California Roulette

Sacramento politicians are gambling with 39 million lives in the name of profit and power

Pacific Palisades: To normal people, a scene of unspeakable loss and tragedy. To many in California’s political class, a blank slate and opportunity. Drone image by Christopher LeGras.

Serious question, occasioned by evidence and experience: Do some members of California’s political class actually want people to die horrific deaths in wildfires and other natural disasters? Because they’re sure acting like it.

In the game of Russian Roulette, people put guns to their own heads while gamblers wager on the outcome. California Roulette is different. It involves politicians putting guns to everyone else’s heads while the powerful financial and business interests that control them rake in massive profits. At least Russian Roulette requires balls. California Roulette is premised on cowardice, mendacity, and avarice.

Take state Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), who has been on an eight year crusade to destroy suburbs and single family neighborhoods. He has called houses “racist and exclusionary,” as if inanimate objects can be bigoted. Wiener, who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, one of the wealthiest (and whitest) suburbs on the planet, doesn’t want anyone in his adopted state to enjoy the kind of life he did as a child. He envisions a brave new California in which 39 million people all live in small, densely packed apartments and get around on public transit and bicycles. No more front or back yards and quiet, tree-lined streets for us naughty, carbon spewing fleshbags. Definitely no more cars.

His hypocrisy isn’t just galling. It’s dangerous. Wiener, who has been called “California’s most devious and craven politician” (which, considering the competition for that particular crown, is really saying something) routinely dismisses concerns about housing development in hazard zones. In fact, he’s introduced multiple pieces of legislation that sought to make it easier for developers to make millions constructing huge apartment buildings in high fire danger severity zones (HFDSZs), tsunami zones, liquefaction zones, areas vulnerable to subsidence, and other places in which dense housing is completely inappropriate.

A flood of dangerous, irresponsible legislation

For example, last year Wiener introduced Senate Bill (SB) 610, which would have eliminated local officials’ power to identify high fire danger severity zones (HFDSZs) in their jurisdictions and prohibit development within those boundaries. He asserted that cities were “weaponizing” HFDSZ designations in order to limit needed new housing (more on the Big Lie behind California’s non-existent housing crisis in another post). This is significant because state fire zones are considerably less expansive than those identified by local governments.

In Scott Wiener’s fever dreamworld, selfish city councilmembers are forever concocting all manner of nefarious schemes to prevent new housing construction. It is beyond his (limited) power of imagination to grasp that local leaders actually care about the safety and lives of the people they represent. Wiener lives in a purely transactional, binary world in which there are only two sides in the housing debate, YIMBYs and NIMBYs. The former are beyond reproach while the latter are beyond salvation. Everyone must be shoved into one of those categories, else his entire reality comes crashing down.

Wiener’s cynicism is boundless. In February, even as the embers of the Eaton and Palisades Fires in Los Angeles were still smoldering, even as a hundred thousand Angelenos were barely beginning to sift through the ruins of their homes and their lives, even as the body count was still being tallied and cadaver dogs were sifting for human remains, he wrote and introduced SB 677. That bill would have made it easier for developers to replace single family homes with four, eight, or ten units – but only in disaster zones.

That’s right. In the midst of unspeakable tragedy and loss, all he could think about was how to take advantage of a historic natural disaster to further enrich the real estate, finance, and tech special interests that control him like a marionette. The January 2025 wildfires brought Los Angeles County to its knees. As 10 million people processed the shock and horror, Scott Wiener saw political opportunity. He is obsessive.

Fortunately, SB 647 and SB 677 were too much even for the YIMBY-dominated California state legislature. His colleagues killed both bills in committee (though several of them voted in favor).

When Scott Wiener isn’t devising ways to make hazard zones even more dangerous and deadly, he’s exploiting tragedy in other ways. On January 27, again as the fires were still burning, he introduced SB 222. That bill would have incentivized “victims of major climate disasters” to “seek damages from fossil fuel companies in court.”

Thanks to recent housing laws that make it easier to build apartments where houses used to be, unscrupulous developers already have attempted to add density to the Palisades and Altadena burn zones. Here, a crew illegally works on a parcel in the Palisades burn zone before the developer’s permit for a four unit condominium was even approved. After being exposed, the developer withdrew the multifamily permit application and now intends to build a single house. Image by Christopher LeGras.

In his press release introducing that bill he said, “Major fossil fuel companies intentionally misled the public for decades about the impacts of their products, and now Californians are paying the price with devastating wildfires, mud slides, sea level rise, and skyrocketing insurance costs. When climate disasters strike, SB 222 [would allow] homeowners and businesses to recover damages from the fossil fuel companies responsible for the disasters.”

Regardless of how one feels about energy companies’ complicity in and responsibility for climate change, regardless of how one feels about climate change full stop, this is pretty rich coming from the likes of Scott Wiener. Out of one side of his mouth he acknowledges with SB 222 that Californians face the threat of natural disasters, a threat that’s increasing. Out of the other side he argues that we need to shoehorn more people into the most hazard prone areas. This is schizophrenic. Then again, along with big real estate Wiener is also the beneficiary of loads of cash from trial lawyers.

Gutting environmental protections

It’s even more insane when you realize that Wiener was a key player in this year’s push to gut the landmark, history-making California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Again, the Senator is talking out of both sides of his mouth. Even as he screeched that “climate disasters” (a hopelessly vague term that is legally meaningless) are getting worse, he worked to dismantle the very law that requires environmental review of proposed new developments.

It’s not just housing. Wiener swung for the fences earlier in the session with SB 607. A coalition of 150 environmental groups warned the bill would have weakened environmental review and protections for “nearly all private and government projects,” including “freeways, airports, railyards, shipping terminals, office buildings, shopping malls, sports complexes, dams, sewage plants, mining, incinerators, power plants, prisons, and massive mixed-use developments on farmland, sensitive habitat, or in high wildfire danger zones.” Nothing says “progressive” like making it easier to expand freeways and build new prisons.

Channeling his inner capitalist, Wiener argued that the exemptions would help attract more companies, such as computer chip makers. Said the San Francisco Democrat: “These are jobs of the future … and I want them to be in California.” Once again, his chutzpah was too much for his colleagues, and SB 607 died in committee. But Wiener wasn’t finished. Later in the session he conspired with Assemblywoman Buffy “That’s Really My Name” Wicks and Governor Gavin Newsom to pass a pair of bills that went even further than SB 607.

YIMBYs hailed it as the most significant “reform” to CEQA since that law was passed in 1973. Calling AB 130 and SB 131 “CEQA reform” is like calling Donald Trump’s national ICE raids “immigration reform.” It’s also a radical break with a half century of legal and political precedent. 

Worse still, they did it via an obscure, opaque legislative process called budget trailer bills. Originally, trailer bills were intended to clarify specific provisions of the state’s annual budget. They were typically less than a page. Over the decades lawmakers increasingly used the process to pass substantive legislation, particularly of the unpopular sort. Unlike normal bills, trailer bills are not scrutinized by legislative committees in both houses. They are simply attached to the budget, ergo “trailers.”

In contrast to the original intent of trailer bills, both AB 130 and SB 131 run to nearly 200 pages (for comparison, the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights combined are just under 20 pages). They address scores of issues and amend dozens of existing statutory provisions. Four hundred pages of historically consequential legislation, passed under cover of darkness by errand runners for some of the wealthiest, most powerful corporate and financial interests in the country.

California’s political class, hard at work. Image courtesy gemini.google.

In short, Wiener and a majority of the political class made historic, immensely consequential changes to arguably the most important environmental protection law in history behind closed doors, with no public scrutiny and barely even any public awareness. It’s not a stretch to say that at this point, when it comes to development and construction, including new factories, warehouses and the like, environmental protections in California are all but dead.

Remember that next time you hear a California lawmaker whinging about how selfish the rest of are for living in single family homes and driving cars.

Also, there’s a word for what Wiener, Newsom, Wicks, and their fellow travelers have been up to. Hint: the word is not “democracy.”

Game on

The good news, such as it is, is that the political class may finally have gone too far this year. Wiener and Wicks also introduced SB 79, which would empower developers to override local development rules and build up to 14 story apartment buildings in single family neighborhoods. This bill has proved too much even for the typically pliant Los Angeles City Council, which last week approved (albeit narrowly) a resolution in opposition.

The dream of California’s political class. Image courtesy Gemini.Google.

Last weekend, residents in a dozen cities throughout California rallied against SB 79 (disclosure: I helped organize the rallies). Public pressure at last is mounting against Sacramento’s full scale assault on neighborhoods, and the political class’s embrace of “build, baby, build.” It’s going to be a hell of a wake-up for a lot of politicians, who for decades have pretty much gotten whatever they wanted. The situation is shifting dramatically.

The fight is on.