Image by James Vaughan

In a strange mea culpa, liberal SF senator Scott Wiener admits that progressive governance has failed local cities in many respects. But his apologia suggests he doesn’t really mean it. From an SF Standard editorial.

Democrats must distinguish ourselves as the party of results by focusing on governing well in the places where we hold power. That will mean reckoning with our past failures.  

Time-consuming and expensive processes in California and other blue states have made it difficult to develop the things that reduce costs for people and improve their lives. Housing comes to mind most vividly. We have made it incredibly hard to build new homes, with onerous zoning, permitting, and review processes choking off supply.Sign up to receive updates on Opp Now articles. Click HERE.

These policy choices have given us a massive housing shortage that has led to ballooning costs. Housing is a significant reason middle- and working-class people have migrated from blue to red states. As a result, California, New York, and Illinois are likely to lose a combined 10 seats in the House of Representatives — and thus 10 votes in the Electoral College — after the 2030 census.

But it’s not only about housing. California’s energy costs are off the charts. PG&E bears a lot of blame for neglecting its infrastructure to boost profits, then passing along the costs to consumers. At the same time, we are falling behind on our long-standing clean energy leadership goals, with Texas now ahead of California on clean energy generation. It’s still too time-intensive and expensive to build clean energy infrastructure in California. That needs to change if we’re going to truly reduce energy costs.

Transportation is another area where California and other blue states are falling short. It’s appalling that California doesn’t have a true statewide rail system. To get from the Bay Area to Los Angeles currently takes twice as long by rail as by car. California’s addiction to process over results has led to our high-speed rail project getting bogged down at every step, resulting in growing delays and cost overruns and a decline in public confidence {Editors’ note: Wiener gets Understatement of the Month for that formulation on HSR} in this critical project.

Local and regional public transportation projects are not immune. Delays plagued San Francisco’s first Bus Rapid Transit project on Van Ness, the Geary BRT project, and a similar project in the East Bay. Of note, the Van Ness BRT line, once it was finally implemented (after far too many years), has been a huge success — it’s now much faster, and ridership is exceeding pre-pandemic levels. 

California, like many states, also has a significant shortage of child-care capacity, making it incredibly expensive for working families to afford this essential service. While subsidies are important to help people afford child care — and we recently increased those subsidies in California’s budget — they don’t solve the basic problem {Editors’ note: a more precise economic analysis would acknowledge that subsidies in fact exacerbate the supply problem.} We need more educators and facilities. Solving this basic supply issue requires a careful examination of regulatory limitations to expanding capacity while also addressing the barriers that prevent child-care professionals from entering the field, including low pay and insufficient benefits

California also, at times, increases the cost of living by not engaging in thoughtful regulation to protect consumers and small businesses. We are lagging badly behind in regulating pharmacy benefit managers {Editors’ note: Ah, prices are too high because we don’t regulate enough—all economists would agree that the reverse is true}, the middlemen of the healthcare industry who jack up prescription drug costs. California has not even capped insulin co-pays {Editors’ note: Back from the Economists’ Graveyard, Wiener advocates for the Return of Wage and Price Controls}, while similar reforms have advanced in red states like Texas and West Virginia.

The solutions to these affordability problems are manifold — they require permitting reform, improved government capacity and efficiency, strategic public investments, smart government interventions that actually reduce costs, and, in some cases, letting the private sector do its thing with reasonable {Editors’ note: Read that closely: “in some cases” Wiener believes he should let the market “do its thing;” the flip disregard of basic economics and the role of the markets here is eye-popping}, but not heavy-handed, regulation. The common denominator is that California and other blue states need to demonstrate, quickly, that we can deliver the things that reduce costs, streamline government programs, and improve people’s lives.