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Congress, Don't Shield Big Oil From Accountability
As city leaders from across the US gather this week to discuss our collective priorities, let’s reaffirm our commitment to protect access to the courts for all our communities.
Nov 18, 2025
As local leaders from across the country gather in Salt Lake City this week for the annual National League of Cities conference to advocate for the interests of local governments, the challenges of protecting and preparing our communities for the future are clearer than ever. Local governments and their taxpayers are being stretched thin. Between the rising cost of living, increasingly severe weather disasters, escalating maintenance costs, and other expenses, local leaders like us in Colorado, Wisconsin, and beyond are having to make tough decisions about our priorities—and the last thing we need is to have the tools at our disposal taken away from us.
And yet, there is a campaign in Congress right now that aims to do just that.
Goliaths of industry, including pesticide and oil companies, have been lobbying Congress for legal liability shields that would block communities from holding them accountable in court for any of their bad actions. No matter your politics, we should all agree that it’s dangerous and wrong to hand any industry a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card.
Bayer, the maker of Roundup, is asking Congress to put an end to the lawsuits the megacorporation is facing for the health harms its product has caused for years—and some lawmakers are actually pushing legislation that would do so.
Broad legal shields for entire industries would not only threaten local governments’ ability to pursue accountability, but also violate a core value of our justice system.
Similarly, lobbyists for oil and gas companies are lobbying federal lawmakers for a legal shield that could effectively put the fossil fuel industry above the law and block dozens of state and local lawsuits the companies are currently facing for deceiving the public about how their products’ fuel climate change. Municipalities in Colorado, one of our home states, are among the communities demanding that Big Oil companies pay their fair share of the climate costs taxpayers are now facing to adapt to an increasingly severe climate. Like tobacco and opioid companies, fossil fuel companies have long known their products were dangerous, but pushed disinformation to cover up the evidence and protect their profits, while our communities pay the price.
Plainly, our right to access the courts is under attack. Local leaders understand the power that comes from being able to access the courts, which is why the National League of Cities—which represents more than 2,700 cities across the country—has a standing commitment to oppose any federal legal shield that would undermine municipalities’ authority to bring affirmative litigation.
These attacks on our right to access the courts cannot stand. Broad legal shields for entire industries would not only threaten local governments’ ability to pursue accountability, but also violate a core value of our justice system. When bad actors lie to the public and cause harm in our communities, the legal system is supposed to serve as a fair venue—where arguments and evidence are considered—but that system is not possible when you take away our ability to present arguments and evidence at all.
Imagine if Big Tobacco or opioid manufacturers had secured legal immunity from Congress—communities decimated by cancer and addiction would never have been able to fund treatment centers and public health campaigns without first filing accountability lawsuits only made possible through access to the justice system.
As city leaders from across the US gather this week to discuss our collective priorities, let’s reaffirm our commitment to protect access to the courts for all our communities and speak with one voice across party lines to ensure that our congressional representatives do the same.
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Mamdani’s Win and the Price of Urban Life: Why City Voters Are Seeking Change
The soaring costs of city life appear to be sending urban voters toward progressive leaders who promise relief, both in the US and globally.
Nov 06, 2025
From New York to California and beyond, soaring costs seem to be rewriting city politics, as voters respond to candidates who promise to ease the financial squeeze. Zohran Mamdani’s historic win in NYC underscores a shift that has been emerging in recent years—both in the US and globally—and could extend to other major cities.
For example, in Boston, progressive Democrat Michelle Wu, elected in 2021, ran on making city life more affordable with expanded tenant protections, investments in housing, and childcare support. Her most prominent challenger, Josh Kraft, son of Forbes 400 billionaire Robert Kraft, flamed out even before the election. Out west, Oakland’s progressive Democrat Barbara Lee, elected in 2025, focused on tackling homelessness and making housing and daycare more accessible for families. And in Chicago, democratic socialist Brandon Johnson, who took office in 2023, campaigned on “Green Social Housing” and other programs to lower living costs for working families.
Across these cities, the math is clear: When basic necessities like housing, childcare, and utility costs reach stratospheric levels, voters turn to leaders who offer solutions. These mayoral victories reflect the economic pressures impacting urban life and show why cost-of-living issues are now a defining feature of city politics.
Let’s take a look at how these four cities—New York, Boston, Oakland, and Chicago—stack up in terms of costs.
When a One-Bedroom Costs a Fortune
Across the US, if you’re renting a one‑bedroom apartment, you’re looking at spending about $1,495 a month as of October 2025.
But if you happen to live in one of the country’s pricier cities, that number skyrockets fast. In New York City, a simple one‑bedroom will set you back around $4,026 per month, almost three times the national average. Boston renters face similarly steep costs—one‑bedroom apartments in the city average about $3,455 per month. Over in Oakland, it’s about $2,090 per month, and Chicago clocks in at roughly $1,893 per month.
The point is clear: If you’re renting in America’s major cities, you’re paying beyond what most renters pay across the country, and that housing squeeze helps explain why affordability is a defining issue in urban politics right now.
When Daycare Drains Your Wallet
For parents juggling work and childcare, the national average cost of full-time daycare comes in at roughly $1,039 a month. In major cities where cost of living is high, that number climbs dramatically.
In New York City, center‑based care costs about $26,000 a year on average, which works out to about $2,167 per month. In Boston, families can expect rates around $2,856 per month for about 130 hours of care. In Oakland, the cost for full-day care for children above 36 months is approximately $2,600 per month in many centers. And in Chicago, estimates for full-day daycare center-based care hover in the ballpark of $2,300 per month.
It’s no surprise that voters in these cities are drawn to mayoral candidates who talk seriously about childcare. When daycare alone can eat up a significant portion of a family’s monthly budget, affordability quickly becomes a top political issue.
Basic Services Break the Budget
Nationally, households in the 50 largest metro areas spend about $310 a month on utilities (electricity, gas, heating, water). But in these cities, utility costs blow past the national average, adding another layer of financial pressure for residents.
In New York City, the average monthly utility bill comes in at roughly $571. Meanwhile, in Boston residents pay around $443 a month for utilities. In the Bay Area, the average bill in Oakland comes in at about $342 a month, which is lower than New York and Boston but still higher than in many parts of the country. Chicago households report average monthly utility bills of approximately $352.
Bottom line: If you live in one of those big‑city hubs, utility bills are another piece of the affordability puzzle that voters in these cities are increasingly factoring into who they elect to lead.
Affordability is the New Political Pulse
Rising prices are taking center stage in urban politics, affecting election outcomes and pointing to a growing trend in city governance. Mamdani’s upset in New York is already sending ripples across the country, giving a boost to candidates with progressive or democratic-socialist platforms.
In Minneapolis, state senator Omar Fateh, a progressive Democrat and longtime advocate for renter protections, ran for mayor on a platform focused on affordable housing and expanded public services. In Seattle, activist Katie Wilson, also aligned with the city’s progressive wing, is challenging incumbent Bruce Harrell, centering her campaign on housing, public transit, and the broader cost-of-living crunch.
And this trend isn’t just an American story:rising urban costs show up in political trends worldwide.
Consider Vienna, Austria. Mayor Michael Ludwig, a Social Democrat, has been at the helm since 2018, reinforcing the city’s storied social-housing tradition (which the New York Times called a “renter’s utopia”). Roughly 60% of residents live in subsidized or publicly-owned apartments, while the city continues to invest heavily in childcare and energy-efficient infrastructure. The result is a model of urban living where the cost of everyday life is more manageable.
Copenhagen, Denmark, under Mayor Sophie Hæstorp Andersen of the Social Democrats from 2021 to 2024, similarly emphasizes public housing, affordable early childhood education, and green-energy initiatives to keep city life manageable. And in Barcelona, Spain, Mayor Ada Colau of the leftist Barcelona en Comú party, led from 2015 to 2023, expanding affordable housing, rent controls, and social services.
The economy of the city is pretty much the politics of the city. Zohranomics is essentially urbanomics: the politics of affordability, writ large across city streets. In expensive urban areas, the numbers aren’t abstract, they’re votes. And as the pressures of urban life mount, politics increasingly follows the bottom line.
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No, Progressives Didn’t Ruin Cities Like San Francisco
Locally and nationally, the City by the Bay is being weaponized like a two-pronged pitchfork aimed simultaneously at erasing local progressive change and mobilizing Republican voters motivated by anti-urban fear.
Feb 25, 2024
Despite the apocalyptic stories you may have heard from Fox News, the New York Post, CNN, and other outlets, San Francisco, California, remains an epically beautiful, achingly poetic, richly diverse, and uniquely important American city. This “cool, grey city of love,” as poet George Sterling coined it back in 1892, has long been a haven for progressive ideas, groundbreaking literature and art, and enlightened social justice.
The City by the Bay has been a national leader on living wages, universal healthcare, criminal justice reform (until recently), and LGBTQ+ rights. But the city has a lesser-known conservative streak that is now mightily resurgent, as deep-pocketed reactionary political forces aim to overhaul San Francisco politics by weaponizing homelessness, drug addiction, and crime to fuel election-year fearmongering about urban crisis.
Progressivism is under siege in this historically forward-looking town that has blazed trails for same-sex marriage, tenants’ rights, immigrant protections, and more. A center-right reactionary movement—financed by Republican billionaires, wealthy corporate Democrats, and big business interests—is pushing hard to take over city politics and roll back progressive policies on everything from homelessness to crime and policing, housing, and elections. It’s a remarkable political volte-face that gained national attention with the 2022 recall of progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin.
The city’s famously pretty and increasingly gritty streets—which, like all cities, are tragically sites of chronic homelessness, virally publicized crimes, and fentanyl fatalities—are now a flashpoint for a conservative narrative on rampant homelessness, crime, and punishment.
While moderate and conservative forces have always existed in San Francisco, the current insurgency surfaced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Frustrated by lengthy school closures and the perception of crime run amok (even though most violent crime rates remained lower than most American cities), the center-right coalition funded and fomented a reactionary rebellion, recalling three progressive school board members and then Boudin. Building on these wins, these groups ran hard and spent big to defeat two progressive candidates last year, splurged on campaigns to upend judges, pushed for local legislative districts to favor moderates, and are gunning for more in upcoming elections in March and November. Famously, tech billionaire Elon Musk proclaimed he would chip in $100,000 to defeat Democratic Socialist supervisor Dean Preston; a week later, Musk insisted Preston “should go to prison” for his progressive positions.
This agenda, promoted through ballot initiatives and candidate campaigns as well as advertising and media, includes expanding policing, arresting both drug dealers and users, rolling back criminal justice reforms, building more market-rate housing despite the city’s affordability crisis, and eroding both police accountability and the environmental review of development projects.
The city’s famously pretty and increasingly gritty streets—which, like all cities, are tragically sites of chronic homelessness, virally publicized crimes, and fentanyl fatalities—are now a flashpoint for a conservative narrative on rampant homelessness, crime, and punishment.
Blaming the left for San Francisco’s struggles—which are in fact common to most big cities in America, and to many rural areas as well—is a prime talking point among right-wing and mainstream media, as well as Republican candidates for president. In a Fox News debate last November with California’s Democratic Governor (and former San Francisco mayor) Gavin Newsom, Florida governor and former Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis held up a “poop map,” allegedly showing the proliferation of human feces on San Francisco streets. After a 20-minute pit stop in the city, DeSantis featured San Francisco in a lurid and sensational campaign ad blaming “leftist policies” for the strife in the streets. The day after President Joe Biden announced his 2024 candidacy for re-election, the Republican Party spat out a “what if” campaign commercial featuring apocalyptic AI-generated imagery of San Francisco’s streets overrun with crime and drugs.
Locally and nationally, San Francisco is being weaponized like a two-pronged pitchfork aimed simultaneously at erasing local progressive change and mobilizing Republican voters motivated by anti-urban fear. These two prongs, the local centrist and the national right-wing, are at once distinct but mutually reinforcing.
At a public safety forum last December, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins told a televised audience that homeless people “have to be made to be uncomfortable.” This stunningly Orwellian moment merits repetition: A high-level elected official in one of America’s allegedly more progressive cities insists that people living on the streets need to be made uncomfortable, as if barely surviving without a home isn’t hard enough.
The GOP’s war on cities isn’t just for votes, it’s also a lunge for political control—even when it means diminishing local control, a longstanding Republican mantra.
Jenkins’ bizarre remarks echoed Mayor London Breed’s oxymoronic declaration a few months earlier, at a chaotic outdoor city supervisors meeting near a block known for intense drug dealing, that “compassion is killing people.” Wait—what? Compassion is what’s killing people, not poverty, trauma, abuse, inequality, and nationwide shortages of affordable housing and treatment facilities? The mayor’s remark crystallizes the reactionary thinking ascendant in San Francisco—a deeply conservative politics that blames “compassionate” policies rather than addressing the region’s and the nation’s epic inequalities and decades of declining public investments in affordable housing and treatment for both mental health and substance addiction.
Now, borrowing from the Republican playbook amid her re-election bid this year, Breed is pushing a ballot measure that would require drug testing for recipients of county general assistance—a basic financial lifeline—despite widespread evidence that the approach doesn’t work and often discourages people from getting this meager assistance that helps sustain the poorest of the poor.
Over the past year, Breed, Newsom, conservatives, and moderates alike have prioritized reviving police “sweeps” to remove homeless people from tent settlements on sidewalks—despite chronic shortages of shelter and drug treatment beds and supportive housing, and despite court rulings against criminalizing homeless people for sleeping on sidewalks when there are no clear alternatives. In August, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed the ban on sweeps, angry protesters—joined by Breed and some city legislators—came to the courthouse to voice their outrage that police are not allowed to sweep away homeless people from city sidewalks. (Somehow, these rulings didn’t prevent Breed and police from forcibly removing homeless people from downtown areas during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.)
In his deeply problematic 2021 book, San Fransicko, author Michael Shellenberger wrote, “Progressives ruin cities,” but there’s one big problem with this view: It is profoundly, empirically wrong. Worse, it is fueling a style of politics based on fearmongering and scapegoating that conveniently distracts from tackling the economic and social chasms propelling these crises.
Fearmongering about urban crises has been standard Republican fare for decades, most famously in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, which established the template for making crime, “law and order,” and images of urban chaos a key strategy for winning white suburban and rural votes.
At a campaign stop in Bakersfield, California, in 2020, Donald Trump railed, “Look what’s happened to San Francisco, so sad what’s happened when you see a slum. It’s worse than a slum, there’s no slum like that.” He lost.
In 2022, Republican Darren Bailey ran a heavily anti-urban campaign for Illinois governor, calling Chicago a “crime-ridden, corrupt, dysfunctional hellhole.” He, too, lost.
Along with San Francisco, New York City is a prime target of this narrative. But as Newsweek found, crime rates in many Republican-led cities, such as Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Miami, Florida, are higher than in the Big Apple.
At the Republican state convention in North Carolina in 2021, Trump railed against Democratic-led cities that “defunded” police, echoing police groups’ claims that staffing reductions led to crime spikes. While some violent crimes rose, most cities trimmed police budgets barely, if at all, and crime rose in places that increased police spending as well as those that cut it, according to a report in The Tennessean.
The city’s chronic homelessness and drug addiction in the streets are rooted in astronomic housing prices, and structural regional and national inequality, exacerbated and enabled by public disinvestments in affordable housing and treatment for mental health and substance abuse.
Now, in a particularly cynical move, Republicans are shipping immigrants to Democratic-led big cities. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida’s DeSantis are flying and busing undocumented immigrants to cities such as Chicago, Denver, and New York City, an election-year strategy to rid their states of mostly brown asylum-seekers while adding fiscal and political pressures on Democratic-led urban areas. In response, Democratic mayors have expanded shelters for immigrants and are pressing Biden to bolster federal resources to address people’s needs.
The GOP’s war on cities isn’t just for votes, it’s also a lunge for political control—even when it means diminishing local control, a longstanding Republican mantra. As Mother Jones reported, Republican legislatures and governors “are moving to curb the power of blue municipalities and other institutions that don’t fall in line; erase the voting power of non-Republicans; expel the people those communities elected; and strip them of redress.” This “war on local control” includes challenging the powers of public school systems, district attorneys, and ballot initiatives. Plus, recall efforts are increasing nationwide.
While the Republican “culture wars” don’t resonate in San Francisco, local centrist groups speak a similar GOP-like language on crime, homelessness, and addiction in the streets. The difference is that they articulate it in a locally palatable, seemingly moderate dialect.
As one longtime city resident and observer of San Francisco politics commented on X (formerly Twitter): “The SF Tech-Finance Republican platform that is exactly the same as the ‘moderate Democrat’ one: Criminalize poverty; cops and more cops; deregulate government oversight commissions; deregulate real estate; racist school segregation; deregulation and tax cut[s] for business.”
The financial interests behind San Francisco's reactionary movement were primary funders of the school board and Boudin recalls, and continue to flood the city’s politics with cash. In one example, just two tech industry entrepreneurs spent $350,000 to boost the mayor’s ballot measure to expand policing.
This well-financed octopus of center-right political groups, many with quite similar names (GrowSF, Advance SF, TogetherSF, and Neighbors for a Better SF, among others) features overlapping funders and political ties, local researchers Nate Horrell and Lisa Awbrey have documented.
Shellenberger, who has also written a climate-denial book and espouses troubling transphobic beliefs, is a key figure. His group, Environmental Progress, funds a host of local advocates who promote various planks of the reactionary agenda, from criminalizing drug users and homeless people to expanding policing and incarceration.
Another top funder is Michael Moritz, a knighted Welsh billionaire who got phenomenally rich as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Moritz funds both The San Francisco Standard online publication and political groups like Neighbors for a Better SF and TogetherSF. Moritz has plowed a stunning $336 million into San Francisco “social and political causes” over the past three years.
Other players include the conservative Manhattan Institute and one of its leading ideologues, Christopher Rufo, who produced a slick, heart-tugging, yet deeply misleading video about San Francisco’s struggles, titled “Chaos by the Bay,” which has netted nearly 2 million views on YouTube alone.
While progressive policies have clearly not fixed the crises in the streets, they have reduced the harm and suffering.
According to Tim Redmond, editor of the local news outlet 48 Hills, this reactionary movement is “driven by a false media narrative” that “suggests San Francisco is crime-ridden and unsafe, and that the solution is more police and more incarceration.” Redmond, who has covered city politics since 1986, adds, “It’s funded by very, very rich Big Tech and real estate folks who are, frankly, taking advantage of a situation where the voters are unhappy to try to impose a neoliberal agenda.”
The thing is, they’re wrong about San Francisco and the causes of its problems. The city’s chronic homelessness and drug addiction in the streets are rooted in astronomic housing prices, and structural regional and national inequality, exacerbated and enabled by public disinvestments in affordable housing and treatment for mental health and substance abuse. Decades of citywide gentrification—and a seismic economic and political shift propelled by the tech and real estate industries—spawned thousands of evictions, even from subsidized housing; meanwhile, 71% of homeless people in the city were formerly housed here, city officials report. A recent peer-reviewed, multi-university study on homelessness in California found that high rents and housing instability are top drivers of the state’s soaring homelessness.
A key character in this story is the tech industry, which has dominated the local and regional landscape for the past quarter-century. This inequitable economic monocropping has produced the world’s greatest concentration of billionaires, alongside California’s most glaring inequality, with the top 10% raking in more than 12 times what those in the bottom 10% make. This, combined with stratospheric housing prices, has fomented a mass exodus of poor and working-class people from the city.
Combine these local and regional factors with a national affordable housing shortage, and nearly half the nation at poverty's precipice, and you have a volatile recipe for homelessness and desperation. Homelessness jumped by record levels in 2023, due to the dearth of affordable housing and stark drops in post-pandemic public assistance. And now, Republicans are trying to eliminate or cut welfare and food stamps.
The suffering on some San Francisco streets, and those of other American cities and towns, is horrifically real. But as long as these reactionary movements blame false causes, while distracting from these huge structural culprits, the suffering—and those reactionary howls for yet more policing and punishment—will only get worse.
While progressive policies have clearly not fixed the crises in the streets, they have reduced the harm and suffering. A harm-reduction center for drug users that Breed first opened and then shut down saved hundreds of lives by preventing overdose deaths, which have spiked since its closure.
Progressive ballot measures in recent years that tax the rich to expand supportive housing and services for homeless people have housed thousands. Progressive policies preventing tenant evictions have helped keep many residents housed who might otherwise have ended up on the streets.
Other progressive policies have substantially improved San Franciscans’ lives: a living wage ordinance; an anti-wage-theft ordinance; universal local healthcare; free public transit for children; and a tax on the city’s wealthiest property owners to fund rental assistance and more affordable housing.
What San Francisco needs is not more punishment, nor more slashing of public aid, nor a new “just say no” war on drugs. Our best hope is to greatly expand and fund policies known to help: more affordable and supportive housing, combined with more treatment for addiction and mental illness; living wages so people can afford that housing; and a New Deal for homeless and poor people that engages, employs, houses, supports, inspires, and includes these people rather than weaponizing them for political gain.
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