> Our current restrictive policies disproportionately hurt poorer, younger, and (frequently) non-white[4] people.
There is massive opposition within the poorer, non-white bay area community to the political group that Stripe is funding here. CA YIMBY [EDIT: correction, should read YIMBY Action] literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest. The LA Times just published a good overview of this issue yesterday. The title: "A major California housing bill failed after opposition from the low-income residents it aimed to help. Here's how it went wrong"[1]
Money quote: "'The YIMBY movement has a white privilege problem,' said Anya Lawler, a lobbyist with the Western Center on Law & Poverty, a legal advocacy group and adversary of SB 827. 'I don't think they recognize it. They don't understand poverty. They don't understand what that's like, who our clients really are and what their lived experience is.'"
Concessions to protect low-income residents were added to the failed bill only after substantial protest from the community. Let's hope next time around, instead of just claiming to act on behalf on poorer and non-white people, they actually try listening to them.
> There is massive opposition within the poorer, non-white bay area community to the political group that Stripe is funding here. CA YIMBY literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest.
While no group is homogeneous in beliefs, polling very clearly shows that minority groups strongly support increased housing construction. (As does an overall majority of Californians.) On the micro level, groups like The 200 (community leaders of color) and experts like Richard Rothstein (author of Color of Law) have endorsed CA YIMBY's pro-housing policy work. See more at https://cayimby.org/endorsement/fair-housing-advocates/.
CA YIMBY was not involved in the protest you mention. I think you're confusing them with other groups.
I believe you are misrepresenting that letter when you say it "endorsed CA YIMBY's work." To quote it,
"We note that some affordable housing and tenants' rights organizations have expressed concerns over SB 827. Recent amendments designed to safeguard local inclusionary zoning ordinances, protect local residents from displacement through a statutory 'right to remain' guarantee, and prohibit demolition of rent-controlled housing, which we applaud, helps to address some of these concerns."
None of these amendments would have happened without protest from low-income and minority housing advocates against CA YIMBY's work. The letter "applauds" these changes and even supports "additional legislation to expand inclusionary zoning." It merely concludes that "the perfect must not be the enemy of the good" and recommends a compromise.
This is far from an endorsement of CA YIMBY's work. In fact it reads as an endorsement of the opposition and resulting amendments.
> While no group is homogeneous in beliefs, polling very clearly shows that minority groups strongly support increased housing construction.
The minority groups who opposed SB 827 support increased housing construction -- just with better protections against displacement than what CA YIMBY has been pushing. To suggest otherwise is a false dichotomy.
Thank you for the correction on which YIMBY group shouted down the minority housing activists.
> The minority groups who opposed SB 827 support increased housing construction -- just with better protections against displacement than what CA YIMBY has been pushing. To suggest otherwise is a false dichotomy.
No, they don't. Organizations like SFTU do not support construction of any market-rate housing.
You conflated housing construction with market-rate housing. And it’s not true. SFTU simply notes that for every market rate unit you need 0.25 BMR units simply to accommodate the resulting job creation (retail, restaurant, public service, etc.) That’s just to keep things where they are, which is already a huge staffing crisis for the service industry in SF. More like 0.5 BMR to make an appreciable impact.[1]
This is something we all should care about if we’re not just here to make a quick buck. Long term we need teachers and cooks and waiters and artists to keep SF a desirable place to live.
As PG himself said, “These independent restaurants and cafes are not just feeding people. They're making there be a there here.”[2]
No economist agrees with Tim Redmond, who is a millionaire homeowner on the westside who unfortunately is very good at couching his own financial and personal interests in the veneer of progressive language in order to co-opt groups like SFTU into working against their constituents' long-term self-interest.
High-end condos don't generate jobs. They provide housing for the jobs that are already here and the new ones that are being created every day.
Raising the inclusionary zoning percentage to 50% will simply make it financially infeasible to construct housing. The City's own study confirms this. Tim knows this too, and that is why he advocates for it.
> High-end condos don't generate jobs. They provide housing for the jobs that are already here and the new ones that are being created every day.
You completely missed the point. You are simply not taking into account the service industry jobs that arise to serve the new "high-end condo" residents. Baristas and teachers need BMR housing.
> a millionaire... who unfortunately is very good at couching his own financial and personal interests in the veneer of progressive language in order to co-opt groups... into working against their constituents' long-term self-interest.
Exactly the same criticism could be made of tech-millionare-backed, largely white YIMBY groups. The difference is minority and low-income housing activists are broadly opposed to YIMBY policies. Your only explanation is that they are victims of a rich white puppetmaster.
You should try listening to them better. You completely misrepresented their position earlier; even those that supported the passage of SB 827 did so after substantial amendments that arose from protesting the YIMBY-backed original bill.
> You completely missed the point. You are simply not taking into account the service industry jobs that arise to serve the new "high-end condo" residents. Baristas and teachers need BMR housing.
Tim's article is yet another misuse of the Residential Nexus Analysis. For more info as to how that paper is abused:
Key point: "The Residential Nexus Analysis gets around all this by assuming that a new development of 100 units does not compete against existing housing but somehow attracts new residents who would not otherwise have looked for existing housing. At the same time, it assumes that the new housing units receive their price from the market. A more reasonable model would make the cost of housing endogenous by considering the new development a part of San Francisco’s housing stock which is desirable by existing residents."
In fact, I'm a walking example of this. I'm moving out of a rent controlled apartment in SF into a new condo in SF, freeing up my old relatively-affordable unit. If NIMBYs had their way, then I'd continue to be living there instead of someone who really needs that studio apartment.
Again: There is no debate among economists about whether California needs to build more market rate housing. The only debates are in the political sphere. This is an open and shut case.
> Exactly the same criticism could be made of tech-millionare-backed, largely white YIMBY groups.
YIMBY groups are diverse and reflect the diversity of the Bay Area, with LGBT especially well-represented. Their opponents like to erase representation of minorities to score political points, which is extremely disrespectful. For example, Gay Shame claims that you can't be "queer" unless you agree with their anti-development politics, which is at best bullying and at worst homophobic.
Notice I wasn't referring to anyone other than Tim Redmond. I'm well aware that NIMBY groups are also diverse.
> The difference is minority and low-income housing activists are broadly opposed to YIMBY policies. Your only explanation is that they are victims of a rich white puppetmaster.
Some minority and low-income housing activists are opposed to development. Others, such as nonprofit developers, supported SB 827.
It is not a controversial statement among anyone other than Bay Area activists that the lines cross against development in a bizarre way unique to San Francisco. It is not a controversial statement among economists that artificially restricting the supply of housing hurts the most vulnerable. From listening to SF "progressives" talk, you'd think that economists weren't completely united in opposition to rent control, which, of course, they are (and I'm not opposed to smart rent control, by the way).
> You should try listening to them better.
I have listened. I understand the concerns about gentrification and displacement. That doesn't change the fact that tenants' activists are wrong about what causes it.
Your arguments are extremely disingenuous. You know that rent-controlled units reset to market when vacated. A barista or a teacher is not going to move into your studio. It's probably going to go to another tech worker.
You dismiss Tim Redmond's analysis based on his vested "millionaire" homeowner interest. Yet you cite an "academic" analysis paid for by the California Homebuilding Foundation. Completely hypocritical.
You attempt to paint the YIMBY groups as diverse and representative of low-income minority groups by citing only their LGBT representation. This blatantly disregards Latinx, AA and other minority groups that are disproportionately affected by the housing crisis.
You mischaracterize BMR as "rent control," then simplistically argue against that straw man. But economists do in fact argue that SF affordable housing developer fees can "improve housing affordability for low- and middle-income households, despite some loss of market-rate housing construction" because "prices are less important than land use controls in explaining whether a parcel will develop new housing."[1] And even economists who argue against the downsides of rent control recognize it has "benefits" and argue for other forms of government "protection against rent increases."[2]
> You know that rent-controlled units reset to market when vacated. A barista or a teacher is not going to move into your studio. It's probably going to go to another tech worker.
It's sure a lot more affordable than the "luxury condos" everyone complains about. And, besides, the reason why it's likely to go to another tech worker is that there isn't enough housing. If the city were to cap the rent at $1,000 (post-Costa-Hawkins-repeal), then the units would still go to tech workers, because if there are many applicants landlords will nearly always rent to the richest.
> You dismiss Tim Redmond's analysis based on his vested "millionaire" homeowner interest. Yet you cite an "academic" analysis paid for by the California Homebuilding Foundation. Completely hypocritical.
I dismiss Tim Redmond's "analysis" because it's wrong and is based on talking points that have been debunked, as I explained. Tim has a history of making specious arguments, always in favor of NIMBYism. For example, Tim made a ludicrous claim a while back that most "luxury condos" are vacant, based on classifying of any listing of a homeowner with a different address as "vacant" (which excludes all rentals!)
The paper I described is academic, because it's written by an academic. Tim is not one.
> You attempt to paint the YIMBY groups as diverse and representative of low-income minority groups by citing only their LGBT representation.
Because it would be weird to namedrop people I don't know well in order to win an an argument on a message board that YIMBY groups are diverse. You are welcome to do your own research to confirm that there are plenty of ethnic minorities in YIMBY groups.
> You mischaracterize BMR as "rent control,"
I never said BMR/inclusionary zoning is rent control. Nor do I disagree with rent control, if implemented properly (see below)!
The problem with high inclusionary zoning percentages is that if they become too high developers won't construct housing at all. Developments have to pencil out, unless we fund them at public expense. (I want to do that as well, but that will be very hard in the current political environment, so in the meantime we have to pursue realistic policies.) Exclusionary suburbs know this—they create unrealistically high IZ requirements in order to prevent new housing from being built.
> And even economists who argue against the downsides of rent control recognize it has "benefits" and argue for other forms of government "protection against rent increases."
Government protection against rent increases is a good idea, as long as it's means-tested—tech workers like me shouldn't stand to benefit from it. For example, a progressive tax credit, as suggested in that paper, would be a great idea that would protect vulnerable renters.
> And, besides, the reason why [my studio is] likely to go to another tech worker is that there isn't enough housing.
Thank you for conceding that your studio is going to go to another tech worker. There goes the (non-academic) argument you just presented against Residential Nexus Analysis. The point stands that baristas and teachers need BMR housing.
> Because it would be weird to namedrop people I don't know well in order to win an an argument on a message board that YIMBY groups are diverse. You are welcome to do your own research to confirm that there are plenty of ethnic minorities in YIMBY groups.
You clearly lost this argument. You were going to "namedrop" some minorities? YIMBY groups are overwhelmingly white. An attendee of the first national YIMBY conference in Boulder noted "it's wealthy and tremendously (88 percent) white; and YIMBY’s racial demographics reflected that."[1] YIMBY activists shouted down minority speakers at a recent protest. YIMBY "has a white privilege problem,"[2] and your comments only serve to reinforce that.
> Thank you for conceding that your studio is going to go to another tech worker. There goes the (non-academic) argument you just presented against Residential Nexus Analysis. The point stands that baristas and teachers need BMR housing.
What I said is true in the aggregate. You're trying to argue that, because my one unit won't solve the housing crisis, we shouldn't build anything at all. That's silly. If we build enough market-rate housing, then eventually tech workers won't have to look downmarket. That will free up the lower end for others and lower rents to affordable levels. There aren't infinite tech workers.
The problem is that tech workers are competing for lower-end units at all. We will only solve that one unit at a time, by building a lot more housing at all levels.
Do you want tech workers like you and me to be taking up rent controlled studios?
> YIMBY activists shouted down minority speakers at a recent protest.
Sonja and Laura shouldn't have apologized for that, because they didn't "shout them down". They were simply chanting "read the bill". That is important, because the bill allows more construction of BMR housing. Since we agree BMR housing is important, telling protestors to read the bill is perfectly reasonable.
>This is something we all should care about if we’re not just here to make a quick buck. Long term we need teachers and cooks and waiters and artists to keep SF a desirable place to live.
The problem could also be solved, (assuming building more at market rate housing) by simply paying the cooks and waiters and artists more. I mean, I'm a sysadmin, which is also 'support staff' and also doesn't require a degree... and I'm getting like twice here what I would elsewhere. I don't see why waiters should be any different.
That’s a nice thought, but obviously you would see massive price hikes at restaurants and stores, and it’s likely that consumers would patronize them less. Macroeconomics rarely have such simple solutions. SF already leads the nation in raising the minimum wage. Tech businesses are a bad compare because the revenue per employee is typically much higher than the service industry.
> That’s a nice thought, but obviously you would see massive price hikes at restaurants and stores, and it’s likely that consumers would patronize them less.
I dunno about the last part. I personally perceive service and food around here to be incredibly cheap (compared to rent and wages for the sort of work I do) - There is, of course a demand curve, and raising prices will somewhat lower demand for the more optional kinds of service work, but we don't really know where that demand curve goes; personally, you'd have to double prices before I changed my consumption of locally produced services other than uber much at all.
Right now, my perception is that area stores and restaurants are massively understaffed and open very limited hours, presumably because they aren't charging enough to pay enough to hire enough people.
>Tech businesses are a bad compare because the revenue per employee is typically much higher than the service industry.
That was kind of my point. right now, local services are under-priced compared to tech worker wages and compared to rent. Of course, this is going to result in dramatically lower revenue per employee than if they charged a lot more.
A lot of the tech industry is also 1 on 1 service stuff. Depending on the day, my own work is more than half 1 on 1 kind of work that "doesn't scale" - but I still get paid a lot because the people I'm helping are valuable. Same principle applies to other kinds of support staff. If you support someone more valuable... you usually get paid more.
> you'd have to double prices before I changed my consumption of locally produced services other than uber much at all.
So you’d pay $26 per cocktail and $68 for a pork chop, but $15 is too expensive for an Uber. I find that hard to believe.
Even if true, you are not representative of SF consumers. A Harvard study notes, “higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants. Higher minimum wages also reduce the rate at which new restaurants open by 4-6% per $1 increase in the minimum.”[1]
(I don't think anyone in my income tax bracket is giving up uber when drinking. I'm mostly talking about uber-as-commute rides, which is a minority of uber riders, but is over-represented in number of rides, just 'cause most of us go to work a lot more often than we go out drinking. The uber as drunk taxi business is pretty safe. The uber as commuting tool business is rather more vulnerable.)
>So you’d pay $26 per cocktail and $68 for a pork chop, but $15 is too expensive for an Uber. I find that hard to believe.
I take uber to work every day. My boss is paying for a parking spot at work, my apartment is paying for a parking spot at home, so uber is competing with me, you know, buying a honda. Most of the infrastructure; most of the expensive part of owning a cheap car already exists and is being paid for regardless of my car ownership status.
Right now, Uber to work is usually unshared, as I'm usually in a hurry, and thats usually more than $10, less than $15. (the ride home is usually under $5, as it's the shared service.) - When I need to haul things, I rent a car or use a service. right now I'm already paying a reasonably high premium to sit in the back and read vs. owning and driving that honda. Would I pay twice that for an everyday commute? probably not.
I work at a place that prepares free (and really quite good) food for me three times a day, so I mostly only eat out on the weekends; I eat out a lot less than I use uber. A lot less, as sometimes I even cook for myself on the weekends (It's... kind of novel, after getting fed all week.)
Of course, even at 3x the price, I'd still use uber when I go drinking... it's just that I don't do that very often compared to how often I use uber to get to where I need to go every day.
(as another aside, I seem to have a higher threshold for cocktail prices than most people and a lower threshold for food prices than most people, I mean, compared with others with similar 'entertainment budget' - I think this is partly an awareness on my part of how expensive alcohol is in performance degradation... but also just personal preference. I really enjoy a good cocktail, and feel that there's a pretty big difference in enjoyment between a really good cocktail and a meh cocktail.)
>Even if true, you are not representative of SF consumers.
I... don't think my situation is that unusual for silicon valley customers. Most homes and most jobs come with free parking, (making the 'tipping point' for using uber much closer than in areas without abundant parking) and a smaller (but still large) number of jobs come with free food. (meaning we eat out less, and therefore can spend more when we do... also, I think, that we demand better food when we eat out. eating at IHOP is super disappointing after getting fed much better food every day as a simple reward for showing up to work before 10:30)
> local services are under-priced compared to tech worker wages
Okay, but if you 'fixed' that, then local services would be over-priced compared to non-tech-worker wages. Then where would non-tech-workers get haircuts or cognitive behavioral therapy?
The argument I'm putting forth is that raising the costs (and pay) for service work, if that could be done without raising the rent, would be a net positive for said service workers, just 'cause they spend a disproportionately large percentage of their income on rent (compared to tech workers) -
But they're still going to have really long commutes because they can't find housing near where they live unless they outbid software engineers, which would raise the rent. And then the software companies will just have to raise salaries to beat them and more money will go toward the landlords.
If you have a mostly-fixed supply and you subsidize buying that supply, you just raise the price. In order to increase the number of people who are able to live their jobs, you need to change the physical structure of area near their jobs to have more housing.
You can't turn money into housing by just adding money. Only construction can do that.
I was responding to the objection that even if we were building unlimited new housing, the new stuff would be unaffordable to those on the bottom. And one solution to that is to pay them more relative to those on the top.
I think it's obvious to people who don't own or live in rent controlled places that we need more housing overall. I was just responding to the fair objection that more housing, by itself, isn't enough to house people who are massively underpaid.
This is just using social justice language to rationalize NIMBYism, which is basically the default tactic for all SF politics. The facts do not support it:
"77% of Latinos, 69% of African Americans, and 64% of Asian Americans support building more housing in their local areas, compared with 53% of whites." Support for the same question is highest for those with incomes under $40,000 and lowest for those with incomes over $80,000.
It's not just "poor non white" people who are struggling with housing. It's becoming so frustrating to see the conversation constantly re-centered on this group.
There are plenty of YOUNG people (yes, including white people, successful people) who are struggling with housing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a push to fix housing for middle class workers. The conversation does not always, all the time, need to be about poor non-white people. Yes, they need help too, and YES we should work on solutions that benefit both groups. But constantly re-centering the conversation on the poor, means it's the middle class who consistently miss out on reform.
Most poor advocacy groups keep pushing low income subsidized housing.
Which is a small band-aid that will never work. It creates lotteries where literally hundreds of people apply for a single home and one lucky person gets it. So one person is helped but the majority get nothing.
We need to actually fix the system, not create lotto winners.
There's definitely a role for bandaids while the longer term fix has its effect. I think it's really important to approach these with a "yes-and-" type of thinking rather than choosing a single direction and sticking to that alone.
Building more housing is a long term fix; even if we start building tomorrow with our maximum construction capacity, it's going to take a minimum of 15-20 years to make a really significant dent.
In the interim, protecting those who are most at risk is essential. And that means not only assistance at 60% of area median income (AMI), but also all the way up to 80% and even some amount of 120% AMI, in order to preserve some amount of economic breadth in communities like San Francisco.
The bandaids can't be the only policy, neither really can zoning be the only policy. It's going to take time to attract enough construction laborers to build everything we need to build!
Take it al with a grain of salt of course, it's just a newspaper columnist and not a full analysis but it's the best I've seen and he cites his sources.
The build rate required to hit that is about 65,000 units/year, which was about the rate that the Bay Area built at in 1971, which has severely tapered off since then:
However, everybody I hear talking about remodeling or building is saying that right now there's a construction labor shortage in the Bay Area, and we're nowhere near building 65k units per year, so it's going to take many years to build up the labor force and construction capacity too.
Building is a long term, but necessary fix to the housing crisis.
So why not just build social housing at a larger scale? It'd put actual downward force on the market by turning publicly-owned housing from a lottery into legitimate competition with privately-owned housing.
Cause that would require billions of dollars and a new state bureaucracy. I think building tons and tons of affordable housing would be great, but where's the money? I don't think the public support for an enormous housing bond is there yet.
And of course any time you tried to put down an affordable housing complex, you'd have to fight the neighborhood. SF had a proposed 100% affordable housing complex in the Mission that got shot down by the neighbors. Even if the money was there, you'd have to deal with the fact that people hate living next to poor people. So we'd probably need another state assembly bill that said something like, "if this complex has 80% affordable housing units no municipality can block it," and given the inability to pass SB827...there's no way that's going to pass.
These are the kinds of things people should talk about, to move the Overton window. But anyway, as of now, building tons of public housing just isn't politically feasible.
The legislators did pass a bill last year, SB 35, that says if a project has enough inclusionary housing, and it complies with all the zoning codes, and the city has been falling behind on affordable housing, then the municipality can’t block it. It has been proposed for use to convert a mall in “the circumstances are not dire” Cupertino to a mixed-use project with 50% affordable housing.
https://sf.curbed.com/2018/2/7/16986422/cupertino-darcy-paul...https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/28/17173010/cupertino-mall-hous...
You should totally support California YIMBY, still. A weakness in the Housing Accountability Act is that the housing goals are very weak and unrealistically low. SB 828 would require the numbers to be more realistic.
https://cayimby.org/policy/
The money for market-rate development is so abundant that we feel a need to suppress it. Getting the public funding for significant social housing would be a revolution all by itself. San Francisco’s entire $10B budget could only build 20k affordable homes at a cost of $500k each (which is low, by a cursory Google for recent projects) if it suspended all other services.
Being a “minority activist” does not make you immune to corruption. The protest was organized for the ambitious elected official Jane Kim, and she invited “minority activists” to speak out-and-out lies. Things like, “SB 827 does not have tenant protections.”
I’ve been at neighborhood meetings, where people working for the Planning Department asked minorities what they wanted. The minorities, every single one, wanted the opposite of what the activists wanted.
I find it hard to believe that "poor non-white people" have the political clout necessary to block SB 827 and housing in general, nor would it serve their interests. I think this is a false flag being proposed and the people against housing are mostly long term residents that don't want to see change because it will get rid of their current under-market pricing housing.
There were two constituencies that would most directly benefit from SB 827 that did not support it this year, that most likely will in the future:
* construction labor - no construction bill is going to get by without their approval
* tenant advocates - without their support it's quite unlikely that the bill will make it through all the way
Municipalities almost universally opposed SB 827, and state legislatures generally cede to them, but with the above two groups, SB 827 probably has fantastic chances.
Construction labor opposed it because currently the discretionary review process is where prevailing wages concessions can be extracted from a developer; construction labor doesn't want to miss out on that. Adding prevailing wages to SB 35 is what brought that group to the table. If labor can be brought on board for SB 827 like they were for SB 35, it's going to go far.
Tenant advocates are nervous about development in general, for very good reason, because that has been the primary way that low income neighborhoods have been destroyed. For SB 827 to come through, it has to be shown that it won't cause the same problems that past development focused on "blighted" areas caused. I think it's quite likely that this will happen because the non-profits that build affordable housing tend to like SB 827. Since SB 827 only hits current neighborhoods in a very few places, there are only a few neighborhoods to protect, so it seems possible to ensure proper protections directly in the bill or through other means.
It seems likely that SB 827 didn't have these groups included yet because the bill sponsors were surprised by the huge amount of press (including national!!) it received and momentum it gained. Given the very short amount of time to coordinate with these interest groups, I don't 100% blame the committee chair for killing it so soon. But with enough time some sort of transit-oriented development bill come through. It has to, both for California's housing crisis and for California's climate goals.
Based on my reading it seemed like SB 827 was doomed because there was no way municipalities were going to support it (it basically removed their power to decide on the matter), even if they believe in the policies it enforced.
Yes, I'm certain that municipalities will oppose almost anything that lessens local control. However that alone is not enough to stop legislation; the housing package of bills got through last year!
Also, it seems likely that "transit" oriented development will be weakened to just "rail" oriented development. In that case, the vast majority of municipalities won't be directly affected, and may actually have reason to support it. That's because it forces their neighbors who are slacking to actually allow people to build, and this should benefit all the municipalities that aren't affected. So it may be possible to split them.
Municipalities are a bit different from just NIMBYs though too, municipalities typically want office space and other business related development because it brings in tax revenue. Housing is seen as a negative to the city budgets, oddly, because of Prop 13.
NIMBY groups (which I am trying to use without an pejorative meaning, simply in reference to neighborhood groups), typically don't act at the state level, except through forcing their municipality to support or oppose specific measures. At least as far as I can tell. I'm still new to this landscape.
EDIT: I apologize, yes, that's YIMBY Action not CA YIMBY in the video. So there was shouting down minority speakers at the protest, but from a different YIMBY group.
-----
Yes, here is video of CA YIMBY shouting down minority affordable housing activists.[1] The executive director of CA YIMBY apologized for her organization's behavior.[2]
It continues to be primarily privileged white people who use zoning to prevent building of low-cost housing, discouraging multi-family units, discouraging non-traditional housing situations for workers, etc.
It would be helpful for these groups opposing SB 827 on "equity" grounds to propose alternatives that will have a similar impact on housing affordability. I read that article, and those linked from it, and could not find a single proposal to that end.
They do; you just don't hear about them if you mainly get your news from pro-YIMBY sources, which love to misrepresent their opposition as exclusively old, white NIMBYs. In fact it is CA YIMBY that is mostly white.
The DSA has a detailed stance on this which lays out what they want in a pro-housing bill.[1] Well worth a read.
Having more nuanced reasoning behind your opposition to all practical projects, and hypothetically supporting “decommodified” projects for which no funding is on the table, don’t meaningfully distinguish the DSA’s position from other forms of NIMBYism in terms of actual effects. Purity of intention, maybe.
I'm not sure what being white has to do with anything, but the NIMBY/YIMBY groups, with the YIMBY being slightly more libertarian and NIMBY being a bet more liberal and idealistic.
The crux of the disagreement comes from YIMBY pursuing housing at all costs believing the market, and prior art (such as other cities like Tokyo), showing that it will work out, and NIMBY wanting to preserve the lives of people that could become displaced by new housing.
I'm actually a great example of someone who has something to lose if YIMBY people get their way, but full disclosure: I support YIMBY. I'm living in a rent-controlled building in San Francisco, paying rent from 7 years ago (aka greatly below market) about 6 minutes walking to a BART station. I probably wouldn't be classified as "poor", but if new housing is built, most likely my unit could be torn down and replaced with a higher density building and I could be "displaced" (losing my rent control). But to get the deal I have you do not have to be in any way "poor"; you just have to be here first/a long time. In no way does NIMBY policy of preserving my right to stay here help poor people (as a group). In my opinion NIMBY's are protecting the "original" residents of an area that stand to have their rents increased because they are underpaying in a prime location.
SB827, and most pro-housing initiatives will cause many areas to be upzoned, increasing the market rates of certain areas, but more importantly, decreasing market rates overall. Of course this means that people like me living in prime areas at below market rates will lose out on this great deal.
NIMBY's prime argument seems to be that a lot of these people living in prime areas at below market rates tend to be poor people, but this is completely false. It has nothing to do with poor people. It only has to do about people who've been here first/a long time. This is the main point of their "preserving the character" of the neighborhood behind their rhetoric. That's why their platform is based around "affordable" housing, which means preserving these lower than market rate units for people that are already there.
If you want to help poor people, you'd increase housing overall to decrease rent overall, which is what YIMBY is after. From a poor person's perspective, they don't need to live in a prime area downtown, but for someone paying below market rent they would definitely want to keep that deal. If you want to help grandfather people into their below market rent, you support NIMBY.
no yimby orgs are gonna have a goal of displacing people like you, who live in rent controlled or otherwise affordable housing, and they actively support policies that protect tenants. The controversy is that they also support policies that build more housing, and many in the "no more growth" group think that any market rate housing built anywhere will just make the current housing crises worse.
Unfortunately, the economic argument to help poor people is extremely adverse in the Bay Area. It’s easy to see why: the opportunity cost of providing housing to someone who has low marginal economic value is much higher in the Bay Area than almost anywhere else in the world. The big asterisk on YIMBYism is that it’s meant to incentivize highly-skilled laborers in roughly the 95th through 99th percentiles who are increasingly walking away from the Bay Area because their overall optionality is improving while CoL in the region is skyrocketing.
Among the biggest threats right now to Bay Area tech companies are smart people (the only kind they’re trying to hire) crunching the numbers.
So yea poor people aren’t really under consideration other than for optics purposes.It’s high salary people versus high net worth people.
However annecdotal - I moved out of SF and will not return for exactly this reason. At this point I almost laugh whenever someone approaches me for a position where the main office is in SF and they have a "no remote employees" policy.
If you want to blame state law for not setting aside enough low-income housing, it seems to me that the original sin was the zoning powers that the state conferred to local governments a hundred years ago. SB 827 itself would have taken back minimal powers from local governments—namely, the right to set arbitrarily restrictive height limits, single-family density restrictions, and parking minimums near transit. Of course, SB 827 could have included any number of additional changes (e.g. eviction reform, low-income funding, tax reform, price controls), but these are each worthwhile policies in and of themselves and are complementary to SB 827, not opposed to it.
They shouted them down because their concern is stupid. Opening up more housing will allow more people of all kinds to move in. All it does is shift the price curve down. How much it shifts down depends on how much more housing you allow.
YIMBY and tenant activism are solving different problems that happen to be conflated under the term “housing crisis.” YIMBYism is about the ease of becoming comfortably housed in the Bay Area; tenant activism is about staying that way. YIMBYs would do well to acknowledge that the left wing’s solutions are more effective in terms of its community-preservation goals, communicate why mobility and urbanism are also worthy goals, and to search for solutions that optimize all three. You’re 100% right: at the moment, it’s tone deaf. Rent control is absolutely a better way to keep people in their apartments, and no one is going to be convinced otherwise.
There's huge amount of sentiment in California to keep new people out. So in order to punish newcomers some people are very willing to take on the negatives of rent control for those that have it--namely a huge lack of mobility once you have a place. Unfortunately that leaves all young people in the lurch, in addition to the newcomers from other places.
The idea of making it easier for people to move here is an absolutely radical and terrible idea, according to a large number of people here.
Yeah. I despise NIMBY behaviors, so I expected to be hugely in favor of the YIMBY movement when I first heard of it. But it seems like every time I come across an advocate for it they're young, upper-middle to upper-class young white people who are relatively new to the community and have a very "fuck your feelings" approach to things. It's mainly been a disappointment to me.
There is massive opposition within the poorer, non-white bay area community to the political group that Stripe is funding here. CA YIMBY [EDIT: correction, should read YIMBY Action] literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest. The LA Times just published a good overview of this issue yesterday. The title: "A major California housing bill failed after opposition from the low-income residents it aimed to help. Here's how it went wrong"[1]
Money quote: "'The YIMBY movement has a white privilege problem,' said Anya Lawler, a lobbyist with the Western Center on Law & Poverty, a legal advocacy group and adversary of SB 827. 'I don't think they recognize it. They don't understand poverty. They don't understand what that's like, who our clients really are and what their lived experience is.'"
Concessions to protect low-income residents were added to the failed bill only after substantial protest from the community. Let's hope next time around, instead of just claiming to act on behalf on poorer and non-white people, they actually try listening to them.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu...