I think the caricature of the self-interested rich guy is really the most rational caricature. Preserve the neighborhood in amber, maintain home values; this ma

I think the caricature of the self-interested rich guy is really the most rational caricature. Preserve the neighborhood in amber, maintain home values; this makes sense, this is the majority of the United States. The activists supposedly fighting for low-income communities are so bizarrely wrong that they’re beyond caricature. Fight oppression by seizing control of the apparatus of oppression instead of by abolishing oppression. A lot of the tenant orthodoxy in San Francisco is based on completely backwards economics. The idea is that building more market-rate housing will increase the demand for market-rate housing even more, so it’s futile to even attempt it. Only housing with guaranteed low prices should be allowed to be built. Completely ignore the hundreds of thousands of homes that used to be naturally affordable, but now are worth an average of over a million each. A major blog for this point of view is 48hills. https://48hills.org/2016/09/debunking-trickle-housing-fallacy/ https://48hills.org/2016/09/debunking-trickle-housing-fallac... The self-interested rich people do come through, still. Dillon mentions the rally, but he doesn’t mention the wealthy white landlords standing at the head of the rally. He quotes Shanti, who was active in the SF chapter of the DSA, but now works full-time as an activist because of funding from the wealthy white-ish Dean Preston. He mentions a black tenant activist, but he doesn’t mention the bald-faced lies, nor the funding from wealthy white-ish Michael Weinstein. The San Francisco “progressive” movement, if judged by its results, well, rich landlords are successfully keeping their home values, but low-income communities are still being evicted. The Filipina activist is interesting. I’ve clashed with her in other contexts, and the summary is that most non-English-speaking low-income people are for the ideas of SB 827, but the leadership of the organizations are against it. Some people from the Planning Department held an exercise where they asked whether we wanted more height and density along our transit corridors, and only the leaders said, “No, we are against developer giveaways.” The ordinary poor people want more affordable housing, and they recognized that affordable housing needs to be legal to be built. Loosening the height and density restrictions is how we legalize affordable housing. In my neighborhood, I think the toughest NIMBY argument is that we are not the organized people of color. I’ve always had a YIMBY point of view, even though I grew up with poor parents, because I want to eliminate the structural causes of poverty. Several others in my neighborhood had a similar experience, and similarly promote more housing. The way the Filipina activist sees it, that makes us “privileged people of color,” so our opinions are not valid. We need to activate the still-poor people to be a constituency for housing; but her organizations have the institutional connections, to legal counsel from SFTU (which also promotes backwards economics), and to other non-housing activities such as immigration and community gardening. I don’t know how to work through this problem.