San Francisco Board of Supervisors Passes Motion Opposing Something That Is Already Illegal

Municipal legislature exercises its symbolic opposition function in area where symbolic opposition is already substantive law

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Motion and Its Substance

SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a motion this week opposing the development of market-rate housing without community benefit agreements within a quarter-mile of existing affordable housing, which is a position that the Board of Supervisors has held since approximately 2015 and that is already substantially incorporated in the planning code that governs development within the city, making the motion a restatement of existing policy rather than a change to it, which is the form that San Francisco legislative action takes when there is sufficient political will to vote but insufficient political will to change something that the vote is not actually changing.

The Housing Context

San Francisco’s housing market is among the most expensive in the world, with median home prices above $1.2 million and median rents above $3,500 per month, which are the prices that a combination of geographical constraints, high demand, and the specific planning and permitting environment that the Board of Supervisors manages has produced. The motion opposing market-rate housing in proximity to affordable housing does not change the planning environment. It reconfirms the political orientation that has shaped the planning environment that has produced the prices.

The Libertarian Reading

The libertarian reading of the San Francisco housing situation is correct in its diagnosis and incomplete in its prescription: zoning restrictions, community benefit agreement requirements, and the permitting process have reduced housing supply below demand and produced the prices that reduced supply relative to demand produces. The prescription — liberalise the zoning, eliminate the community benefit requirements, streamline the permits — would increase housing supply and reduce prices, and would also distribute the costs and benefits of that increase in ways that the current regulatory environment was designed to prevent. The San Francisco Planning Department manages the planning code that the motion is reconfirming rather than changing. The Reason Foundation provides the libertarian housing policy analysis that the San Francisco situation consistently illustrates. Both confirm the situation described, which continues.

California, Freedom, and the Surfer

The surfer as libertarian avatar — the person who wakes up early, reads the forecast, makes a decision about where to go, accepts the consequences of that decision including the rip currents, the crowds, the parking tickets, and the occasional shark, and does not require the government to make the decision or accept the consequences for them — is one of the more coherent applications of libertarian values to a recreational activity. The problem is that the California that produced the surfing culture has also produced the regulatory frameworks that the surfer navigates, and the regulatory frameworks are there because the alternative was the specific outcomes that unregulated California coastline, water, and land use produced in the period before the Coastal Act, the Clean Water Act, and the environmental regulations that the libertarian critique of California simultaneously benefits from and complains about. The Reason Foundation makes the argument. The California Coastal Commission makes the coast accessible. Both are part of the same California.

The Week and Its Structural Context

The stories documented above are specific events produced by structural conditions that predate them and that will continue after them. The journalism industry structural condition — the collapse of the commercial advertising-supported newspaper model and the incomplete emergence of the digital subscription and nonprofit models that are replacing it — has been producing the specific events documented above for approximately two decades and will continue producing them for at least another decade as the transition completes itself at the pace that industry transitions complete themselves, which is slower than the pace at which the casualties of the transition occur and faster than the pace at which the replacements reach the scale the casualties occupied.

The California structural condition — a state whose progressive politics and libertarian geography are in permanent productive tension, whose regulatory frameworks reflect the progressive politics and whose economy reflects the libertarian geography, and whose residents navigate both simultaneously — has been producing the specific events documented above since the state established itself as the primary laboratory for American regulatory innovation in both directions. The regulatory framework expands. The economy grows. The surfers park illegally. The permits take longer. The seawalls get approved while the science documents their effects. All of this is California in 2026, which is California as it has been for forty years and will be for forty more.

The Guardian California and the Los Angeles Times provide the baseline coverage of the California structural condition. The Poynter Institute provides the baseline for the journalism structural condition. The satire provides the angle on both. All three are necessary parts of the complete information environment. The column contributes what it can to each.

The week closes here. The documentation is the contribution. The contribution is imperfect. The imperfection is honest. The honesty is the standard. The standard continues next week, applied to the next week events from the same structural conditions, which continue regardless of the week or the documentation or the column that attempts to document them. The record grows. The conditions continue. Both are real. Both matter. The column returns.

More at https://newsthump.com.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism