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Price, I learned during our Vancouver conversation, had recently been flown to San Francisco by the Newsom campaign to give a presentation on enviro-friendly urbanism as part of a series of policy charettes put on by the campaign. Vancouver-style urbanism is the intellectual driver of Newsom's "workforce housing" policy initiative, which was prepared by the Chamber of Commerce. The initiative would streamline housing permits in certain areas of the city, in hopes of creating enough housing to serve the people who work in San Francisco.
And the Newsom-supported initiative is one of the main reasons, Joe O'Donoghue told me, that the Residential Builders Association will campaign for Matt Gonzalez. "It's housing fraud," O'Donoghue said of the Newsom-linked plan.
These sorts of development issues form one of the starkest dividing lines of San Francisco politics, and they cleave in a way that ignores classic liberal/conservative doctrine. Vancouver-style development is anathema to certain members of San Francisco's "progressive coalition," which opposes Gavin Newsom. This is more a question of financial interest than consistent liberal ideology: Among the so-called progressives who oppose workforce housing are the city's nonprofit developers, who have benefited mightily from the city's highly politicized development process. The opposition also includes groups allied with the nonprofit developers, such as the anti-growth, anti-change, anti-anything-that-hasn't-been-here-for-a-decade Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. And it includes leftovers from the 1970s anti-development movement, including Sue Hestor, an attorney who makes her living suing developers. Matt Gonzalez, who has not made a focused study of urbanism, borrows opinions from these groups.
Joe O'Donoghue has thrived, so far, within a labyrinthine building permitting system so rife with uncertainty, delay, and political gamesmanship that nationally based developers have largely avoided the city. He apparently fears that a Vancouver-oriented approach to planning might attract nationally based developers, who would squeeze the RBA pikers out.
"They don't care anything about the little guy," O'Donoghue said, referring to the Chamber of Commerce plan.
In the spirit of the backward world that is San Francisco political reality, fully understanding the approaches of these two mayoral candidates to housing requires one more trip through the looking glass. Though it might seem so at first, it's not necessarily true that Gavin Newsom favors the construction of more housing, and Matt Gonzalez opposes the same.
Indeed, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the businesses it represents back Newsom and favor significant housing construction -- it's their employees, after all, who can't afford a place to live -- but the suburban-minded, western-San Francisco homeowners who make up Newsom's most reliable voting bloc fervently oppose new housing construction anywhere near where they live. To appease the latter group, Newsom has sought to block proposals for additional housing in areas where his supporters reside.
Newsom opposed a law drafted by Supervisor Aaron Peskin that would have given permits to homeowners wishing to add in-law units to their houses -- potentially adding thousands of housing units to San Francisco. And he has opposed a plan developed by the nonprofit policy group SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research) that would facilitate the construction of apartment buildings along transit corridors such as Geary Boulevard.
"His financial backers support housing, his voters oppose it," is how one insider explained it to me, "and he's tried to please them both."
Board of Supervisors President Gonzalez, for his part, told me that the board would have supported much of the Workforce Housing Initiative if the measure had been given a chance to move through the legislative process. But the Chamber was anxious for Newsom to be able to use it to political advantage, so the proposal languished at the Board of Supervisors, so it could be used as a Newsom plank. In keeping with critics' view of Newsom's record, the Workforce Housing Initiative has been used by Newsom's backers to bolster his ideological stance -- at the expense of action and policy.
Some housing advocates, meanwhile, believe that Gonzalez's interest in reforming bureaucracies, as demonstrated in a battle he undertook with the Housing Authority two years ago, suggests that as mayor he'd greatly reduce the inefficiency that has plagued the Planning Department. Dave Snyder, president of Transportation for a Livable City, a group advocating environmentally sustainable urban development à la Vancouver, told me he believes Gonzalez-led bureaucratic reform in the Planning Department could theoretically foster as much additional housing development as Newsom's plan.
"In terms of actual units, I think it could be more," Snyder said.
There are precedents aplenty of politicians who were initially billed as fringe leftists becoming hard-nosed policy-makers once they arrive in office. In Mexico City, left-wing Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has allied himself with the country's richest businessman. In Brazil, international leftist symbol Ignacio Lula Da Silva has become a bankers' darling. Closer to home, a former host of the left-wing radio program We the People, home of anti-nuclear activists, Earth First! enviro-rebels, Tibetan monks, and anti-war-on-drugs conspiracy theorists, recently became mayor of Oakland, where he allied himself with developers and systematically disempowered the city's leftist old guard.
These weren't cases of politicians flip-flopping; they were situations in which old-fashioned ideas of left and right provided a lousy map for governing, so politicians drew their own maps.
San Francisco faces a similar circumstance; our economic slump, gasping budget, discredited public-safety departments, creaking infrastructure, and desperate housing shortage are problems to which neither S.F. business groups nor the S.F. progressive coalition has coherent solutions. Our next mayor will have to find his own way. Likewise lacking reliable ideological road maps, so will voters.
As Matt Gonzalez and Gavin Newsom barnstorm San Francisco during the next few weeks, voters should question them vigorously about their records, and about how they plan to carry out purported solutions to city problems. Ask the "Why should you be mayor?" question, then parse and criticize the answers, ignoring preconceptions of left and right.
