The Sad Debate Over SB 827
- Josh Stephens
- May 10, 2018
- 5 min read
That was fun, wasn’t it?
Introduced as stentorian rejoinder to California’s anti-development voices in January and progressively muted into something resembling compromise by its third draft, Senate Bill 827 surely was not as awful as its critics contended nor as revelatory as its strongest supporters contended. It had big, possibly overstated goals and strategic flaws and surely would have been revised within an inch of its life had it not died in committee April 17.
It was, in short, a typical legislative process.
And yet, few land use laws captured the public imagination and animated the land use community the way SB 827 did in its three short months on this earth. I mean “imagination" literally. Opponents especially took to hyperbole and, occasionally, graphic design to vilify the bill. My favorite meme depicts Sen. Scott Wiener, the bill’s author, and Sonja Trauss, head of the YIMBY group San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation, wearing business suits and odd ninja-esque hairstyles, pledging to invade new territories against a backdrop of endless apartment towers that appear ripped from Shanghai or Hong Kong.
Other memes inexplicably depict Wiener ready to enter a dance-off against John Travolta. I think we can all agree thatyou’ve really arrived in politics when your opponents equate you with disco. (Wiener praised the memes as “exceptionally gay.”)
