The Standard sat down with Assembly District 17 candidates David Campos and Matt Haney ahead of their February primary race. Now, heading into the April 19 election, we wanted to revisit their stances on a host of issues important to San Francisco voters. Here’s what they had to say about housing.
Haney’s campaign website lists housing as a top priority. The candidate’s commitments include ending exclusionary zoning policies and building 100,000 new housing units in San Francisco over ten years. Campos’ campaign website also highlights housing as a top ten priority, with an emphasis on prioritizing affordable housing. Campos proposes passing a “displacement fee” for Wall Street landlords that would be used to develop affordable housing.
In a Nov. interview, Haney said that his district, which has historically generated a disproportionate amount of the city’s overall new housing stock, has seen thousands of new housing units approved since he was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2018. Earlier on, Haney opposed a state bill, SB 35, that streamlined housing production in cities that were falling short of state-mandated minimums, but later came to support the bill.
“What has changed for me is I have been District 6 supervisor for three years, and I’ve seen what this looks like…that we’re allowing so many cities and counties to do what essentially many of the neighborhoods of our city are unfortunately doing, which is saying no to everything,” Haney told The Standard.
Haney, who has won the endorsement of California YIMBY, told The Standard that cities must strike a balance between local control and broader mandates to make progress on a persistent housing shortage statewide.
If elected to the Assembly, Campos said that the legislators should consider a statewide bond to build affordable and middle-income housing.
“I’m not against market-rate housing, but I think that there has to be a balance. And for that balance to include affordable housing, state government has a role to play,” Campos said.
Campos noted, however, that his first bill in Sacramento will be a California “Medicare for All” bill, intended to set in motion a single-payer system in California. An earlier bill, AB 1400, was introduced last year but did not make it out of committee. Campos said he would work to re-introduce and build support for the proposal, which calls for a public program that would administer healthcare benefits to all Californians.