expansion of the child tax credit during the pandemic and massive clean energy spending programs put in place under the Biden administration.

“Is Congress a tough place? Absolutely. But am I excited about the prospect of being able to take my job federally? I’m very excited about that,” he said.

He also emphasized that his plan will not simply be to overhaul his state legislature at the federal level.

“At the state level, what we learned and acted on was that the state has dramatic power to shape zoning and permitting,” he said. But other barriers, such as the high cost of construction, the relative shortage of construction workers and expensive financing, are well within Congress’s wheelhouse, he added.

Other important elements of his platform include the creation of a mixed-income federal revolving loan fund.”social housing” projects, a proposed boost in funding for rental assistance programs and more federal support for trade schools.

“The proposals I’m making to Congress are highly complementary to land reform at the state level,” he said.

But there are also some Viennese classics in the mix. These include changing building regulations and building codes to allow for cheaper development, rewriting the National Environmental Policy Act so that it does not impede “climate-friendly housing” and creating a “Housing Incentive Fund” to reward local governments where more housing is built.

Is Congress Going YIMBY?

Congress appears to be slowly coming around to Wiener’s views on housing.

A year and a half ago, a bipartisan group of House members formed the chamber first YIMBY Caucus. Not coincidentally, many of them, like Democratic co-chairs Robert Garcia of Long Beach and Scott Peters of San Diego, hail from California, the political birthplace of the movement and Patient Zero of what has now become a national housing affordability crisis.

“California is a little bit ahead of the curve because our crisis hit 10 years ago,” said Congresswoman Laura Friedman, a Burbank Democrat and former assemblywoman who is running for Congress under the YIMBY mantle in 2024. It’s only been in the past few years that once-affordable shelters across the country have it’s starting to look a little Californian.

Leading the group on unaffordability also gave California lawmakers a head start in trying to tackle the problem, she said. “California has become a testing ground for many of these solutions.”

Last Thursday, the US Senate passed what is widely believed to be the biggest housing bill in one generation. The legislation includes measures it would be at home in Wiener’s platform, including tying federal subsidies to local housing production and adding new tools to speed up or bypass federal environmental review. (The House still has to pass the bill.)

The bill represents an unusual development in Congress, where housing has been considered a “quiet crisis,” said Dennis Shay, who monitors housing policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “You can’t go a day now without being bombarded with three or four stories about housing affordability.”

As in California, housing has become an issue that cuts across party and ideological lines, making it one of the most favorable topics in Congress.

“Housing has been an island of bipartisanship in a sea of ​​division,” Shea said. Case in point: The Senate bill was co-authored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a progressive, and Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina.

However, policymaking in Congress looks a little different than it does in Sacramento, said Friedman, who served in the Assembly from 2016 to 2024. That can make it challenging for former state lawmakers who want to pick up where they left off in Congress.

“The skills are transferable because the skills are really about building consensus, but also being strategic about how you can get things done. But the process is much more difficult,” she said. A Democrat in California’s much smaller legislature can expect most of their bills to at least get a hearing. Not so in Congress, Friedman said, which has five times as many members and where leadership plays a more assertive role in advancing or limiting legislative proposals.

The flavor of housing policy is also slightly different.

In California, lawmakers have passed a number of bills over the past decade targeting local development preferences and prerogatives.

“The federal government has never played that role,” said David Garcia, associate director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Nor is it likely to be anytime soon. The bill, which awaits a vote in the House, is heavy on the carrots and light on the stick.

Still, it remains unusual in its drive to encourage new housing more broadly.

“The speed with which it has been accepted that the federal government needs to do more in terms of supply is shocking,” Garcia said.

Seems like a good time for California’s chief YIMBY to run for Congress.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.