Being a dire threat to the status quo that created California’s housing crisis, state Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to legalize apartments near mass transit and jobs has drawn much outlandish criticism. But perhaps the most unlikely comes from James Baldwin, the gay African American writer and activist who died more than 30 years before the legislation was introduced.
Baldwin, of course, is in no position to join the SB50 opposition, but a series of cable and mail ads by the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation misappropriates his likeness and words for its cause. Disingenuously quoting comments Baldwin made in 1963 about the so-called urban renewal that displaced thousands of African Americans from San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood — “It means Negro removal,” the author said — the ads suggest Wiener’s bill would do the same.
Foundation head Michael Weinstein has been at odds with Wiener, D-San Francisco, for years, dating to his objections to the group’s opening a Castro pharmacy. Representatives of the foundation, which comprises pharmacies, thrift stores and multimillion-dollar political campaigns, have delved even deeper into American history in search of evils with which the senator’s proposed zoning reforms might be equated, having compared an earlier iteration of SB50 to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy.
The ads offer a more cartoonish version of accusations leveled at the bill from San Francisco to Beverly Hills, where local officials and longtime residents jealously guard the power to block any building that might incrementally increase the affordability and diversity of exclusive neighborhoods. The dangers most often ascribed to the bill, such as gentrification and displacement, sound strikingly like those that have already reached epidemic proportions in California. In fact, SB50 would address such ills by lowering barriers to multifamily development in the most expensive cities and suburbs.
Weinstein’s foundation has deployed similar tactics in pushing other anti-development policies, including a 2017 ballot measure to suspend high-density development in Los Angeles and last year’s statewide initiative to expand rent control, further suppressing the supply of rental housing. It could be a good omen for Wiener’s legislation that both of those campaigns failed spectacularly.