No local issue divides San Francisco congressional candidates Scott Wiener and Connie Chan more than land use.
Urbanism is Wiener’s top focus. He has worked for his 16 years in office to create a San Francisco that has more transit, more bicycle lanes and far more housing. He was a YIMBY long before that stance was popular.
Like most city moderates, he believes in a market-based solution to the affordability crisis.
Chan, meanwhile, has been more cautious. She has advocated for avoiding changes that upset residents or risk displacement of existing San Franciscans.
Like most city progressives, she is skeptical private development will decrease housing and rent costs.
That is not an unfamiliar divide. Land use has long been one of the city’s most contentious issues, to the point where it is often used as a de-facto litmus test for whether someone falls into the city’s progressive or moderate camp.
Though in Congress neither Wiener or Chan would make local land use decisions, supporters and detractors alike feel that the two candidates’ records on housing and transportation show their priorities, and how they would approach governing at the federal level.
Here are some of the decisions Chan and Wiener have made in their careers.
Bus rapid lanes, car-free streets, and regressive taxes
Chan has frequently drawn the ire of bike and mass transit advocates because she has not supported some projects that come at the expense of cars.
One was a 2023 plan to build a rapid bus lane for the 38-Geary and 38R, dedicating one lane of the street exclusively to bus use. The proposal sought to implement the lane on the 32 blocks between Stanyan Street and 34th Avenue, letting buses speed down the boulevard without encountering traffic. Transit advocates strongly supported it.
But Geary’s small business owners were concerned the plan would make it harder for customers to drive to their stores because the plan removed 31 parking spots, about one per block. This was scaled down from the original proposal, which removed 70.
They found a champion in Chan, who urged the city to delay the project.
“We appreciate Connie Chan, she really listened to us,” said Sean Kim, the owner of Joe’s Ice Cream.
But Chan’s request for a delay frustrated transit activists, who pushed back on the argument that the loss of parking would tank the commercial corridor. They pointed to Clement Street, arguing that it is a thriving corridor in part because it is less car-centric.
In August 2023, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency moved forward with the bus lane. Chan criticized the agency for ignoring resident concerns, saying residents should not have to “suffer the mismanagement of our transit agency by ideologue bureaucrats.”
By late 2023, the bus lane was painted onto city streets, and according to an SFMTA report, sped up bus travel times by 6% to 11%. As for the parking concerns, “Median parking search time is less than 1 minute,” the report said.
Though transit activists got their project, several told Mission Local the process left them disappointed in Chan.
“It felt as if she was ignoring advocates or community members who really wanted better transit access up on Geary,” said Janelle Wong, a transit and bike activist and co-founder of Asian Urbanist SF.
It was not the first time Chan butted heads with transit advocates. In 2022, she opposed turning John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park into a pedestrian walkway, pushing for an alternative plan that would have partially reopened the road to cars. This would help improve “drop-off for seniors, people with disabilities and others,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle.
She later opposed Proposition K in 2024, which converted a portion of the Great Highway into a park, saying that it was a “winner-takes-all approach” and that she would support a solution “that provided both open space and maintained road access.” Chan is currently supporting Prop. G to close Sunset Dunes park during the week and bring back the coastal road; Wiener has written the official opposition against it.
Wong described working with Chan on transit issues as “difficult.”
“She wasn’t very open to hearing why advocates wanted to have JFK car-free, not just for recreation purposes, but also for a safer route without cars for families and people riding bikes,” Wong said.
Chan’s stance on tax measures to fund transit has depended on whom the city is taxing. She supported Prop. L in 2024, which taxed ridehailing companies to fund Muni, but in 2020 she opposed Measure RR, a sales tax to fund Caltrain and in 2023 opposed a $1.50 temporary toll hike on Bay Area bridges for BART and other Bay Area transit agencies.
“We’re increasing bridge tolls to fund public transit, and it’s still not providing services that people actually need so they can ditch their cars to get to work, and that is a vicious cycle that I’m not going to enable,” Chan told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023.
As for Measure RR, she said the sales tax would be a burden on “small businesses and working people,” and that the city should instead focus on finding state and federal funding.
To transit and bike advocate Zach Lipton, though, this stance was “surprising and alarming.”
“This was a point where without this Caltrain was going to shut down,” he said.
Another sales tax, the Regional Transit Measure, which was negotiated by Wiener, is on the ballot this Tuesday to bolster Muni and BART budgets so they don’t have to slash service.
Chan is supporting the measure, though she said she will have to “hold my nose and vote for it.” She does not like that it is a sales tax, a regressive tax that hits lower-income people more. She criticized Wiener for not securing a more progressive tax scheme.
Wiener and other transit advocates, who spent years working on the measure, said that the progressive options explored — including a business tax and an income tax — would have likely failed, or been vetoed by the governor.
“It’s easy to shoot down other people’s solutions and be a Monday morning quarterback when you refuse to engage in the years of hard work of bringing a diverse region together to solve a complex problem,” Wiener said.
Urbanist advocates say that Wiener has consistently been aligned with their vision for a San Francisco with better public transit and more walkable and bikeable streets.
Janice Li, a BART Board Director, said that with Wiener, transit advocates “knew you reliably had an elected official that you could go to, to work with to bring an issue forward.”
In 2025, for instance, Wiener secured an emergency state loan for Muni, BART and Caltrain, intended to stabilize them until the regional transit measures passes.
“It’s hard to think of someone who’s fought more on those issues than Scott has,” she said. “When the regional transit measure wins, Scott will be the very first person I’m texting to say thank you.”
Upzoning, streamlining, and tenants rights
Wiener, one of the original YIMBYs, has made the perennial quest to build more housing in San Francisco his No. 1 priority in his years as city supervisor and state senator.
The core YIMBY argument is that low housing supply drives up costs. Far more people want to live in San Francisco than there is housing, and the competition drives up costs, they argue.
When Wiener was elected to the California State Senate in 2016, it was a YIMBY dream come true. He proposed audacious bills, like SB 827, that would have radically rezoned cities up and down the state to allow apartment buildings near public transit. It brought the state senator national renown.
That bill died in committee, but Wiener persisted. Seven years later, and after two failed efforts, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 79, one of the most sweeping zoning overhauls in modern state history.
Wiener also passed streamlining bills to guarantee that projects that follow city rules can quickly and easily get permits.
But this streamlining eliminated opportunities for residents to weigh in, which Chan sees as a loss. The review process was “empowerment for neighborhood input and for community input,” she told Mission Local in May. “Do we see then, at times, it could be abused? Absolutely, like any other law. But that does not mean we abandon it.”
Many YIMBYs feel these community meetings were venues for blocking housing, citing studies that found the attendees at these hearings were not fully representative of the general population.
“I think that prioritizes who can show up and who is able to do that, statistically speaking, we know is older, we know is whiter, we know is richer, we know is more likely to own a home,” said Jane Natoli, a Wiener supporter and former Bay Area director at YIMBY Action.
Chan has also criticized Wiener’s laws for streamlining not just subsidized affordable housing, but also market-rate housing that in San Francisco is astronomically expensive.
Chan does not think that the city needs more market-rate housing, saying it is “luxury” housing that will only go to “those people who can afford it.”
“New housing can be a good idea, especially if it’s affordable housing,” said longtime tenant advocate Mitchell Omerberg. “But it’s not how you protect people who live in San Francisco.”
YIMBYs counter that building market-rate housing benefits low-income people, pointing to studies that found that high-income residents who move into new units free up cheaper housing.
Some studies have also found that new apartment buildings lead to small decreases in nearby rents.
Chan has subsequently opposed some majority market rate housing projects, including the 22-story Safeway project in the Marina and a project in SoMa that would have converted a parking lot into 495 units of housing.
The Marina project, which would create 848 units including 86 affordable units, has been opposed by local residents — and Mayor Daniel Lurie — for being out of scale with the neighborhood. The SoMa project was slated to be about 20% affordable but was opposed by local residents who argued that it would gentrify the neighborhood, bringing in wealthier residents.
Ian Krager, Chan’s spokesperson, said when in Washington, Chan will “fight for federal investments in affordable housing and public transit, Medicare for All and a progressive tax code that makes billionaires and corporations pay their fair share.”
Wiener hasn’t aligned with the YIMBYs on every single issue, though. In 2018, he opposed Proposition C, which raised taxes on businesses in order to dedicate $300 million every year to homelessness services, half of which was dedicated to helping people get into permanent housing.
Wiener said at the time that while he supports raising business taxes and wants more money to go to homelessness, the tax measure was “not responsibly crafted,” pointing out that it did not go through negotiations with the mayor, Board of Supervisors, or other stakeholders.
“If Prop C passes, tax policy will have effectively moved out of City Hall and into the hands of outside groups,” he wrote.
Chan’s housing record has emphasized protecting existing San Franciscans over building new market-rate housing, something some tenant advocates think makes sense.
Shanti Singh, a longtime tenant advocate, said Chan’s work as budget chair was “critical” for restoring funding to programs like eviction prevention and tenant legal defense.
“Connie’s top priority is making San Francisco affordable for the people who call it home,” Chan’s spokesperson Krager said.
While a state senator, Wiener has also been a fairly reliable vote on tenant issues, but Singh said those were not a top priority compared to streamlining housing.
During his tenure as supervisor, Wiener at times clashed with tenant activists. They took issue with his support of a 2013 tenancy-in-common proposal, for instance, that would have given those buildings — jointly bought by several owners — a one-time chance to become condos for a fee.
But in activists’ eyes, tenancies-in-common were suspect — they took rental units off the market, and buyers had sometimes evicted tenants in the process. Bailing out tenancy-in-common owners by allowing condo conversions, which would increase their value, sent the wrong message, they felt.
Activists also took issue with some of Wiener’s stances on Costa Hawkins, the California law that bans local jurisdictions from expanding rent control. It is the reason why rent control only applies to buildings occupied prior to 1979 in San Francisco.
In 2023, Wiener supported a bill that would have reformed Costa Hawkins to let cities extend rent control to apartment buildings more than 28 years old.
But tenant advocates have long wanted a full repeal of Costa Hawkins so rent control can be expanded to every unit. In 2024, Prop. 33 was put on the ballot to do just that, and Wiener took no position.
“Rent control is an important tool to keep housing affordable, and I’ve stood with tenants to expand it over and over throughout my time in public office,” Wiener said in a statement.
Chan and Wiener’s different land-use approaches came to a head last fall when the board considered an upzoning allowing taller buildings on commercial corridors in the city’s northern and western neighborhoods, including Chan’s homebase, the Richmond.
The plan, which was mandated by the state due to a law Wiener wrote, increased heights from about four stories to between six and eight stories, creating more capacity for housing.
Chan hated the upzoning plan, and argued that tenants and small businesses were at risk of being displaced if their buildings were redeveloped. The city has strict criteria for redeveloping rental housing.
The board eventually voted 7-4 to approve the upzoning plan. Chan voted against it.
In her remarks about the plan, she took aim at Wiener.
“We cannot simply agree to demolish San Francisco for the sake of meeting a state mandate legislated by a single-minded legislator based on unproven housing ideology,” she said at a hearing on Nov. 17, 2025.
Three days later, on Nov. 20, Chan announced her run for Congress.
