It's not Yes in My Back Yard -- it's Yes in Your Back Yard.

It's not Yes in My Back Yard -- it's Yes in Your Back Yard. A perspective from a long-time working-class family home owner (aka Land Baron).

BY DENIS MOSGOFIAN
-
JUNE 4, 2019


There are no Yimbys.

Yimby stands for Yes In My Back Yard. But Yimby advocates don’t have backyards. It’s other peoples’ backyards they want. They just can’t say that.Yimbys shout down a rally against SB 827, which would have allowed more density in other people’s back yards.

I was struck by the fact that advocates of limitless market-rate housing adopted this term to describe themselves. Politically, they don’t support backyards, believing backyards are land that should be developed instead of being preserved as gardens, gathering places, or open space for families.

The Yimbys fiercely support the state eliminating most local zoning altogether — the zoning that is the bedrock of lasting stability in communities. They ardently support development “by-right” without restrictions, and also strongly support the right of the state to allow developers up to six exemptions from such mandates as rear yards, open space, and set-backs. I note that their advocacy aligns perfectly with right-wing deregulators.

So it struck me that Yes In My Back Yard is a myth. The term should be “Yes In Other People’s Back Yards,” or Yes in Your Back Yard, Yiybys, as Calvin Welch put it when we talked recently.

After reading a recent NY Times op-ed, and a recent piece in Nation Magazine, and listening to the dominant narrative from Yimby spokespersons, I have learned that as a progressive working-class native San Franciscan and homeowner, it is my fault and the fault of other progressives who have blocked the development of sufficient housing for the thousands upon thousands of high tech workers who want to live in San Francisco. Damn! My bad.

Never mind that I and other community residents have over years — decades — of volunteer and full-time nonprofit work caused to be constructed more truly affordable housing units for working class and low-income folks than all the Bay Area Yimbys put together. The affordable housing has been promoted by community activists, not by developers.

Senator Wiener’s SB50 literally spells out that developments of ten units or less, such as will be allowed in areas zoned RH-3,RH-2 and RH-1, will be exempt from building any affordable units, and alternatively developers will be allowed to build McMansions in lieu of mid-rise condos.


I am clear that the housing we need the most is for existing lower income working class and middle-class residents. Over decades our city leaders have allowed, invited and with huge tax breaks, encouraged the influx of a massive concentration of capital in San Francisco. The huge public investment that has enabled the concentration of capital has never been recovered by our city. Instead, our city continues to use taxpayer money to pave the way for Google, Uber, and Facebook, et. al despite the obvious need for regulation and limitation to sustain livability for the city’s residents and workers.

The population that is to be the chief beneficiary for the current Yiyby narrative is that portion of the top 30 percent of wage earners who work in the tech industry and who want to live where there are a lot of restaurants, bars, and gyms, and reside in the cool areas of town, usually ethnic and working-class communities.

What they are saying about development is: Yes in Your Back Yard. Because Nimbys don’t have back yards.

Article in www.48Hills.org  HERE

YIMBY advocates for Massive Housing Tax

Yimby+Envy Making sense of the YIMBY politics.

Here is a brief twitter exchange between me and Sonja Trauss, a YIMBY leader.  I have been fascinated by this group because they are not fundamentally ideological in my opinion. They are driven by economic insecurity and generational politics.  They have much in common with the other groups like Occupy Wallstreet and Antifa.  They are essentially nihilists who want to destroy what they believe they cannot attain.  Baby boomers are their number one target since they hold the most wealth in society.   Despite their irrational arguments, they are an educated group who feel that radical action is the only way to achieve their objectives.  Thus, SB50 that will radically upzone every neighborhood in California and take away local authority is perfectly "reasonable"

As Sonja Trauss puts it "Envy is social justice"

I guess she never read about the French Revolution.

LA Tenants Union Take on YIMBYism

Dropping the Hammer on YIMBYism

LA Tenants UnionFollow
Mar 19

This statement is from a group of organizers associated with the LA Tenants Union, DSA-LA, and/or the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, in response to an event hosted by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on March 19, 2019 titled “The Growing YIMBY Movement.” We also organized a protest inside/outside of the event.

As Angelenos committed to housing as a human right, we are disappointed that the Hammer Museum would provide a fawning and uncritical platform to Sonja Trauss and other spokespeople of YIMBYism. It is not simply that we disagree with their ideology, or recognize it as an astroturf campaign; YIMBYs undermine the true movement for housing justice and tenant power.

“Yes In My BackYard” advocates a deregulatory, trickle-down framework for housing policy that does more harm than good. The thread uniting YIMBYs is that we should just “build baby build” to solve our housing crisis, despite abundant evidence — including studies by MIT academics and the Federal reserve, in addition to historical evidence from cities that have pursued this approach — showing that merely adding market-rate supply does not lead to lower housing prices, but rather spurs gentrification and displacement. By empowering the real estate industry, which has long served as a vanguard of structural racism and segregation, YIMBY policies hasten the construction of cities only accessible to the rich.

YIMBYs view the nightmares of housing and homelessness as a matter of supply and demand, ignoring the basic human right to shelter. Indeed, what they don’t fight for speaks volumes. YIMBYs do not support communities of color that have been fighting a permanent housing crisis for decades. YIMBYs do not support empowering and protecting tenants through policies like right to legal council, just-cause eviction, and rent control. They overwhelmingly ignore the possibility of increasing supply with public or social housing. They do not support redistributions of power and wealth. Fundamentally, they are not on the side of the working class and people of color, and they are not guided by a commitment to housing as a human right.

They have also been notably quiet on the subject of vacancy and speculation. They continue to ignore that there are 100,000 vacant homes in San Francisco and 268,000 vacant homes across the L.A. metro area. These staggering numbers can only fail to be relevant to those who are steadfastly committed to housing as a profit-making commodity.

Their deference to the free market is why someone like Ben Carson, Secretary of HUD in the Trump Administration, feels comfortable enthusiastically declaring himself a YIMBY.

With advocates in the Trump White House, the Governor’s Office, and the chair of California State Senate’s Housing Committee, the YIMBYs are not at all a “grassroots movement,” as the Hammer event ridiculously describes them. From the beginning, YIMBYs have benefitted from robust funding from the tech and real estate sectors. In 2015 Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman helped get YIMBYism off the ground with a $100,000 donation to a Sonja Strauss-led group. According to a more recent investigation by In These Times, among the YIMBY PACs that disclose their donors, over half their money comes from employees of tech or real estate firms.

Indeed, last March, the LA Times wrote that “California YIMBY has raised more than $1 million and has a registered lobbyist on its payroll. The group hopes to collect another $1.5 million this year, Hanlon says. He estimates that about 90% of the money has come from technology executives.” This was reported before a $1 million donation from the tech company Stripe.

Despite occasional claims to the contrary, YIMBYs do not support the burgeoning tenants movement, and do not take the problems of gentrification seriously. Last year the YIMBYs relentlessly pushed the upzoning bill SB 827 in the face of vehement statewide opposition from tenants groups and anti-gentrification organizations rooted in communities of color that were arguing the bill would intensify displacement. This year, they are again allying with anti-tenant groups like the California Apartment Association (the landlord lobby who have been leading the fight against rent control in California for years) and various Chambers of Commerce to push essentially the same bill.

Prop 10 is another good example. This was a massive priority for tenants and the biggest push for an expansion of rent control in California in decades, yet the YIMBYs were nowhere to be found. Instead, they ignore or downplay the need for tenant protections with their laser-like focus on increasing market-rate supply.

Sonja Trauss, the invited speaker to this event, has gone out of her way to represent the most nefarious qualities of the aggressively anti-poor, anti-immigrant, and anti-POC mindset of YIMBYism. She has claimed that gentrification is actually a net good for urban land equity because it’s “the revaluation of black land to its correct price.” She has also cited Edward Banfield, who popularized racist ideas like culture-of-poverty theory and broken-windows policing, as a “huge influence.” Even worse, Trauss has has compared Latinx anti-gentrification activists fighting to block luxury development in their neighborhoods to Trump supporters who demonize immigrants.

YIMBYs often claim that all opposing them are reactionary NIMBYs opposed to low-income housing and diversity. This framing forecloses and ignores — intentionally, we think — ideas from the volunteer-run, tenant-led housing movements who are often their critics. We support more housing, as long as it’s affordable for the poor and the working class. We want social housing for all, whether owned by the state or by communities. We thus call ourselves PHIMBYs, advocating “Public Housing In My BackYard.”

YIMBYism is a dangerous ideology that is funded by the powerful to serve the powerful. We, as advocates for tenants (not housing units), for the human rights of working, poor, and people of color, must push back and provide alternatives to their narrow views. We hope this statement and our action does so, and invite you to join us.

Yimby Leader Sonja Trauss is advocating storming golf courses and demanding housing

Yimby Leader Sonja Trauss is advocating storming golf courses and demanding housing

Imagine what a herd of these YIMBYs can do to your neighborhood. :)

YIMBY "Victoria Fierce" demands affordable housing because Life is Hard

YIMBY activist "Victoria Fierce" demands affordable housing at the CASA Oversight  Committee hearing on December 12, 2018.  He cites having to pay $2100 a month to share an apartment and the $500 cost of a cellphone as the reason why.  Most people who migrate suffer some hardship, find cheaper rent and live in thrifty ways. Many sleep on friend's couches until they get established with a new job.  It seems that Ms Fierce is more prosperous than many people who have been here for four years.  Is this a "housing crisis"?

YIMBY Sonja Trauss trashes Local Democracy

Radical Urbanists/ Developer says Marin should have built Marincello

Example of the "Urbanist PR" being promoted by local housing developers. Marincello's defeat saved Marin County from overdevelopment. It could have had highways crisscrossing it and developed like the East Bay. Fortunately Marin County chose a different path and is a testament to "human scale" development and environmentalism.

Marincello: The Failed City




Updated: 3 days ago














Adil Modan| NextGen Marin

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Highway 17 was proposed to be lengthened all the way to Point Reyes National Seashore. With this would come plans to build 5 impressive developments along the Highway that would house almost 250,000 people.

Marincello was one of these projects. In the early 1960’s, a developer by the name of Thomas Frouge proposed Marincello as a suburban bedroom community of San Francisco, with financial support from the Gulf Oil Corporation. The project would have included high-rise apartment buildings, townhomes, retail stores, and even a resort between the Golden Gate and Fort Cronkhite Beach. There was even another project planned alongside Marincello, which would have been an entire city with a population of 150,000 being placed in Tomales Bay.

While this may seem grandiose by today’s standards, it was at the time a very popular and well-supported proposition, so much so that it was approved by the County of Marin in 1965 when the project's density was cut from 5.9 homes per acre to 3.5. It wasn’t proposed to be a massive urban city, but rather a reflection of the nature-focused character of Marin County by using open-space architecture, clustering buildings and amenities while maintaining the scenic landscape. The Pacific Sun wrote that the metropolis "will be a showcase, which will point the way to preservation of the clear and open areas essential and unique in Marin.”

Construction began almost immediately, and the large-scale project began to take shape as the gates of the city were erected. Peter Arrigoni, a stockbroker who would later become head of the Marin Builders Exchange, ran and won as a Republican against Ernest Kettenhofen in the Marin County Supervisor race of 1968. Arrigoni would go on to be the decisive third vote to withdrew support of Marincello in 1970 and would play a large part in repealing the West Marin General Plan that included plans for the city in Tomales Bay.

In an interview with the Marin Independent Journal, Arrigoni mentioned that "there was a distinct change in the Marin County political climate at that time." Prior to this shift, Marin County was booming. It had established a reputation for being the epitome of good growth. It maintained a healthy openness to development without compromising the quality of its environment. However, a small grassroots movement led by a few men began to single-handedly transform the mindset in Marin County. The leaders of this movement formed a new group: the Nature Conservancy.

This sudden emergence of a conservationist movement began to cause problems for the city. Homeowners were urged to complain of trespassing, lawsuits were filed against Gulf Oil, and Marin County’s General Plan was accused of having zoning irregularities and were accused of trespassing. The cost of project began to balloon. In 1972, the Gulf Oil Corporation sold the 2100 acre parcel to the Nature Conservancy at $6.5 million. The area would become a keystone in the Golden Gate Recreation Area, effectively eliminating the housing development project. The Marincello project’s cancellation set the precedent for Marin County’s harsh anti-development ideology and desire to sacrifice affordable housing for open space

A year later, Arrigoni, along with two other supervisors, voted to create a Countywide Plan, which divided the county into three corridors — coastal/recreational, inland/rural, and city-centered — and restricted development to only the city-centered corridor. Owners of agricultural land were allowed just 1 home for every 60 acres of property.

In the following few years, Supervisor Gary Giacomini worked with Congressman Philip Burton to purchase thousands of acres of Marin’s coastal land, leading to the expansion of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Point Reyes National Seashore. Today, 84% of Marin County has been reserved as permanent open space. On the little land that can be developed upon, there are an absurd number of regulations, fees and other hindrances that discourage any sensible developer from addressing the housing crisis in the County.

Marincello is a perfect example of something that could have been. Its downfall symbolizes the birth of a stubbornly anti-growth mindset that has become the Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) movement, a major contributor to Marin’s housing shortage and growing unaffordability. However, as California State Senator Peter H. Behr, one of the leaders of the conservation movement, put it “when enough people care enough, work hard enough, long enough, the right thing will in time happen despite what would appear to be permanent setbacks.” While we don't believe in such a large project, we can see that the pendulum can be swung the other way, through local and community action. If the numerically tiny Nature Conservancy could make a permanent impact in the political culture of an entire region, a group of people today most definitely have the power to inspire community and governmental action despite the overwhelming obstacles we face.

tHE URBAN HUMANISM MANIFESTO: PUTTING COMMUNITIES FIRST

by John Mirisch 05/06/2018

Urban planning exists to serve people and communities, not the other way around. Unfortunately, urban planners these days, perhaps under the influence of academic arrogance as well as the lure of developer dollars, seem to forget this simple truism.

A particularly invidious form of planning orthodoxy involves certain adherents of so-called “new urbanism,” which looks at density, more density and only density as the hallmark of the (for them) only acceptable form of urban living.

Without considering that people of all colors, stripes and ethnicities might like to have gardens, these urban planning densifiers support policies whose main aims are to eliminate low-density housing, without regard to preservation of the integrity of communities or without acknowledging that community character means anything.

The new urbanist density hawks also use other “arguments” apart from social justice to make their moral case for high-density, including, importantly, environmental considerations. Never mind the fact that even studies done by density advocates show that the supposed benefits of increased density on the environment would be marginal, at best. But that doesn’t dampen the rhetoric. Far from it. Some of the most strident density fetishists decry single-family neighborhoods as “the enemy” and proclaim homeowners to be nothing less than “zoo animals” and “bloodthirsty dinosaurs,” who are “angry, entitled, immoral, classist and racist.”

While new urbanist Yimbys make claims that low-density housing is immoral for numerous reasons, many social justice groups and environmental groups take issue with policies they aggressively (and sometimes obnoxiously) push, such as California state senator Scott Wiener’s SB827, which would have used public transportation as an alibi to allow developers to densify cities by pre-empting municipalities’ general plans.

While Yimbys are evidently great at chanting, they aren’t as skillful in appreciating the irony of their dehumanizing policy goals. The contradictions and outright hypocrisy in their density fetishism is sometimes so extreme, that the cognitive dissonance should cause heads to explode. The density fetishists can’t seem to help treating people like widgets, stats or marks. They don’t seem to understand that communities are made up of people. They can’t recognize that communities are dynamic extensions of people, that they are extensions of families – however one chooses to define “family.”

Some of the most strident pro-density new urbanists and Yimbys are militant about their own personal right of self-definition, as they well should be. Whether it is a matter of how one defines “family,” LGBTQ rights, religious beliefs, ethnicity or any other seemingly trivial or crucial personal characteristic that helps people to define themselves, the right of self-definition is paramount when it comes to people’s abilities to unfold their own unique potential and to live a fulfilled life.

So is it with communities. But such self-definition for individuals and communities demands respect and tolerance, two qualities seemingly in short supply with the Yimbys and academic master planners.

Cities in many ways are like human beings themselves. Communities made up of living, breathing humans need the same right of self-definition as individuals. Like people, communities have their own unique character, their own DNA, their own aspirations which arise from the individuals who make them up.

Urban humanism, in direct opposition to new urbanist Yimbyism’s cult-like intolerance, respects that communities are made up of dynamic people and that one-size-fits-all mandates aren’t suitable for them any more than imposing a single definition of “family” would be for the individuals that make up these communities.

Density fetishism itself negates the notion that while ultra-dense urban living may be a lifestyle choice for some individuals (a choice which might, incidentally, change as people get older), so is the desire to live within a human-scale, low-rise community. Both choices are legitimate, as is everything else in between.

Yet in their unflinching dogmatism, new urbanist Yimbys seem unwilling to dispense the kind of tolerance they take for granted when it comes to many of their own personal lifestyles. The unwillingness to recognize and respect the uniqueness of communities can have a similar effect as the unwillingness to recognize and respect the uniqueness of individual people.

The new urbanist de-humanizing view towards cities and communities often tends to repeat the misguided narrative that cities themselves are to blame for the housing crisis in California. While CEQA needs to be fixed to ensure that cities don’t act irresponsibly, the Yimby blame-game towards cities doesn’t take into account Sacramento’s role in pushing cities to prioritize commercial development above housing, including abolishing re-development agencies.

New urbanist Yimbys would rather blame cities than look at the issue of income inequality or the role corporations play in having created the housing crisis. Tech CEO’s brag about their “insane margins,” and the Yimbys just harrumph and glibly move on to their next pro-density rant. Perhaps this shouldn’t be so surprising, considering that the Astro-Turf Yimby groups are largely funded by Silicon Valley tech billionaires, including Trump-buddy Peter Thiel.

Urban humanism, in direct contrast to new urbanist Yimbism, understands that corporations are not people and that money is not speech. Urban humanism, which favors a bottom-up approach as opposed to the top-down approach favored by new urbanist Yimbys, puts communities over corporations, people over profits and does not try to make political hay out of housing policy.

Strangely enough, the new urbanist Yimbys fail to see the contradictions resulting from their ideological alignment with corporate interests. Self-defined “progressive” Democrats find themselves spouting the Reaganomic trickle-down theories of Laffer and Mundell, as well as defining “property rights” in a way which, glossing over income inequality, would make hardliner objectivists nod their heads in agreement. Instead, they choose to focus on what they perceive to be the insuperable inconsistencies of those who oppose their corporatist agenda.

In politicizing the housing crisis, density advocates suggest that there is an unnatural alliance between affluent communities and poor ones. They think, on the other hand, that there’s a natural alliance is between Yimbys and tech billionaires, corporations and developers because they “all want housing.”

True, yimbys, tech billionaires and corporations “all want housing” for reasons which would seem to be diametrically opposed to urban humanist policy. The commonality amongst these groups is the profit motive (or willingness to accept the profit motive “for the greater good”). Perhaps more importantly, low-income and affluent communities are not “unnatural allies.”

One alliance is driven by the profit motive while the other is driven by elective affinities and empathy. Communities have the capacity to understand each other at the most basic level because of the underlying human element which is at their core. It is the capacity for empathy at its most elemental: if I have a child whom I love, I should be better able to comprehend and internalize the depth of feeling of others for their own children and to bond with them because of it.

As former LA County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said:

Every member of every community cares deeply about where they live and work. Whether you live in Echo Park or Beverly Hills, in Chatsworth or Wilmington, your community is your community. Businesses, residents, and other stakeholders fight to maintain a community’s values—and its value. That doesn’t make them NIMBYs; it makes them the responsible citizen stakeholders who make a city what it is.

With all the Big Money behind their attempts at urban Gleichschaltung, the Yimbys have shown urban humanists and communitarians the pressing need to change the calculus of how policy gets set in Sacramento. With all the Big Money pushing for policies which would place profiteering over people, it’s clear we need a state government based upon the principles of subsidiarity, regional cooperation and de-centralized self-government that has the capacity to put communities over corporations.

The dual goals of livability and sustainability can best be achieved by letting communities try to develop into the best versions of themselves, as decided upon by the residents. And this means respecting the individuality of communities, instead of the Bến Tre school of urban planning, espoused by the new urbanist Yimbys who would impose their rigorous versions of density upon communities throughout the state.

Far from “destroying communities to save them,” we need to allow communities to adapt even better to the ever-changing world, while empowering them to maintain the characters which make them unique. In a world of corporate profiteering über alles, in a world in which the academic elite thinks it should be able to dictate how people live, the time has come within urban planning to stop treating human beings like widgets, stats or marks.

Urban humanism, a humanistic approach to urban planning and urban policy is an idea whose time has come. Now more than ever, it’s time to put people first. Communitarians of California, unite! You have nothing to lose but Sacramento overreach.

Vice Mayor John Mirisch has served on the Beverly Hills City Council
since 2009, including as mayor in 2013-2014 and 2016-2017. He created the City's Sunshine Task Force in 2013 to increase transparency and public participation in local government.

The Suburb Wooing Millennials With Avocados, Kombucha, and Cheap Houses

thinkhomewood.com

The Suburb Wooing Millennials With Avocados, Kombucha, and Cheap Houses

AMANDA KOLSON HURLEY APR 9, 2018

In a new comic-strip ad campaign, Homewood, Illinois, bills itself as a hip, diverse, urban neighborhood that Millennials can afford. The only catch: It’s in the suburbs.

Four friends in early middle age are chatting on a small-town sidewalk. “So, what are you doing this weekend?” asks one of them, a man in a button-down shirt. “The usual,” replies his friend, a black woman wearing a t-shirt with a rainbow-striped heart. “A guitar lesson, checking out the artisan street fair with the littles, and then some Aurelio’s—“

Her partner, a blond woman, cuts in. “From the old oven, of course!”

The man and the third woman look pleasantly surprised. “And here we thought you’d miss living in Chicago,” he says.(thinkhomewood.com)

Welcome to Homewood, Illinois, a suburb of 20,000 that is marketing itself to urbanites as a hidden hipster gem.

The town, which is about 25 miles south of downtown Chicago, just launched a new advertising campaign called “Think Homewood.” Ads posted inside trains on the L’s Blue Line and elsewhere in Chicago contrast the laid-back vibe of Homewood to the stress of city living. The ads are comic strips drawn by illustrator and Homewood resident Marc Alan Fishman.

In one strip, a Homewood mom with a purple streak in her hair and a tattoo praises the school system. “Zen gets to be with the same kids all the way through high school,” she says. Meanwhile, “Somewhere in Wicker-Humboldt-Pilsen”—Chicago neighborhoods that have experienced dramatic gentrification and zooming housing prices in recent years—two anxious moms in a city park talk about school options for their kids. “Have you started figuring out the schools yet?” a Janeane Garofalo lookalike asks her companion.

“No … I’m so overwhelmed with all the options,” the other mom says. “I’m just pretending like it’s not happening.”(thinkhomewood.com)(thinkhomewood.com)

The ads, which will run through the end of May, were the idea of Mary Jane Maharry, a public relations consultant to the town. Maharry enlisted Fishman, the local artist, and presented the concept to the village board, whose members embraced it, according to Homewood Mayor Richard Hofeld.

Hofeld said the town wants more young families to move there, and as urban Millennials start to think about homeownership and child-rearing, it’s the right time to recruit them. “We found the Millennials [in Chicago] are prone to looking to the north suburbs and the west suburbs, and rarely look to the south,” Hofeld said. “We have all the amenities that a family could ask for. And on top of it, as far as the housing stock goes, it’s affordable. We feel those are good sells.”This proves a fact that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago: Suburbs now have to work to attract the cohort they were built for.

The ads evoke a bougie paradise with as much tongue-in-cheek detail as an episode of Portlandia: avocados, kombucha, farm-to-table brunch, street fairs. In the one with the tattooed mom, she’s joined by a guy (her partner?) who’s looking at his iPhone and wearing a t-shirt that says LOCAL FOOD. But there’s a twist: Here, the people living out this progressive urban cliché are suburbanites.

In Homewood, we’re told, people walk to the farmer’s market, keep chickens in their yards, and hang out with friends of different races and sexual orientations. By contrast, their urban peers come across as either a bit square (see the first ad above), or just stressed out from having to deal with school bureaucracy and oversubscribed city services, like rec classes that fill up immediately.

Who’s the sucker for moving to the suburbs now, eh?, the ads seem to ask. But the characters are more or less interchangeable; the implication is that if they move to Homewood, those tightly wound Chicagoans will chill out and name their kids “Zen,” too.

While they might seem suspiciously like they were generated by an algorithm fed with marketing data and New York Times trend pieces, the comic-strip Homewood denizens are based on real residents and real events, according to Maharry (who lives in Homewood herself).

In fact, “Think Homewood” reveals just how much the old dichotomy of city vs. suburb is blurring. It proves a fact that would have been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago: Suburbs now have to work to attract the cohort they were built for. As certain cities become more sought-after and lively, suburbs can no longer just sit back and wait for the inevitable stampede of first-time homebuyers and new parents. They have to convince skeptical young folk of their essential urbanity first. (Another Chicago suburb, Berwyn, is running ads on city billboards proclaiming that it’s “nothing like a suburb.”)

They also have to offer a competitive advantage vis-a-vis the city. In Homewood, that advantage is affordable real estate and good public schools. The median home value in Homewood is a reasonable $149,800, according to Zillow. The area high school, Homewood-Flossmoor, is well regarded. And the K-8 schools have a streamlinedstructure, which the ads dangle in front of Chicago parents as sweet relief. Even as school choice brings more educational options to Chicago and other U.S. cities, it can be a gamble, and a fragmented school landscape can be difficult and exhausting for parents to navigate.

In the view of sociologist John Joe Schlichtman, Homewood is basically promising gentrification without the guilt. Ditto for guilt-free driving: The ads promise easy car trips on traffic-free streets along with (limited) walkability and Metra rail service into Chicago. This “car-light” lifestyle is portrayed as the best of both worlds.

One comic panel shows Chicago Dad stuck in traffic on the way back from the store. He realizes he forgot to get avocados. Frak! That’s taco night ruined. But when Homewood Dad remembers the avocados, he can hop in the car and be back at the store in minutes. Taco night is saved.(thinkhomewood.com)(thinkhomewood.com)

The multiracial cast of these ads is not a sleight of hand. Homewood is legitimately diverse: 53 percent white, 37 percent black, 2 percent Asian, and 8 percent Hispanic. Its schools are majority nonwhite. These figures reflect larger demographic shifts as people of color move out (or are pushed out) of expensive cities, and as immigrants bypass central cities and head straight to the ’burbs. But Homewood-Flossmoor also has a history of proactive integration efforts: The South Suburban Housing Center, a regional fair-housing organization, was founded in Homewood in 1975.

Mayor Hofeld told me that in Homewood, “the glue that really binds [the] community together” is a series of annual festivals, including a chili cook-off and a rail fest. He hopes people who are interested in the town will attend one. Millennials, he said, “have enjoyed living in the city, and the features the city might afford. But they’re getting a little bit older, thinking of raising families, and looking around for a stable community that has a lot of amenities. And that’s what we are.”

I asked the mayor, who is 80 and has been in office for two decades, if “Think Homewood” reflects the town as it is today. “Very much so,” he said. “This cartoonist and MJ [Maharry], they really nailed it down. There are choices here. And that’s what’s nice.”

DECONSTRUCTING “YIMBYISM”

DECONSTRUCTING “YIMBYISM”

by John Mirisch 04/10/2018

California’s housing crisis has emboldened grandstanding Sacramento politicians who measure their own “success” by the number of bills they can pass with their own names attached.

We now have Scott Wiener’s SB827, a bill which would use “mass transit” (defined as four buses an hour during rush hour) to eliminate local governments’ ability to zone single-family housing and to replace locally crafted General Plans with increased density levels dictated by Sacramento politicians.

SB827 would effectively eliminate any protections for single-family housing in cities and allow developers to build up to ten-story buildings without any input, control or recourse from local communities. It’s the Developer Industrial Complex’s dream come true.

Wiener’s SB827 is the absolute wrong prescription to deal with the housing crisis.

Despite Wiener’s attempts to blunt criticism by making some cosmetic amendments to SB827, the bill continues to be opposed by a wide variety of diverse communities and social justice organizations such as the Crenshaw Subway Coalition. And last week, the LA City Council, hardly a bastion of reaction, rejected it by a 13 to 0 vote.

So who’s backing Wiener’s bill? It’s the oddest combination of special interests and committed densifiers, many of whom have banded together under the moniker of “Yimby,” which wittily and ingeniously changes the pro-density pejorative “Nimby,” “not in my back yard,” to “yes in my back yard”. On the one hand we have hardline Ayn Rand “free market” property rights advocates, who in principle oppose government regulation; on the other hand, we have radical ideologues, who think zoning is inherently “racist” and that opponents are selfish people who want to exclude people from their neighborhoods. Wiener’s bill seems to have created a curious case of “intersectionality,” including Cliven Bundy-style radical libertarians and those partial to Soviet style top-down planning.

The Yimby movement

Although sometimes characterized as a product of the left, the “Yimby” movement is largely funded by Silicon Valley billionaires who seek to cram tech workers into expensive multi-family housing as well as developers who don’t like pesky zoning restrictions or environmental protections. The alliance of developers and tech oligarchs look to Yimbyism as a means to eliminate zoning and environmental restrictions in order to increase profits. Should it surprise anyone that developers and developer interests represented the largest donor base to senator Wiener?

Sonja Trauss, a professional Yimby who runs San Francisco BARF (Bay Area Renters Federation), openly endorses indiscriminate building, fiercely defending the rights of “those who haven’t moved to the Bay Area yet.” Her notion is based on a simplistic supply-side argument which argues that we can somehow build our way out of the housing crisis and into affordability.

Trauss and her supporters seem unconcerned that, given the costs of constructing multifamily housing, particularly in coastal California, this will likely increase new luxury housing. The theory is that the luxury housing would relieve the pressure for this market sector and ultimate filter down to create affordability.

These “trickle down” theories are singularly ill-suited for application to the housing crisis. For one thing, they don’t consider the phenomena of absentee landlordism and speculation. How many foreign investors, for example, might purchase condos for speculative purposes or as second homes which they might occupy for only a few weeks a year?

Trauss’s “build, baby, build” pseudo-solutions fail to take into account the demonstrated results of densification by design. The most unaffordable markets in Australia, Canada, Great Britain as well as the United States are those that are generally densest and, in many cases, prevent construction of housing where it is most affordable --- the periphery.

Yimbys are not as interested in stabilizing the system and solving the crisis for those who already live here but in creating housing for future residents. In fact, Yimby anti-zoning policies lead directly to the displacement of existing residents, including many lower income groups and minorities.

Wiener’s bill, rather than a boon for affordable housing, is a potential bonanza for well-placed developers. Developers hate having to pay for parking for their projects. Check that: SB827 eliminates parking requirements near bus stations, even if public transportation, compared with driving, takes triple the amount of time to get from Point A to Point B. Developers hate design review, as they don’t want to be bothered with such niceties as aesthetics. Check that: SB827 eliminates design review requirements. Developers hate to enter into development agreements with municipalities, which would provide for additional public benefits, including funding necessary to provide services. Check that: SB827 gives them by-right development rights, representing an exponential increase in property values and profits – all without having to negotiate additional public benefits or give municipalities an extra nickel.

This comes at a time when cities are notoriously bad at extracting benefits from developers whose profits they enable. Rather than look to strengthen cities’ ability to make good deals with developers, which would create revenue cities could use to provide residents services or even build affordable housing, SB827 literally gives away the game away by taking away their leverage.

In fact, by taking zoning out of the hands of municipalities, SB827 will also cause cities to incur significant additional expenses in the form of more staff needed to serve more residents, just for starters. The scraps from the table which municipalities would receive in the form of some fees and taxes would in no way counterbalance the additional expenses.

"Transit-Oriented Development"

Ultimately, the whole notion of TOD (“transit-oriented development”) which is the main rationale for SB827, is itself a backward-looking mid-20th Century concept, which ignores developments in technology and advocates transit “solutions” which could soon be obsolete or, at best, second-best. Communities and regions should instead look to 21st Century transit and urban models such as AOD (“Autonomous Oriented Development”), which look to the ways in which technology can and will impact commuting patterns and even the notion of commutes themselves.

In fact, some of the decreasing ridership in LA’s MTA system has been explained by poor people, including illegal immigrants who now can get drivers’ licenses under state law, and who now are moving away from expensive areas near transit and themselves abandoning public transit in favor of driving. This is no small wonder since public transportation can often take exponentially more time to reach a destination even in the worst LA rush hour traffic.

Ultimately self-styled "progressive" senator Wiener is pushing for the single largest wealth transfer in modern California history for the benefit of wealthy developers. So, with Scott Wiener, at least, the word "progressive" actually means: "regressive." We are truly living in a world which would put Lewis Carroll to shame (not to mention Orwell and Huxley).

Naturally, Wiener is in denial about the rabbit hole he has gone down. Wiener claims he has “no issue” with single-family homes. He and his handlers claim he never said that he considers single-family housing to be “racist.” But, despite the senator’s denials, many of the most ardent supporters of SB827 have made it clear that they consider single-family housing to be “racist.”

In defending SB827, Senator Wiener himself wrote the following: “Severely limiting density around transit perpetuates an ugly American reality: that restrictive low-density zoning has historically been a tool to exclude people of color, especially African-Americans, and poor people from neighborhoods. Indeed, low-density zoning – banning apartment buildings – was invented shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive zoning laws were unenforceable.”

The irony of this statement is that most of the people who actually live in our City today were excluded from doing so under the covenants which were in effect in the very early years. Some things, thank goodness, do change for the better.

Clearly, actions speak louder than words: SB827 could eliminate more than 90% of single-family housing in San Francisco, more than 50% in Los Angeles, and a figure somewhere in between that in Beverly Hills, literally destroying many communities. “Community” with a capital “C” is the most elemental form of human beings coming together to live among one another; the concept of Community is an extension of the concept of family. SB827 would not only destroy Beverly Hills, but a multitude of unique communities throughout the state.

But, hey, at least ideological purity would be served by eliminating much of that “racist” form of housing.

Ideological purity is why Wiener and the radical Yimbys would burn down all urban planning theories which don’t conform to their own notion of density. They are convinced that only their level density is the only “right” way to live and would impose their dogma on everyone else by force.

At its core, that’s what SB827 is about.

This kind of ideological Yimbyism is marked by a complete lack of tolerance about divergent views or lifestyle choices. It represents an urban planning form of totalitarianism – or Soviet-style master planning at its finest.

Needed: More Humanity and diversity

A humanistic urban planning perspective, on the other hand, accepts that people are individuals and respects that individuality by embracing a multitude of living options. From single-family housing to ultra-dense, Manhattan-style living, along with everything in between, humanistic urban planning offers choice and diversity.

Far be it from Wiener & Co., their corporatist sponsors or academic boosters to look at people as dynamic, living, breathing and, yes, individual human beings, who go on to form dynamic, living, breathing and, yes, individual communities. For them, all too often, human beings seem to just widgets, stats or marks.

But cities are in many ways like human beings themselves. And the best, most successful communities develop and grow organically. Once a community has reached the urban planning version of its ideal height and weight, it can continually try to improve and regenerate itself. It can improve roads. It can add municipal fiber (something that Sacramento politicians are now trying to ban). It can replace failed buildings while protecting character-defining ones. It can work out rules to stabilize rents and encourage continuity.

But if outside forces, like zealot planners or politicians with an agenda, attempt to force feed the community, if they shove forced development down the community’s throat, then the community will become bloated and unhealthy, and its arteries will clog.

If Scott Wiener and his Yimbys were really interested in solving the housing crisis they would fight to bring back redevelopment agencies which could fund truly subsidized housing. They would help empower municipalities to share substantially in developer profits and to use the funding generated to create truly inclusionary housing.

And, overall, they would try to create a nexus between job magnets which create a demand for housing and those corporations profiting from the growth. He’d get his Silicon billionaire buddies and their corporations to step up and pay for housing in cities and communities which would welcome the investment.

But Scott Wiener, his Yimbys and their Big Developer allies aren’t really interested in solving the housing crisis.

They’re interested in profiteering from it.

And they don’t care if they have to destroy communities to do it.

Vice Mayor John Mirisch has served on the Beverly Hills City Council
since 2009, including as mayor in 2013-2014 and 2016-2017. He created the City's Sunshine Task Force in 2013 to increase transparency and public participation in local government.

If high density housing makes rents cheaper, why do developers want to build it?

YIMBY question for today: "Why are developers and banks willing to invest in real estate if #SB827 will make rents go down?"

YIMBYS: "We are so sorry if you are a minority, (We only target old rich white people)"

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Welcome to the Wiener Village NOW RENTING!

California’s housing crunch has turned liberals against one another

California’s housing crunch has turned liberals against one another

by JAMES RAINEY


Brian Hanlon, 35, is executive director of California Yimby, a group lobbying for the construction of more housing. "I would argue our generation's inability to afford housing is not some moral failure," said Hanlon. "It's the result of a dysfunctional system." Feb. 22, 2018 in Los Angeles. Jim Seida / NBC News


BERKELEY, Calif. — A median-priced one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco rents for nearly $3,300 a month. In the Silicon Valley community of San Mateo, the median home will set you back almost $1.4 million. Even in semi-rural Petaluma in Sonoma County, at least an hour drive from the city, rent for a one-bedroom can reach $2,000 and more.

To afford a place to live in the Bay Area, stressed workers and students are moving farther and farther out, commuting for hours a day from what used to be farm country. Others pile two and three to a room. In Los Angeles, San Diego and along much of the coast, the picture is much the same. For many Californians, the housing crisis has become “a feeling of tightness in their chests and in their jaws,” said Brian Hanlon, a prominent housing activist, “because they have this sense that there is no future for them here.”

But now the need for more affordable housing is provoking an intense ideological struggle, and in this left-leaning state, one that pits liberals against liberals. On one side are old-style liberals who lean against development and do not want to see construction cranes building high-rise apartments in their neighborhoods. On the other side are progressives who support such building efforts and focus on the effect of long commutes on the environment, particularly from cheaper exurban areas with little mass transit.
An aerial view of Berkeley, California. Diego Cupolo / NurPhoto via Getty Images

The struggle has recently reached a boil with the decision by some state political leaders to require the construction of new housing units. Frustrated by the inaction of local officials, they are moving to take control of planning decisions, setting off alarms among those who cherish the notion of local control.
Yimbies vs. nimbies

The drive to build more housing units, particularly along bus and light-rail lines, has been spearheaded by members of the fledgling Yimby (for “Yes, in my backyard”) movement. The Yimbies have spread not only across California but to cities around the country — like Austin, Texas; Boston; New York; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle — where the amount of housing has not expanded to meet a surge of new jobs.

The Yimby newcomers, many of them millennials, have run smack into old-guard liberals, often baby-boomers or older, who cut their political teeth during an era when one could be staunchly progressive and adamantly “slow growth.” The collision has not been a happy one.

“I think they are a combination of dumb and venal and maybe equal parts of both,” said Becky O’Malley, a 78-year-old Berkeley lawyer and journalist, when asked about the Yimby activists. She didn’t hesitate to add that some of the Yimbies appear to be “fronts” for big developers.

On the other side, Hanlon, 35, the executive director of California Yimby, accuses opponents like O’Malley of having a drawbridge mentality, of wanting to exclude newcomers after having obtained entrée to the state’s rarefied housing market.

“They are the masters of hypocritical progressivism,” Hanlon says. “They have created what amounts to natural retirement communities. And now people like me can’t get a toehold.”  

Each side accuses the other of being overly entitled and insufficiently attuned to the needs of poor people. O’Malley calls Hanlon “an entitled young white boy.” He retorts that she is one of the “elderly white homeowners” who too often turn up to oppose new housing. How did things get this testy?
Little action by cities

It began with California’s barely abated population growth. From just over 15 million in 1960, the state’s population now hovers close to 40 million residents, the vast majority crammed into a thin strip near the Pacific Coast. But housing construction has not kept pace. A study by the Urban Land Institute found that by 2035 demand will call for an additional 2.5 million housing units.

For decades, California mostly left local communities to their own devices when it came to land-use planning. But in 1969, recognizing the “vital statewide importance” of providing enough housing, the state Legislature enacted a law that required each community to include a “housing element” in its general plan. The documents are supposed to lay the groundwork for a minimum number of new units — with quotas for very-low income, low-income and moderate-priced units.

Experience has shown that many towns and cities do not write adequate housing elements into their plans. And even when communities do, the needed units (particularly affordable ones) usually do not get built.
A rendering for a proposed multi-residential building at 3031 Adeline St. in Berkeley. Dinar and Associates

Yet, the state’s booming economy — particularly among high-wage tech workers — keeps drawing newcomers to California’s big cities. Census figures last year showed the Bay Area had the highest household income in the country. At $97,000 a year, the region moved ahead of Washington and was nearly $25,000 above the median household income for New York.
Long commutes and greenhouse gases

If the misery of long commutes and oppressive rents is not enough to force a change, policymakers have found a new motivation in recent years: climate change. Researchers estimate that fully 37 percent of the earth-warming greenhouse gases produced in California begin with car and truck tailpipe emissions.

In 2008, the state passed the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act, requiring each of 18 regions to show how they would reduce greenhouse gases by integrating land use, housing and transportation. One obvious imperative: House people close to their jobs, since less driving means less pollution. Still, the 2008 law did not force cities to build housing.

Last year, the Democratic-controlled state Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown, the term-limited Democrat who leaves office next year, turned up the pressure on cities by passing two new laws. One requires cities that fail to keep pace with their designated allotment of housing to automatically approve new projects in areas already zoned for high-density development. A survey this year found that the law would apply in the vast majority of communities, because just 13 governments met their housing allotments, while 378 did not.

The other new law calls for penalties of $10,000 per unit for cities that fail to meet their housing requirements. The fines would go into a housing construction trust fund.

The first bill, written by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, drew opposition from old-line liberals, including the Sierra Club and the League of California Cities. They joined many city councils in saying the law does too much to help developers and takes away the long-sacrosanct right of cities and counties “to make smart local decisions about development,” as a Sierra Club spokesperson said.

But other environmental groups, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, supported the proposal, which won passage thanks to the support of an unusual coalition of Republicans and Democrats.
The San Francisco skyline in May 2015. David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images file

Wiener is back this year with an even more aggressive measure to get substantial housing built near transit lines. His bill, SB 827, would allow the stateto override local zoning restrictions and build taller residential buildings — as high as eight stories — around rail and bus stations.

With millions of new homes needed to meet population and market demands, Wiener argues California has no more time for half measures.

“We will never meet our long-term climate goals unless we change traffic patterns and allow more people to live near public transportation,” said Weiner, 47, a Harvard Law grad who rides public transit. “Some cities have essentially opted out of building new housing, and it has led to this huge deficit.”
Protecting low-income residents

Opponents, again including the Sierra Club, cite a litany of objections to SB 827. They said the bill does not require that at least some portion of the state-mandated housing be reserved for people of modest incomes. They say speculators building new apartment complexes may displace poor people already living there. They wonder how cities will pay for the additional schools, police and other services needed to accommodate the new residents. And they even question the proposal’s central premise: If new residents arrive with cars, who is to say they won’t spurn the nearby buses and rail lines and take to the roads?

Wiener and his supporters reject those arguments, pointing to research showing that housing built adjacent to transit reduces car and truck traffic. And the lawmaker on Monday announced amendments to his proposal to protect the rights of existing tenants, especially the poor. The changes make explicit that cities will retain their right to block demolitions of existing structures. When buildings are torn down, displaced tenants will have to be guaranteed equivalent housing during construction and the right to live in the new building, at their old rent.

Wiener's amendments also ban destruction of rent-controlled units and keep in place the ability of cities to order that a certain percentage of units in new buildings be set aside for low-income tenants.

Around ever-more-crowded Berkeley, there’s no clear consensus about what should be done.
The North Shattuck neighborhood of Berkeley. Smith Collection / Getty Images

Claire Neal is one of four roommates who split the $3,000 monthly rent for a one-bedroom near the Berkeley campus. She acknowledges that building apartments may eventually reduce rents. “I know taller buildings might be more efficient, but they are really not very pretty,” says Neal, a senior studying environmental sciences. “And if you are building up, you are going to tear down some things and change the neighborhood.”

Waiting at the same Starbucks near the downtown Berkeley BART station, Rahsaan Coleman, 45, also was wary of pledges to build in lower-income communities. A lifelong resident of Oakland, he said he had already seen many friends in the African-American community forced out by gentrification.

“If we build up, at what price? Who is going to live there? And is some of it Section 8?” said Coleman, who works at a nonprofit group, referring to a federal rent subsidy program. “The promises made to some sectors of the community in the past have not been kept.”

He said he had seen people forced to live on the streets, noting how many tent encampments are now packed beneath Bay Area freeway overpasses. The picture is not much different in Los Angeles, where a survey last year by the Homeless Services Authority found half of the homeless people said they were there because of eviction, foreclosure, unemployment or for “financial reasons.”

Mike Jones, 23, who works for a music company, shares a $2,200-a-month one-bedroom with his girlfriend near the Oakland-Berkeley border. He has heard the objections to new construction and adds lost views and increased shadows to the list, but said something needs to be done about high rents and long commutes. “The view might be diminished,” he said, “but that shouldn’t matter more than people matter.”
Housing dreams out of reach

Hanlon, of Yimby, called his group a growing force, saying it’s adding members even in outlying communities like Eureka, on California’s North Coast. The Yimbies say they are tired of being demonized for wanting something that approached what their parents generation had. Hanlon’s father, a postal worker, could afford to buy a home. But even with two master’s degrees, Hanlon said he is not even close to that dream.

“I would argue our generation’s inability to afford housing is not some moral failure or some lack of effort,” Hanlon said. “It’s the result of a dysfunctional system, and it’s dysfunctional because the older generation made it that way.”

He said older white homeowners are the one group in the state that doesn’t support new housing. When he goes to hearings about new development, he said, the opponents are typically “septuagenarians who just don’t want the kids living there.”

Hanlon worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Forest Service before taking on the housing cause. He acknowledges that the Yimby group he now heads receives most of its funding from Silicon Valley tech investors, who want to see more housing for their workers. He scoffs at the notion that his opinions have been bought by developers, pointing out that he is living in a cheap studio apartment in Sacramento.

O’Malley, for her part, bridled at the notion that she is elitist. She derided other whites who fled Berkeley in the 1970s, when the community began busing to integrate its schools. She helped her scientist husband start a tech company that turns digital script into speech. They sold the company at a handsome profit and now own two homes in the leafy Elmwood section of Berkeley. The O’Malleys act as patrons of the arts, allowing a gaggle of three or four musicians (and numerous regular guests) to live in one of the homes, rent free.

She has taken on Hanlon and the Yimbies on the news website, berkeleydailyplanet.com, which the O’Malleys bought in 2001. The Yimbies, she said, are guilty of “magical thinking” if they believe that housing near public transit will trickle down to benefit those who need it most.

“These young people believe themselves to be liberals,” O'Malley said. “But if they are not careful, their policies will build dormitories for people with high-paying jobs and leave no place for families and people of color.”

The sharp talk suggests that fixing the housing shortfall will not be easy. And no one is predicting easy passage for Wiener’s legislation. But some of those who have been following the debate for years take heart that California has tackled other seemingly intractable issues.

Egon Terplan, the regional planning director for the Bay Area good government nonprofit SPUR, noted that the perennial deficits in the state budget have been erased — California now has a $6 billion surplus. And the state’s cap-and-trade program, which provides a financial incentive for companies to pollute less, is a bold initiative that has become a model for nations around the world.

So perhaps a path toward building a new wave of homes is not impossible.

“I think we are entering a new era,” Terplan said, “and there seems to be a window of opportunity to really set a high bar for housing.”

Megacities of the Future , YIMBY Paradise?

Little Boxes by Pete Seeger Conformity and Overdevelopment

This song was written in 1960 by Housewife and Activist Malvina Reynolds to protest the overdevelopment of Daly City, CA.    It's message is a warning to YIMBYs and Plan Bay Area who want to destroy places like Marin County for high density housing.  They pretend it is for "social justice" and "combat global warming" but in the end it is about developers making money from the Tech Boom.  When the quality of life in the Bay Area is destroyed, where will you go?

Daly City, CA

Little-known Yimby-developer bills will have big impact on local planning

Little-known Yimby-developer bills will have big impact on local planning

Growth machine continues its attack on anything that stands in the way of more market-rate housing

BY ZELDA BRONSTEIN
-
December 3, 2017


Of the fifteen bills in the “housing package” signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on September 29, the one that got the most attention in the news media was State Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 35—and for good reason: SB 35 goes a long way toward “putting teeth” in California’s Regional Housing Needs Allocations, the number of housing units whose each city’s and county’s zoning must accommodate. Moreover, the bill’s provisions for “by-right” approval of certain multi-family, infill developments both circumvent the California Environmental Quality Act and eliminate negotiations with developers over community benefits.Housing for all — or just market-rate housing for the rich?

But two other items in the package, SB 167 and AB 1515, that either got much less publicity (SB 167) or virtually none at all (AB 1515) will likely do much more damage to the democratic governance of land use in the state. Both amend California’s Housing Accountability Act, a once-dormant law now being exploited by Bay Area Yimbys.

Passed in 1982, the HAA limits the ability of local agencies to reject or make infeasible housing developments without a thorough analysis of the economic, social and environmental effects of such action. It applies to all housing projects. Most important, the HAA allows a court to compel a city to take action on proposed developments.

Analyzing AB 1515 for the State Senate Rules Committee, Senate staffer Alison Hughes observed that when a jurisdiction is sued under the HAA,

the local government bears the burden of proof that its decision has conformed to all of the requirements in the law, including, if applicable, any findings that the development was not consistent with the city’s general plan or zoning standards.….

[I]n order to qualify for the Housing Accountability Act’s protections, a development must be consistent with a city’s general plan and zoning standards in effect at the time that the application was deemed complete. In land use cases, when the issue is such consistency, courts have tended to defer to local governments, unless the court finds that the local government acted arbitrarily, capriciously, or without evidentiary basis.

In legalistic terms, a local government’s decision would be upheld unless no reasonable person could have made the same decision—a very high bar. AB 1515 effectively lowered the bar to the ground.

AB 1515, Hughes explained, “requires courts to give less deference to a local government’s consistency determination. It changes the [evidentiary] standard of review by providing that a project is consistent if there is substantial evidence that would allow a reasonable person to find it consistent.”

AB 1515 was sponsored the California Building Industry Association. The Legislature staff analyses list only one opponent: the California chapter of the American Planning Association. Given that professional planners are usually avid proponents of development, Cal APA’s opposition is striking.

In a letter sent to the members of the Legislature on August 1, Cal APA laid out the harm that AB 1515 does to democratically accountable land use policymaking:

Under current law, a city council or board of supervisors weighs the evidence and reaches a decision based on established principles of democratic decision-making—local governments are ultimately held accountable for their decisions by the local electorate.

AB 1515 would replace the judgment of local elected officials with that of any “reasonable person,” including the project developer who has a fundamental economic interest in the project. When fundamental land use decisions, like general plan consistency, are made by developers rather than elected representatives, local government accountability is compromised and the recourse available to the electorate is taken away.

AB 1515 will allow the applicant, rather than the local agency or a judge, to determine consistency of a development with the General Plan and zoning by allowing the applicant to provide contrary reasons why the project is consistent.

As a result, the issue will be whether a “reasonable person” could conclude that the project is consistent—not whether the city or county had substantial evidence to back up its conclusion.

In response to my e-mailed query, Cal APA Executive Director Sande George elaborated:

Under this bill, a project would have to be found consistent with local plans if there’s any evidence or interpretation supporting a finding of consistency, regardless of circumstances and evidence to the contrary.

The existing standard is that the local agency’s finding is assumed to be correct unless no reasonable person could reach that conclusion. This [standard] retains the “reasonable person” phrasing in the bill but does not allow developers to begin making what are clearly local determinations, or to take a local agency to court over every finding.

Cal APA asked that AB 1515 be amended to read: “the local agency’s finding is assumed to be correct unless no reasonable person could reach that conclusion.” Request rejected.

The Legislature approved AB 1515 on September 15. On September 19, the League of California Cities sent Gov. Brown a letter requesting him to veto the bill. Like the APA, the League argued that AB 1515 “would deviate from longstanding judicial precedent” that generally deferred to local determination of a project’s consistency with a jurisdiction’s planning.

But whereas the APA held that the bill authorized developers to begin making such determinations, the League contended that it

would essentially allow a court to determine whether a project is consistent with local zoning and general plan [sic] by selecting the substantial evidence it wishes to rely on rather than reviewing whether the city council relied on substantial evidence.
Instead, the League wrote, “[l]ocal governments are in the best position to determine whether a project is consistent with adopted general plan and zoning requirements.”

The Yimbys Seize on the HAA

Besides the California Building Industry Association, AB 1515 supporters included the Bay Area Council, the California Apartment Association, the California Chamber of Commerce, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Nonprofit Housing Association of Northern California, and Yimby Action. Every one of these organizations also supported SB 35.

But the Yimby support for AB 1515 is particularly notable.

To begin, the California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund or CaRLA, self-described as “the legal advocacy arm of the Yimby Party,” qualifies as a “housing organization” that can sue cities under the HAA. The law that made housing organizations eligible to sue under the HAA, AB 2584, is one of the eleven bills listed on the Yimby Legislative Report Card for the California Legislature’s 2016 session. Like AB 1515, AB 2584 was authored by Assemblymember Daly.

Developers are reluctant to sue a city, because they are constantly negotiating with city officials over their projects. The Housing Accountability Act allows a developer’s surrogates to do the dirty work by authorizing as plaintiffs not only a project applicant but also a person who would be eligible to apply for residency in the development, and a housing organization.

As state staffer Rebecca Rabovsky wrote in her analysis of AB 2584, previously “only the project developer or an eligible tenant of the proposed development [could] bring an action against [a] jurisdiction to enforce the provisions of the HAA.” HAA added a “housing organization” to the roster of prospective plaintiffs.

As amended by AB 2584, HAA defines a housing organization as

a trade or industry group whose local members or primarily engaged in the construction or management of housing unit, or a nonprofit organization whose mission includes providing or advocating for increased access to housing for low-income households and have filed written or oral comments with the local agency prior to action on the project.

In 2015, CaRLA sued Lafayette under the HAA and lost; the petitioners were Sonja Trauss and SFBARF (San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation). In 2016 it sued Berkeley and won; this time the petitioners were SFBARF, CaRLA, Trauss, and Diego Aguilar-Canabal. On November 2, CaRLA sued Sausalito; the petitioners are SFBARF, CaRLA, Trauss, and Sausalito resident and San Francisco property owner Robert Tillman. None of these lawsuits concern affordable housing, and two of them don’t concern much new housing of any sort. The Lafayette case involved 44 single-family homes. In Berkeley, the issue was whether an existing single-family home would be demolished and replaced with three single-family units. In Sausalito, the city has denied an application to demolish and remodel a duplex and add a new single-family unit.

SB 167 was drafted by prominent Bay Area Yimby Brian Hanlon. Hanlon runs CaRLA with SFBARF founder Trauss.

Like AB 1515, SB 167 weakens local authority over land use decisions by changing the evidentiary standard for determining whether a proposed development is consistent with a jurisdiction’s zoning. The change is different, however. AB 1515 makes it much easier to challenge a city’s disapproval of a project by lowering the standard of evidence for mounting such a challenge. SB 167 makes it much harder for a city to disapprove a project in the first place by raising the standard of evidence for such a disapproval.

Before SB 167, a city could disapprove a project based on “substantial” evidence in the record, which means requiring “more than a ‘mere scintilla of evidence.” SB 167 changed the standard to “a preponderance of” evidence in the record, which is to say, to evidence showing that the argument at hand is more likely than not to be convincing and accurate.

SB 167 further strengthened the developer hand at the expense of local government by expanding the Housing Accountability Act’s provisions about attorney’s fees. Before SB 167, a court could award “reasonable attorney’s fees and cost of suit” to a petitioner. SB 167 mandates that a housing organization shall be entitled to reasonable attorney’s fees if it sues a city under the HAA and wins.

SB 167 also increased the size of fine that a court can impose on a city. If a court finds a violation of the HAA, SB 167 requires the court to impose a fine in a minimum amount of $10K per housing unit (in the Yimby first draft of the bill, the fine was $100K per unit). Money cannot be paid out of a fund already committed to affordable housing. Fines go into an affordable housing trust fund with the sole purpose of financing newly constructed housing units affordable to extremely low, very low, or low-income households.”

And if a court finds that a city acted in bad faith when it rejected or conditionally approved the housing development or failed to carry out the court’s order within 60 days, the court must multiply the fine by a factor of five.

Like the other bills in the housing package. AB 1515 and SB 167 take effect on January 1, 2018.

The Yimbys and other stalwarts of the California growth machine cast growth-resistant communities as a mighty political force. Yet AB 1515 and SB 167 made their way through the Legislature without grass-roots protest. That history suggests that the growth entrepreneurs’ portrait of a Nimby juggernaut is a caricature whose main purpose is to justify the machine’s ongoing assault on local authority over land use.