Who's afraid of San Francisco? Everyone

Jun 27, 2023 View in browser   By Debra Kahn and Jordan Wolman THE BIG IDEA San Francisco's reputation for squalor is inspiring others to try to avoid its fate. | Jeff Chiu/AP Photo DISMAYED BY THE BAY — San Francisco is known for lots of things: Rice-A-Roni, the Full House house, and being a punching bag for Republicans. But the upside of its reputation for urban squalor is that it's spurring other states to do something on housing. Fox News' relentless focus on the 12-block stretch of downtown San Francisco where drug use and misery are thickest made it the poster child for Democrats' urban woes. The pandemic further hollowed out the city's downtown as tech workers stayed home, and the spiral shows no signs of abating, with retailers announcing new departures daily and office vacancies still ticking higher. Officials across the country are taking notice, Jordan reports. “Every state in the country other than California is saying, ‘I don't want to become California,’ and every other city is like, ‘I don't want to become San Francisco,’” said Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow on urban economics and housing policy at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. San Francisco helped inspire a law Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) signed last month that prevents cities from enforcing single-family zoning rules. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott (R) signed a law earlier this month that effectively bans single-family zoning statewide. It's not just blue states, either: Montana Republicans appealed to an anti-California sentiment to drum up support for their suite of housing reform legislation the GOP supermajority enacted this year. Vermont Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D-Chittenden) is a Los Angeles native who said she was inspired by personal experience: Her sister had experienced homelessness for several months, while her father struggled to find affordable housing in the San Francisco suburbs. “I look at California as a place where housing instability is just consistently escalating,” she said. “When places like San Francisco and liberal bastions in California have held themselves up as the standard for progressive policy, I've always felt like it's a bit of a sham when you think about the many people who experience income inequality in California and can't afford to meet their very basic needs." San Francisco knows it's a bad example and is trying to change. “Other states are looking at California as a cautionary tale on housing, and I support them doing that as we try to dig out of our hole," said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who championed state laws to streamline permits for affordable housing and end single-unit zoning and is working on a bill this year that would expedite approvals for multi-family housing development as the state continues to encounter local pushback. Sustainable Finance WHAT’S IN A NAME – BlackRock CEO Larry Fink isn’t using the term “ESG” anymore. Don’t expect that to change much of anything about the way the world’s largest asset manager does business. Fink’s comments on Sunday reflect the way Republicans have politically weaponized the use of environmental, social and governance factors in investment decisions. But even if the term “ESG” is no longer fashionable, no one is walking away from the consideration of the factors themselves. That’s because financial firms are in the business of making money. And there’s lots of it to be made in the green transition. “They have inadvertently wandered into an area of what's known as political risk, where they're suddenly under fire because of something happening in the political zeitgeist,” said Todd Phillips, a Roosevelt Institute fellow and former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. attorney. “I found Larry Fink's statements really fascinating because it's clear that they're not planning on changing course when they say that investing with environmental principles in mind is good for their investors. They just don't want to talk about it that way because they're under fire.”   SUBSCRIBE TO POWER SWITCH: The energy landscape is profoundly transforming. Power Switch is a daily newsletter that unlocks the most important stories driving the energy sector and the political forces shaping critical decisions about your energy future, from production to storage, distribution to consumption. Don’t miss out on Power Switch, your guide to the politics of energy transformation in America and around the world. SUBSCRIBE TODAY.     BUILDING BLOCKS Pleasants Power Station in West Virginia. | Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress/Wikipedia WOBBLY WIN-WIN — The green transition is tentatively making headway in West Virginia, where a California company is proposing to convert a coal plant to run on hydrogen. Omnis, the company that's proposing to buy the 1,300-megawatt Pleasants Power Station, has gotten backing from Republican Gov. Jim Justice and Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in other ventures it's undertaken in the state. But, as Ben Storrow reports for POLITICO's E&E News, the technology and business case are drawing skepticism from analysts. “This is a company that as far as we know has never run a coal plant, and they face the additional challenges of converting it in a way that appears unprecedented and untested,” said Seth Feaster, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis who raised concerns about Omnis’ plans in a note earlier this month. Omnis is confident: “We believe in this enough that we’ve written a very big check to acquire one very large power plant,” Simon Hodson, who co-owns Omnis with his wife, told Ben. EXTREMES RACING TO STAY IN PLACE — Whoops! A new study warns that the flood assumptions that the federal government is using to hand out hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure funding are out of date and could prove extremely costly, Zack Colman reports. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law calls for state and local governments to consult NOAA's Atlas 14 prediction model, which the First Street Foundation says vastly underestimates the likelihood of flooding. That means that many new projects could face flooding threats far earlier than expected, forcing local governments to pay for unanticipated maintenance or potentially wasting funds from the $350 billion the legislation set aside for projects. First Street highlighted specific public works that it predicts will face much more frequent flooding than NOAA estimates suggest, like an $86.1 million road project in New Jersey that it predicted will flood every other year over the next 30 years. The next edition of NOAA's model isn't going to launch until 2027. “A ton of this money is not only being allocated in the wrong way because the cost of the project might be much different if you use the up-to-date standards, but they're just going to flood — they're going to become inadequate or potentially failing as soon as they're done,” said First Street CEO Matthew Eby. “There's projects that have shovels in the ground right now that are being built to the wrong standard.” YOU TELL US GAME ON — Welcome to the Long Game, where we tell you about the latest on efforts to shape our future. We deliver data-driven storytelling, compelling interviews with industry and political leaders, and news Tuesday through Friday to keep you in the loop on sustainability. Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott, deputy editor Debra Kahn and reporters Jordan Wolman and Allison Prang. Reach us all at gmott@politico.com, dkahn@politico.com, jwolman@politico.com and aprang@politico.com. Want more? Don’t we all. Sign up for the Long Game. Four days a week and still free! WHAT WE'RE CLICKING — A giant wind farm taking shape off the Massachusetts coast will have turbines taller than any building in Boston, the New York Times reports. — The biggest source of U.S. electrical power is also the most vulnerable to extreme weather. Bloomberg takes a look. — A new technology-sharing deal could lead to an EV that James Bond could love, the Wall Street Journal reports.   LISTEN TO POLITICO'S ENERGY PODCAST: Check out our daily five-minute brief on the latest energy and environmental politics and policy news. Don't miss out on the must-know stories, candid insights, and analysis from POLITICO's energy team. Listen today.       Follow us on Twitter Debra Kahn @debra_kahn Greg Mott @gwmott Jordan Wolman @jordanwolman Allison Prang @AllisonPrang   Follow us

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