It Will Never Work
By Michael Barnes / 48 Hills (San Francisco) / September 22, 2025
State Sen. Scott Wiener’s latest upzoning bill, Senate Bill 79, is bizarrely incompetent. The bill upzones huge areas around BART, Muni and other rail transit stops in a way that is impractical. In the coming decades, there will not be enough population growth to come close to filling these new transit-oriented development zones.
The bill is a good example of how we face the confluence of powerful landowners, sympathetic pro-growth newspapers publishers, and sycophantic legislators. SB 79 is billed as a measure to help keep public transit solvent, but in reality, it’s a land grab.
The bill only applies to seven counties in California, the four Bay Area counties of San Francisco, Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara, plus Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento. Three Bay Area counties, Contra Costa, Sonoma and Marin, were carved out of the bill by an added requirement that a county contain more than 15 rail transit stops. Orange County will most likely be included once it finishes its streetcar plan. These eight counties contain 59 percent of the state population.
It’s an article of faith in the Wiener/Yimby supply-side orthodoxy that California is suffering from a severe housing shortage. The business press no longer agrees. There is no question California is suffering from an affordability problem that includes the cost of housing—yet another problem that the state legislature has failed to address. But despite the prattle about supply and demand, the amount of housing in California and its affordability are distinct issues. Affordability is primarily a problem of grotesque income inequality in California and the rest of the nation.
To understand what is wrong with SB 79, we will need to dig into a bit of geometry, but nothing more sophisticated than what we learned in middle school. Let’s begin with the concept of the acre. Historically the acre has been defined as 10 square chains. The surveyor’s chain was 66 feet (22 yards) long. One square chain is 66 by 66 feet in area, or 4,356 square feet. An acre contains 43,560 square feet.
(For the balance of this article and for all the important links, see original here)
The bad news is that Gov. Newson just signed SB 79.
Yes Mr Gormlie. However today’s U-T article seems to say the bill has little effect in the city, and no effect in Del Mar, Solana Beach, Carlsbad, Encinitas. There are no perfect solutions in a city (ours) with the best climate resulting in housing demand exceeding supply, maybe forever. I don’t know enough about San Francisco to have an opinion on the author’s article. A little bit of ‘apples to oranges’ to me.
Citations, quotes?
So, Scott Wiener has crafted 250 housing bills that have been passed by the legislature and signed into law. I guess that’s why housing is so much cheaper now than before he was elected. Oh, and the urban landscape has gotten so much more attractive and desirable. God bless you, Senator Wiener!