Scott Wiener is a sick bastard

One day before the anniversary of the 2025 Los Angeles firestorms, Wiener will re-introduce legislation making it easier for developers to profit off victims’ losses and trauma. Right photo by Christopher LeGras. Left photo an unintentionally appropriate screenshot.

UPDATE 1/6/2025: Scott Wiener has apparently gutted and amended SB 677; the all aspect report will have a full analysis of the revised bill in the coming days. None of this changes the fact that Wiener is a sick bastard.

I start this post with some reflection. This Wednesday marks the one year anniversary of the January 2025 wildfires that devastated swaths of the city and county of Los Angeles. As the world well knows, the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena were almost completely wiped off the map. The fires destroyed 18,189 structures including homes, local businesses, community centers, places of worship, schools and others. At least 31 people died as a direct result of the fires, to which researchers attribute an additional 409 excess deaths. Nearly a quarter of a million people were evacuated, and some 100,000 remain displaced to this day.

During two hellish weeks, Angelenos were glued to their TVs and to the Watch Duty app, which provided invaluable real time alerts of the fires’ progress, the ignition of new fires, evacuation orders and warnings and other critical information. Dozens of times a day the app’s distinctive whooshing tone sounded and millions of people picked up their phones to get the latest alert. That tone is etched into our collective memory.

For two hellish weeks, Angelenos were glued to the Watch Duty app.

We were also glued to our phones themselves, sending and receiving thousands of texts and making hundreds of phone calls to affected loved ones, friends and colleagues. Countless Angelenos from unaffected areas rose to the moment by volunteering or donating. Those who could — journalists, city and county staff, off duty first responders — shuttled residents back to the remains of their homes to sift through the rubble for whatever precious possessions that might have survived. Residents in neighborhoods bordering the burn zones formed watches to deter looters. A number of victims remained on their properties, camping out, protecting their neighborhoods and proving the essentialness of the Second Amendment. Unlikely bonds and friendships were forged in the flames and the aftermath.

The rains came too late. Ten days after the fires a series of storms pounded the raw, exposed land. In Altadena mud flows reached 20 feet, washing away entire hillsides. In the Palisades, millions of gallons of toxic ash and sludge washed down the mountains and down storm drains into Santa Monica Bay. A month later a record setting algae bloom poisoned the Bay, sickening and killing thousands of marine mammals and birds.

You’ll be hard pressed, one year on, to find an Angeleno who doesn’t have direct memories of the fires, through personal experience, the experiences of family and friends, or both. Those 100,000 displaced people just celebrated their first holidays in new homes they never expected to occupy. Many will never be able to return.

Like the burn zones themselves, the psychological wounds will take years to heal. And while they ultimately will, the scar tissue will never look quite like the pre-fire physical and emotional landscapes. While a majority of Angelenos weren’t directly affected, their lives were changed, too. Their perceptions of the city they live in changed, from Santa Monica to Sunland-Tujunga, Malibu to Monrovia.

Faith shaken

Their perceptions of their city and county governments changed, too. In some cases, they changed for the better. CD 11 Councilwoman Traci Park secured her place in L.A. history as she fought tirelessly, relentlessly, for her devastated district and traumatized constituents. Out in the valley, while CD 7 Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez’s district was spared severe destruction, she nevertheless became an outspoken voice demanding accountability from city agencies.

Park and Rodriguez are, unfortunately, two of the rare exceptions. Along with the sheer scale of the devastation, the January 2025 L.A. wildfires revealed a near-total collapse in city, county and state governance. Even those of us already skeptical of the political class were shocked by the breakdown, the incompetence. In the face of some of the most dire fire warnings in L.A. history, Mayor Karen Bass decided to jet halfway across the world on a literal ego trip as part of a presidential delegation to the swearing in of the new president of Ghana. Because, of course, that’s the kind of thing a mayor should do in the midst of a looming emergency.

As the Palisades Fire exploded, Karen Bass busied herself with photo ops 7,000 miles away.

Senior staff at the Los Angeles Fire Department failed in almost every conceivable way. There were no pre-deployments of personnel and resources. Less than 12 hours before the fires ignited, former Chief Kristin Crowley allowed more than 1,000 firefighters to head home for the night, when she could have ordered them to remain at their posts (several hundred remained at their stations on their own volition, showing the stark difference between LAFD — oh, let’s call it “leadership” — and the rank and file). No pre-evacuation orders were given to move thousands of Angelenos out of harm’s way and clear the way for emergency egress.

Other failures were months or years in the making. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) allowed the Santa Ynez Reservoir, the key water source in the Palisades, to remain empty for a year leading up to the fire. The reason was a small tear in the reservoir’s federally mandated cover, a tear that cost around $100,000 and took around two weeks to complete. In the year since, officials at LADWP and those at numerous state agencies have gone to great lengths arguing that the reservoir was never intended as a water source for firefighting, fooling precisely no one.

In the year since, we’ve seen more obfuscation, more buck passing, more cowardice. Despite her egregious dereliction of duty, Bass has largely dodged accountability. Thanks to dogged reporting by a pair of journalists at, of all places, the Los Angeles Times, we know that senior LAFD officials watered down the department’s Palisades Fire after action report so egregiously that its principle author asked that his name be removed from the final version.

The most vile piece of legislation in recent California history

Which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Scott Wiener. On Tuesday at 1:30pm the state Senate Housing Committee will gavel its first meeting of the year. The second item on its agenda is Senate Bill 677 (SB 677).

It’s hard to overstate how contemptible, destructive and even cruel SB 677 is. In neighborhoods still reeling from last year’s fires, where residents remain displaced, grieving losses, struggling with insurance and attempting to rebuild, SB 677 relaxes anti-speculation guardrails that were central to the political compromise of SB 9. It would strip away these safeguards precisely when communities are at their most vulnerable. It targets properties damaged or destroyed by “earthquake, other catastrophic event, or the public enemy.” Wiener doesn’t even have the guts to say “wildfire.”

SB 677 would invite unscrupulous developers to swoop in, acquire parcels at literal fire sale prices, and upzone them for profit, with no obligation to live in or meaningfully reinvest in the community. Wiener’s bill treats burn zones not as places to heal but as opportunistic redevelopment zones. It treats victims as pawns to be swept aside in the mad rush to the YIMBY utopia.

Scott Wiener is demented. He wrote the original SB 677 while the fires were still burning. What kind of sick bastard watches entire neighborhoods engulfed in flames, dozens of people dying, hundreds of thousands losing everything and being displaced, and thinks, “What a great opportunity to advance my political agenda!” What kind of monster views human suffering at a historic scale as a chance to reward his political paymasters?

Scott Wiener, that’s who. Now he’s reintroducing this diabolical bill less than 24 hours before fire victims will gather in the Palisades and Altadena to mourn those who died, grieve their own losses and try to plant the seeds of community renewal. That’s how vicious he is.

To you and me, a place of unspeakable loss and destruction. To Scott Wiener and the YIMBYs, an “opportunity zone.” Photo by Christopher LeGras.

Enough is enough of this garbage. My fellow Angelenos, my fellow Californians, Scott Wiener doesn’t give a fraction of a damn about you. He isn’t a leader, he’s barely even a man. He’s an errand boy for special interests and ideologues. His laws have a 100% failure rate. This is true of all YIMBY legislation. They’ve gotten their way at every turn for nearly a decade. In that decade, the state’s housing affordability crisis went from bad to catastrophic. That’s no accident. Affordability has always been cover for their true agenda: Profit. All you have to do is look here for proof.

Wiener claims that SB 677 will make it easier for homeowners to rebuild, and to add capacity. Right. Because thousands of homeowners are saying to themselves, “You know, our family loved every square inch of our old house. Let’s rebuild it as a fourplex.” Because those thousands of homeowners also possess the requisite knowledge, expertise and experience to get into the multifamily development business.

Please. SB 677, like all of Wiener’s and the YIMBYs’ housing legislation, is a big, fat giveaway not just to developers, but a particular cohort of developers who make a living by preying on neighborhoods.

The YIMBYs have had the momentum for the last seven years. Their rapacious, profit-driven agenda has nothing to do with community, much less affordability. It never has. It’s a lie. Scott Wiener lies as easily as you and I breathe.

As 2026 dawns, the counteroffensive begins. Last year we pushed the YIMBYs’ signature bill, Wiener’s SB 79, to the brink of defeat. Sure, he may have had a couple votes in reserve, but never in his worst nightmare did he imagine he’d be fighting for it down to the last 48 hours of the legislative session.

Scott Wiener and the YIMBYs declared war on California. So be it. Californians are declaring war right back.

Once more unto the political breach, dear friends.