zlacker

>>etc-ho+(OP)
> favoring moderate causes and candidates and targeting progressives

for us non-americans, can someone please explain what general political aims the 'moderate' and 'progressive' parties represent? And where are they on the republican democrat spectrum?

>>willva+i7
The article goes out of its way to avoid naming the cause which is: housing! More affordable homes! Valuing people over historic buildings and neighborhood character! You know, the kind of stuff that actually should be considered progressive

>>habitu+C8
so the progressives want more affordable homes, and the moderates don't?

>>willva+Q9
Everyone claims to wants more affordable homes, there's just a disagreement about how to best achieve it, and a certain amount of money spent on obfuscation and practically counterproductive policies (arguably on all sides); property owners are a major political force on all sides of SF politics, and some of them want to keep prices high.

The "progressives" generally want to limit gentrification, prevent renters from being evicted, and add more subsidized housing. The "moderates" generally want to make it easier to build more housing of any type. You could broadly characterize the two groups as "default skeptical" vs. "default supportive" of real estate developers.

But housing is only one point of disagreement (albeit one of the most significant), plenty of people have more nuanced positions than this, and these camps are not entirely uniform across issues. Other points of recent disagreement include Covid lockdowns, what the school board should focus on, how hard prosecutors should go after police misconduct vs. minor crime, responses to the homeless, how much power the board of supervisors should have vs. the mayor's office, ...

>>jacobo+gd
This is an extremely charitable take. As far as can be observed by the consequences of their policy, the progs don’t actually care about maximizing new affordable housing production. If they did, they would not have referred to SB35 as genocidal policy. It also squares with their coalition which is basically NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers.

>>shuckl+Oo
I was trying to be as "extremely charitable" to both sides here as I could, because the point is to broadly characterize the two groups for the information of people unfamiliar with SF politics, not to push my own personal message. (For reference, Wiener, who wrote SB35, used to be my supervisor and I am generally a fan.)

It's not fair to say that the progressive group primarily consists of "NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers", nor is the group cohesive enough to label anyone's individual comments as representative of a "they"; if you are going to characterize either of these groups negatively you should try to quote specific comments and attribute them to specific people, rather than making vague insinuations.

>>jacobo+qp
The position on SB35 was taken by CCHO, which is not a wacky fringe organization but instead of the most influential progressive policymaking bodies around housing policy.

I think you offered charity to the point of being misleading. There is only one side who wants to make housing more affordable. The charitable view of progressive policy making is that they reject any demand for San Francisco to be a commercial center and want to preserve the lifestyle, built environment, and composition of residents to what it was in the 80s.