The Poodle Spies: Five Fall Guys in California’s Housing Crisis

THUS SPAKE SPADE:  “We’ve got to have a fall guy,” insisted Sam Spade, the hard-boiled private dick played with cynical élan by Humphrey Bogart  in The Maltese Falcon, the proto-crypto film noir classic. In so stating, Spade accidentally articulated the first commandment of modern American politics.

When it comes to California’s genuinely desperate housing crisis, the “fall guys” we all are expected to fall for are the environmental activists who allegedly fly the flag of no growth, slow growth, or other variants of NIMBYism, and the local governments in their thrall. In today’s brave new urbanist fantasy of “build, baby, build,” such lofty notions of “living within our resource constraints” are not merely quaintly antiquated but are now considered racist, elitist smokescreens for those who’ve already got from those who never can. 

It’s a catchy tune and one that San Francisco’s State Senator Scott Wiener — not coincidentally the single largest recipient of developer dollars — has been whistling quite effectively in his campaign to strip local governments of all their land-use controls limiting the pedal-to-the-metal development he insists will solve the housing crisis.