Saikat Chakrabarti finished third in the June congressional primary with just under 20 percent of the vote — 17.9 percent to be exact.
That kept him from advancing to the runoff to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi. But, for Chakrabarti’s staffers and supporters, it proved the existence of a sizable, left-leaning — but YIMBY — crowd of San Franciscans ready to organize.
A new Democratic club formed by ex-campaign staff and volunteers, tentatively named the Solidarity SF Democratic Club, aims to carry on Chakrabarti’s goals and messaging.
“Maybe it was only 20 percent, but 20 percent in a city like this is more than enough, far more than enough to swing a race,” said Alex Vanscoy, field director of Chakrabarti’s congressional campaign and one of the interim leaders of the club. He described the club as eyeing a lane that Chakrabarti represents and that Vanscoy believes is missing in San Francisco politics, “a progressive YIMBY club.”
Kaizen Betts-LaCroix, a senior field organizer for Chakrabarti and fellow club founder, said, “There’s been this idea in San Francisco that if you’re going to be a progressive, you have to be against housing production. If you’re supporting building new housing, supporting density, then you’re not a progressive.”
But being pro-tenant, pro-housing and pro-transit all at the same time can work, Betts-LaCroix said.
That coalition could quickly make the club one of the largest in the city: Some 5,000 people signed up to volunteer for Chakrabarti’s campaign, said Betts-LaCroix, who ran the volunteer program. If even only a fraction become involved, it could surpass most San Francisco political clubs, which usually have a few dozen active members.
Vanscoy, Betts-LaCroix and others also stress that the club is not formally tied to their former candidate. Chakrabarti does, too.
“This is definitely not like my personal Democratic club,” he said. He will not run for a leadership position in the club in its first term, he said. “I’m going to be a member like anyone else. I’ll have a vote like anybody else.”
“It’s best that he is a leader in the club, but hopefully we’ll also have other reasons for people to come,” added Vanscoy. If the club is too closely tied to Chakrabarti, “then when he moves on — as would be his right — the club would die.”
Chakrabarti added that the progressive YIMBY lane is “probably a majoritarian lane in San Francisco, but it’s not really neatly in either [progressive or moderate] camp right now.”
The club’s ultimate ambition is to create a force outside the tribalism of San Francisco’s progressive-moderate divide.
“We are sick of” it, said Betts-LaCroix. “We have a little kingdom organized around one person or we have factions warring with each other. We’re really looking to create a politics that is past that.”
Chakrabarti’s failed congressional bid reflected that outsider focus. He believed he could create enough momentum after seeing the victories of New York insurgent candidates Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his former boss, and built a strong following. Still, he lost to two rivals backed by the local moderate and progressive political establishments.
Many who contributed to Chakrabarti’s campaign were getting involved in politics for the first time, Betts-LaCroix said, but have — after contributing hours and hours to the campaign — become highly motivated.
After Chakrabarti’s defeat, many felt “politically homeless,” Betts-LaCroix said. Some joined the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter and the Working Families Party, said Vanscoy, but most struggled to find a home in the 23 chartered Democratic clubs in the city today.
The club has already kicked off. About 120 people attended its first meeting at Dolores Park on Aug. 1, and Vanscoy expects at least 100 to join. The next meeting will be this Sunday at 800 Irving St., the former headquarters of Chakrabarti’s campaign.
One thing is certain: The club plans to be involved in the November election. Organizers hope to get chartered by the county Democratic Party, a requirement, as quickly as possible, though it may not happen before this election.
Still, said Vanscoy, “If getting chartered stands in the way of” doorknocking and phonebanking, “I’m going to go ahead with the club and not the charter.”
The club is already phonebanking for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, according to Nadia Rahman, the political director of Chakrabarti’s campaign, who plans to join the club as a regular member. The nascent club has not decided on which local candidates or measures to support in November.
Vanscoy, for his part, is bullish. “If we have a club that has 80 members, we can really swing a lot of votes in a supervisor district.”
It does not matter whether anybody local supports or opposes YIMBY because the YIMBY have rampaged irreversibly both in San Francisco and in California. Ain’t nothing on the horizon that’s gonna undo Wiener’s developer corporate welfare. That political check has been cashed. Relitigating such a major loss only telegraphs weakness and that only begs further walloping.
What we need to do is to realize that the housing crisis is a fabrication of housing developer lobbyists, both for-profit and non-profit, because to builders, for whom restrictions on funding or zoning ARE crises.
We need to reformulate a housing agenda that is ethically independent of developer lobbyist propaganda, and to do so from first principles.
The poverty charity nonprofit dominated progressive political rump is highly vulnerable. Their politics no longer resonate with the voters, who they hold in barely concealed contempt. And their politics is nothing but a set of increasingly restrictive exclusion criteria based on prejudicial demographic pre-crime, exemptions which are readily granted to those who throw money at the nonprofits.
Remember the first episode of South Park, “Cartman gets an Anal Probe?” To paraphrase Cartman, “How come everything today has involved things either coming in or going out of nonprofit housing developers’ asses?”
Their only goal is funding CCHO members. There are no goals after CCHO members get funded. This is why progressives have collapsed politically. None of this is remotely in the political interests of a majority of voters.
The truth is that no housing solutions can ever scale due to market conditions and for affordable an inability to scale financing principal, interest, taxes, insurance and, most critically, maintenance/depreciation.
That means that YIMBY will only really be a problem during the 1/4 of the biz cycle where prices are rising because the market shuts down market rate housing production.
And with rampant statewide deregulation and background inflation, the costs of housing inputs are just going to skyrocket, making market rate and affordable projects more difficult to pencil out, even when market rate projects are relieved of exaction burdens.
We really have bigger fish to fry than to try to force the Rube Goldberg machines of housing development perform in ways that they simply cannot.
The cynical cognitive disconnect of Chakrabarti:
One can’t be anti-Wiener and pro-Housing.
“Tech money guys just fuck off please” — another majoritarian lane?