{"id":44056,"date":"2025-09-20T13:46:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-20T20:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=44056"},"modified":"2025-09-20T13:46:39","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T20:46:39","slug":"the-engardio-recall-yimby-urbanist-elitism-and-the-next-step-in-sf-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2025\/09\/20\/the-engardio-recall-yimby-urbanist-elitism-and-the-next-step-in-sf-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Engardio recall, Yimby urbanist elitism, and the next step in SF politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is there a potential alliance around growth and development that brings together a broad range of voters?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ByTIM REDMOND<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SEPTEMBER 18, 2025 (48hills.0rg)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone in the local news media is talking about the fallout from the Engardio recall. Some of them get the point, mostly: This is about more than the Great Highway, and it could mark the recreation of a powerful alliance that once passed the city\u2019s premier development-control measure and got the last real progressive, Art Agnos, elected mayor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early 1980s, land-use politics (and much of San Francisco is about land use) was \u201cdowntown against the neighborhoods.\u201d Office developers were making massive fortunes building highrises in the Financial District, and then Soma (destroying blue-collar industry), and with a compliant mayor and Board of Supes, they were starting to eye residential areas. They wanted to turn San Francisco into Manhattan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Mayor Daniel Lurie is going to have to balance his pro-Yimby policies with a restive West Side. Photo by Ebbe Roe Yovino-Smith<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This was never about housing, no matter how the Yimby historians want to play it.<\/a> Back then, nobody was building housing, because profits were higher in offices. (That, for the record, is how capitalism works.) Progressives were demanding, not opposing, new housing; one line I heard a lot was \u201cif you create a job, you need to build a housing unit.\u201d The Office Housing Production Program, entirely a progressive idea, mandated that developers who were bringing new workers to the city build housing for them; Mayor Dianne Feinstein opposed it, and anything else that would undermine developer profits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After two attempts at limiting office growth through ballot measures, which almost passed, City Hall got the message, and reduced height limits in a lot of residential neighborhoods. Again: Not about housing. Not about Nimbyism. It was about preventing office creep, preventing \u201cManhattanization.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were, of course, some people who wanted to defend single-family housing on the West Side of town. But the bigger issue was growth in general: The city was growing too fast, with too much new population (to work in those highrise offices) and not enough infrastructure (or housing) to support that growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The downzoning was supposed to buy off neighborhood opposition to office growth<\/strong>. It didn\u2019t. By 1986, fed up with paying the price on the city of developer profits, a coalition of voters passed Prop. M, which strictly limited the amount of new office space. (It probably saved the local economy; when the S&L crisis happened in the late 1980s, cities with overbuilt office space, all heavily leveraged, faced collapse).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The coalition that passed Prop. M, and a year later elected one of the few public officials to support the measure (Agnos), was made up of progressives on the East Side of town\u2014and more conservative neighborhood activists on the West Side. Agnos won the Chinese vote over John Molinari, a West Side guy, native San Franciscan\u2014and widely known ally of the big developers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Engardio recall suggests that voters in the conservative areas are unhappy with the way the new \u201cmoderate\u201d majority<\/a> at City Hall is treating them. Mayor Daniel Lurie, who won with those West Side votes and who stayed out of the recall, seemed to acknowledge that in a statement:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As I campaigned for mayor last year, I heard countless west side families say what San Franciscans have been feeling for years: that their government is doing things to them, not with them, and that government is not working to make their lives better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


As votes are still being counted and the election will be certified in the coming weeks, our team is evaluating next steps for the District Four supervisor seat.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In other words: I don\u2019t want to offend the voters who put me on office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there\u2019s a problem, because now it\u2019s all about housing<\/strong>\u2014and just as Feinstein did whatever office developers wanted, Lurie and the current majority on the Board of Supes are doing whatever market-rate housing developers want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Big Lie of the office boom, and then later the tech boom, was that development and tech was \u201ccreating jobs.\u201d It was: For mostly white, mostly male, people with finance or computer science degrees, who moved here from somewhere else to take those jobs. For the existing residents, particularly Black and Latino residents without college degrees, there were no decent jobs\u2014just displacement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Big Lie about Lurie\u2019s housing plan (and State Sen. Scott Wiener\u2019s entire approach to housing) is that more market-rate housing will bring prices down for \u201cfamilies.\u201d For existing working-class families, particularly renters, on the West Side of town, the new luxury housing will mean nothing but displacement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the axioms of progressive urban planning is: First, stabilize existing vulnerable communities. Lurie\u2019s plan does nothing of the sort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Same goes for small businesses, which will bear the brunt of new housing development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s interesting to see David Ho, who has mostly worked for more \u201cmoderate\u201d candidates and causes, saying this<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

(Engardio\u2019s) evolution to this white urbanist agenda, aligned with YIMBYs, is out of touch with the majority of the D4 constituency,\u201d said David Ho, a progressive political consultant and Chinatown organizer, referring to how leadership of such groups tends to be white.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Ho is not a \u201cprogressive\u201d consultant. In fact, he\u2019s often attacked progressives, including me. But it\u2019s true that a lot of the pro-tech, pro-late-stage-capitalist fans of more market-rate housing are younger and richer and whiter than the communities they could be damaging. There is a lot of elitism in the Yimby \u201curbanist\u201d movement, and there always has been, going back to Richard Florida.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wiener and his allies, including Engardio, talk about how cities have to change, how San Francisco can\u2019t be set in amber. That\u2019s fair\u2014but when cities change, the people who have lived here for decades and the legacy businesses that anchor communities shouldn\u2019t be forced to leave so people with more money can take their place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Yimby, Wiener, and Lurie argument is that more market-rate housing will solve the problem, by giving the new rich people a place to live. If that were true, Vancouver BC would be the most affordable city in North America. It\u2019s the least affordable\u2014after doing what the Yimbys wanted for decades<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know if the post-Engardio politics can spark some discussion about economic inequality (the real source of the housing crisis), class issues, and the future of the city. But there\u2019s an opening.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit\u00a0here<\/a>. We also invite you to join the conversation on our\u00a0Facebook<\/a>,\u00a0Twitter<\/a>, and\u00a0Instagram<\/a>.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Redmond<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is there a potential alliance around growth and development that brings together a broad range of voters? ByTIM REDMOND SEPTEMBER 18, 2025 (48hills.0rg) Everyone in the local news media is talking about the fallout from the Engardio recall. Some of them get the point, mostly: This is about more than… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44056"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44057,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44056\/revisions\/44057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}