Extreme weather and changes in seasonal patterns are fundamentally altering the landscape, in cities and in farming communities. You’re going to pay for it.

BY GABRIELLE GURLEY DECEMBER 4, 2025 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

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Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina unleashed a levee-busting catastrophe on New Orleans that woke Americans up to the fabled city’s precarious relationship with water. But it’s not just tropical storms that unleash flooding; the fierce thunderstorms that wind up long before hurricane season can also bring NOLA to grief. In April, a period of flash flooding captured national headlines. Ten inches of rain pelted the Algiers neighborhood on the western flank of the Mississippi River; other areas of the city saw up to seven inches—more rainfall than the city usually sees during the entire month.

More from Gabrielle Gurley

“New Orleans is facing, I would say, like a seven-layer cake of challenges in regard to flooding,” says Jessica Dandridge-Smith, executive director of The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, a regional water policy, education, and equity organization.

Climate change delivers constant reminders of how humans have completely disrupted the ways water cycles around the planet. There’s more precipitation in some places and next to no rainfall in others, or alternating seasons of flooding and drought. Persistent drought threatens the supply of fresh water, while heavy and more frequent rains, like the ones New Orleans experiences, stress inadequate stormwater systems that struggle to prevent flooding. All of these events complicate whether people can afford the one substance that they can’t live without, and renders the simple act of turning on a faucet a budget-busting financial decision.

Civilizations have prospered according to the rhythms of the natural world. And even in the Anthropocene, societies continue to grow crops and raise livestock that flourish in their environments. For everything else, they turn to global markets. But climate change–fueled natural disasters and shifting weather patterns have hit hard, disrupting where humans live, right along with their traditional agricultural practices. These upheavals mean that people are left scrambling, in some cases almost daily, to respond to a world in constant flux.

Climate change plays havoc with crops as much as it does with water, leading to sticker shock at the grocery store.

Climate change plays havoc with crops as much as it does with water, leading to sticker shock at the grocery store.

Climate change is an affordability issue that demands reassessing the pearl-clutchers’ claims that expensive solutions only burden people with higher costs. This era’s threats should prompt the realization that inaction (or worse, retrenchment) is prompting price hikes right now, which people find intolerable. By contrast, the policy responses and environmental adaptations needed to grapple with the crisis can potentially decrease consumer prices, as the progress in the renewable-energy sector shows.

A warming planet can cause more suffering, more disease, and even mass deaths. But even if you don’t live in a danger zone made more treacherous by climate change, the higher prices you pay for everyday goods—even something as basic as water—mean that no one escapes the impacts.

AFFORDABLE WATER IS AN OXYMORON in New Orleans. The American Water Works Association defines water affordability as “the ability of a customer to pay the water bill in full and on time without jeopardizing the customer’s ability to pay for other essential expenses.” Water affordability is a monumental stressor in a place where the poverty rate is nearly 23 percent and the median income is $55,580. A 2024 investigation by The Lens, a New Orleans–area public-interest newsroom, found that water bills average $115.44 each month, more than twice that of comparable Southern cities.

Not only do New Orleanians already pay premium water and sewer rates, but the infrastructure that delivers drinking water, carries out sewage, and pumps out floodwater is more than a century old, and chronic needs to upgrade or repair contribute to the high rates that residents will continue to pay.

New Orleans stays dry for the most part because its massive, antique system of dozens of pumps, catch basins, drainage pipes, and aboveground and underground canals keeps it that way. At times, this is not enough—the April rains overwhelmed the pumps in certain sections. A system built for the weather patterns of the 20th century can’t keep up with the heavier rainfall of the 21st.

Much of the city’s difficulties rest with the wildly dysfunctional and despised entity that runs the system: the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (SWBNO). This dysfunction extends to predatory billing practices and water shutoffs that are a regular occurrence in the city. It’s bad enough that working families and seniors are paying the cost of climate change through progressively higher water and sewer bills; it’s worse that those bills are sometimes erroneous.

Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA) finally convened a special task force to get to the bottom of a myriad of issues, including ongoing maintenance failures despite hundreds of millions of federal, state, and local investments; billing snafus; and no small amount of corruption. The inquiry confirmed what residents and businesses already knew about water “affordability” in New Orleans: “The SWBNO billing crisis may very well be the single biggest hindrance on daily quality of life.”

“Low-income families and those on fixed incomes simply cannot tolerate a ‘surprise’ high water bill,” the task force report reads. “A fairly typical complaint was an inaccurate [water usage] reading leading to a massive bill that was either auto drafted out of the customer’s account or double billed.”

To partially address the lack of confidence in billing, the SWBNO finally launched a system with an outside vendor to work with customers who owe $50 or more to pay their bills interest-free without incurring additional penalties or having their water shut off. As of September, 23,000 customers have been able to catch up on payments and the utility has recovered nearly $19 million in past-due revenue, with an estimated $24 million projected to be paid through the program.

Dandridge-Smith, who once had her water shut off for two months when she was between jobs, says the program appears to be making progress. “But the issue that still remains is that our water bills are high, so the residents are feeling the burden,” she said. “And frankly, the utility is feeling the burden.”

New Orleans isn’t alone. Many municipalities face astronomical water rates at a time when energy bills are also soaring. An April 2025 Bank of America report indicated that in March Americans’ median monthly water utility payments increased more than 7 percent year over year. Durango, Colorado, ratepayers face a 10 to 20 percent hike; San Diego will see a 30 percent hike. Broomfield, Colorado, approved a 50 percent increase. All are blaming aging infrastructure, and shifting climate patterns are at the heart of those unanticipated costs.

Helping people pay their bills is not the same as making sure that water flows to homes at a reasonable cost. “What we really need are affordability solutions that address [bringing] bills down to a level that a household can afford to pay based on their income,” says Mary Grant, who directs the Public Water for All campaign at Food & Water Watch, a national advocacy group.

To address the city’s massive stormwater infrastructure issues, New Orleans residents passed a $50 million bond proposition to improve drainage and stormwater management facilities. Another proposal being debated is a stormwater fee to begin to chip away at the $1 billion in improvements over the next decade that the SWBNO needs to make. According to a Water Collaborative survey conducted earlier this year, a majority of New Orleanians are willing to acquiesce to a fee in return for modern stormwater infrastructure that can offer relief from flooding during smaller storms—as long as the SWBNO isn’t collecting the fee. New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno has said that she supports a regional entity to monitor and address drinking water issues, as well as the stormwater fee. She’s no fan of the SWBNO either.

But the demands of problems like lead pipe replacement and treating drinking water from the Mississippi River for pollutants and salt water intrusion due to sea level rise mean that recurring infrastructure costs still get passed on to consumers. The SWBNO runs its own power plant to help power older segments of the system, a cost that even the utility admits is not sustainable.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, New Orleans had access to the federal Low Income Household Water Assistance Program (LIHWAP), a federal program that mirrored the existing federal home heating assistance program. Congress provided more than $1 billion in funding across the country, sparing more than a million low-income households from shutoffs and bills that they could not pay.

The need is still there, but LIHWAP isn’t; the program expired in 2022. A proposal to restart the program introduced in July by Reps. Eric Sorenson (D-IL), Rob Bresnahan (R-PA), and several other members of Congress is going nowhere fast, given the lack of interest in social programs in Congress and the White House.

But New Orleans never properly utilized LIHWAP during COVID to assist ratepayers, says Dandridge-Smith. “We have a state that, oftentimes, either intentionally or unintentionally, does not mobilize federal dollars to the people who need it the most. This is a constant problem across all issues, and then you have a city that is essentially drowning in its own aging and failing infrastructure,” she says.

CLIMATE CHANGE PLAYS HAVOC WITH CROPS as much as it does with water, leading to sticker shock at the grocery store, one of American consumers’ biggest concerns.

The role of climate can sometimes be surprising. When faced with high coffee prices, many people might blame President Trump’s tariffs on coffee-producing regions like Brazil and Vietnam. But droughts in the region near the equator known as the “coffee belt” sent prices to an all-time high before any tariffs were imposed.

Climate-fueled drought in the Great Plains states have thinned out cattle herds, also leading to higher beef prices. Houston Public Media reported that prices reached $6.32 per pound in September for 100 percent ground beef, the highest ever—and after a drought, ranchers expect to see price increases for the next couple of years.

Every day, there seems to be a new weather-related food disaster. Olive oil prices skyrocketed in early 2024 due to drought. That spring, high temperatures in Ghana and Ivory Coast, home to 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, took those prices up by threefold. By summer, a heat wave in Asia spiked Japanese rice prices by 48 percent and Korean cabbage prices by 70 percent.

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Heavy rains can also ruin fertile soil. A November report from the United Nations Development Programme finds that more than 90 percent of all countries will see lower crop yields because of climate change by the end of the century, even after accounting for farmers adapting to weather changes.

One reason for lower crop yields is changes in the seasons. Trees have adapted to the climate by blossoming earlier, for example, which makes fruits and nuts more vulnerable to spring cold snaps and frosts that can wipe out a whole harvest. That’s what happened to hazelnuts this year in Turkey, the country that accounts for 73 percent of the global supply. The projected 40 percent loss of hazelnut yields translates into a 30 percent increase in price.

In addition to risk from seasonal patterns, a hotter climate can become a breeding ground for pathogens that can debilitate the food supply. The New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on warm-blooded animals like cows and other livestock, has been virtually eradicated in the United States since the 1970s. But it returned to Panama in 2022, has been reported in southern Mexico, and is threatening domestic cattle herds this year, leading to a ban on Mexican livestock to contain the damage.

Huge agribusinesses have fewer water issues, but smaller farmers can be driven out of business by extreme events.

Bird flu, which reappeared in the U.S. this fall, has also been spurred by a warming planet. Changes in migratory patterns have led to diseased birds flying into new places, leaving those areas vulnerable to outbreaks.

Both Brazil, the world’s biggest producer of oranges, and the U.S. have been slammed by citrus greening, spread by an insect, the Asian citrus psyllid. About 50 percent of Brazil’s crop has been infected, while Florida’s production has dropped more than 92 percent in the past two decades. Severe weather has also plagued Florida orange producers: Hurricane Milton destroyed 20 percent of the state’s orange crop.

These alternating seasons of flood and drought, as well as disease and insect infestations, leave agricultural producers wrestling with the basic questions of whether they can afford to keep juggling different climate adaptation strategies.

FOR TWO STRAIGHT YEARS, SUMMER TORRENTS led to extreme flooding in Vermont, with mudslides and washouts that destroyed entire farms and pulverized town centers. A July 10, 2023, deluge across the state lasted 48 hours, produced nearly a foot of rain in the worst-hit enclaves, and led to a federal disaster declaration. Exactly one year later to the day, the remnants of Hurricane Beryl struck some of the same towns that had been inundated before.

It had been more than a decade since Tropical Storm Irene meandered up the East Coast and introduced Vermonters to their own new climate strangeness: severe flooding from weather systems that originate in the tropics. During the decade it took to recover, some Vermonters began to see Irene as a “one-off.” It wasn’t.

This past summer delivered another weird, unwelcome jolt: weeks of extreme drought. The prospect of seasons of inundation and scarcity colors how farmers view the affordability of their enterprises. Huge agribusinesses have fewer water issues, but smaller farmers can experience crises and be driven out of business by extreme events.

Vermont farmers who grow vegetables irrigate their lands with river water or streams and creeks that run through their properties. In the eastern United States, farmers have riparian rights, sourcing their water from nearby bodies of water like streams, rivers, and lakes, or from groundwater via wells. As of 2023, Vermont requires farmers to report their surface water usage annually above a particular threshold. (In the West, under the doctrine of prior appropriation, farmers access water based on water rights acquired decades ago.)

A 2023 Vermont Agriculture Recovery Task Force survey found that extreme weather left farmers with about a 30 percent loss in annual income; nearly 60 percent reported that their cash flow would go negative. Estimated total drought losses reported through the state’s 2025 Agriculture Drought Survey are $13 million for this year alone.

Maddie Kempner, the policy and organizing director for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, explains what it means to local farmers to have uncertain water access. Livestock farmers, for example, have tremendous water demands: “A productive dairy cow needs 50 gallons of drinking water daily,” Kempner says. If a well runs dry, “that means paying to haul water to your farm constantly to keep up with that level of need that your animals have, in order to keep them healthy, alive, and producing the product that is the lifeblood of your business.” It’s also a major cost to bear if the wells that they rely upon have run dry. They may have to drill new ones, up to a five-figure expense.

To make farming work, some regional growers plant crops like carrots and leafy greens like lettuces that they can harvest in a shorter span of time, rather than vegetables like broccoli or brussels sprouts that take months to mature and are at risk in areas subject to flooding.

Kempner spotlighted another major concern: “They don’t have meaningful crop insurance support or disaster relief programs that work for their operation. Those by and large are designed to work for much larger and less diversified farms and poorly serve our farming community here.”

Farmers also must think about moving heating and cooling systems and other infrastructure to higher ground, or shoring up roads and improving drainage, costs that also run into the tens of thousands of dollars. “A lot of our farms are living on thin profit margins where they don’t necessarily have extra room in their budget to invest in those kinds of protective measures,” she says.

All of these additional measures add cost to the produce or beef you buy in the grocery store. And farmers are not just growing the food; they’re buying it, too. “Beyond these climate disasters and extreme weather events, farmers are dealing with the same inflationary pressures as everyone else in general,” says Kempner. “We are facing a pivotal moment in American agriculture, where our population of farmers is aging, and access to farmland and affordability of farmland is a huge challenge for beginning farmers trying to get into farming. These affordability challenges are existential when you think about the future of our food system on the whole.”

IN THE SUMMER OF 2025, FLOODING wasn’t the problem in Middlebury, Vermont, where commercial beekeeper Curtis Mraz runs the Champlain Valley Apiaries. “We actually produced quite a bit more honey in the years where we had significant flooding,” the fourth-generation beekeeper tells the Prospect. “And we were in a part of Vermont where we didn’t have serious washouts like other parts of the state.”

“That being said,” he continues, “the more it rains, the less a bee can fly. We often as beekeepers talk about fly time. We need clear days; they don’t fly at night. So in the last couple years, we had significant rainfall to the point where fly time was limited.”

Until the beginning of July, the apiary’s bees were very productive, but as the month wore on, the amount of honey dropped off. “If you looked out in the Vermont landscape, you’d see goldenrod coming in in August, but not a single bee dancing across it,” says Mraz. “Beautiful flowers, but because there was a drought, there was no water in the soil, and therefore, no nectar in the flowers for the bees to feed on.”

Mraz and his family have worked with bees for a century, and he has an excellent sense of how the bee ecosystem has changed. “In Vermont, we’re getting into these two seasons, where there’s too much water or too little water: Now it’s either mud season or it’s a drought,” he says. Wet conditions mean that Mraz and his workers spend more time moving equipment around, because it’s too muddy for a truck to drive into the fields. That ends up increasing his labor costs.

Last year, beekeepers lost between 60 and 100 percent of their colonies, Mraz says, and his losses were “in that range.” It’s not just the excess rainfall, but the amount: A deluge, then drought, makes the bees susceptible to disease. Colony collapse disorder is what beekeepers now call a mass bee die-off. But while it’s been forecast for two decades, researchers noticed a serious uptick in 2025.

Colony collapse is an imprecise name. “It’s basically this huge conglomeration of pressures that nobody can truly name,” Mraz says, “although I’ll tell you, it’s pesticides that’s the biggest contributing factor.” He adds that the family’s hives once lived from 10 to 15 years; now they last about three. A 60 percent colony loss would have been unimaginable previously, he says: “When my great-grandfather was running the business, a 10 percent loss would be a terrible year.”

Some of the practices used on soybeans and other monoculture crops, like the use of pesticides, contribute to the conditions that produce bee colony losses. After a heavy rainfall, pesticides used to treat them wash off into ditches, then streams and other water sources that bees use, and poison them. Neonicotinoids are a class of pesticides that have emerged as a major culprit.

Mraz would like to see a shift in perspectives in using pesticides in the food system at all, especially when the chemicals kill the very bugs that are needed to cultivate crops. But pesticides are used to maintain crop yields that are thinning due to climate change. So the conditions that are killing so many bees have a climate nexus as well.

Because the honeybees that migratory beekeepers tend are central to the economics of pollination for crops like almonds, apples, cranberries, and blueberries, there’s a whole passel of scientists and researchers dedicated to the continuation of the species. Mraz worries that the U.S., unlike Canada and the European Union, isn’t moving fast enough to deal with the threat. Vermont is working on a gradual phaseout, but a ban won’t go into effect until 2029.

“Because our agricultural system is so dependent on honeybees, you can always guarantee that somebody will be out there selling more honeybees,” Mraz says. But like most producers, the costs get passed on to his customers.

“My uncle has a saying: We are no longer beekeepers—we’ve all become bee replacers. I just couldn’t help but wonder, is this really the right future?” Mraz asks. “And the reality is if we want to keep this going, there’s not a ton of government subsidy money for us, like there is for corn, soybean farmers, or dairy producers, so we have to ultimately increase the price of our products.”

The financial pressures of adapting to climate shifts and bee colony collapse weigh heavily on the young beekeeper. “Every year, we’ll take those 40 percent of the bees that survive and we’ll turn 200 colonies back into 1,000. But that comes with a huge genetic cost, a huge labor cost, and then, ultimately, every spring, I’m breaking down and crying again and talking to my beekeeper peers who are ready to walk off a cliff—‘How can we do this again?’”

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David Dayen
Executive Editor

This article appears in Dec 2025 Issue.

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July 24, 2017TAGGED:affordability, agriculture, beekeeping, Cities & Communities, Climate Crisis, Economic Policy, Energy & the Environment, flooding, New Orleans, Vermont, water, weather

GABRIELLE GURLEY

ggurley@prospect.org

Gabrielle Gurley is a senior editor at The American Prospect. She covers states and cities, focusing on economic development and infrastructure, elections, and climate. She wins awards, too, most recently picking up a 2024 NABJ award for coverage of Baltimore and a 2021 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication urban journalism award for her feature story on the pandemic public transit crisis. More by Gabrielle Gurley

This might be the defining issue in the race to succeed Nancy Pelosi

By J.D. Morris, Alexei Koseff,Staff WritersDec 9, 2025

Gift Article

An affordable housing complex at 383 Sixth Ave., formerly 4200 Geary Blvd., became a vivid example of a bitter divide between Scott Wiener and Connie Chan over their approaches to new housing.Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle

State Sen. Scott Wiener and San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan stood side by side, smiling, as they cut a ceremonial red ribbon to mark the debut of a new affordable-housing complex on the west side of the city last month.

Days later, however, the building at Geary Boulevard and Sixth Avenue — a former funeral home transformed into 98 apartments for low-income seniors — became a vivid example of a bitter divide between Wiener and Chan that could fuel their dueling campaigns to represent San Francisco in Congress.

When Chan entered the race to succeed Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi on Nov. 20, her announcement video featured an image of the Geary apartments as she took a thinly veiled dig at Wiener, who has for years opposed Chan in San Francisco’s notoriously fractious housing debates. As a supervisor representing the Richmond District, Chan said she had “built real affordable housing, not the Sacramento version that destroys our neighborhoods.” 

“This is rich,” Wiener retorted. He pointed out that the Geary site took advantage of several recent state laws aimed at increasing housing development — including one that he passed. In a news release, he accused Chan of taking credit for others’ work to cover her own thin record.

The sniping immediately catapulted housing to the center of the race at a time, more than six months before the primary, when candidates are usually just introducing themselves to voters. The campaign could open yet another front in the eternal NIMBY vs. YIMBY war and potentially turn the contest to succeed Pelosi into a referendum on the best way to bring down astronomical rents and home prices.

Though Congress is not traditionally where most Americans look for housing policy, it’s becoming an increasingly potent issue in Washington during this era of affordability politics. And in a safely Democratic seat, where the major candidates are all running as various shades of progressive, it could be the most significant differentiating factor.

“One of the reasons we have a housing crisis is because the federal government has not thought of housing as their role,” said Rep. Laura Friedman, a Burbank Democrat who jumped to Congress from the state Assembly last year and recently introduced a bill that would exempt certain infill housing projects from federal environmental reviews.

How the candidates align

Either Wiener or Chan would likely be among the most left-leaning members of Congress if elected in November. But locally, they represent different factions of a long-running political schism centered on housing — and the specific steps that policymakers should take to reduce living costs in one of the country’s most expensive cities.

On one side of the debate are Wiener and his allies in the YIMBY movement that seeks to cut red tape and spur development of all new housing, including market-rate apartments and condominiums.

Wiener told the Chronicle he wants to return to the mid-20th century, when the United States built large amounts of new affordable housing. If elected to Congress, he would like to create a federal social housing program, despite the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to slash housing assistance, and help scale up apprenticeship programs for construction workers.

“We need to get government back in the business of housing,” Wiener said. “The cost of housing is profoundly more important to people’s lives than the cost of eggs.”

On the other side are Chan and others who focus their advocacy more specifically on government-funded affordable housing, protecting low-income tenants from displacement and preserving the character of historic neighborhoods.

Chan described her approach to housing to the Chronicle as “not for special interests” but rather “for San Franciscans” — especially lower-income workers feeling increasingly priced out by the city’s affordability crisis. She said Congress should create more ways to fund affordable-housing construction, as the city did by getting voters to approve a 2019 bond that helped pay for the Geary project.

“You can have a lot of housing be made available and built, but if people cannot afford it because they just can’t with their salary, that in and of itself is an affordability crisis,” Chan said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, and there’s definitely not … one policy (that) will just be able to magically build housing. Many factors have to come together.”

It’s not the first time Chan and Wiener have been on opposite sides of an expensive electoral fight where housing was a top issue. In 2022, they backed dueling — and ultimately unsuccessful — ballot measures that aimed to fast-track housing development.

Then there’s Saikat Chakrabarti, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and aide to progressive favorite Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who originally entered the race offering a generational change to Pelosi. Now he’s betting that San Francisco residents are weary of the polarized housing debate exemplified by Chan and Wiener and is trying to position himself as an appealing alternative.

He described himself as “an all-of-the-above person when it comes to housing,” stressing that he wants to cut red tape to accelerate development while also expanding funds for low-income housing. His housing proposals include calling for the establishment of a federal agency that could offer low-interest financing to pay for home construction.

“Look at what the results have been of the current nature of tribal politics in this city,” Chakrabarti said. “The result has been a housing crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, and it’s become harder and harder to actually live in this city. We have to be willing to talk about new ideas.”

What’s happening in D.C. 

Disputes over housing policy would more typically animate a race for the Board of Supervisors or the state Legislature than for Congress, but the urgency around this issue is ramping up in national politics.   

Suddenly the buzzword everywhere is “affordability” — and the cost of housing, which was turbocharged nationwide by the pandemic, is the biggest driver, bringing the rest of the country into a debate that has long consumed California.

During last year’s presidential election, President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris both touted plans to increase the housing supply and provide financial assistance for homebuyers. Though it has not ultimately been a focus of Trump’s first year back in office, he did last month float a controversial idea to create a 50-year-mortgage, while also proposing to slash billions of dollars for homelessness programs.

Meanwhile, a small group of lawmakers is trying to elevate the issue in Congress, where housing policy lately has mostly meant district earmarks and other appropriations. Two new bipartisan caucuses, the Congressional YIMBY Caucus and the Build America Caucus, formed in the past year to promote housing construction and streamline development.

And a sweeping bill that has excited housing advocates could pass before the end of the year attached to the defense spending measure. It includes dozens of provisions aimed at boosting production, including prioritizing federal funding for projects near public transit and in opportunity zones, rolling back federal environmental reviews for infill housing, and developing federal recommendations for state and local zoning, as well as “pattern books” of approved designs that can be adopted by local planning departments. Many of these ideas align with state laws that Wiener and other YIMBY-aligned legislators pursued in Sacramento over the past decade.

“This is the biggest congressional policy play on housing in a generation,” said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. He said housing is the rare policy issue these days where divisions are not partisan — liberal and conservative states have begun passing similar laws to address the affordability crisis — which gives Congress cover to actually take action. 

‘Voters are tired of the same political factions’

It remains to be seen, however, whether the congressional race can sustain a nuanced debate about what that federal vision for housing policy should be. In San Francisco, housing is always a hot-button topic, and the campaign threatens to be consumed by more immediate fights dominating local politics.

The Board of Supervisors, which shifted to the center in 2024, just passed a sweeping plan from Mayor Daniel Lurie to allow taller and denser housing on the west side of the city — with support from Wiener and YIMBY groups and despite opposition from Chan. Critics including former Supervisor Aaron Peskin, a longtime Chan ally, are now floating a countermeasure to protect more rent-controlled housing from demolition.

Details are still up in the air, but Chan, one of four supervisors to vote against Lurie’s zoning plan, has indicated that she’d likely support the measure, which could appear on the ballot at the same time she is trying to turn out supporters for her congressional bid.

“If City Hall won’t listen to the people, we know what San Franciscans can do,” Chan told the Chronicle before supervisors approved the zoning plan. “I’m going to work with stakeholders and see what their next steps are, and that includes an option for a ballot measure.” 

Wiener criticized Chan’s positioning in the race as “a very, very cynical way” to “galvanize NIMBYism” to boost her campaign. 

“She’s trying to harness the energy that got us into this crisis and ride it all the way to Congress,” he said.

San Francisco labor leader Rudy Gonzalez said he hopes the race doesn’t devolve into the “progressive versus moderate or YIMBY versus NIMBY” mudslinging that has characterized past political fights on housing.

Gonzalez’s labor group, the influential San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, has not backed a candidate in the race, which could unlock money and volunteers. The council endorsed Wiener in his first state Senate campaign and Chan in her reelection campaign last year. He said that to win, both will need to “show themselves as different, as having new ideas.” 

“I think San Francisco voters are tired of the same political factions repeating,” he said.

Dec 9, 2025

J.D. Morris

City Hall Reporter

J.D. Morris covers San Francisco City Hall, focused on Mayor Daniel Lurie. He joined the Chronicle in 2018 to cover energy and spent three years writing mostly about PG&E and California wildfires.

Before coming to the Chronicle, he reported on local government for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, where he was among the journalists awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the 2017 North Bay wildfires.

He was previously the casino industry reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. Raised in Monterey County and Bakersfield, he has a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from UC Berkeley.

Alexei Koseff

Staff writer

Alexei Koseff is the Washington, D.C., correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, chronicling President Donald Trump’s policies targeting California and the tension between the state and the federal government, as well as how powerful Bay Area figures are shaping — or thwarting — solutions in Washington.

He is rejoining the Chronicle from CalMatters, where he covered Gov. Gavin Newsom and state government. Previously, he previously served as a Capitol reporter for the Chronicle and spent five years in the Capitol bureau of the Sacramento Bee. Alexei is a Bay Area native and attended Stanford University. He speaks fluent Spanish.

by Randy Shaw on December 8, 2025 (BeyondChron.org)

Mayor Lurie made a smart choice in picking Alan Wong as the new D4 Supervisor.  Three factors support a Wong victory in June.

First, Wong is exactly the type of mayoral appointee capable of winning an election. Unlike past appointees that lost—former Mayor Lee’s choices were 0-3 and Mayor Brown had a mixed record—Wong’s election to the Community College Board shows he knows how to run a winning campaign.

Many San Francisco supervisors are first elected to the School Board or Community College Board. Those campaigns teach candidates how to win. Wong fits that profile. He will hit the ground running for the June election (appointees Wong and D2’s Stephen Sherrill first run in June to finish their predecessor’s term and then seek a full term in November).

Second, Wong has a path to victory that mirrors Lurie’s. Lurie benefited from being the most popular second choice vote for rival candidates. Wong currently faces two announced candidates—Natalie Gee and David Lee—with the potential addition of Albert Chow.

Gee will get most progressives first place votes. Chow will be the conservatives top choice. Wong’s work with former D4 Supervisor Gordon Mar positions him to get the vast majority of Gee’s second place votes. The more conservative Chow’s second place votes will  go to either Wong or Lee.

It’s hard to see where David Lee gets support. He moved into D4 after losing multiple races in D1 (unlike Engardio, who was redistricted into D4). Conservative voters will go with Chow and may prefer using their second-place votes to enable Wong to defeat Gee.

The third factor boosting Wong’s chances is his announcement that he voted No on Prop K. That position is a prerequisite for a winning D4 campaign.

D4 is Politically Complex

D4 has long been considered the city’s most conservative district. Yet in 2018 voters elected Gordon Mar, a progressive labor activist.

Mar’s election was seen as an aberration. Here’s why.

In 2018 D4 Supervisor Katy Tang was expected to seek re-election. She would have won easily. But Tang surprised the city by pulling out of the race on the eve of the June filing deadline.

Many thought this late announcement was designed to clear the moderate Chinese-American field for Tang’s legislative aide, Jessica Ho. It did clear that field. But it left the politically inexperienced Ho to run against an activist candidate who knew how to win elections after helping his brother Eric win two supervisor terms.

Gordon Mar also had strong backing from organized labor. He attracted sufficient money and field volunteers to win against Ho, who was in over her head in that contest.

Because many saw Mar’s victory as a fluke, in 2022 he was seen as extremely vulnerable. Joel Engardio had a history of losing supervisor races in the adjacent district but was a committed campaigner whose views were thought to be much more aligned with D4 voters.

Engardio knocked on virtually every D4 door. By all accounts he outworked the incumbent.  But despite these factors and the perception of D4 as a moderate to conservative district, Engardio only beat Mar by a 51%-49% margin.

Engardio’s victory was the first time an elected incumbent lost re-election since district elections resumed in 2000. But the fact that it was so close sent a message that D4 is not as conservative as many think.

Mar’s narrow defeat has led many to believe that Natalie Gee can win in D4. But unlike Mar, Gee will likely face two strong Chinese-American candidates. Of the three, Wong’s views appear likely to better reflect the district.

Ultimately, that’s why he’s well positioned to win.

Randy Shaw

<I>Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. </I>

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by Randy Shaw on December 8, 2025 (BeyondChron.org)

Photo of Family Zoning on SF Planning website

The battle over Mayor Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan is a fight over San Francisco’s future. Backers see the Plan opening the city’s doors to the long priced-out working and middle-class; opponents believe it widens the door to displacement without ensuring greater affordability.

The debate over building housing has long shaped city politics. And last week’s unveiling of a 25-story project on the Marina Safeway—a project Family Zoning could not stop—added fuel to the fire.

San Francisco is more divided over building apartments in single-family home neighborhoods than the Board’s 7-4 passage indicates. Yet the proposed twin towers at the Marina Safeway has unified Mayor Lurie and former Supervisor Peskin in opposition.

I’ve been foreseeing a citywide ballot measure challenging the Family Zoning Plan since it emerged (“Will Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan Divide San Francisco?, September 2). A ballot initiative is the only viable way opponents can rollback the law.

An initiative can unify anti-Family Zoning candidates across districts. It frames the next round of supervisor races around an argument that opponents believe favors them.  It’s the only real alternative because the 2026 supervisor elections will not brings eight repeal votes to the Board

I’ve never believed the Plan has the huge negative impacts opponents fear. State law changes (SB 330 and SB79) have already reduced local control over housing development; these laws allow demolitions of rent-control housing and allow multi-unit projects along transit corridors and in many neighborhoods.

But the Plan hits the third-rail of San Francisco housing politics by allowing apartments to be built in neighborhoods that have stopped them for decades. And even though D2 Supervisor Sherrill ensured the Plan would not raise the 40-foot height limit for the Marina Safeway, voters could mistakenly blame the Plan, not state law, for the project.

The Marina project threw a big wrench into the Family Zoning debate. These developers interrupted Mayor Lurie’s well-deserved Family Zoning victory lap. Lurie and his allies will go all out to reduce its height.

The project also could impact the Scott Wiener-Connie Chan congressional race. Wiener’s state density bonus laws preempt local height limits; expect Chan to use the project to win over moderate to conservative Marina voters.

Framing the Debate

Two core arguments drive the Family Zoning Plan.

First, it as an essential strategy for opening San Francisco to those long priced-out. I know this message well. I wrote a book about how San Francisco and other progressive cities fail to build housing (Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America, UC Press).

I describe in the book how the Haight-Ashbury completely gentrified without building any new “luxury” housing. The same is true for Noe Valley, Potrero Hill and other long gentrified neighborhoods. Yet most San Francisco progressives—unlike Zohran Mamdani and other New York City leftists—still believe that not building housing preserves neighborhood “character” and affordability.

Second. backers of the Plan argue that it protects San Francisco from the state mandating far more sweeping upzoning  to meet the city’s housing goals. Failure to meet the state’s requirements could also result in the loss of affordable housing funds. Absent the Plan the notorious “Builders Remedy”—a state-imposed upzoning imposed on cities that flout state housing laws—could also come to San Francisco.

Mayor Lurie framed the Plan as avoiding state preemption. Ironically, the Marina Safeway project proves the mayor’s point but politically fuels opponent’s “No Wall on the Waterfront” argument.

Opponents raise two main arguments.

First, they dispute that building market rate housing improves affordability. They say the Plan does not mandate any affordable housing and that by allowing the Plan to demolish rent-controlled duplexes, thousands of currently affordable housing units will be lost.

This rent control exemption issue is curious. Supervisor Melgar’s amendment prevents the Plan from demolishing rent-controlled buildings over two units. But opponents responded to this positive step by claiming rent-controlled duplexes would now be targeted for demolition.

Melgar’s amendment sparked an online fight between the San Francisco Tenants Union (SFTU) and former D5 Supervisor Dean Preston. The SFTU pointed out that rent controlled duplexes could already be demolished under SB 330, the Housing Crisis Act of 2019. Preston insisted that rent-controlled duplexes would now be at greater risk,

But the fact is that for the past six years San Francisco has been powerless to stop the demolition of rent-controlled duplexes. If any have, they must be few since there’s been no stories about them. According to the Planning Department, from 2012-2024 San Francisco only saw 18 units of all housing types demolished per year.

Many if not most duplexes are on lots too small to build larger buildings. San Francisco builders do not find demolishing rent-controlled duplexes to be a sound economic strategy. The tenant protection provisions of state law strongly deter duplex demolitions. Raising fears among tenants in duplexes may be an effective political strategy, but its a false threat.

Family Zoning vs Prop K

Opponents of the Plan see parallels with Prop K, the measure that led to Joel Engardio’s recall. They see pro-Plan supervisors facing voters next year—Sherrill, Wong and Dorsey—as putting their political careers at risk.

But Prop K won the citywide vote. And Engardio’s big problem was that the Sunset Dunes park opened prior to the recall deadline, converting angry drivers into eager petition signers.

Prior to the Marina Safeway announcement, opponents of the Plan lacked a specific project like 1400 Washington to point to. But now the “No Wall on the Waterfront” campaign has a Marina Safeway project that closely resembles the deeply despised Fontana Towers. Built in 1962, opposition to the view-blocking project led to the city reducing heights along the waterfront to 40 feet. It took a state law preempting local zoning to enable the Marina Safeway project.

The Marina Safeway developers handed a huge present to Plan opponents.  But I don’t see that project getting built at 25 stories. Mayor Lurie is not going to allow that project to undermine support for his Family Zoning Plan.

San Francisco hasn’t seen a citywide ballot initiative that creates a “which side are you on” feeling in some time. Get ready for a wild 2026 for national, state and San Francisco politics!

Randy Shaw

<I>Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. </I>

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by Randy Shaw on December 1, 2025 (Beyond Chron.org)

1993 flyer. What tenants faced prior to the BIC

Five city officials with no connection to tenant groups is trying to eliminate San Francisco’s most vital tenant protection body: the Building Inspection Commission (BIC). Minutes from a recent meeting of the Streamlining Committee reflect the group’s profound ignorance regarding the BIC’s powers and mission. The Streamlining Committee (hereafter “the Committee) does not understand what the BIC does nor, more importantly, what it is supposed to do.

The Committee was created by Prop E in the November 2024 election. Prop E was the reform alternative to Prop D, which sought to eliminate dozens of commissions and strengthen mayoral power. Voters rejected Prop D, favoring Prop E’s plan for a committee to carefully assess what reforms to the commission system were necessary.

Unfortunately, the Prop E committee has ignored input from  groups affected by potential changes. As a result, the Board of Supervisors must reject the group’s plan to place a measure on the November ballot eliminating or weakening the BIC.

Tenants Deserve Habitable Dwellings

 If Committee members ever read the ballot handbook on the initiative (Prop G) that created the BIC they would know that improving living conditions for tenants drove the measure’s passage. Voters got what they were promised. Prior to the BIC, the downtown-run and politically unaccountable Bureau of Building Inspection (BBI) made housing code enforcement its lowest priority. The BBI failed tenants, landlords, and builders alike.

After the BIC was seated, stronger and far more effective code enforcement procedures were installed in record time. San Francisco went from having one the nation’s worst code enforcement systems to a national model (New York City, Oakland, and Los Angeles consulted me on how to adopt code enforcement procedures based on the San Francisco model).

Under the BIC’s leadership, DBI has never deviated from these successful code enforcement policies to this day. DBI  continues targeting bad landlords rather than good ones, which was not the case at the prior BBI.

The BIC has given San Francisco tenants the greatest protection of their living conditions than renters in any other major city in the United States. This is the success this committee wants to dismantle.

Misunderstanding the BIC’s Role

Why do these people think the BIC has failed?

According to former Director Ed Harrington, the BIC “lends itself to graft and corruption.” The retired controller claims the commission “neither adds value to the City nor provides adequate oversight of the Department of Building Inspection.”

Harrington supports eliminating the BIC, “stating it neither adds value to the City nor provides adequate oversight of the Department of Building Inspection. However, he acknowledged uncertainty about where its current functions should be reassigned.”

Why doesn’t Harrington know where BIC’s functions can be reassigned? Because he proposed its elimination without taking the time to learn what the BIC does.

Ed Harrington was the city Controller when Prop G, which I wrote to create the Department of Building Inspection and the BIC, was on the November 1994 ballot. He never asked me about what the BIC does and should do. He was a great Controller but knows nothing about the history of city code enforcement and the BIC’s role in improving it. To this day Harrington has never taken the time to talk to tenant supporters of BIC.

As a controller, Harrington made sure to perform due diligence before reaching conclusions. He has not done so here.

Graft and Corruption?

The Building Inspection Commission was designed to set housing and building policies and to approve department budgets. Its purpose was never focused on eliminating “graft and corruption” because as a commission its members do not have supervisory authority over front line staff.

Ed Harrington knows enough about how San Francisco operates to know that Commissioners are not to blame for a Building Inspector on the take. Or a permit expediter falsifying information. Commissioners do not directly supervise line employees; I believe a city charter provision bars them from doing so.

In thirty years of operation covering tens of thousands of inspections and permits, DBI has seen a handful of corruption cases. It’s also seen a huge number of cases where commission policies have resulted in tenants getting heat, hot water, and other vital services they did not get before the BIC.

Prior to the BIC the city had no Spanish-speaking housing inspectors! Nearly all housing code lawsuits filed by the city attorney were to close illegal in-law apartments!

Absent a commission, slumlords were almost never prosecuted. Why? Because the downtown interests that controlled the then-BBI did not want the agency to pay the city attorney’s office to sue slumlords.

That’s the world without a BIC that Ed Harrington and his colleagues want San Francisco to revive.

It will take all those who care about tenants and social justice to stop them.

The BIC Can Do Better

 I disagree with Harrington’s claim that the BIC does not provide adequate oversight of the DBI. But I agree the BIC should be more engaged with DBI leadership. DBI is such a large agency that commissioners must be especially dedicated to their role. It’s why talk of combining the BIC with the Planning Commission makes no sense. A single commission does not have the bandwith to set policies and monitor two large and complex departments with many very different functions.

If Planning and Building Inspection were combined under one commission, the big developer and downtown interests would go back to calling all the shots. Housing code enforcement would once again become the lowest priority, as those benefiting from that action rarely make campaign donations.

The minutes report that Vice Chair Bruss felt that the qualification requirements made appointments of quality DBI commissioners difficult. But these requirements were recently amended by Supervisor Melgar. Melgar’s reforms also shifted power over appointing the DBI Director from the BIC to the mayor.

Bruss at least knows enough to conclude that “BIC is responsible for administering mandatory state building code and regulations, which makes its role distinct.” Committee member Sophie Hayward also expressed support for BIC’s elimination but “remained hesitant without a clear understanding of where its functions would go.”

Critics of the sweeping Prop D in November 2024 felt that it had been drafted without input from the broader public. Voters overwhelmingly agreed.

The Streamlining Committee is now making the same mistake.

Randy Shaw

<I>Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. </I>

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Zohran Mamdani for NYC Dec 7, 2025 Know your rights. Protect your neighbors. New York is — and always will be — a city for all immigrants.

Dec. 9, 2025 (NYTimes.com)

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

In 1982, Phyllis Schlafly, perhaps the most important anti-feminist in American history, debated the radical feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon. Schlafly believed that sexism was a thing of the past; to her, if women had different roles in society than men, it was due to their distinct talents and inclinations. She herself, she said, had never experienced discrimination.

MacKinnon pointed out that Schlafly, who’d written extensively about defense policy, had wanted a position in Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon. Any man with Schlafly’s considerable accomplishments, MacKinnon argued, would have been given a job. Schlafly had to concede that her feminist foe had a point.

An ambitious woman who is willing to absolve the right of misogyny can go far, but rarely can she achieve the same status as a man. That’s especially true today, in a Republican Party that’s increasingly giving itself over to the most retrograde forms of sexism.

Recently several Republican congresswomen have been complaining, on and off the record, that their party’s leaders, especially Mike Johnson, the House speaker, don’t take them seriously. It started with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a onetime MAGA icon who is resigning next month. “They want women just to go along with whatever they’re doing and basically to stand there, smile and clap with approval, whereas they just have their good old boys club,” she said in September. It turns out she’s not alone in her frustration.

Last week, The Times reported on Republican women in Congress who say that Johnson “failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues,” which they seemed to attribute to his highly patriarchal evangelical Christianity. (He recently said that women, unlike men, are unable to “compartmentalize” their thoughts.)

Feeling sidelined by Johnson, some Republican women are defying him. All but one of the House Republicans who bucked leadership to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files were women. Of the eight Republicans who joined with Democrats in November to try to censure their fellow Republican Cory Mills — who has been accused of threatening his ex with revenge porn — six were women.

Recently, rumors have swirled that Nancy Mace, who is running for governor of South Carolina, could soon follow Greene in quitting the House before the end of her term. Mace has denied this, but her disgruntlement is no secret. On Monday, she wrote in The Times, “Women will never be taken seriously until leadership decides to take us seriously, and I’m no longer holding my breath.”

It’s tempting to roll one’s eyes at women who are shocked, shocked to discover sexism in a political party led by Donald Trump. But it’s a sign of progress that these women are not responding as Schlafly did, demurely accepting their subordinate position within conservatism. They may not all call themselves feminists — though at times Mace has — but they’ve internalized basic feminist assumptions about their entitlement to equal treatment. What they’ve failed to understand, however, is that those aren’t assumptions their party shares.

Much has been made about the rebirth of gutter antisemitism and racism within the conservative movement. There’s been less public alarm about the resurgence of unapologetic misogyny. Last month, there was an uproar over the support that the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, offered to Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nick Fuentes, the influential antisemite. We’ve seen far less backlash to Heritage’s hiring of Scott Yenor, who believes that workplace discrimination against women should be legal, as head of its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Among the sort of young men who revel in transgressive antisemitism — which is to say, among much of the conservative movement’s rising generation — calls to repeal women’s right to vote have become commonplace.

Not long ago, most Republicans at least pretended to accept liberal premises about human equality, sometimes even gloating about one-upping Democrats on diversity. In 2008, Republicans tried to capitalize on the disappointment some women felt about Hillary Clinton’s primary loss by putting Sarah Palin on their ticket. There was a moment in 2011 when Michele Bachmann was a leading candidate in the Republican presidential primary race. For years it was almost a truism that the first woman president would probably be a Republican, some steely American version of Margaret Thatcher in high heels and pearls. Republicans didn’t want to raise up women as a group, but they valorized a certain kind of powerful woman, one who disdained feminism and proved through her success that the strong didn’t need it.

Today, however, Republicans are much less defensive about being the party of chest-beating patriarchy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has purged women from the highest ranks of the military. Johnson has attributed school shootings to the “amoral society” wrought by “radical feminism” and the sexual revolution and has said Americans should strive to live by “18th-century values.” Vice President JD Vance is famously contemptuous of women without children.

And the lower levels of the administration are littered with defiant chauvinists. Paul Ingrassia, whom Trump recently made deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration, is probably best known for a leaked email where he referred to his “Nazi streak.” But he also reportedly intervened during a federal investigation on behalf of the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate — who is his former client and has been accused of sex trafficking — after electronic devices belonging to Tate and his brother were seized at the border, and he called opposition to women’s suffrage “very based,” a term of high praise on the right.

There are still plenty of opportunities in the MAGA movement for women who embody Trump’s preferred style of hyper-femininity, espouse traditional gender roles, or both. Indeed, the president’s obsession with aesthetics can open doors for women who might otherwise never have careers in politics. Many Republicans like having beautiful women around, and they appreciate being able to put a feminine face on their culture war crusades. But as some women in the party are realizing, there’s a big difference between being useful and being respected.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.

A correction was made on

Dec. 9, 2025

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a departing U.S. representative. She is Marjorie Taylor Greene, not Majorie.

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When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Third of May” redirects here. For the date, see May 3.

THE THIRD OF MAY 1808
Wikimedia | © OpenStreetMap
ARTIST	Francisco Goya
YEAR	1814
MEDIUM	Oil on canvas
DIMENSIONS	268 cm × 347 cm (106 in × 137 in)[1]
LOCATION	Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Third of May 1808 in Madrid (commonly known as The Third of May 1808)^[1] and also known, in Spanish, as El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid or Los fusilamientos de la montaña del Príncipe Pío,^[2] or Los fusilamientos del tres de mayo, is a painting completed in 1814 by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. In the work, Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon‘s armies during the occupation of Madrid in 1808 at the start of the Peninsular War. Along with its companion piece of the same size, The Second of May 1808 (or The Charge of the Mamelukes), it was commissioned by the provisional government of Spain at Goya’s own suggestion shortly after the ousting of the French occupation and the restoration of King Ferdinand VII.

The painting’s content, presentation, and emotional force secure its status as a ground-breaking, archetypal image of the horrors of war. Although it draws on many sources from both high and popular art, The Third of May marks a clear break from convention. By diverging from the traditions of Christian art and traditional depictions of war, it has no distinct precedent, and is acknowledged as one of the first paintings of the modern era.^[3] According to the art historian Kenneth Clark, it is “the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention”.^[4]

The Third of May 1808 inspired Gerald Holtom‘s peace sign and a number of later major paintings, including a series by Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso‘s Massacre in Korea and Guernica.^{[citation needed]}

Background

Main article: Peninsular War

Napoleon I of France declared himself First Consul of the French Republic on November 10, 1799, and crowned himself Emperor in 1804. Because Spain controlled access to the Mediterranean, the country was politically and strategically important to French interests. The reigning Spanish sovereign, Charles IV, was internationally regarded as ineffectual. Even in his own court he was seen as a “half-wit king who renounces cares of state for the satisfaction of hunting”,^[5] and a cuckold unable to control his energetic wife, Maria Luisa of Parma.^[6] Napoleon took advantage of the weak king by suggesting the two nations conquer and divide Portugal, with France and Spain each taking a third of the spoils, and the final third going to the Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy, along with the title Prince of the Algarve. Godoy was seduced, and accepted the French offer. He failed, however, to grasp Napoleon’s true intentions, and was unaware that his new ally and co-sovereign, the king’s son Ferdinand VII of Spain, was using the invasion merely as a ploy to seize the Spanish parliament and throne. Ferdinand intended not only that Godoy be killed during the impending power struggle, but also that the lives of his own parents be sacrificed.^[5]

Under the guise of reinforcing the Spanish armies and marching over Lisbon to capture the members of the House of Braganza before the eventual transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil, 23,000 French troops entered Spain unopposed in November 1807.^[7] Even when Napoleon’s intentions became clear the following February, the occupying forces found little resistance apart from isolated actions in disconnected areas, including Zaragoza.^[8] Napoleon’s principal commander, Marshal Joachim Murat, believed that Spain would benefit from rulers more progressive and competent than the Bourbons, and Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte was to be made king.^[9] After Napoleon convinced Ferdinand to return Spanish rule to Charles IV, the latter was left with no choice but to abdicate, on March 19, 1808, in favor of Joseph Bonaparte.

Although the Spanish people had accepted foreign monarchs in the past, they deeply resented the new French ruler. A French agent in Madrid wrote that “Spain is different. The Spaniards have a noble and generous character, but they have a tendency to ferocity and cannot bear to be treated as a conquered nation. Reduced to despair, they would be prepared to unleash the most terrible and courageous rebellion, and the most vicious excesses.”^[10] On May 2, 1808, provoked by news of the planned removal to France of the last members of the Spanish royal family, the people of Madrid rebelled in the Dos de Mayo Uprising. A proclamation issued that day to his troops by Marshal Murat read: “The population of Madrid, led astray, has given itself to revolt and murder. French blood has flowed. It demands vengeance. All those arrested in the uprising, arms in hand, will be shot.”^[11] Goya commemorated the uprising in his The Second of May, which depicts a cavalry charge against the rebels in the Puerta del Sol square in the center of Madrid, the site of several hours of fierce combat.^[12] Much the better known of the pair, The Third of May illustrates the French reprisals: before dawn the next day hundreds of Spaniards were rounded up and shot, at a number of locations around Madrid. Civilian Spanish opposition persisted as a feature of the ensuing five-year Peninsular War, the first to be called guerrilla war.^[9] Irregular Spanish forces considerably aided the Spanish, Portuguese, and British armies jointly led by Arthur Wellesley, who first landed in Portugal in August 1808. By the time of the painting’s conception, the public imagination had made the rioters symbols of heroism and patriotism.^[13]

Like other Spanish liberals, Goya was placed in a difficult position by the French invasion. He had supported the initial aims of the French Revolution, and hoped for a similar development in Spain. Several of his friends, like the poets Juan Meléndez Valdés and Leandro Fernández de Moratín, were overt Afrancesados, the term for the supporters—collaborators in the view of many—of Joseph Bonaparte.^[14] Goya’s 1798 portrait of the French ambassador-turned-commandant Ferdinand Guillemardet betrays a personal admiration.^[15][a] Although he maintained his position as court painter, for which an oath of loyalty to Joseph was necessary, Goya had by nature an instinctive dislike of authority.^[17] He witnessed the subjugation of his countrymen by the French troops.^[18] During these years he painted little, although the experiences of the occupation provided inspiration for drawings that would form the basis for his prints The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra).^[15]

In February 1814, after the final expulsion of the French, Goya approached the provisional government with a request to “perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions of our glorious insurrection against the Tyrant of Europe”.^[19] His proposal accepted, Goya began work on The Third of May. It is not known whether he had personally witnessed either the rebellion or the reprisals,^[12] despite many later attempts to place him at the events of either day.^[20]

The painting

Description

The Third of May 1808 is set in the early hours of the morning following the uprising^[21] and centers on two masses of men: one a rigidly poised firing squad, the other a disorganized group of captives held at gunpoint. Executioners and victims face each other abruptly across a narrow space; according to Kenneth Clark, “by a stroke of genius [Goya] has contrasted the fierce repetition of the soldiers’ attitudes and the steely line of their rifles, with the crumbling irregularity of their target.”^[22] A square lantern situated on the ground between the two groups throws a dramatic light on the scene. The brightest illumination falls on the huddled victims to the left, whose numbers include a monk or friar in prayer.^[b] To the immediate right and at the center of the canvas, other condemned figures stand next in line to be shot.^[c]

On the right side stands the firing squad, engulfed in shadow and painted as a monolithic unit. Seen nearly from behind, their bayonets and their shako headgear form a relentless and immutable column. Most of the faces of the figures cannot be seen, but the face of the man to the right of the main victim, peeping fearfully towards the soldiers, acts as a repoussoir at the back of the central group. Without distracting from the intensity of the foreground drama, a townscape with a steeple looms in the nocturnal distance,^[26] probably including the barracks used by the French.^[d] In the background between the hillside and the shakos is a crowd with torches: perhaps onlookers, perhaps more soldiers or victims.

The Second and Third of May are thought to have been intended as parts of a larger series.^[27] Written commentary and circumstantial evidence suggest that Goya painted four large canvases memorializing the rebellion of May 1808. In his memoirs of the Royal Academy in 1867, José Caveda wrote of four paintings by Goya of the second of May, and Cristóbal Ferriz—an artist and a collector of Goya—mentioned two other paintings on the theme: a revolt at the royal palace and a defense of artillery barracks.^[27] Contemporary prints stand as precedents for such a series. The disappearance of two paintings may indicate official displeasure with the depiction of popular insurrection.^[27]

The Disasters of War

Goya’s series of aquatint etchings The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra) was not completed until 1820, although most of the prints were made in the period 1810–1814. The album of proofs given by Goya to a friend, however, now in the British Museum, provides many indications of the order in which both the preliminary drawings and the prints themselves were composed.^[e] The groups identified as the earliest clearly seem to predate the commission for the two paintings, and include two prints with obviously related compositions (illustrated), as well as I saw this, which is presumably a scene witnessed during Goya’s trip to Saragossa.^[30] No se puede mirar (One cannot look at this) is clearly related compositionally and thematically;^[31] the female central figure has her arms outstretched, but pointing down, while another figure has his hands clasped in prayer, and several others shield or hide their faces. This time the soldiers are not visible even from behind; only the bayonets of their guns are seen.

Y no hay remedio (And it cannot be helped) is another of the early prints, from a slightly later group apparently produced at the height of the war when materials were unobtainable, so that Goya had to destroy the plate of an earlier landscape print to make this and another piece in the Disasters series. It shows a shako-wearing firing squad in the background, this time seen receding in a frontal rather than a rear view.^[32]

Iconography and invention

At first the painting met with mixed reactions from art critics and historians. Artists had previously tended to depict war in the high style of history painting, and Goya’s unheroic description was unusual for the time. According to some early critical opinion the painting was flawed technically: the perspective is flat, or the victims and executioners are standing too close together to be realistic. Although these observations may be strictly correct, Richard Schickel argues that Goya was not striving for academic propriety but rather to strengthen the overall impact of the piece.^[34]

The Third of May references a number of earlier works of art, but its power comes from its bluntness rather than its adherence to traditional compositional formulas.^[26] Pictorial artifice gives way to the epic portrayal of unvarnished brutality. Even the contemporary Romantic painters—who were also intrigued with subjects of injustice, war, and death—composed their paintings with greater attention to the conventions of beauty, as is evident in later works, such as Théodore Géricault‘s Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) and Eugène Delacroix‘s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People.^[33]

The painting is structurally and thematically tied to traditions of martyrdom in Christian art, as exemplified in the dramatic use of chiaroscuro, and the appeal to life juxtaposed with the inevitability of imminent execution.^[35] However, Goya’s painting departs from this tradition. Works that depicted violence, such as those by Jusepe de Ribera, feature an artful technique and harmonious composition which anticipate the “crown of martyrdom” for the victim.^[36] The man with raised arms at the focal point of the composition has often been compared to a crucified Christ,^[37] and a similar pose is sometimes seen in depictions of Christ’s nocturnal Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.^[38] Goya’s figure displays stigmata-like marks on his right hand,^[35] while the lantern at the center of the canvas references a traditional attribute of the Roman soldiers who arrested Christ in the garden.^[f] Not only is he posed as if in crucifixion, he wears yellow and white: the heraldic colors of the papacy.^[39]

The lantern as a source of illumination in art was widely used by Baroque artists, and perfected by Caravaggio.^[40] Traditionally a dramatic light source and the resultant chiaroscuro were used as metaphors for the presence of God. Illumination by torch or candlelight took on religious connotations; but in The Third of May the lantern manifests no such miracle. Rather, it affords light only so that the firing squad may complete its grim work, and provides a stark illumination so that the viewer may bear witness to wanton violence. The traditional role of light in art as a conduit for the spiritual has been subverted.^[40]

The victim is as anonymous as his killers. His entreaty is addressed not to God in the manner of traditional painting, but to an unheeding and impersonal firing squad.^[35] He is not granted the heroism of individuality, but is merely part of a continuum of victims. Beneath him lies a bloody and disfigured corpse; behind and around him are others who will soon share the same fate. Here, for the first time, according to biographer Fred Licht, nobility in individual martyrdom is replaced by futility and irrelevance, the victimization of mass murder, and anonymity as a hallmark of the modern condition.^[39]

The way the painting shows the progress of time is also without precedent in Western art.^[39] The death of a blameless victim had typically been presented as a conclusive episode, imbued with the virtue of heroism. The Third of May offers no such cathartic message. Instead, there is a continuous procession of the condemned in a mechanical formalization of murder. The inevitable outcome is seen in the corpse of a man, splayed on the ground in the lower left portion of the work. There is no room left for the sublime; his head and body have been disfigured to a degree that renders resurrection impossible.^[33] The victim is portrayed bereft of all aesthetic or spiritual grace. For the rest of the picture the viewer’s eye level is mostly along the central horizontal axis; only here is the perspectival point of view changed, so that the viewer looks down on the mutilated body.^[39]

Finally, there is no attempt by the artist to soften the subject’s brutality through technical skill. Method and subject are indivisible. Goya’s procedure is determined less by the mandates of traditional virtuosity than by his intrinsically morbid theme.^[41] The brushwork could not be described as pleasing, and the colors are restricted to earth tones and black, punctuated by bright flashes of white and the red blood of the victims. The quality of the pigment itself foreshadows Goya’s later works: a granular solution producing a matte, sandy finish.^[42] Few would admire the work for painterly flourishes, such is its horrific force and its lack of theatricality.^[41]

Provenance

Despite the work’s commemorative value, no details about its first exhibition are known, and it is not mentioned in any surviving contemporaneous accounts. This lack of commentary may be due to Fernando VII’s preference for neoclassical art,^[43] and to the fact that popular revolts of any kind were not regarded as suitable subject matter by the restored Bourbons. A monument to the fallen in the uprising, also commissioned in 1814 by the provisional government, “was stopped by Ferdinand VII, in whose eyes the senators and heroes of the war of independence found small favour, on account of their reforming tendencies”.^[44]

According to some accounts, the painting lay in storage for thirty to forty years before being shown to the public.^[45] Its mention in an 1834 Prado inventory shows that the painting remained in the possession of the government or monarchy;^[27] much of the royal collection had been transferred to the museum upon its opening in 1819. Théophile Gautier mentioned seeing “a massacre” by Goya during a visit to the museum in 1845, and a visitor in 1858 noted it as well, though both accounts refer to the work as depicting the events of the second of May,^[27] perhaps because Dos de Mayo continues to be the Spanish name for the whole episode.^[g]

In 1867, Goya’s biographer Charles Emile Yriarte considered the painting important enough to warrant its own special exhibition,^[27] but it was not until 1872 that The Third of May was listed in the Prado’s published catalog, under the title Scene of the Third of May 1808.^[27] Both the Third and Second of May suffered damage in a road accident while being transported by truck to Valencia for safety during the Spanish Civil War,^[46] apparently the only time they have left Madrid. Significant paint losses to the left side of the Second of May have been deliberately left unrepaired until the restoration work to both paintings done in 2008 in time for an exhibition marking the bicentennial of the uprising.^[47]

In 2009, the Prado selected The Third of May 1808 as one of the museum’s fourteen most important paintings, to be displayed in Google Earth at a resolution of 14,000 megapixels.^[48]

Sources

The most likely sources for The Third of May were popular imagery, prints, and broadsides. Depictions of firing squads were common in Spanish political imagery during the Napoleonic War,^[49] and Goya’s appropriations suggest that he envisaged paintings of heroic scale that would appeal to the general public.^[49] Miguel Gamborino’s 1813 devotional print The Assassination of Five Monks from Valencia is thought to have served as a source for Goya’s composition.^[50] Points of similarity include a victim in a posture of crucifixion, whose white garment sets him apart from his companions; a tonsured monk with clenched hands who kneels to his left; and an executed corpse lying in the foreground.^[51] The geometry of the composition may be an ironic comment on the French painter Jacques-Louis David‘s 1784 work Oath of the Horatii. The outstretched arms of David’s three Roman Horatii in salute are transmuted into the rifles of the firing squad; the upraised arms of the Horatii’s father become the victim’s gesture as he faces his executioners. While David painted his figures’ expressions with a neoclassical luster, Goya’s reply is fashioned from brutal realism.^[52] Goya may also have been responding to a painting by Antoine-Jean Gros; the French occupation of Madrid is the subject of Gros’s Capitulation of Madrid, The Fourth of December 1808.^[53]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_of_May_1808

Andy Borowitz2d

The Borowitz Report

Dec 7, 2025

Since his death in 1994, Richard Nixon has refrained from public comments. Today, however, he has broken his silence in a letter from Hell.

Mr. Nixon offered The Borowitz Report the exclusive right to publish the following letter he wrote to Donald Trump on one condition: that his expletives not be deleted.

Donny Boy:

Congratulations: I’m adding you to my enemies list.

It’s not because you’re evil. I usually put evil people on my friends list. Every Thursday, I play bridge with Mao, Stalin, and Kissinger. Mao and Stalin had a moral objection when I brought Henry into the game, but I begged them to give him a chance.

No, it’s not because you’re evil. It’s because you’re so fucking unoriginal.

Hmm, let’s see: a paranoid president commits a shitload of crimes, then abuses his power trying to cover them up. Why does this ring a bell?

You’re lucky I’m dead, asshole, or I’d sue you for plagiarism.

Your sad little Epstein cover-up isn’t an homage to my Watergate cover-up—it’s a fucking reboot. And I don’t appreciate a bloated asswipe like you stealing my IP.

I mean, you ripped off my playbook down to the tiniest details—including your choice of a crooked Attorney General. Do you honestly think if Pam Bondi winds up in jail, that will be a fresh plot twist? Wrong, moron! My boy John Mitchell already did that. (John’s still a good friend, by the way—just last week we went skinny-dipping in Satan’s lake of fire.)

Now, don’t get me wrong—I don’t blame you for wanting to keep the Epstein files under wraps. Beelzebub has a copy of them in his lending library and I read them last night. I’m not easily shocked, but let me say this: you are one sick fuck. There’s stuff in there that would curl Matt Gaetz’s toes.

When this shit gets out, you’re going straight to prison—and not the Canyon Ranch resort where Ghislaine is getting her daily mani-pedis.

Since you’re stealing all my best ideas, I know how you’ll try to save your ass: you’ll whip out your trusty Sharpie and scribble over every word of the Epstein files until they look like something Jackson Pollack did on a bender.

But that won’t work, fuckface. Because whenever there’s a document this spicy, there are bound to be bootlegged copies out there, just waiting to be leaked to some Jew in the media. Remember the Pentagon Papers? Of course not—you can’t even remember your wife’s name.

Let me put it this way: if you think the DOJ has all the copies of the Epstein files in existence, then Pete Hegseth isn’t the only one who’s been drinking on the job. That genius Pam left them sitting on her desk, for fuck’s sake. I’ve seen documents stored more securely in Mar-a-Lago’s public crapper.

So, once the unredacted Epstein files come out—and they will—how do you plan to save your drooping jowly ass? Well, I see you’ve already dipped into my playbook yet again: you picked a vice president so fucking loathsome that he’s impeachment insurance.

That’s what I thought I was doing when I chose Spiro. But then, what do you know, that lowlife scumbag went and got busted accepting paper bags full of cash in the White House basement. The moment he got the boot, I knew I was fucked.

I don’t know what skeletons JD has in his closet. Maybe there’s a video of him in a three-way with a couch and an ottoman. But you’ve got to do everything in your power to make sure that nothing, I repeat, nothing happens to him. Bubble-wrap that fucker.

One last thing, jerkwad: I ran into Epstein the other day at a barbecue. (Satan was mesquite grilling him in a lime cilantro marinade.) In between anguished shrieks, he told me to thank you for that perverted birthday card you gave him. I told him to thank you in person. It won’t be long.

Fuck you,

Dick Nixon

Your weekly to-dos

1. Email your Members of Congress to demand investigations into Hegseth’s murderous strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. Despite increased scrutiny, Pete Hegseth and the Trump regime continue to carry out lethal strikes on small vessels without any legal rationale. More background on these extrajudicial killings of over 80 people can be found below. 
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