By blocking housing and aligning with NIMBYs, progressives hoisted themselves on their own petard. Progressives created the conditions for accelerating high housing costs - resulting in this situation where the only people who can afford to move in are tech people.
2020 and forward also saw tech people deciding to actually pay attention to politics and stop apologizing for being tech people, and decide to become politically active. Ergo Garry Tan and GrowSF becoming a real force in local politics.
Bullish SF now that they are waking up and deciding that results actually matter more than slogans!
Eskenazi's quote about Republicans is indicative of the often poor quality of political analysis from SF progressives. There are almost no Republicans who fit that description. In fact, he's describing liberals but calling them Republicans.
Great piece. On if SF voters are "real progressives" I'd argue that SF is ironically one of the few cities in the country that's progressive enough to actually try to implement a number of the progressive-left doctrines (or what Matt Zeitlin called "The progressive non-profit industrial complex agenda") which resulted in a sort of moderate center left/normie revolt that we are now seeing. You might compare it to Liverpool in the 80's where militant socialists succeeded in taking over city government and this led to a massive public backlash because they turned out to be really bad at running the show. You also saw something similar in Minneapolis where progressives succeeded in getting a measure on the ballot in 2021 to abolish the MPD and replace it with some sort of new department (we never got to learn how this would work....) and as a result the voters voted it down by a wide margin.
It's a sign of your progressive nature that things "no new housing built by capitalism" or "Lincoln was bad actually" are taken seriously and not laughed off the stage or ignored like they would be in Santa Monica or where ever.
I'll second your take on the election results. The board of supervisors in SF are incompetent and they have been for a very long time. I don't see this as much as a moderate vs. progressive thing, but more of technocratic vs. populist thing. The current "progressive" board of supervisors is anti-housing and they are anti-housing because they don't believe that increasing supply will actually lead to lower rents. This is an understandable position, but it is also an anti-science position. Worse, the very people that they claim to be sticking up for are those who suffer the most.
If moderates do succeed in removing barriers to building, I expect a big backlash. There are a lot of old hippies in the city and their entire net worth is locked up in their housing. They don't like change and they don't like anything that might in any way affect their property values. Like the hippies of yore, their values are performative and they will fight change tooth and nail, and feel smugly superior while they do it to boot.
The element missing here, though, is that no one from the "progressive" coalition has been elected mayor of San Francisco since Art Agnos in the 1980s. Ed Lee was very close to the business and tech industries. London Breed has warred with the progressive faction. Gavin Newsom was socially liberal but fiscally moderate. Frank Jordan was fairly conservative. San Francisco as a progressive city is a bit of a myth because the top executives are invariably center-left, pro-business. Other cities do elect progressive mayors. There has been no equivalent of Bill de Blasio in SF, no equivalent of Brandon Johnson, no equivalent of Michelle Wu, no equivalent, perhaps, of Karen Bass. Not in the last 20 years, at least.
Going back further, the last unabashed progressive with any real power in SF was probably George Moscone, who was of course assassinated with Harvey Milk. His successor was the decidedly non-progressive Dianne Feinstein.
I'm not an SF voter, I'm in the east bay, but I basically consider SF "Progressives" to be a form of confused Republican. NIMBYism is just "build a wall" conservatism on a local scale. Their complaints about losing this election to "conservatives" ring very hollow to me. I acknowledge that there's more to this than the single issue of housing, and the public safety and policing issues do read as more "conservative" to me, but the SF "Progressive" positions also seems clearly insane (another hallmark of Republicans). They should just switch parties, they'd be more comfortable.
I'm not very sold on the idea of forcing people to go to treatment who don't want to be there. That just screws over the people who actually want to recover from addiction by turning treatment into the place you meet people to tempt you back into using.
I guess the real question is: can progressivism deliver results?
It certainly used to be able to. But vast majority of real "liberation" that can realistically occur probably already has which makes additional results pretty tough unless you embrace the zero-sum game of the woke or the increasingly absurd intersectional oppressions.
Ideologies often have a hard time accepting when they've won.
I don’t live in SF but from the East Bay care about the City a lot, and I’m quite puzzled as to why there doesn’t seem to be a movement to completely re-write the City Charter. It would I’m sure receive tremendous pushback from established interests, and it seems badly needed. Voters might well support it. Yes? No?
As a 4th generation San Franciscan (who has moved away) I think you got it mostly right. Somebody needs to come up with better descriptions of the 2 groups however. I am envisioning someone in DesMoines reading the headline (but never visited the City) being shocked at SF being moderate...only to be trumped by Xi Jing Ping reading it (having visited) and thinking WOW - I'm a moderate!
I think it's pretty fair to say that this is also a national trend. There are a lot of people who fit into the definition of "progressive" (broadly: socially liberal, with a belief that government intervention can and does improve on market outcomes in particular cases).
But the "in particular cases" piece is hugely important. A lot of what I've observed in allegedly "progressive" governance is the idea that solving problems is easy, and the reason they aren't solved is that anyone proposing anything different from their pet fix is a bad faith ogre. If rent control isn't working, it must be that some Republican or "liberal" (read: closet Republican) is sabotaging it, or it hasn't been tried, not that it doesn't work.
I think the vast majority of progressives nationally, including in San Francsico, who aren't very loud but are quite numerous, have a pretty simple worldview: we want a just society. We want things like education, safety, healthcare, etc. to be delivered in the most effective way possible. We're open to government playing a role in delivering those things, and the size of its role should be a function of what empirically is shown to work. And we're open to taxes being hiked on us both to deliver broad social services and targeted supports to those that need it.
But the key is the empirics-- the fix has to work. If it's not working, we should try something else.
I really enjoyed this article . Quite informative and it discussed a lot of various opinions about the whys on how things came about and the wheres things might be going. Personally, I think San Francisco is incrementally improving.
By blocking housing and aligning with NIMBYs, progressives hoisted themselves on their own petard. Progressives created the conditions for accelerating high housing costs - resulting in this situation where the only people who can afford to move in are tech people.
2020 and forward also saw tech people deciding to actually pay attention to politics and stop apologizing for being tech people, and decide to become politically active. Ergo Garry Tan and GrowSF becoming a real force in local politics.
Bullish SF now that they are waking up and deciding that results actually matter more than slogans!
Eskenazi's quote about Republicans is indicative of the often poor quality of political analysis from SF progressives. There are almost no Republicans who fit that description. In fact, he's describing liberals but calling them Republicans.
Great piece. On if SF voters are "real progressives" I'd argue that SF is ironically one of the few cities in the country that's progressive enough to actually try to implement a number of the progressive-left doctrines (or what Matt Zeitlin called "The progressive non-profit industrial complex agenda") which resulted in a sort of moderate center left/normie revolt that we are now seeing. You might compare it to Liverpool in the 80's where militant socialists succeeded in taking over city government and this led to a massive public backlash because they turned out to be really bad at running the show. You also saw something similar in Minneapolis where progressives succeeded in getting a measure on the ballot in 2021 to abolish the MPD and replace it with some sort of new department (we never got to learn how this would work....) and as a result the voters voted it down by a wide margin.
It's a sign of your progressive nature that things "no new housing built by capitalism" or "Lincoln was bad actually" are taken seriously and not laughed off the stage or ignored like they would be in Santa Monica or where ever.
I'll second your take on the election results. The board of supervisors in SF are incompetent and they have been for a very long time. I don't see this as much as a moderate vs. progressive thing, but more of technocratic vs. populist thing. The current "progressive" board of supervisors is anti-housing and they are anti-housing because they don't believe that increasing supply will actually lead to lower rents. This is an understandable position, but it is also an anti-science position. Worse, the very people that they claim to be sticking up for are those who suffer the most.
If moderates do succeed in removing barriers to building, I expect a big backlash. There are a lot of old hippies in the city and their entire net worth is locked up in their housing. They don't like change and they don't like anything that might in any way affect their property values. Like the hippies of yore, their values are performative and they will fight change tooth and nail, and feel smugly superior while they do it to boot.
The element missing here, though, is that no one from the "progressive" coalition has been elected mayor of San Francisco since Art Agnos in the 1980s. Ed Lee was very close to the business and tech industries. London Breed has warred with the progressive faction. Gavin Newsom was socially liberal but fiscally moderate. Frank Jordan was fairly conservative. San Francisco as a progressive city is a bit of a myth because the top executives are invariably center-left, pro-business. Other cities do elect progressive mayors. There has been no equivalent of Bill de Blasio in SF, no equivalent of Brandon Johnson, no equivalent of Michelle Wu, no equivalent, perhaps, of Karen Bass. Not in the last 20 years, at least.
Going back further, the last unabashed progressive with any real power in SF was probably George Moscone, who was of course assassinated with Harvey Milk. His successor was the decidedly non-progressive Dianne Feinstein.
I'm not an SF voter, I'm in the east bay, but I basically consider SF "Progressives" to be a form of confused Republican. NIMBYism is just "build a wall" conservatism on a local scale. Their complaints about losing this election to "conservatives" ring very hollow to me. I acknowledge that there's more to this than the single issue of housing, and the public safety and policing issues do read as more "conservative" to me, but the SF "Progressive" positions also seems clearly insane (another hallmark of Republicans). They should just switch parties, they'd be more comfortable.
I'm not very sold on the idea of forcing people to go to treatment who don't want to be there. That just screws over the people who actually want to recover from addiction by turning treatment into the place you meet people to tempt you back into using.
I also can't help but notice that the "moderate" wing seems to be disproportionately Asian.
Good post but my constructive criticism is that it was tricky to read at points due to long sentences and grammatical errors.
I guess the real question is: can progressivism deliver results?
It certainly used to be able to. But vast majority of real "liberation" that can realistically occur probably already has which makes additional results pretty tough unless you embrace the zero-sum game of the woke or the increasingly absurd intersectional oppressions.
Ideologies often have a hard time accepting when they've won.
I don’t live in SF but from the East Bay care about the City a lot, and I’m quite puzzled as to why there doesn’t seem to be a movement to completely re-write the City Charter. It would I’m sure receive tremendous pushback from established interests, and it seems badly needed. Voters might well support it. Yes? No?
"....more conservative positions...."
There are no conservative positions in San Francisco. You either have totally insane leftists or just plain insane leftists.
As a 4th generation San Franciscan (who has moved away) I think you got it mostly right. Somebody needs to come up with better descriptions of the 2 groups however. I am envisioning someone in DesMoines reading the headline (but never visited the City) being shocked at SF being moderate...only to be trumped by Xi Jing Ping reading it (having visited) and thinking WOW - I'm a moderate!
I think it's pretty fair to say that this is also a national trend. There are a lot of people who fit into the definition of "progressive" (broadly: socially liberal, with a belief that government intervention can and does improve on market outcomes in particular cases).
But the "in particular cases" piece is hugely important. A lot of what I've observed in allegedly "progressive" governance is the idea that solving problems is easy, and the reason they aren't solved is that anyone proposing anything different from their pet fix is a bad faith ogre. If rent control isn't working, it must be that some Republican or "liberal" (read: closet Republican) is sabotaging it, or it hasn't been tried, not that it doesn't work.
I think the vast majority of progressives nationally, including in San Francsico, who aren't very loud but are quite numerous, have a pretty simple worldview: we want a just society. We want things like education, safety, healthcare, etc. to be delivered in the most effective way possible. We're open to government playing a role in delivering those things, and the size of its role should be a function of what empirically is shown to work. And we're open to taxes being hiked on us both to deliver broad social services and targeted supports to those that need it.
But the key is the empirics-- the fix has to work. If it's not working, we should try something else.
For those of us living in the Midwest there is real Judean people's front vs people's front of Judea vibe here.
I mean I went to grad school in the bay area so I get the context but still.
I really enjoyed this article . Quite informative and it discussed a lot of various opinions about the whys on how things came about and the wheres things might be going. Personally, I think San Francisco is incrementally improving.