Senator Scott Wiener
CA State Senate - 11th District
@Scott_Wiener
Elected in November 2016, Senator Scott Wiener represents District 11 in the California State Senate. District 11 includes all of San Francisco, Broadmoor, Colma, and Daly City, as well as portions of South San Francisco.
In the Senate, Senator Wiener works to make housing more affordable, invest in our transportation systems, increase access to healthcare, support working families, meaningfully address climate change and the impacts of drought, reform our criminal justice system, reduce gun violence, reduce California’s high poverty rate, and safeguard and expand the rights of all communities, including immigrants and the LGBT community.
Senator Wiener has authored 36 bills that were signed into law. Among them are SB 35, a landmark bill to streamline housing approvals in cities not meeting their housing goals; SB 822, which enacts the strongest net neutrality protections in the nation; SB 1045 and SB 40, which expand and strengthen California’s conservatorship laws to help individuals who are living on our streets with severe mental health and substance use disorders; SB 700, which significantly expands access to renewable energy storage; SB 923, which modernizes California’s eyewitness identification standards to ensure innocent people are not sent to prison; SB 136, which reduces mass incarceration by repealing California’s most common used sentence enhancement; SB 219, which protects LGBT seniors in long-term care facilities; and SB 159, which allows pharmacists to provide PrEP and PEP (powerful HIV prevention medications) without a physician’s prescription.
Senator Wiener is also the author of landmark legislation, SB 50, which, if passed, will override local restrictive zoning to legalize apartment buildings and affordable housing near public transportation and job centers. (Currently, many communities ban apartment buildings, even right next to major transit hubs.)
Senator Wiener was named Legislator of the Year by the California Sexual Assault Investigators Association and California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, for his work reforming California’s criminal justice system, and by the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition and California Building Industry Association for his work addressing California’s housing shortage. He was also named Legislator of the Year by the California Solar & Storage Association for his work to expand on site solar storage throughout the state. Larkin Street Youth Services honored Senator Wiener with the Anne B. Stanton Award for his work to combat youth homelessness throughout California. For a full list of awards, please see awards tab.
Senator Wiener serves as Chair of the Senate Housing Committee and is a member of the Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee; the Human Services Committee; the Public Safety Committee; the Governmental Organization Committee; the Governance and Finance Committee; and the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. He is also the Assistant Majority Whip, and serves as the Chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus.
Before his election to the Senate, Senator Wiener served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, representing the district previously represented by Supervisor Harvey Milk. During his time on the Board of Supervisors, Senator Wiener authored a number of first-in-the-nation laws, including mandating fully paid parental leave for all working parents, requiring water recycling and solar power in new developments, and banning public spending in states with LGBT hate laws. He focused extensively on housing and public transportation, authoring laws to streamline approvals of affordable housing, to legalize new in-law units, and to tie public transportation funding to population growth.
Before his election to the Board of Supervisors, Senator Wiener spent 15 years practicing law: as a Deputy City Attorney in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, in private practice at Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, and as a law clerk for Justice Alan Handler on the New Jersey Supreme Court. Senator Wiener co-chaired the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club, BALIF (the Bay Area’s LGBT bar association), and the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, as well as serving on the national board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights organization.
Senator Wiener grew up in New Jersey, the son of small business owners, and attended public school. He received a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a law degree from Harvard Law School. He spent a year in Chile on a Fulbright Scholarship doing historical research. He has lived in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood for over 22 years.
