8 ms·

> Our current restrictive policies disproportionately hurt poorer, younger, and (frequently) non-white[4] people. There is massive opposition within the poorer

> 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. [1] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failure-equity-groups-20180502-story.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu...

rcpt 8y ago
> CA YIMBY literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest. There should be a ton of videos accompanying this, right? All I could find was https://www.facebook.com/groups/vote123equity2018/permalink/225109874735410/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/vote123equity2018/permalink/... which looks like pretty standard protesting to me.
- abalone 8y ago
  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] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU [2] https://twitter.com/NeverSassyLaura/status/981901464929951744 https://twitter.com/NeverSassyLaura/status/98190146492995174...
  - pc 8y ago
    That's not CA YIMBY's ED. CA YIMBY was not involved in that protest.
  - rcpt 8y ago
    I mean, that still looks like typical protesting. Is everyone supposed to shut up because the guy at the mic isn't white?
dublinben 8y ago
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.
- rcpt 8y ago
  This is best survey of the literature that I know on the topic: http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Been%20Ellen%20O'Regan%20supply_affordability_Oct%2026%20revision.pdf http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Been%20Ellen%20O'...
- abalone 8y ago
  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. [1] http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827 http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827
  - closeparen 8y ago
    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.
  - chrischen 8y ago
    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.
sp527 8y ago
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. Highly cynical and all around awful? Yes.
- sudomake 8y ago
  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.
rubicon33 8y ago
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.
pc 8y ago
> 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/ 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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- abalone 8y ago
  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.
  - 8y ago
chrischen 8y ago
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.
- epistasis 8y ago
  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.
  - 8y ago
yonran 8y ago
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.
darawk 8y ago
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.
nerfhammer 8y ago
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. http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-affordability/ http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-aff...
closeparen 8y ago
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.
- epistasis 8y ago
  Such an excellent way to pose this, thank you. 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.
the-pigeon 8y ago
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.
- epistasis 8y ago
  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!
  - hueving 8y ago
    >it's going to take a minimum of 15-20 years to make a really significant dent. According to what data?
    - epistasis 8y ago
      This was article was making the rounds a few days ago, as the amount needed to bring housing costs down to a normal amount of average income: http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-area-housing-stock-must-grow-50-percent-20-years/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-are... 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: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/8g7qyk/to_solve_affordability_crisis_bay_area_housing/dya7snr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/8g7qyk/to_sol... That trend on not building in recent decades is state wide too: https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/05/03/82720/five-reasons-california-s-housing-costs-are-so-hig/ https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/05/03/82720/five-reasons-cali... 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.
Decade 8y ago
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. http://www.beyondchron.org/special-report-sb-827-failed/ http://www.beyondchron.org/special-report-sb-827-failed/
rayiner 8y ago
Ironically, it is NIMBYism that really has the white privilege problem. It was white people that invented zoning laws in response to desegregation: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/02/zonings-racist-roots-still-bear-fruit http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/02/zonings-racist-roots-s.... 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.
- wpietri 8y ago
  It is entirely believable to me that both of them have giant white privilege problems.
wpietri 8y ago
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.

rcpt 8y ago

> CA YIMBY literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest. There should be a ton of videos accompanying this, right? All I could find was https://www.facebook.com/groups/vote123equity2018/permalink/225109874735410/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/vote123equity2018/permalink/... which looks like pretty standard protesting to me.

abalone 8y ago
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] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU [2] https://twitter.com/NeverSassyLaura/status/981901464929951744 https://twitter.com/NeverSassyLaura/status/98190146492995174...
- pc 8y ago
  That's not CA YIMBY's ED. CA YIMBY was not involved in that protest.
- rcpt 8y ago
  I mean, that still looks like typical protesting. Is everyone supposed to shut up because the guy at the mic isn't white?

dublinben 8y ago

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.

rcpt 8y ago
This is best survey of the literature that I know on the topic: http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Been%20Ellen%20O'Regan%20supply_affordability_Oct%2026%20revision.pdf http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Been%20Ellen%20O'...
abalone 8y ago
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. [1] http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827 http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827
- closeparen 8y ago
  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.
- chrischen 8y ago
  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.

sp527 8y ago

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. Highly cynical and all around awful? Yes.

sudomake 8y ago
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.

rubicon33 8y ago

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.

pc 8y ago

> 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/ 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.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
abalone 8y ago
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.
- 8y ago

chrischen 8y ago

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.

epistasis 8y ago
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.
- 8y ago

yonran 8y ago

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.

darawk 8y ago

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.

nerfhammer 8y ago

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. http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-affordability/ http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-aff...

closeparen 8y ago

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.

epistasis 8y ago
Such an excellent way to pose this, thank you. 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.

the-pigeon 8y ago

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.

epistasis 8y ago
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!
- hueving 8y ago
  >it's going to take a minimum of 15-20 years to make a really significant dent. According to what data?
  - epistasis 8y ago
    This was article was making the rounds a few days ago, as the amount needed to bring housing costs down to a normal amount of average income: http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-area-housing-stock-must-grow-50-percent-20-years/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-are... 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: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/8g7qyk/to_solve_affordability_crisis_bay_area_housing/dya7snr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/8g7qyk/to_sol... That trend on not building in recent decades is state wide too: https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/05/03/82720/five-reasons-california-s-housing-costs-are-so-hig/ https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/05/03/82720/five-reasons-cali... 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.

Decade 8y ago

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. http://www.beyondchron.org/special-report-sb-827-failed/ http://www.beyondchron.org/special-report-sb-827-failed/

rayiner 8y ago

Ironically, it is NIMBYism that really has the white privilege problem. It was white people that invented zoning laws in response to desegregation: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/02/zonings-racist-roots-still-bear-fruit http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/02/zonings-racist-roots-s.... 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.

wpietri 8y ago
It is entirely believable to me that both of them have giant white privilege problems.

wpietri 8y ago

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.