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That is a low quality and highly inaccurate comment that doesn’t really belong on HN, but just briefly: - The real estate lobby funds CA YIMBY and YIMBY candid

That is a low quality and highly inaccurate comment that doesn’t really belong on HN, but just briefly: - The real estate lobby funds CA YIMBY and YIMBY candidates, not socialists. - Dean Preston was a major tenants rights attorney who authored key legislation protecting tenants from evictions, not a landlord.

jeffbee 1y ago
See, you're a very poorly-informed person. Dean Preston's SF manse and his two gigantic North Bay estates are owned by the Goosby Family Trust, his wife's legacy real estate empire. The avowed purpose of Goosby Family LLC is "REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT" you can look it up yourself on the Sec. State's website. Class solidarity with a guy who moved directly from undergraduate school to living in a $3 million Nob Hill apartment is, as the online socialists love to say in that incredibly irritating way, "a bad look". Edited to add: I will be disengaging from this thread because it's so bizarre that I, advancing a Marxist materialist analysis, am being accused of aligning with fascists, while you, licking the boots of a millionaire who owns a REIT, cast yourself as a socialist. I will actually lose my mind.
- abalone 1y ago
  This is Q-anon level conspiracy rambling. Preston has a long career as a tenants right attorney directly opposing the interests of landlords. He is landlord enemy number one. He wrote and passed a tax on the real estate industry to the tune of $350M along with several laws protecting rent control and tenants from eviction. The idea that he's secretly a landlord and that socialists are in the pocket of the real estate industry is a desperate (though well-funded) Big Lie. But you've made the larger point of the article: The oligarchy that funds the YIMBY movement uses it as a political tool to slander and fight anti-oligarchy activists. Just moments after pointing to seemingly neutral, technical legislation on the minutiae of zoning reform, you descended into crazed mudslinging against tenants rights advocates and socialists. Addendum: I looked up Red Bridge Strategies and find no evidence they have opposed affordable housing developments. What I do see them supporting:[1] * Yes on H! Rent Control for Pasadena * Yes on M! Empty Homes Tax * Tax on $10M Real Estate Sales to Fund Social Housing * Gross Receipts Tax on Large Corps to Fund Homeless Services and so on. These are all genuinely progressive/socialist positions consistent with promoting working class affordable housing and opposing landlords. It seems like you've just been taken by this well-funded right wing disinformation campaign. I hope you can see the larger point of the article that this is indeed a coordinated political strategy designed to radicalize people like you (and tech industry professionals generally) into fighting to defend the oligarchy and undermine the kind of populist progressive movement we see Bernie/AOC trying to start up again lately, and that folks like Preston genuinely were a part of. [1] https://www.redbridgewins.com/work https://www.redbridgewins.com/work
  - hedora 1y ago
    None of the things you mention support building more housing. A few look like they might, but don’t: Increasing taxes on expensive real estate just pushes demand down the chain, reducing supply for all. If empty houses are actually a problem, fix the root cause. I can think of two reasons a house would go empty: Speculation (betting there will not be enough houses built), or planning departments that prevent the house from being repaired. Making it easy to build houses solves both those problems. If you attack landlords, who do you expect to build and maintain rental housing? The affordable housing requirements are similar nonsense: Say you have some cash to invest. If you put it into building housing, the government will require you to sell the houses at a loss. Are you really going to build houses, and not invest it in something that can at least break even? The yimby folks in CA are useful idiots that serve people that want housing prices to stay up. If you don’t believe this, go take an introductory micro and macroeconomics course.
    - abalone 1y ago
      It might surprise people in the U.S. to know that the Abundance agenda is not at all how many other international cities solve affordable housing. Did you know that one in four Parisians live in public housing? Or that in Singapore it’s 80%? Or did you know the National Bureau of Economic Research just published a study concluding “Supply Constraints Do Not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities”?[1] Directly contradicting the YIMBY narrative that all we need to do is unleash market rate supply. Simple economics tells us that when you have a boom town with strong demand from white collar professionals migrating in, driving up incomes, they will outbid lower income folks for market rate units ten out of ten times. Per the law of supply and demand, all of that demand needs to be satisfied before market prices even have a chance of declining to affordable levels - and that’s only if the real estate industry decides it is profitable to keep building. Older units get renovated into luxury units as well. That creates a real scalability problem for cities because you get a labor shortage. That drives up the cost of everything: education, restaurants, and you guessed it, construction itself. That’s why social housing is such an international standard. Without affordable working class housing, the local economy becomes dysfunctional. And it echoes the debate we had about socialized medicine some years ago, the solution favored by pretty much all other developed countries, but always said to be too expensive or impractical to be done here, the richest country on the planet. But we’re beginning to see some cracks in the narrative. And it clarifies why these right wing movements find the Abundance agenda so appealing. [1] https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2025-06.pdf https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2025-06.pdf

jeffbee 1y ago

See, you're a very poorly-informed person. Dean Preston's SF manse and his two gigantic North Bay estates are owned by the Goosby Family Trust, his wife's legacy real estate empire. The avowed purpose of Goosby Family LLC is "REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT" you can look it up yourself on the Sec. State's website. Class solidarity with a guy who moved directly from undergraduate school to living in a $3 million Nob Hill apartment is, as the online socialists love to say in that incredibly irritating way, "a bad look". Edited to add: I will be disengaging from this thread because it's so bizarre that I, advancing a Marxist materialist analysis, am being accused of aligning with fascists, while you, licking the boots of a millionaire who owns a REIT, cast yourself as a socialist. I will actually lose my mind.

abalone 1y ago
This is Q-anon level conspiracy rambling. Preston has a long career as a tenants right attorney directly opposing the interests of landlords. He is landlord enemy number one. He wrote and passed a tax on the real estate industry to the tune of $350M along with several laws protecting rent control and tenants from eviction. The idea that he's secretly a landlord and that socialists are in the pocket of the real estate industry is a desperate (though well-funded) Big Lie. But you've made the larger point of the article: The oligarchy that funds the YIMBY movement uses it as a political tool to slander and fight anti-oligarchy activists. Just moments after pointing to seemingly neutral, technical legislation on the minutiae of zoning reform, you descended into crazed mudslinging against tenants rights advocates and socialists. Addendum: I looked up Red Bridge Strategies and find no evidence they have opposed affordable housing developments. What I do see them supporting:[1] * Yes on H! Rent Control for Pasadena * Yes on M! Empty Homes Tax * Tax on $10M Real Estate Sales to Fund Social Housing * Gross Receipts Tax on Large Corps to Fund Homeless Services and so on. These are all genuinely progressive/socialist positions consistent with promoting working class affordable housing and opposing landlords. It seems like you've just been taken by this well-funded right wing disinformation campaign. I hope you can see the larger point of the article that this is indeed a coordinated political strategy designed to radicalize people like you (and tech industry professionals generally) into fighting to defend the oligarchy and undermine the kind of populist progressive movement we see Bernie/AOC trying to start up again lately, and that folks like Preston genuinely were a part of. [1] https://www.redbridgewins.com/work https://www.redbridgewins.com/work
- hedora 1y ago
  None of the things you mention support building more housing. A few look like they might, but don’t: Increasing taxes on expensive real estate just pushes demand down the chain, reducing supply for all. If empty houses are actually a problem, fix the root cause. I can think of two reasons a house would go empty: Speculation (betting there will not be enough houses built), or planning departments that prevent the house from being repaired. Making it easy to build houses solves both those problems. If you attack landlords, who do you expect to build and maintain rental housing? The affordable housing requirements are similar nonsense: Say you have some cash to invest. If you put it into building housing, the government will require you to sell the houses at a loss. Are you really going to build houses, and not invest it in something that can at least break even? The yimby folks in CA are useful idiots that serve people that want housing prices to stay up. If you don’t believe this, go take an introductory micro and macroeconomics course.
  - abalone 1y ago
    It might surprise people in the U.S. to know that the Abundance agenda is not at all how many other international cities solve affordable housing. Did you know that one in four Parisians live in public housing? Or that in Singapore it’s 80%? Or did you know the National Bureau of Economic Research just published a study concluding “Supply Constraints Do Not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities”?[1] Directly contradicting the YIMBY narrative that all we need to do is unleash market rate supply. Simple economics tells us that when you have a boom town with strong demand from white collar professionals migrating in, driving up incomes, they will outbid lower income folks for market rate units ten out of ten times. Per the law of supply and demand, all of that demand needs to be satisfied before market prices even have a chance of declining to affordable levels - and that’s only if the real estate industry decides it is profitable to keep building. Older units get renovated into luxury units as well. That creates a real scalability problem for cities because you get a labor shortage. That drives up the cost of everything: education, restaurants, and you guessed it, construction itself. That’s why social housing is such an international standard. Without affordable working class housing, the local economy becomes dysfunctional. And it echoes the debate we had about socialized medicine some years ago, the solution favored by pretty much all other developed countries, but always said to be too expensive or impractical to be done here, the richest country on the planet. But we’re beginning to see some cracks in the narrative. And it clarifies why these right wing movements find the Abundance agenda so appealing. [1] https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2025-06.pdf https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2025-06.pdf