Public Comment

In case you didn’t already have reason enough to vote against Sacramento incumbents Nancy Skinner and Buffy Wicks: They oppose letting people work from home. In fact, they apparently even oppose reducing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. 

Check out their #2 and #4 signatures on this remarkable letter. It’s designed to intimidate the Bay Area’s regional transportation agency, MTC, into dropping a mandate that large employers allow 60% of their employees to work from home by 2050. MTC’s goal is to slash the climate impacts of daily commuting. 

Here’s the background: Sen. Scott Wiener (the letter’s actual author), Skinner, and Wicks have spent their whole past term trying to destroy local governments’ land-use authority, to force lots more dense luxury housing into Bay Area communities. This was allegedly intended to reduce the climate impact of long-distance commuting. 

Now a regional agency offers a direct, effective, and measurable tool to reduce GHG emissions at their source. (By counteracting employers’ archaic demands for workers to show their faces in offices.) And incredibly, the three oppose it. 

They’ve dragooned several other Bay Area legislators – who should know better – into signing the letter. (We’re happy to at least not see a signature from Berkeley mayor Jesse Arreguin.)  

The signers have different motivations. San Francisco’s and San Jose’s mayors are transparently trying to shore up downtown real-estate interests. Tech firms’ demand for office space has exploded commercial rents, kicked civic amenities like art galleries out of downtown San Francisco, and inflamed our decade-long nightmare of soaring housing costs and displacement. 

Now the pandemic has taught most white-collar organizations to be effective at working remotely. The best-positioned are the tech companies, which were already offshoring work – to places like Bangalore and Indiana – to escape exactly the vicious cycle of high salary demands and high housing costs they’d created here. Their office buildings have become empty, expensive white elephants – bearing sky-high leases that won’t be renewed. 

But what’s motivating Wiener, Skinner, and Wicks, the Three Displaceketeers? They yelp about potential harm to transit agencies, but that’s patently false. Pre-pandemic, the region’s biggest transit operator, BART, was straining capacity because of all the office workers clambering into downtown San Francisco. The proposed work-from-home mandate – building on today’s work-from-home reality – is a huge relief valve. It would allow BART to actually function, without huge new capital investments which have no likely source. 

What’s really eating the Displaceketeers is losing their ability to micromanage everyone’s lives – forcing us into the dense, “walkable,” high-priced urban Wienervilles and Skinnervilles they prescribe for all of us. And further constraining our lives with new costs and miseries, like MTC’s lurking notion of turning every foot of regional freeways into an expensive toll lane. 

Meanwhile, the Displaceketeers keep raking in huge donations from big developers. And preaching mass restraint and suffering to save the climate, while they (presumably) drive fat State-funded SUVs between the Bay Area and Sacramento, every day the Legislature is in normal session. 

This election is a chance to send a message about this kind of arrogant hypocrisy. That’s why we urge votes for Skinner’s and Wicks’ challengers, Jamie Dluzak and Sara Brink. And if you live in San Francisco, you have the far greater honor of helping to retire Wiener – the mastermind of all this mischief – by voting for progressive challenger Jackie Fielder.