OAKLAND — Protesters shouted down Sen. Scott Wiener on Tuesday as he stood on the steps of Oakland City Hall, attempting to introduce a revamped bill to spur more housing development throughout California.

For nearly an hour, while Wiener and other supporters ran through the merits of Senate Bill 50, protesters including activist group Moms 4 Housing drowned them out with chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, luxury housing has got to go” and “Where’s the affordable housing?”

The clash between two pro-housing groups — both of which believe the Bay Area faces a crippling affordability crisis but disagree over how to fix it — symbolizes the contentious nature of the California housing debate.

It also highlights the polarizing aspects of the proposed legislation and sets the stage for a tense campaign as Wiener races to push the bill through a Senate floor vote by the Jan. 31 deadline.

“We have a terrible housing crisis here in California, and we see the effects every day. People are being pushed into poverty, and people are being pushed out of California, and people are being pushed into multi-hour commutes,” Wiener, D-San Francisco, said Tuesday as protesters yelled “California hates the homeless” and “No more market-rate apartments,” at times making it impossible to hear what he was saying.

The irony is that everyone who was standing with Wiener on Tuesday agrees with Moms 4 Housing’s pro-affordable housing message, said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, which supports SB 50.

“In shortages, people turn on one another and become very ‘us vs. them,’ ” she said. “And it’s hard to break that.”

Flanked by supporters including Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, Sen. Nancy Skinner and Assemblymembers Ash Kalra and Buffy Wicks, Wiener intended to use Tuesday’s news conference to re-launch SB 50. The bill, first introduced last year, would force cities to allow duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes on land currently zoned only for single-family homes and to approve larger apartment buildings near transit stops and job hubs.

The measure stalled in the Senate in May after the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee decided to turn it into a two-year bill moments before a key vote.

The bill faced intense opposition from the beginning, including from some city officials, who worried it would strip their ability to decide what gets built in their jurisdictions, and from activists such as Michael Weinstein of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who argued the bill would lead to gentrification and the displacement of low-income residents.

Under the new SB 50, cities will have at least two years to write their own “local flexibility plan” to add more housing, as long as the plan meets the goals of SB 50, including not increasing car usage and adding density across the board — not just in low-income areas. It also gives affordable housing preference to low-income residents already living in the community, in an attempt to prevent displacement.

But protesters with Moms 4 Housing — a group started by homeless women who took over an empty, investor-owned West Oakland house in November — worry the bill will allow too many luxury homes to be built, and not enough affordable housing. For Moms 4 Housing member Misty Cross, SB 50 seems to be another example of a solution that doesn’t work.

“I don’t know how that’s going to help me,” said Cross, who is living in the West Oakland house with her three children and other Moms 4 Housing members.

The affordable housing provisions included in SB 50 aren’t enough, Cross said, though she admitted she hadn’t yet read the updated version.

Wiener maintains his bill will benefit people like Cross.

“SB 50 will be a huge boon for affordable housing,” he said to reporters after the news conference. “I have to be clear about that.”

The bill bars demolition of a residential building if a renter has lived there in the past seven years, delays implementation in communities deemed susceptible to gentrification and requires new construction to be at least 15% to 25% affordable.

After Mayor Schaaf spoke to the crowd Tuesday, angry, tearful Moms 4 Housing members confronted her directly about helping the city’s low-income residents. Schaaf’s office said the mayor got one of the women’s phone number to arrange a follow-up meeting.

“The anger we saw today was real and legitimate — we are in the depths of a housing crisis that is unjustly impacting our most vulnerable residents, and particularly African American residents,” Schaaf said in an emailed statement. “The path to undo the harms caused by decades of exclusionary housing policy is to adopt legislation like SB50, which is one of a larger array of transformative changes that will help lift all of us out of this crisis.”

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo also weighed in, via Twitter.

“Am puzzled to see @moms4housing take such an adversarial posture toward #SB50, which could do more to produce affordable and accessible housing than virtually any other bill in the last decade,” he tweeted.

Am puzzled to see @moms4houaing take such an adversarial posture toward #SB50, which could do more to produce affordable and accessible housing than virtually any other bill in the last decade. There’s room for all of us to push together w/@Scott_Wiener https://t.co/wIF84wyVxS — Sam Liccardo (@sliccardo) January 7, 2020

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26-story housing highrise eyed in downtown San Jose Despite their clash Tuesday, Wiener said he believes in Moms 4 Housing, the members’ mission and their democratic right to protest.

“I support Moms 4 Housing,” he said. “I support what they’re trying to do.”