Scott Wiener Passed Laws Making It Easier to Build in California. Can He Do the Same in Congress?

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In the shaded courtyard of a San Francisco affordable housing complex in early March, California’s most prolific Yes In My Backyard legislator rolled out his congressional campaign’s new housing platform.

For Sen. Scott Wiener, it was all very on brand.

Flanked by union construction workers, campaign volunteers and some of the YIMBY advocates who have been on “Team Wiener” since his days on the city’s Board of Supervisors, Wiener ticked through the housing policy highlights.

The package was a mix of hyperambitious spending proposals — the type that rarely make it beyond campaign literature — wonky left-of-center objectives  and a raft of the kind of pro-development, deregulatory proposals upon which Wiener has built his political reputation.

Proposals to cut red tape might seem an odd fit for Congress, which has historically steered clear of local land-use and construction rules. Wiener was happy to address the apparent mismatch.

“It was also an area, first of all, that the state traditionally was not involved in — and we changed that,” he said.

Since Wiener joined the state Senate in 2017, California’s legislature has undergone a historic pivot on housing. Majorities now embrace the notion, at least rhetorically, that the state has an active role to play in promoting the construction of more homes, even if that means bigfooting local governments and neighborhood groups. More so than any other legislator, Wiener has been the hinge of that pivot.

The question now is whether Wiener, if elected, could help orchestrate the same feat of political reengineering in Congress, given its longstanding aversion to legislating on his policy issue of choice — or, as is increasingly the case, to doing much of anything.

‘Where everything good goes to die’

On the one hand, of course Wiener wants to go to Washington.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision last year to step aside after holding the seat for nearly four decades created a once-in-a-generation opportunity in San Francisco, a city brimming with Democratic political talent and few empty rungs further up the electoral ladder. Wiener has been a professional politician going on 16 years and is possessed of a professional politician’s career ambitions. He’s also termed out of the state legislature in 2028. When he announced his candidacy last October, it was a well-foreshadowed decision that caught virtually no one in the political world by surprise.

On the other hand … really, Congress?

While the legislative branch of the federal government is not a body known for its productivity, Wiener is an exceptionally productive lawmaker. He is the rare California state legislator who can plausibly claim a degree of public name recognition not just outside of his district, but outside the state. That’s in part thanks to his knack for taking up searingly controversial, headline-baiting bills – banning ICE agents from wearing masks, decriminalizing psychedelics, regulating AI, forcing corporations to publicize their carbon footprints and repealing penalties for activities related to sex work.

But it’s also because he has a habit of actually getting a lot of them passed.

The Center for Effective Lawmaking, run jointly out of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, regularly rank lawmakers on a “State Legislative Effectiveness Score” based on the number of bills authored, how far those bills go and how substantive they are. In California’s Senate last legislative session, Wiener came first, and has spent his entire Senate tenure in the top five.

Wiener has been particularly effective at pushing legislation aimed at boosting the construction of new housing. He has authored bills to speed up the building of apartment buildings, tighten the screws on uncooperative local governments and limit environmental review for new development. In an ideological grand finale last year, Gov. Newsom signed a Wiener bill that legalizes mid-rise apartments around major public transportation stops. That’s been a policy priority of Wiener’s since his first year in the Legislature.

It might be some time before anyone can say conclusively whether those bills have actually resulted in significantly more homes getting built or if the state has become more affordable as a result. But love him as the state’s most prolific housing champion or hate him as a developer shill — there are plenty who fall into either camp — no one can deny that Wiener gets bills passed.

Congress, where he hopes to serve, does not.

By some measures, 2025 may be among the least productive years in recent congressional memory and legislative productivity has been on a downward slope for decades. That makes it an odd place for Wiener to take his next career step.

“I gave him that same speech when he was running for state Senate,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action and longtime Wiener ally, describing Wiener’s 2016 legislative run while still on the San Francisco board. “I was like ‘Scott, the state is a garbage hole. You’re gonna leave us here when we’re actually making some progress here locally. You’re gonna go up to the state level where everything good goes to die.’”

“So there’s a lesson learned there,” she said.

Wiener pushed back on the caricature of a “Do Nothing” Congress, pointing to an expansion of the Child Tax Credit during the pandemic and massive clean energy spending programs enacted under the Biden administration.

“Is Congress a tough place? Absolutely. But am I excited about the prospect of being able to take our work federal? I’m very excited about that,” he said.

He also stressed that his plan would not be to simply re-run his state legislative playbook at the federal level.

“At the state level, what we learned and acted on was that the state has dramatic power to shape zoning and permitting,” he said. But other barriers, like the high cost of construction, a relative shortage of construction workers and costly financing, are well within Congress’ wheelhouse, he added.

Other big ticket items from his platform include the creation of a federal revolving loan fund for mixed-income “social housing” projects, a proposed boost in funding for rental assistance programs and more federal support for trade schools.

“The proposals that I’m making for Congress strongly complement the land use reforms at the state level,” he said.

But there are also some Wiener classics in the mix. They include tweaking construction regulations and building codes to allow for cheaper development, rewriting the National Environmental Policy Act so that it won’t impede “climate friendly housing” and the creating a “Prohousing Incentive Fund” to reward the governments of localities where more housing is getting built.

Is Congress going YIMBY?

Congress does appear to be coming around slowly to Wiener’s view on housing.

A year-and-a-half ago, a bipartisan group of House members formed the chamber’s first YIMBY Caucus. No coincidence that many of them, like Democratic co-chairs Robert Garcia from Long Beach and Scott Peters from San Diego, hail from California, the political birthplace of the movement and Patient Zero of what has now become a national housing affordability crisis.

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“California is a little ahead of the curve because we had our crisis hit 10 years ago,” said Rep. Laura Friedman, a Burbank Democrat and former Assemblymember who ran for Congress under the YIMBY mantle in 2024. It’s only in the last few years that once-affordable refuges across the country are starting to look a bit Californian.

Leading the pack in unaffordability also gave California’s lawmakers an early headstart in trying to tackle the problem, she said. “California has become a testing ground for a lot of these solutions.”

Last Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed what is widely seen as the largest housing bill in a generation. The legislation includes measures that would be at home in Wiener’s platform, including tying federal grants to local housing production and adding new tools to speed up or bypass federal environmental review. (The House still needs to pass the bill.)

The bill represents an unusual development in Congress, where housing was thought of as a “silent crisis,” said Dennis Shea, who oversees housing policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington D.C.-based thinktank. “Now you can’t go a day without being bombarded by three or four stories about housing affordability.”

As in California, housing has become an issue that cuts across partisan and ideological lines, making it one of the more dealmaking-friendly topics in Congress.

“Housing has been a bit of an island of bipartisanship in a sea of division,” said Shea. Case in point: The Senate bill is co-authored by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a progressive, and South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.

Even so, policymaking in Congress looks a little different than it does in Sacramento, said Friedman, who served in the Assembly between 2016 and 2024. That can make it challenging for former state lawmakers eager to pick up where they left off in Congress.

“The skills are transferable because the skills are really about building consensus, but also being strategic about how you can get things moved through. But the process is much harder,” she said. A Democrat in the much smaller California legislature can expect most of their bills to at least get a hearing. Not so in Congress, said Friedman, which has five times the membership and where leadership plays a more assertive role in elevating or throttling legislative proposals.

The flavor of housing policy is a bit different too.

In California, lawmakers have passed a raft of bills over the last decade, steamrolling the preferences and prerogatives of local governments over issues of development.

“The federal government has never played that role,” said David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Nor is it likely to anytime soon. The bill awaiting a vote in the House is heavy on carrots and light on sticks.

Still, it remains unusual in its aim to promote new housing construction more broadly.

“The speed with which it has become accepted that the federal government should do more on supply is shocking,” Garcia said.

Good timing, it would seem, for California’s YIMBY-in-chief to run for Congress.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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