GrowSF recommends voting for Matt Haney for Assembly District 17 in the April 19, 2022 election.

If you followed the GrowSF voter guide in February and voted for Bilal Mahmood, then you should now vote for Matt Haney. Like Bilal, Haney will fight to legalize housing, help small businesses, and improve public transit and low-carbon transportation infrastructure. In fact, Bilal has even endorsed Haney!

In Matt Haney’s own words:

I believe that the growth of cities is good for the environment, quality of life, creativity, equity, and community. It is important that more people are able to live near where they work by building more housing in our cities, and that we build the infrastructure so that people are able to walk, bike or take public transit to work. It is also important that we enhance features that make cities such wonderful places to live and incubators of creativity and community: parks, public spaces, arts, nightlife, small businesses, and innovation.

GrowSF shares these policy priorities, and we are eager to work with Matt Haney in the Assembly to reform the laws that are holding San Francisco back.

Snapshot of their differences

Matt Haney is right on bikes & transit

Matt Haney has represented district six (SOMA/Tenderloin/Mission Bay) in San Francisco for the past four years. In that time, he has delivered on improving low-carbon transportation infrastructure like protected bike lanes. Since San Francisco’s largest contribution to climate change is emissions from private cars, this makes a big difference on our city’s carbon footprint. From the SF Bike Coalition:

As supervisor of District 6, he worked to get immediate improvements on Howard Street in response to a fatality, which then helped to spur the creation of the SFMTA’s quick-build process, resulting in several new protected bike lanes. He funded and championed a neighborhood-wide 20 mph speed limit and no turn on red policy in the Tenderloin.

Matt Haney wants more housing

Matt Haney has also shown that he is an advocate for building more housing and reforming well-intentioned but backwards laws like CEQA. Most recently, he supported turning a valet parking lot into an apartment building while his fellow Supervisors opposed it.

One of the best ways to build more housing is to fix CEQA, which Haney has pledged to do. Haney has recently called for reforming CEQA, which is currently being abused by Berkeley NIMBYs to prevent 3,000 students from attending Cal:

And this isn’t the first time Haney has gone toe-to-toe with CEQA:

This is in stark contrast to his opponent, David Campos. When Campos was Supervisor of district nine (Mission/Bernal), he attempted to block all housing construction by passing the “Mission Moratorium.” This foolish and backward-looking initiative would have prevented tens of thousands of homes from being built in San Francisco. And Campos has said that CEQA strikes a "pretty good balance."

Matt Haney supports small business

Haney is also a big supporter of small business and nightlife in the city.

Matt Haney supported the “Save Our Small Businesses” ballot prop in 2020, which dramatically liberalized the rules holding us back from Covid recovery. He has also voted in favor of every grant and tax relief bill during the Covid-19 emergency. And Haney was a key ally in GrowSF’s fight to make outdoor dining permanent.

In addition, Haney created the Entertainment Venue Recovery Fund which helped keep our entertainment venues from permanent closure during the pandemic. And he worked with Mayor Breed to pass “First Year Free,” which waives the first year’s registration fees, licensing and permitting fees, and many other fees for new businesses in the city.

Vote Matt Haney

Over the past four years, we have seen Haney grow into his role as a public official. He has certainly made some decisions we disagree with, but overall his trajectory has been towards liberal centrism and away from far-left partisan fights.

We can’t let David Campos bring his backwards politics to Sacramento and hold San Francisco back. Vote Matt Haney for Assembly on April 19.