DEPARTMENT OF GETTING SHIT DONE

Scott Wiener has revolutionized California housing law. Can he bring that same energy to Congress?

- Adam Rogers

FOR a moment, it looks like California—maybe the whole country!—is doomed.

Usually, the last days of a legislative session in Sacramento are a blurry schlep through hundreds of votes as both sides of the Capitol try to get bills onto the governor's desk. Today, a strikingly pretty Friday in mid-September, it's time for a bill called SB 79, authored by a state senator from San Francisco named Scott Wiener.

He has been trying to pass a version of this bill for nearly a decade. Simply, it overrides city land use rules and not-in-my-backyard procedural objections to allow big apartment buildings near public transit. The theory is that more housing brings down costs—but it's more totalizing than that. Denser housing helps fight climate change and racism, enlarges tax rolls, helps fund public transit, reduces traffic congestion, and adds voters who'll give Democrats more power in Congress. So it's worth pissing off some of the people who live near the places these buildings will go. It is controversial. Wiener has done a Triple Crown's worth of horse trading to get to this vote.

All he needs is a thin majority, just 21 green Y's to show up on the big red screen behind the president pro tem's podium. They start to tick in. Two powerful committee chairs who initially opposed the bill, fellow Democrats, are now yeses. Pro-housing senators: Yes. A few rural Republicans: Yes. A dozen, 20, and then—blackjack!