Marin Voice: Legislature should recognize that housing is a right, not a Wall Street commodity

Marin Voice: Legislature should recognize that housing is a right, not a Wall Street commodity

Artist rendering of the Victory Village housing project in Fairfax. (Courtesy of RCD)

By SUSAN KIRSCH |
August 14, 2019 at 10:19 am


We remember the pain and dislocation brought about by the housing melt-down of 2008, when foreclosures spiked by more than 81% and more than 3 million people lost their homes. It was precipitated by deceitful, predatory loans, subprime mortgages, and fanciful financial tools like derivatives.

Many individuals never recovered, but banks, developers, and real estate investors scored big. While property values have largely recovered, an ominous trend has occurred: a shift from individual home ownership to corporatized housing.

The language has shifted, too, from “home” as a safe abode where a middle-class family could acquire a significant asset to “housing unit” where investors could acquire a commodity to produce return on investment.

“We’re in a whole new world of organized, global financial investment into the housing market,” Michael Storper, a professor at UCLA and London School of Economics, explained when asked what changed between 2008 and 2019.

He called it the financialization of housing.

Components of the financialization of housing include giant construction companies such as Florida-based Lennar which is behind the controversial San Francisco Bayview-Hunters Point housing project, and national and global private equity investment firms such as The Blackstone Group, with California offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Why does the financialization of housing matter? It is fueled by corporate greed, not civic values or care about community. Mortgage or rent payments flow out of the community, stewardship diminishes, and global wealth goes into unknown, gold-lined pockets.

In 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council warned that the financialization of housing “undermines democratic governance, exacerbates inequality, dehumanizes housing, and causes displacement and homelessness.”

The UN report cautioned “unprecedented amounts of global capital are being invested in housing as security for financial instruments and traded on global markets, which is having devastating consequences.”

Against this corporate backdrop groups such as Bay Area Council and the Silicon Valley Leadership Team have curried favor with California legislators. They’ve created a simplistic narrative: We have a housing crisis. Cities are to blame. The state must assert itself with top-down, one-size-fits-all bills that undermine local control.

What they don’t say is that by reducing local control, global investment firms and national builders will gain easier access to community wealth, including individual homes, land, and public places.

Certain bills introduced by Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, Nancy Skinner of Berkeley, and Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco would weaken elected city councils’ planning authority and financial stewardship, and ultimately deepen the affordability crisis.

For example, a stripped-down version of Chiu’s Assembly Bill 1487 seeks to gain approval for a 2020 ballot measure known as the “San Francisco Bay Area Regional Housing Finance Act.”

It would provide a regional financing mechanism for affordable housing and would apply to all cities, including charter cities.

This new entity estimates an annual budget of $2.5 billion. It would be governed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, but identified as a separate legal entity.

Critics, myself included, are alarmed because a regional authority to raise, administer, and allocate funds is likely to reduce their capacity to raise local tax revenue for local projects. Small cities worry that big cities will rake off the majority of the funds, and they’ll be taxed for big city successes.

Supporters of putting the regional tax on the ballot try to quell opponents’ fears saying they merely want to give citizens the right to decide. However, imagine the unequal playing field.

The national/global corporations that stand to gain from the financialization of housing will invest millions in messaging, push polls, ads, and social media.

We have a housing problem, but the crisis is the loss of democracy brought about by the financialization of housing. When legislators become champions of the simplistic explanation that cities are to blame, they abandon critical thinking, their constituents, and their oaths of office.

Legislation that diminishes local control by expanding developers’ rights, investors’ profits, and regionalism will worsen the affordability crisis. Take a breather. Adopt a collaborative approach. Review housing policy and projects at the local level that are proving successful.

Susan Kirsch, of Mill Valley, is founder and former president of Livable California, susankirsch@hotmail.com. She wrote this commentary for CalMatters.

Housing is a right, not a Wall Street commodity

California Legislature should recognize that housing is a right, not a Wall Street commodity

(Aerial shot of neighborhood. )





By Susan Kirsch, Special to CalMatters

We remember the pain and dislocation brought about by the housing melt-down of 2008, when foreclosures spiked by more than 81% and more than 3 million people lost their homes. It was precipitated by deceitful, predatory loans, subprime mortgages, and fanciful financial tools like derivatives.

Many individuals never recovered, but banks, developers, and real estate investors scored big. While property values have largely recovered, an ominous trend has occurred: a shift from individual home ownership to corporatized housing.


The language has shifted, too, from “home” as a safe abode where a middle-class family could acquire a significant asset to “housing unit” where investors could acquire a commodity to produce return on investment.

“We’re in a whole new world of organized, global financial investment into the housing market,” Michael Storper, a professor at UCLA and London School of Economics, explained when asked what changed between 2008 and 2019.

He called it the financialization of housing.

Components of the financialization of housing include giant construction companies such as Florida-based Lennar which is behind the controversial San Francisco Bayview-Hunters Point housing project, and national and global private equity investment firms such as The Blackstone Group, with California offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Why does the financialization of housing matter? It is fueled by corporate greed, not civic values or care about community. Mortgage or rent payments flow out of the community, stewardship diminishes, and global wealth goes into unknown, gold-lined pockets.


In 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council warned that the financialization of housing “undermines democratic governance, exacerbates inequality, dehumanizes housing, and causes displacement and homelessness.”

The UN report cautioned “unprecedented amounts of global capital are being invested in housing as security for financial instruments and traded on global markets, which is having devastating consequences.”

Against this corporate backdrop groups such as Bay Area Council and the Silicon Valley Leadership Team have curried favor with California legislators. They’ve created a simplistic narrative: We have a housing crisis. Cities are to blame. The state must assert itself with top-down, one-size-fits-all bills that undermine local control.

What they don’t say is that by reducing local control, global investment firms and national builders will gain easier access to community wealth, including individual homes, land, and public places.

Certain bills introduced by Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, Nancy Skinner of Berkeley, and Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco would weaken elected city councils’ planning authority and financial stewardship, and ultimately deepen the affordability crisis.

For example, a stripped-down version of Chiu’s Assembly Bill 1487 seeks to gain approval for a 2020 ballot measure known as the “San Francisco Bay Area Regional Housing Finance Act.”

It would provide a regional financing mechanism for affordable housing and would apply to all cities, including charter cities.

This new entity estimates an annual budget of $2.5 billion. It would be governed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, but identified as a separate legal entity.

Critics, myself included, are alarmed because a regional authority to raise, administer, and allocate funds is likely to reduce their capacity to raise local tax revenue for local projects. Small cities worry that big cities will rake off the majority of the funds, and they’ll be taxed for big city successes.

Supporters of putting the regional tax on the ballot try to quell opponents’ fears saying they merely want to give citizens the right to decide. However, imagine the unequal playing field.

The national/global corporations that stand to gain from the financialization of housing will invest millions in messaging, push polls, ads, and social media.

We have a housing problem, but the crisis is the loss of democracy brought about by the financialization of housing. When legislators become champions of the simplistic explanation that cities are to blame, they abandon critical thinking, their constituents, and their oaths of office.

Legislation that diminishes local control by expanding developers’ rights, investors’ profits, and regionalism will worsen the affordability crisis. Take a breather. Adopt a collaborative approach. Review housing policy and projects at the local level that are proving successful.

The NIMBY Principle

Nowhere in America is the battle over single-family zoning more bitterly contested than the affluent suburbs of California's cities. Mike Blake/Reuters

The NIMBY Principle

LAURA BLISS JUL 26, 2019
The advocacy group Livable California has led the resistance to the state’s biggest housing proposals. What's their appeal for “local control” really about?



Susan Kirsch’s backyard is, predictably, beautiful. Past the sunny wooden patio, tomatoes, blueberries, and poppies blossom between rugged pathways. A birdbath draws sparrows to the center; a lemon tree drapes over the back fence.

But all is not perfect. Next door, her neighbors recently added a detached room, which peeks over the side fence and cuts off part of Kirsch’s view of Marin County’s rolling hills.

“It broke my heart,” she told me. “But at least it was only one story.”

In California, the debate between NIMBYs and YIMBYs—that’s Not In My Backyard and Yes In My Backyard, respectively—doesn’t usually involve actual backyards. It’s about housing: By one estimate, the state is short 3.5 million homes to accommodate current and projected demand. In cities like San Francisco, this gap has raised rents to some of the highest in the nation, fueling a homelessness problem that the United Nations recently labeled a human rights violation.


The scale of this problem has fractured the voters of this largely progressive region, pushing Californians of varying political stripes into rival camps that don’t neatly subdivide along the usual left-right lines. Struggles between homeowners and newcomers over development are fixtures of neighborhood-level politics nationwide, but the Bay Area’s version of this narrative might be the most bitterly contested in the U.S., fueled by a uniquely Californian cocktail of economic and cultural factors.

This particular backyard holds some clues about why that is, and in particular, what motivates a certain powerful segment of older, relatively liberal, home-owning Californians. Among urbanists who promote density-boosting zoning reforms, “NIMBY” is usually a pejorative. While Kirsch doesn’t appreciate the negative connotations, to her, the term can imply something good.

“It’s about people being stewards of what they love and care about,” she told me over coffee at her home in Mill Valley, an enclave north of San Francisco surrounded by natural preserves. “It’s care-giving, not excluding care for others.”

In early 2018, at age 74, Kirsch founded Livable California, a nonprofit that advocates for slow growth and local control over urban development issues. With Kirsch at the helm, the group has rallied suburbanites around the state against two high-profile housing bills that proposed to open up some communities to denser development. Their opposition helped kill both: The first bill, SB 827, was quickly defeated in committee; the second one, SB 50, was shelved until 2020.


The rhetoric around the bills has been heated. Residents who oppose the zoning changes (which would, by and large, allow just a few extra stories of residential development) have been made out as a bunch of narrowly self-interested geriatrics, unconcerned with the economic plight of younger adults. “It has begun to feel like the politics of an older generation saying, ‘Fuck you, I got mine,’” Henry Grabar wrote in Slate in May. Meanwhile, at least in the Bay Area, where the YIMBY movement took root, pro-housing activists are often made out by their foes as self-entitled Millennials whose political leaders are bankrolled by the real estate industry. “That was their message: ‘I don’t care about preservation or you people with those old Victorians. It’s our time now and you should die. You are in the way,’” is how one San Francisco preservationist summed up the YIMBY sentimentfrom a recent community meeting.
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But this narrative of class and generational combat is incomplete. Lower-income renters and homeowners are in this conversation, too, and their allegiance is somewhat torn. Some tenants rights groups buy the logic that an increased housing supply would benefit them, but at least as many view the prospect of high-volume, market-rate housing as a threat to already gentrifying neighborhoods.

Indeed, the NIMBY-YIMBY binary often reduces each sides’ arguments to cartoons, with neither camp spending much effort to understand the hopes and fears of their adversaries. Both factions are intensely community-minded and profess to love their cities and neighborhoods. Yet each seems convinced that the other represents an attack on their respective futures.

Is there any way to try to bridge this divide and find some common ground? One approach might be look deeper into the ostensible NIMBY instinct—to see if the forces that drive these passionate defenders of the neighborhood status quo are richer than pure self-interest and fear of outsiders.

It turns out, yes, they are. But also, there’s some of that stuff, too.

***

Wendy Sarkissian, a Life Fellow at the Planning Institute of Australia, has worked as a social planning consultant and academic since 1969. The co-author of the book Housing As If People Mattered, Sarkissian has theorized extensively on the psychology of NIMBYism, which is related to what academics term as “place attachment.” People latch onto their surrounding environments for psychological refuge and safety, and perceived threats can summon an instinct towards defense, she told me: “We are nothing if we’re not animals, after all. We seem to be hardwired for this.”


But emotions are hard to talk about, and to guard beloved homes and communities from change that’s outside our control, we often adopt complex rationales, Sarkissian notes. Neighborhood skirmishes over a new grocery store’s traffic impacts, or concerns about surface runoff, can elide deeply felt connections to a place.

Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosopher who coined the term “solastalgia”—the psychological pain created by environmental destruction—agrees. “I’m at the point where I think these little battles are genuine expressions of people trying to maintain their connections to life and things,” he told me.

Long before launching Livable California, Kirsch proved an effective channeler of the pro-suburban animus. SB 375, a landmark piece of California legislation from 2008 that asked regional authorities to set emissions reductions goals and plan for transit and housing that requires less car travel, marked the start of much of her activism. She may drive a Prius and support the Sierra Club, but a future where people are smushed into denser neighborhoods and deprived of personal vehicles sounds to Kirsch like the stuff of a developing nation. “That’s a really horrifying thought to me: that most peoples’ greatest asset would be a bicycle,” she said. “That’s a diminishment of the American dream.”

And she objects to the way California’s climate policies have reemerged at the local level. In 2007, Kirsch organized neighbors to kill plans for a mixed-use housing development on a major commercial thoroughfare in Mill Valley. Then she co-founded a slow-growth advocacy group for her town, and later the countywide Citizen Marin, which battled more high-density projects and regional urban plans. In 2016, Kirsch attempted to unseat a Marin County commissioner, running on a platform of slow growth, fiscal restraint, and keeping Marin politics tightly focused on Marin. “Climate change is a serious problem, and we need to get a handle on it,” she said in her announcement for candidacy. “But we need to get a handle by focusing on local control: local solutions for local issues.” She lost the race, but with a respectable 42 percent of the vote.Livable California founder Susan Kirsch in her Marin County kitchen. (Laura Bliss/CityLab)

Kirsch’s own home is modest. It’s a World War II-era, single-story three-bedroom bungalow with a snug kitchen and a living room large enough for a couch, a coffee table, and not a whole lot more. She raised her two children here; now divorced, she lives alone, save for the Airbnb guests who sometimes book a guest suite. Her Mill Valley street is full of these little houses, each now worth around $1.5 million.


Kirsch grew up on a farm in Minnesota, earned degrees in English and speech communication, and worked as an educator in Cleveland and Oregon before landing in Marin County 40 years ago. Long known as a bastion of 1960s-style communitarianism, the county is 80 percent undeveloped; its forested hills and craggy shoreline are largely intact thanks to a century of determined conservationism. Limits on developable land, strict local zoning laws, and the growth of the city across the Golden Gate Bridge has meant that housing demand has long outstripped supply.

In early 2018, momentum in the California senate was building behind SB 827, a bill authored by Senator Scott Wiener that would “upzone” certain neighborhoods. If they were near frequent transit service, parcels reserved for single-family homes would be unlocked for higher-density development. To Kirsch, the bill felt like yet another dictum from state authorities telling her community how to behave. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the streets were full of homeless people, and her county was barely taking care of its existing public housing. More market-rate apartments weren’t going to solve their problems. And with a central shopping crossroads just around the corner, her own home was in upzone territory.

After meeting up at a greasy spoon in San Francisco to discuss strategies, Kirsch and a group of friends from around the Bay Area launched a movement that quickly went statewide.


Over the next year, Livable California rallied residents to testify in Sacramento, write letters to their representatives, and spread the word against the bill through maps and images that showed leafy suburban blocks overshadowed by high-rise apartments and crowded with parked cars. Kirsch penned a raft of op-eds in her own local paper, as she has been doing for years. “We voted for local representatives to thoughtfully plan a community that reflects our values,” she wrote in the Marin Journal. “A one-size-fits-all mandate violates democratic principles, forcing us to pay for unregulated private development in the service of billion-dollar corporations.”

After SB 827 died in its first committee hearing, in large part because it didn’t go far enough to protect gentrifying neighborhoods, Wiener revised it and put forth SB 50 in 2019. In some respects, this bill targeted affluent neighborhoods even more narrowly by proposing to upzone “jobs-rich” areas, too; even if they were far from regular transit service, single-family parcels close to big employment centers would be eligible for an extra story or two, too. Livable California campaigned harder, showing up to lobby in Sacramento, speaking out at community meetings in Palo Alto, Orinda, Cupertino, and San Carlo, and protesting Wiener’s public appearances. It joined forces with a like-minded group in Southern California called the Coalition to Preserve L.A., which released a video called “Will SB 50 Kill Your Neighborhood?,” claiming that luxury condos were going to raze entire blocks. Critically, the group connected suburban homeowners from San Diego to Marin with mayors and city council members, who in turn voiced their own dissent.California’s YIMBYs now find themselves is a difficult position: They’ve whacked a hornet’s nest full of some of the nation’s most powerful voters.

It’s hard to escape the fact that most of the communities that glommed onto Livable California represent older, whiter, and more affluent homeowners from some of the most desirable enclaves in California. That is a perception that the group itself is aware of: In an internal email that was recently picked up and tweeted by a Wiener staffer, one Livable California member wrote that “housing activists ... are deeply suspicious of ‘white suburban NIMBYs’ and the objectives of Livable California.”

Kirsch recognizes these less-than-ideal optics, as well as the link between old, racist redlining practices and contemporary zoning codes. But she insists that Livable California’s only interest is keeping neighborhoods intact. As proof, she points to the pro-tenant groupsthat have aligned with the group to defeat SB 50 and its kin, out of fears of gentrification and displacement. And she talks about “activating” her fellow retirees, awakening them to what they can still achieve for the greater good. “I’m really more in favor of advancing, or whatever the opposite is of retiring,” Kirsch said.


Critics might object to this framing, but California’s suburban defenders can indeed be said to be fueled by a kind of altruism, at least for one another and for future residents who share their values. Indeed, the upzoning bills show that Livable California’s resistance is not entirely about protecting narrow economic interests: Kirsch and her neighbors would make great money selling their lots to a developer looking to build a few midrises.

But they’re not. Established residents often see themselves as long-term shareholders in their community, said Clayton Nall, a political scientist at Stanford who has studied grassroots community organizing. As such, they feel a responsibility for protecting the community against perceived threats, which might include pollution, crime, and the undesirable effects of over-development. Indeed, back in the 1960s and ’70s, NIMBYs were the people fighting highways and oil refineries in their backyards, not fourplexes. In battling upzoning, some NIMBYs are animated by the fear of a takeover of their neighborhoods by commercial interests.

“The possibility that their property interests will then be defined by corporate actors like landlords is frightening to them,” Nall said. “And it complicates their effort to protect their common interest as homeowners defending a shared way of living in their particular neighborhoods.” In other words, the distant landlords of a multi-unit building may not see the local value, of, say, tending lovely front-yard gardens.


The greed of developers and the overreach of government actors certainly come up a lot with Kirsch; to her, both seem to be strong-arming communities into cookie-cutter, “smart growth” developments. Kirsch ties these forces to the decline of homeownership since the 2008 economic crash, and the banks and investors that took over many of those foreclosures. With fewer properties in individual hands, ”the strength of a voting public is further and further diminished,” she said. Meanwhile, in the Bay Area, the tech companies whose massive success has fueled demand for housing aren’t fairly redistributing their profits. The real California housing crisis, she believes, is the runaway growth of that industry, not this handful of older homeowners trying to save their bungalow neighborhoods.

This last element of Kirsch’s thinking finds some enthusiastic and perhaps unlikely cosponsors. Richard Walker, the David Harvey-trained Marxist geographer, professor emeritus of economic geography at UC Berkeley, and longtime observer of the dark side of the Bay Area’s tech boom, says that California’s YIMBYs get the economics of the housing crisis wrong by focusing myopically on the “supply” side of the equation. When demand for housing is driven solely by the most affluent renters and buyers in a marketplace, home prices and rents are bound to run away to astronomical heights, Walker explains; this is exactly what has happened as Apple, Google, and Facebook have gotten away with paying so little in taxes and employing vast numbers of well-paid employees. “That’s who the developers want to accommodate, and it leaves working people out of the equation,” he said.


Walker is skeptical that giving developers more room to play is likely to fix the housing crisis. Instead, taxing and regulating the tech industry so that more of its profits would find their way into the pockets of the working class would go a lot further, he thinks. Restrengthening unions to set wages higher and put more housing within reach is another solution. “When was the last time a massive amount of working-class housing was built?” Walker asked. “Post-World War II, because it was the most equal time since before the Civil War.”

There are definitely progressive leaders making variations on this argument; Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign platform emphasizes raising taxes on the most affluent, regulating tech, and bolstering organized labor. But with the NIMBY-vs.-YIMBY dynamic overshadowing everything else in housing politics, a mess of ideas and principles are getting glopped into two seemingly opposed buckets. The Trump White House also wants zoning reform, of some sort, which makes liberal-leaning YIMBYs pretty uncomfortable. Meanwhile, conservatives and Marxists ally themselves against legislation like SB 50. Something about the logic of upzoning must be murky if so many divergent thinkers can interpret it as a win or loss.

***

One big problem with SB 50, Nall believes, is that its beneficiaries aren’t clear, other than the real estate developers who back it, and, perhaps, the young white-collar renters who might easily afford to move to Austin instead. Housing isn’t a pure supply-and-demand problem; location is a huge factor. Some say that the amount of demand to live in the Bay is literally insatiable, and that costs will never come down naturally. And the jury is out on whether “trickle-down housing”—also known as filtering—brings down rents. You could fill a basketball court with the economists and policy wonks who are arguing about this right now.


This is not to say that upzoning isn’t called for, along with (say) tenant protection laws and funds for low-income housing. It’s gaining traction nationally as one tool that can close housing gaps: Minneapolis has a new plan to allow for denser development citywide, and Oregon passed a bill that allows duplexes and triplexes to replace detached houses in urban areas across the state. The champions of these plans were successful, in part because they found ways to unite communities around shared values that went beyond attachments to their own blocks. Oregon’s bill is built on the state’s long history of conservation-minded urban growth management; in Minneapolis, upzoning proponents highlighted the racist origins of zoning codes and the importance of working to erase them.

In contrast, it seems California’s upzoning advocates have struggled to show how such unlocking more market-rate (read: expensive) apartments in suburban neighborhoods would help those with the biggest housing challenges. While Kirsch applauds their commitment to civic engagement, YIMBYs also strike her as whiny. “Few of us have had housing just handed to us at the level that we might havewanted,” Kirsch told me. (She compares them to her CEO daughter, who bought a house in Oakland, with financial help from mom.) California’s YIMBYs now find themselves in a difficult position: They’ve whacked a hornet’s nest full of some of the nation’s most powerful voters.


Bu the zoning reformers have succeeded in introducing a big, bold idea for addressing a crisis that demands all kinds of different solutions. Livable California, on the other hand, is short on fixes. Part of its stated mission is to “empower communities to take action to support local community planning and decision-making with the goal of an equitable and sustainable future for California.” Yet its website offers no examples of how else to accommodate Californians who would also like to live, “livably.” Instead, it’s full of links to articles and materials opposing various state housing bills.

One could not be blamed for noticing that such politics serve to protect the single-family status quo. And this is where the NIMBY principle draws its clearest line: Fundamentally, it begins with saying no.

That’s why so many housing activists view Livable California and its platform in such cynical terms. The group may share a few strands of DNA with Marxist critiques and use the language of citizen empowerment, but to critics like Nall, it is a force of elitism. Proposition 13, California’s property tax freeze of the 1970s, and the appreciation of urban land in coastal communities created what he terms a “bizarre middle-class aristocracy” that’s based almost solely on homeownership. “Single-family zoning has a lot of parallels to aristocratic land-holding systems,” Nall told me. “It’s, ‘Protect our regime from these predatory outside capitalists who don’t have the noblesse oblige that we have for our communities.’”


Kirsch strongly disagrees with this line of thinking; to her, rejecting state intervention is a way to lift up local power, which can still shepherd development, slowly and incrementally. Communities like Mill Valley have taken steps that open doors, Kirsch said—including allowing backyard “granny flats” and creating a new development impact fee to fund affordable housing. She approvingly cites other kinds of housing efforts, too: “Bigger cities are looking at additional options like commercial linkage fees, employer head taxes, 100 percent affordable housing projects, and vacancy taxes, to name a few,” she wrote me in an email.

Of course, “local control” has often served to keep resources away from those suffering most acutely under California’s housing crisis. For two timely examples in the Bay Area, see the dueling GoFundMe pages over a proposed San Francisco homeless shelter, or the large mixed-use development in San Bruno, with 15 percent affordable units, that was killed by a single city councilmember objected to potential traffic impacts. Better citizen engagement processes would address the root of these conflicts, Kirsch believes, by getting a wider representation of people to influence decisions and connect on an empathic level. “It’s about engaging in conversations before jumping to conclusions about what to do,” she said. “You can’t come in with the solution too quickly.”

Here, I think, lies the great YIMBY-NIMBY divide: a matter of intention versus outcome. While some selfish or bigoted actors may be sheltering their property values behind calls for “local control,” the desire to protect local communities, by using slow and incremental processes, is legitimate. But the single-family zoning codes that NIMBYs champion aren’t working for California circa 2019, and nor are they biblical. YIMBYs are justly impatient for progress, and they’re appealing to democratic processes for change, too. Perhaps both sides of the housing debate would be served by not assuming the worst in the other.

In any case, Kirsch is no longer Livable California’s acting leader. She stepped down in June. Now, the group hopes to file a state ballot initiative that would curtail the state’s ability to pass legislation that would alter local zoning codes. That isn’t quite Kirsch’s style: She feels her strength is in educating people at the grassroots level.

Meanwhile, she wonders if the triumph of the California suburbs may be short-lived. The bills in Oregon and Minneapolis surprised Kirsch, especially since they succeeded in two places in which she once lived. She thought leaders there would know better than to give in to development pressures. “Maybe I’m out of step with my own roots and history and about what a better way is,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be California next. All I can say is, it’s troubling to me.”

About the Author

Laura Bliss

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Laura Bliss is CityLab’s west coast bureau chief. She also authors MapLab, a biweekly newsletter about maps (subscribe here). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Los Angeles magazine, and beyond.

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The tide is turning — cities are battling for local control

Marin Voice: The tide is turning — cities are battling for local control

By Susan Kirsch



Have you heard about Brisbane in San Mateo County, population 4,700, where legislators are threatening new regulations if local voters don’t change their General Plan? Why should you care? Because, if legislative trends continue, local voters’ wishes everywhere will be trampled.

Universal Paragon Corp. (UPC) has pushed to develop Brisbane Baylands for 12 years. It proposes 2,200 housing units and 7 million square feet (121 football fields) of commercial space on former railyard and sanitary landfill.

Brisbane residents — like any community with history, character, and pride — have resisted, based on concerns about toxicity, traffic, sea-level rise and infrastructure like water and schools’ capacity. The City Council recently voted 4-1 to amend its General Plan to favor UPC but agreed to put it to a vote in this fall’s election.

You might think a public vote would be the end of the story. But Brisbane’s Sen. Jerry Hill and Sen. Scott Wiener disagree. Wiener, author of SB 827 and SB 828, is also the force behind SB 35, one of 14 bills passed in 2017 that makes it easier for developers to build high-density housing, while dismantling local regulations of the General Plan, Housing Element, Design Review and California Environmental Quality Act requirements.

If voters reject the amendment, Wiener and Hill threaten to introduce legislation that would force Brisbane to comply.

This push to reduce local control is nothing new. In 1989, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development published the Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) Report that contended local planning and zoning control were an impediment to affordable housing and private, for-profit development. Recently, big business, developers and big banking have backed a national Yes-In-My-Backyard (YIMBY) campaign.


UPC, taking a page from the YIMBY playbook, writes, “The region is in a housing crisis and every jurisdiction, including Brisbane, has an obligation to help meet the region’s housing needs.”

Really? Why is tiny Brisbane responsible? READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Marin Voice: Bay tax is taxation without representation for Marin

By Susan Kirsch

POSTED: 03/09/16, 11:44 AM PST | UPDATED: 4 DAYS AGO

22 COMMENTS

The San Francisco Bay is a precious resource and the entire area is enhanced by it. Of course, we must work to preserve it. That said, I hate the idea of a regional government agency claiming our tax dollars without local representation. I would like to see restoration done another way.

In June, the Clean and Healthy Bay Ballot Measure will be on the ballot. Measure AA is brought forward by the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority. It puts a special parcel tax of $12 per year for 20 years up for a nine-county vote.

The authority is a regional government agency created by the state Legislature in 2008. The mission is to raise money and allocate resources “for the restoration, enhancement, protection, and enjoyment of wetlands and wildlife habitat in the San Francisco Bay and along its shoreline.”

For example, funds could be used to reduce trash and toxins, improve water quality or protect communities from floods.

The authority proposes to raise money by charging a $12 tax on every parcel in the Bay Area.

This tax applies equally to a single, one-story home in Marin, a 10-story building of luxury condos in San Francisco, and the corporate campuses of Facebook or Google in Silicon Valley.

At the modest rate of $12, you wouldn’t pay much, but you’d pay the same as Apple and Chevron. This is unfair.

Like any other tax, Measure AA needs 67 percent voter approval to pass. What’s different — indeed historic — about Measure AA is that it would be the first regionwide tax in the Bay Area. Regardless of voters’ wishes in any one county, the regional vote will prevail. Local input and control is diminished. That’s a problem.

Another problem is the way the tax would be collected and distributed.

The tax is estimated to generate $25 million per year, eventually totaling $500 million over 20 years. County tax collectors would collect the funds and send them to the authority to dole out.

The authority is governed by a seven-member board appointed by the executive board of the Association of Bay Area Governments, an agency in danger of being swallowed up by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

This board doesn’t have representation from each county, and Marin is one county without a representative. Like MTC, none of these board members, who will pick the projects, are elected by a direct vote of the people.   See the full article in the Marin IJ HERE

King Canute  could not command the Sea.

Marin Voice: Repairing Marin City housing needs to be higher priority

By Susan Kirsch

POSTED: 01/23/16, 2:43 PM PST |

2 COMMENTS

We recently celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. In the 1960s, King inspired the nation to stand up to injustice. How is justice playing out in our own backyard?

Three recent events catch my attention — a lawsuit, a bonus, and a facelift.

A lawsuit: In 2014, after two years of Marin Housing Authority’s failure to respond to residents of Golden Gate Village, the U.S District Court ruled in the residents’ favor.

It took Bay Area Legal Aid’s lawsuit filed in 2012 on behalf of the Golden Gate Village Resident Council to re-establish the legitimacy of the council as the voice of the residents.

The housing authority board includes the five-member Board of Supervisors and two public housing residents. Its stated mission is to provide decent and safe housing for low-income people.

It oversees six affordable housing complexes with nearly 500 units of public housing. Golden Gate Village has two-thirds of the authority’s total population. It houses 700, mostly people of color, in 294 units.

It is Marin’s only public housing for families with children.

Prior to filing the lawsuit, Royce McLemore, a Golden Gate Village community leader, reached out to Supervisor Kate Sears 11 times in an attempt to find a solution. She got no response.

A bonus: The Board of Supervisors hired Lewis Jordan, former housing authority chief in Chicago, as director of Marin Housing Authority in 2012 with a salary of $169,500.

In December 2015, it gave him a $20,000 bonus, equivalent to an annual salary for a Marin City resident working full-time at minimum wage.

A bonus?

True, Jordan inherited a tough situation. Under his direction, authority staff submitted updated five-year agency plans for 2014-18 to HUD. The plan is practically identical to the one Jordan’s predecessor submitted for 2010-14.

Read the full article in the Marin IJ HERE