Look, I'm following this congressional race in San Francisco pretty closely because it really gets at something fundamental about how we think about housing in the Bay Area. According to reporting from CalMatters Housing, this race between Supervisor Connie Chan and State Senator Scott Wiener to succeed Nancy Pelosi is shaping up as a real clash over how to tackle the city's housing affordability crisis.
What's interesting here is that both candidates call themselves progressive, but they have very different philosophies about solving the problem. Chan is positioning herself as the grassroots progressive, rejecting corporate PAC money and emphasizing that she's fighting for working families and tenants. She's been vocal about protecting existing residents from displacement and preventing the kind of urban renewal that harmed San Francisco's Black community decades ago. Wiener, on the other hand, comes from a pro-housing, yes-in-my-backyard perspective. He's authored legislation that's streamlined building permits across the state, reportedly cutting average permit wait times from years down to just a few months.
The tension between them really comes down to this: Chan has consistently opposed new development projects in her supervisorial district, including a nearly 500-unit mixed-income housing project near a BART station that she helped kill back in 2021. She's also fought state-mandated zoning changes and sued the state over housing requirements she felt unfairly targeted San Francisco. Chan says she's protecting tenants and small businesses from the disruption of construction, and that she can support accountability and environmental review while still opposing these particular projects.
Wiener believes the state needs to force local governments to actually build housing rather than just promise to, since cities like San Francisco have resisted new construction for decades. He's argued that the state and federal government have a role to play in overriding local obstruction. Housing advocates and some progressives have been frustrated by what they see as San Francisco's generational pattern of blocking new housing, which they argue is what created the affordability crisis in the first place.
The race has gotten attention partly because a third candidate, Saikat Chakrabarti, who had energy among younger voters for combining anti-establishment messaging with support for housing abundance, didn't make the general election runoff. That left voters to choose between Chan's tenant-focused protectionism and Wiener's abundance approach, both wrapped in progressive rhetoric.
What I'm seeing locally here in the East Bay is that this same tension is playing out in conversations with my clients and neighbors. Folks care deeply about protecting existing tenants and preserving community character, but they also recognize that without more housing supply across all price points, we're not going to solve affordability. In Fremont and throughout the region, we need leaders who can figure out how to build sustainably while addressing legitimate displacement concerns, rather than just blocking everything that comes forward.
