This piece was originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Scott Wiener has passed a lot of “housing legislation” in Sacramento, but he’s got painfully few actual homes to show for all his efforts.

Even from his days as a San Francisco supervisor, he was no friend of housing justice. My first dealings with him were in 2013 when he and then-Supervisor Mark Farrell tried to cannibalize thousands of rent-controlled units into luxury condos. In 2016 Wiener supported a ballot measure to criminalize homelessness on the streets. These are the types of things he was a YES on.

But when it came to poor and working-class people, he was a NIMBY NO all the way. He opposed 2018’s Prop F to guarantee legal counsel for tenants. Scott stood by his real estate friends on two statewide efforts to expand rent control by repealing Costa Hawkins. And in 2018 he opposed Prop. C, a comprehensive approach to addressing homelessness through emergency rent subsidies, housing first, and mental health and addiction support.

These aren’t the only reasons I distrust Scott. His acceptance of Israeli genocide (only recently switched after a painfully embarrassing episode of waffling in public) and his ongoing attempts to erase teaching about Palestine in our schools is not unrelated to his housing positions. His support for the dispossession of Palestinian lands has its local corollary in his acceptance of the displacement of working-class communities in his own city.

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