State Sen. Scott Wiener, the Bay Area's most vocal YIMBY crusader and current congressional candidate, has unveiled a new proposal: a federal "pro-housing incentive fund" that would hand cities $10,000 for every new home they build.

The pitch is simple — reward cities that actually permit housing instead of drowning builders in red tape. In theory, this is the kind of market-aligned, incentive-based policy we'd love to get behind. Carrots over sticks. Local governments doing the right thing and getting rewarded for it. What's not to like?

Well, the number, for starters.

Ten thousand dollars per home in a state where the average cost to build a single unit of housing can exceed $700,000 — and where San Francisco specifically has seen affordable housing projects come in north of $1 million per door — is, to put it generously, a rounding error. Even SF officials are saying the quiet part out loud: it's not enough.

And they're right. If you're a city council weighing whether to greenlight a controversial housing project against neighborhood opposition, is $10K per unit really going to move the needle? That barely covers the cost of the community meetings where people show up to scream about parking.

To be fair to Wiener, the proposal at least gets the framework right. Federal dollars flowing to cities that build rather than block is a genuinely good idea. The problem is scale. This feels more like a campaign trail talking point than a serious policy lever — a press release dressed up as legislation.

What would actually work? Tying meaningful federal infrastructure and transit dollars to housing production. Making the incentive large enough that city managers salivate instead of shrug. Or, here's a radical thought: stripping away the regulatory barriers that make building so expensive in the first place, so we don't need to bribe cities into allowing what should be happening naturally.

Wiener has been one of the few California politicians willing to take on local NIMBYism. We respect that. But if you're going to swing at the housing crisis, swing hard. Ten grand a unit isn't a swing — it's a tap.