Photo: Sarahbeth Maney / Special To The Chronicle 2019

Just in time for Christmas, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has reiterated its opposition to housing what Ebenezer Scrooge memorably called “the surplus population.”

The supervisors, who intermittently govern a city suffering from a full-blown housing and homelessness crisis, took the time and legislative energy this week to pass yet another symbolic resolution against SB50, which would legalize multifamily housing near mass transit and job centers. Remarkably, they did so twice in one day, first as the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and then as the Board of Supervisors. Absurdly, they did so despite having passed a resolution against the same bill in April and against its predecessor, SB827, the year before.

Led by Supervisor Gordon Mar, who championed all three of this year’s anti-SB50 measures, the supervisors have distinguished themselves as the most virulently anti-housing governing body in California, which is saying a lot. While many city councils have passed resolutions against SB50, its sponsor, San Francisco’s own state Sen. Scott Wiener, couldn’t think of a jurisdiction other than his hometown that had done so more than once, let alone in triplicate. Even as the senator has made a series of concessions to the bill’s critics, the board has only grown more reflexive and lockstep in its opposition, with all but Supervisor Ahsha Safaí joining the latest vote.

The supervisors preside over a city where the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is near $3,500, the homeless population has grown 17% in two years and a major convention just fled for Las Vegas partly due to local “street conditions.” By compulsively reiterating their revulsion at a measure that would force them to do more to alleviate these ills, the supervisors have accidentally proved its necessity.

Their cries to preserve local control, neighborhood character and housing affordability are all ways of saying they don’t want more homes. The luxury rates being charged for new housing and the gentrification of low-income neighborhoods are functions of the scarcity created by anti-development policies in neighborhoods like Mar’s Sunset, which produced a grand total of three new housing units last year. Restrictive zoning, sclerotic bureaucracy and endless appeals have saddled California with the worst housing shortage on the U.S. mainland, and local officials in exclusive enclaves from San Francisco to Beverly Hills won’t change any of it unless forced to do so.

“The housing status quo in San Francisco is not working,” Wiener said. “It’s a disaster.”

The supervisors are increasingly surrounded by more courageous examples. Mayor London Breed, who has seen her recent efforts to streamline affordable housing development blocked and diluted by the supervisors, has endorsed SB50 along with her counterparts in Oakland and San Jose. And even as the San Francisco board threw its latest tantrum against the measure Tuesday, supervisors in Santa Clara County, another hotbed of anti-housing sentiment, unanimously endorsed the bill.

The efficacy of the approach is already becoming clear in Berkeley, another ostensibly progressive but practically exclusive city. Spurred by San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu’s bill overruling local obstruction of high-density housing near BART stations, a sort of mini-SB50 enacted over staunch opposition last year, the city’s habitually anti-housing officials have begun to acknowledge that a sea of surface parking is not the best use of land around a mass-transit hub.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín told The Chronicle that “the housing affordability crisis, the people living in tents on our streets and the impact of people driving because they have to move far away have required me, and required all of us, to act differently.” In fact, it was a state law that required Berkeley to act differently.

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