Wiener and the YIMBYs Don't Speak for Gay Activists

Robert Brokl

Saturday April 07, 2018 - 10:56:00 AM

My husband and I were active in the effort to pass the Berkeley Gay Rights Ordinance in the late 1970s, getting encouragement from Harvey Milk. (Soon thereafter, we got to thank him at an event in Berkeley.) That successful effort led to the passage of similar ordinances in Oakland and then San Francisco (as depicted in the movie Milk).

As a gay rights, now neighborhood, activist, I hoped that the participation of gays inside the government would be a vast improvement. We’d be more compassionate, democratic, and inclusive, based upon our own history of marginalization and oppression. Unfortunately, we’ve seeing gay politicians can be just as wrong-headed and doctrinaire as their straight counterparts, and as susceptible to the powerful financial interests as those they’ve replaced. 

And gays were, once upon a time, well-known for appreciating historic preservation and neighborhood character, being pioneers in appreciating San Francisco Victorians for instance. Or Mid-century Modernism, as in Palm Springs.  

Senator Scott Wiener at the Folsom Street Fair in 2016

This history, and gene, seems missing in San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener who is pushing Senate bills 827 and 828. San Francisco Assemblyperson David Chiu, a “ straight ally,” is promoting Assembly bill 2923. All promote high density, high rise housing development in “ transit corridors,” reducing or eliminating local controls like zoning that allow local resident input. The very “little people” that Milk reached out to, unionists, blue collar workers, longtime residents, to reassure them about his openness and awareness of their issues.  

Victoria Fierce, Ex. Director of the East Bay Yimby cell, East Bay For Everyone, at the BART Board’s March 8 meeting public comment period, said: “I’m extremely gay—really, really gay—and a single-family home does not work for me.” Single-family homes, she declared, “enforce the patriarchy.” 

YIMBY Activist/Socialist Victoria Fierce wants to eliminate single family zoning. 

SB 827 would allow housing projects as high as 105 ft., no off-street parking provided, within a half-mile of a major transit stop or a quarter mile radius of a transit bus stop on a “high quantity” transit corridor. If passed, the dramatic rise in land values and subsequent demolition of existing houses and apartments would likely cause massive dislocation of low income tenants and residents. It would be a gold mine for the real estate and development interests, providing housing for tech workers but doing little to address the pressing issues of homeless, gentrification, and affordability. It may make a good sound bite to suggest that simply building more market-rate housing will make housing more available and affordable for everyone who needs it, but that simply isn’t true! 

As former LA Councilmember and LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has written, SB 827 “isn't a housing bill; it’s a real estate bill.”  

Wiener first burst upon the political scene with his campaign against public nudity. In retrospect, that now seems a diversion from his true goal of promoting developer and real estate interests, all in the name of solving the housing crisis, affordability, transit-oriented development, or smart growth. In this effort, he’s enabled by other gay elected officials like Rebecca Saltzsman of the BART board. 

The bills are moving forward at lightning speed, at the state level, before many are even aware of their long-term radical impacts. Unfortunately, many of us that are paying attention to politics are distracted by the Trump national nightmare, with immigration, war and peace, the environment, and minority rights all threatened.  

Oakland based YIMBYs

Denounce the Yimby disruption: An open letter to Sen. Wiener

Denounce the Yimby disruption: An open letter to Sen. Wiener

Community leaders ask author of SB 827 to distance himself from the Yimbys who shouted down a community coalition trying to hold a peaceful rally

BY

 TIM REDMOND

 -

April 6, 2018

Dear Senator Wiener:

On April 4, on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall, we and other representatives from more than 40 San Francisco community organizations joined together for a lawful and fully permitted press conference to express concerns regarding the negative impacts of SB 827. 

Our speakers included representatives from across the city including the Mission, Excelsior, Chinatown, Western Addition, the Northside and Westside. We included tenants, homeowners, seniors, environmentalists, and communities of color. Our intention was to raise concerns that SB 827 would exacerbate displacement, undermine our affordable housing policies, and strain our overburdened transit system. We particularly sought to bring to public awareness that SB 827 would eliminate the opportunity for the voices of disadvantaged communities to impact policies that have a direct and immediate impact on their lives.

But we were denied the opportunity to speak by the deliberate, concerted, and continuous disruptive actions of the Yimby organization which is alsothe sponsor of SB 827. 

As has been described in media accounts including the San Francisco Examiner,  a Yimby contingent including leadership of the national and state organization, shouted down our speakers and disrupted the event to the point no one, including the assembled reporters, could hear our speakers.  As a direct and foreseeable consequence of the Yimby action the press coverage of the event has centered on the disruption and not the content of our messages.     

As the principal author of SB 827 and a close collaborator with the local and state Yimby organization locally we ask you to condemn all Yimby networks’ efforts to suppress public critique of this legislation.  It is not enough, as Yimby spokespeople have assured, to change their future disruptive actions to not interrupt speakers if they are “low income people of color.” The Yimby organization needs to cease silencing critique by any and all people. 

We believe that this position should extend to the consideration of SB 827 itself.   It is no coincidence that the sponsors of SB 827 sought to deny our communities the ability to raise concerns about a bill that would institutionalize the suppression of community voices, participation, and dialog.  

Yimbys shout down a rally against SB 827

As written SB 827 is a deeply divisive and disrespectful proposal.   As has been noted by community organizations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and throughout California, SB 827 will undo the efforts of hundreds if not thousands of community organizations to improve the livability, sustainability, and affordability of their neighborhoods. Exclusionary practices that suppress the development of truly inclusionary housing need to be challenged. But it is fundamentally wrong to then conclude that all community plans are exclusionary and should be overridden by state law. Yet that was the claim of the Yimby chants interrupting our press conference and also the underlying assumption of the legislation itself.

For all these reasons we demand that you to denounce Yimby disruptive practices and we ask you to put SB 827 on hold until there is the room for the dialog that all our communities deserve

Sincerely,

Deepa Varma

Fred Sherburn Zimmer

Wing Hoo Leung

Charles Dupigny

Gus Hernandez

Ozzie Rohm

Becky Evans

Reinventing TOD: Could Neo-Sumerian Ziggurats House The Growing Bay Area?

Reinventing TOD: Could Neo-Sumerian Ziggurats House The Growing Bay Area?

History can help with our Bay Area population’s growing pains. Maybe.

The 21rst century BCE Mesopotamian capitol of Ur was famous for its ziggurat, dedicated to the moon god Nanna, the city’s patron deity. The massive step pyramid measured 210 feet (64m) in length, 150 feet (46m) in width and over 100 feet (30m) in height. The height is speculative, as only the foundations of the Sumerian ziggurat survived the ravage of centuries before it was rebuilt in the sixth century BCE.

Yet the legend of the ziggurat lives on. Some scholars think that the ancient city of Ur the birthplace of Abraham, who as a young man left to settle in the land of Canaan. And who knows. Ur's landmark ziggurat may even have provided inspiration for the Tower of Babel mentioned in Biblical lore.

But now fast forward to 21rst century AD---exactly 42 centuries later. Modern day YIMBY’s (Yes In My Back Yard) are pitching the need for Mass Transit Oriented (High Density) Development, TOD, in “user friendly” parlance, to solve the Bay Area’s jobs/housing imbalance brought on by the mass influx of young urban techies to SF.

The YIMBYs' two most prominent spokespeople are Senator Scott Wiener, D-SF, author of pending SB827 & SB828 and Sonja Trauss, candidate for supervisor in SF. Surely they are talking their talk. The young SF urbanists are here. Vocal. And now. http://www.marinij.com/opinion/20180224/marin-voice-we-need-more-housing-near-public-transportation

And they’re pitching a much denser Marin, to be rebuilt as an extension of the City. But is TOD a good fit for car centric Marin? That might sound good as a concept, but maybe new thinking is needed when considering the stark reality of Tam Ridge Residences (AKA, Corte Madera’s “Wincup”), our own oft-criticized monument to top-down planning.

As many Marinites say, “Anything would be an improvement on THAT!”

So, should we bring back the ziggurat!?

YIMBYS want YOUR BACKYARD

YIMBYS discuss their tradecraft and political strategy. Notable YIMBY Laura Clark, Sam Moss and Louis Mante talk about #827

YIMBYs reveal their hatred for Boomers, NIMBYs, green lawns, Applebees (working class suburbanites , Sierra Club and of course Marin. They reveal they are children of privilege growing up in places like Lafayette, Cupertino and Los Altos.

YIMBYs are much more than just housing activists.

They admit are fighting a generational war and think they know better than "lower classes". It sickens me that Senator Wiener and the Housing Industry are using these millennial fools to achieve their financial ends. YIMBYS are intolerant and fascist in their aims.

East Bay YIMBY group

https://simplecast.com/s/68c3f945

YIMBY Propaganda now is PAID FAKE NEWS printed everywhere in the World

PAID EDITORIAL CONTENT BY ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION.

Rise of the yimbys: the angry millennials with a radical housing solution

They see themselves as progressive housing activists. Critics call them stooges for luxury developers. Meet the new band of millennials who are priced out of cities and shouting: ‘Yes in my back yard’
A pro-housing protest in San Francisco. Yimby groups take aim at space-hogging, single-family homeowners and confound anti-capitalist groups by daring to take the side of luxury condo developers. Photograph: Yimby Action


Cities is supported byAbout this content

Editor's Note: This is PAID EDITORIAL CONTENT from the Rockefeller Organization. Like many stories, news programs and tv shows THEY RECEIVE REVENUE just like advertising revenue to run PR PROPAGANDA on seemingly independent news media and "objective" television shows purporting science or public affairs. FAKE NEWS is very real and all sides use it -Russia, US, Corporate, Non Profit, Democrats and Republicans. They all want a share of our minds. This is why former media people like me are so jaded. We know the tricks that are being played on the public. YIMBYs have an unprecedented amount of worldwide press but really are only a small number of activists. They are young, idealistic and quite naive. Stalin called these folks "useful idiots"


Erin McCormick in San Francisco

Monday 2 October 2017 02.15 EDT

When a woman stood up and waved a courgette in the air at a City of Berkeley council meeting this summer, complaining that a new housing development would block the sunlight from her zucchini garden, she probably felt confident that the community was on her side. After all, hers was the kind of complaint – small-scale, wholesome, relatable – that has held up housing projects for years in cities around the world.

She didn’t expect the wrath of the yimbys.

“You’re talking about zucchinis? Really? Because I’m struggling to pay rent,” retorted an indignant Victoria Fierce at that 13 June meeting. Fierce went on to argue that it was precisely the failure to build new housing that is causing rents to climb in San Francisco, to the point that she can barely afford to live anywhere in the Bay Area.


Fierce is a leader of one of a series of new groups that have sprouted up in cities from Seattle to Sydney, Austin to Oxford, lobbying not against development but for it. They say their lives are threatened by housing shortages and skyrocketing rental prices. Calling themselves yimbys, they are standing up to say “Yes, in my back yard” to any kind of new housing development. And courgettes be damned.
 Yimby activists helped push through a 24-storey apartment and retail/restaurant development in Oakland this year despite local opposition. Illustration: Solomon Cordwell Buenz

The movement is fuelled by the anger of young adults from the millennial generation, many of whom are now in their late 20s and early 30s. Rather than suffer in silence as they struggle to find affordable places to live, they are heading to planning meetings en masse to argue for more housing – preferably the very kind of dense, urban infill projects that have often generated neighbourhood opposition from nimbys (“not in my back yard”).

The birthplace of the yimby movement, the San Francisco Bay Area, has among the highest rents in America. It added 307,000 jobs between 2010 and 2013, but built fewer than 40,000 new housing units, according to state of California estimates.

“It’s clear that this is a housing shortage – and the answer is to build housing,” says Laura Foote Clark, who heads San Francisco-based Yimby Action. “You generate policy by yelling about things.”

Clark and other members of yimby groups consider themselves progressives and environmentalists, but they’re not afraid to throw the occasional firebomb into the usual liberal alliances. They frequently take aim at space-hogging, single-family homeowners and confound anti-capitalist groups by daring to take the side of developers, even luxury condo developers. They have started a “sue the suburbs” campaign that targets cities that don’t approve big housing projects and have even attempted to take over the board of the local Sierra Club.


Their willingness to lobby for market rate housing in traditionally minority neighbourhoods has seen them called techie gentrifiers and developer stooges. Their penchant for market-based solutions, has seen them called “libertarians” with “trickle-down economics”.

A yimby conference organised in Oakland this summer attracted protests from Gay Shame, a radical queer activist group, with about a dozen protesters stood outside chanting “Queers kill techies” and “It’s not your backyard.”

But they don’t mind name-calling. Ever since that June meeting, they have adopted the zucchini as the emblem of their rage. In online postings, they pass on zucchini jokes, tips for growing zucchinis in the shade and even shared a picture of a hunter with a rifle on “opening day of zucchini season.”

View image on Twitter




San Francisco resident Sonja Trauss, 35, a former maths teacher, says the housing shortages facing many big western cities are not financial, technical or due to any kind of material shortfalls. “The cause of our current shortage is 100% political,” wrote Trauss in 2015, in an internet post that helped her build an army of followers to speak at public hearings, send letters and drum up support for housing on the internet.

High income people who can't live in this project if it isn’t built … will just displace someone somewhere elseSonja Trauss

The idea caught like wildfire. The yimby movement, which Trauss started in 2013 as a letter-writing campaign, has spread around the globe.

In Oakland, local yimby organisers helped win approval for a 24-storey housing tower to be built next to the low-slung MacArthur BART subway station. In Seattle, activists have been instrumental in pushing to the city to “upzone” – or allow higher density building – in neighbourhoods including the University District.

In Vancouver, yimby groups are organising tours to show the most wastefully zoned lots in the city, including a ritzy area where 150 acres houses only about 400 people. In Britain, groups have formed in London, Oxford and Cambridge and are looking at how to change the government process to enable more new housing. In Australia, newly formed yimby groups are looking to change laws to allow people to rent out the loft spaces above their garages or “Fonzie Flats”, as they are known Down Under.
Sonja Trauss urges San Francisco’s Planning Commission to approve a 75-unit housing project in the historically Hispanic Mission District

In the California state legislature, yimby activists have helped Democrats pass a sweeping new package of legislation designed to spur the creation of affordable housing. In San Francisco, supporters have even formed a yimby political party and signed Trauss up to run for a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors in 2018.

Assembly member David Chiu said that when he was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before being elected to state office in 2014, residents would rarely speak up in favour of any local development projects.

“Often the only voices we would hear would be neighbours who were opposed,” said Chiu, who called on yimby support to get affordable housing measures through the legislature this year. “I think they’ve provided a counterbalance. They’ve been changing the conversation on the local level as well as in the state.”

Yimby groups want to reduce the need for cars by building dense, infill housing close to transportation. They want to do away with suburban sprawl. Most of all, they want somewhere to live.

That simple cry for housing can in practice turn out to be anything but straightforward. In the trenches of local politics, each battle for a single development can turn into vicious neighbourhood warfare.

Hispanic groups storm San Francisco City Hall to protest the proposed Mission housing project supported by Trauss and the yimbys. Photograph: Kyle Smeallie

Nowhere have these battles been more fiercely fought than in San Francisco’s Mission District, a historically low-income, Hispanic neighbourhood, which has been rapidly transforming into an upscale enclave for mostly white, well-heeled tech workers. The huge number of tech jobs created in San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley has pushed up rents in the Mission to a median of $4,250 a month.


It’s a mostly white, mostly young, mostly able-bodied people suggesting that working class people are nimbysDeepa Varma

Due in part to evictions and the lack of affordable housing, the number of Latinos in the area has been dropping sharply. A 2014 study estimated that between 2000 and 2020 more than 10,000 Latinos, or a third of the Mission’s Hispanic population, will have disappeared from the area.

Angry protesters have vowed to stem the gentrification by stopping any further development that doesn’t include significant amounts of low-income housing.

Yimby groups have jumped right into this debate, arguing that any new housing is better than none at all. On 14 September, Trauss and other yimby activists went to the San Francisco Planning Commission to argue on behalf of a proposed 75-unit development in the Mission that would be mostly market rate. Hispanic activists argued against them.

“Eighty-nine percent of the units that are to be constructed are going to be out of income range of the vast majority of the Latino population living in the Mission District,” argued project opponent Carlos Bocanegra of La Raza Centro Legal, a legal aid group.

But Trauss countered that not building is not the answer to the housing shortage.





“The 100 or so higher income people, who are not going to live in this project if it isn’t built, are going to live somewhere,” she said. “They will just displace someone somewhere else, because demand doesn’t disappear.”

Yimby groups have received funding from founders of several hi-tech companies, including tens of thousands of dollars from Jeremy Stoppelman, a co-founder of Yelp, and the Open Philanthropy Project, which is partly funded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Deepa Varma, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, says it has been frustrating to see a new group come in and portray Latinos fighting for preservation of their neighbourhood as nimbys.

“They’ve flipped the script. It’s a mostly white, mostly young, mostly able-bodied bunch of people suggesting that working class neighbourhoods are being nimbys,” said Varma.

It also riles opponents of gentrification that yimbys often lobby on projects far from their home turf.

“It’s helpful to know your community for a while before you decide to change it,” said Andy Blue, an activist with Plaza 16 Coalition, a group trying to preserve the Mission’s Latino culture. “The folks in the Mission feel tremendously disrespected by these people telling them what’s good for them.”

 Greg Magofna, who formed his own yimby chapter, in the micro apartment he rents for $1,200. Photograph: Erin McCormick
Generational divide

The net wealth of millennials in the US today is only about half of what of their parents’ generation, the boomers, had when they were the same age in 1989, according to Young Invincibles, a research and advocacy group. The typical millennial has accumulated about $29,000 in assets compared to $61,000 amassed by those in the boomer generation by 1989.

“They earn less, carry more college debt and face greater challenges to home ownership,” says Tom Allison, Young Invincibles’ deputy director of policy and research. But he says they seem more willing than other generations to stand up and change the world. “This generation is resilient. They are changing things in the face of adversity. That is the silver lining,” Allison adds.


The art of gentrification: city data made beautiful


Greg Magofna, 33, a nonprofit worker who was raised in the leafy East Bay town of Alameda, formed his own East Bay yimby chapter as he struggled to afford to live in his home region. He has been lucky that Berkeley’s rent control held down the price of his 300-square-foot micro-apartment to $1,200. But he still can’t afford a car and his bikes, refrigerator, kettle and favourite chair compete for space along one crowded wall in his unit.

“There is a generational divide. A lot of the older generation doesn’t recognise the world has changed,” he says, adding that it can be confrontational for a yimby to go to a public meeting where opponents might call them gentrifiers or worse.

“The world is changing and there’s lots to be angry about,” he says. “The yimbys are saying: ‘We can do something about this.’”

The Undeclared War on Middle Class Suburbia

The Undeclared War on Middle Class Suburbia

Posted by: Richard Hall - October 8, 2017 - 2:57pm







Glancing at today’s newspapers, a reader might easily believe the only important topics are our erstwhile president and “What’s he gone and done now?”. But for those of us leading busy lives that would be a grand mistake, because we’ve taken our eye off the ball. The big changes are not only happening in Washington D.C., but also in Sacramento - and soon, right here in our own neighborhoods.

The March of the YIMBYs

Over the last few years, a new movement has formed in San Francisco - a movement made up of 20 and 30 somethings who prefer the urban environment. This movement detests middle class suburbia for its “inefficient” use of land and transportation, and for what it deems to be implicit exclusion of races and those on lower incomes through zoning decisions that maintain high property values. And that would be fine, but they not only have Sacramento’s ear, they’ve lobbied heavily for significant change.

The movement was born out of the San Francisco chapter of the Bay Area Renters Federation or SF BARF. SF BARF renamed itself SF YIMBY - that’s “Yes in My Backyard”. Their goal sounds worthy. The Bay Area, especially Silicon Valley and San Francisco, has rapidly grown the number of jobs in the region, but this thirst for fresh troops for the technology sector has far outpaced the region’s housing supply. The result, we’re all too aware of sky high costs of living and traffic congestion.

The YIMBYs want to build as much housing as possible, to address the housing crisis and their number one enemy is the suburbs. They look to the many perceived obstacles that have inhibited housing development there. With a slew of legislation just passed in September 2017, they have bulldozed and dispensed with many of these obstacles, such as:
Architectural design review
Consideration of traffic impacts
Consideration of school impacts
Consideration of impacts on infrastructure
Community input
Local Council approval
Environmental review

I met with a YIMBY for coffee - a Silicon Valley engineer in his late 20s. He was smart, informed and engaged. His concern was that the high cost of housing was hindering people from getting on the house ownership ladder in the Bay Area. He himself had benefited from an IPO stock offering and had no problem affording a home, but he wanted to demonstrate his support for many other workers without that advantage.

YIMBYs have become a powerful force in the Bay Area region. They have become highly connected to the young tech elite raising large sums in support - $100,000 from Jeremy Stoppelman, the founder of Yelp, and more from Dustin Moskovitz, a founder of Facebook. They now hold an annual conference called “Yimbytown”. The SF YIMBY organization now has a full time, paid staff pushing their agenda.

The Triumvirate of State Senate Bills

Allied with San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener, YIMBYs were delighted when the California State Senate recently passed three housing bills:


Senate Bill 2 charges real estate documentation recording fees of $75 per document, with the funds to be used to pay for affordable housing development;

Senate Bill 3 proposes to raise $4 billion through the sale of state bonds to fund affordable housing development; and

Senate Bill 35 allows qualifying developments to bypass local and environmental review, and assume “by right” zoning for high density housing development, if those developments meet some simple qualifying criteria:
They include 2 or more units;
The developer pays “prevailing wage, which is code for union rates, if the project has 75 units or more;
At least 10% of the units qualify as “affordable” or whatever the prevailing minimum requirement is (in Marin this is typically 20%). The units that qualify as “affordable,” only includes a small number of very low income units;
The city or county must have failed to issue permits for enough new housing units to meet their requirements for each income category in the city’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment or RHNA quota.

Putting Development on the Fast Track

Typically, it takes 30 days or more for a city to identify omissions in development applications, and months and sometimes years to process and approve them. However, Senate Bill 35 puts review on the fast track, so not only review, but also approval must be given to qualifying proposals:

(1) Within 90 days, for developments with under 150 housing units.

(2) Within 180 days, for developments with more than 150 housing units.

Put another way, if a city does not grant approval within these timelines, they open themselves up to litigation, not just from the developer but from any interested third party (i.e., housing advocacy groups). Successful plaintiffs are also entitled to collect legal fees and costs.

Moving Away from Planning Commissions & Design Review Boards

Today, California’s cities and counties typically have a planning commission and a design review board. Together with their locally elected councils and supervisors they review applications and ensure architectural design conforms to local norms and codes.

Senate Bill 35 removes this local review process to ensure that developments will not be held up for long periods, while local boards apply subjective requirements. The new bill directs that only previously documented, objective requirements can be used. Few local jurisdictions in California have such documented standards in place - none in Marin do. To do so would be a sizable undertaking requiring diverting local planning teams and engaging in public outreach.

Senate Bill 35 will go into effect on January 1st 2018. Local jurisdictions now have less than 90 days to complete this process or developers will potentially be able to bypass architectural and design review, and many of the other impacts noted above.

The Irony - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose May Be Unaffected

Certainly, a major reason for the housing shortage in the SF Bay Area has been the increase in tech jobs primarily in major cities. However, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose may all easily meet their required permitting quotas to build, while locations such as Marin will not, simply because land is so scarce, infrastructure is inadequate, water resources are very limited, building costs are high and few developments there prove to be financially feasible.

Who is paying for All This Altruism? The Middle Class, of Course

Politicians at local and state levels have become adept at presenting legislation with highly attractive (who could possibly oppose them) names, which conceal steep increases in taxes and fees, the burdens of which fall mainly on the middle class.

For instance, who could possibly oppose SB2, “The Building Homes and Jobs Act,” an innocuous sounding $75 “documentation fee” increase. Opponents sent a letter to State legislators putting their own spin on it, but here are the fee increases without any spin:
Recording documents after the loss of a spouse: (Increase from $36 to $261)
Contractors, laborers, suppliers, and employees recording mechanics liens seeking reimbursement: (Increase from $26 to $176)
Homeowners refinancing their mortgage: (Increase from $43 to $268)
Custodial parents recording child support liens seeking delinquent child support payments: (Increase from $13 to $88)

Then there’s Senate Bill 3, the “Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2018.” This bill was sponsored by Marin County state senator, Mike McGuire, who claims on his Facebook page that it will “build a stronger middle class”. However, this bill potentially saddles state taxpayers with interest and repayment of a $4 billion bond.




Together, Senate Bills 2 and 3 are estimated to raise $3.9 billion annually to assist developers in building more housing (which only includes 10% affordable units). According to a non-partisan group, the state would actually need $15 billion annually to truly address the housing crisis and even that calculation is questionable.

The Suburban Middle Class Is Now Set Up To Bankroll Silicon Valley’s Growth Boom

What is really happening is that:
Silicon Valley has been on an unrestrained growth binge;
Thousands of jobs have been added without a commensurate increase in housing or any significant increase in income to the vast majority of existing residents;
Under the guise of altruistic ideology and the new doctrine of regionalism, YIMBYs have teamed up with state legislators - eager for campaign contributions from big developers - to force middle class suburban taxpayers to foot the bill for Silicon Valley’s continued growth boom; and
With the passage of the housing bill package of SB 2, SB3 and SB35, YIMBYs have now unofficially declared war on suburbia, forcing suburban jurisdictions to pay for, plan for and accept urban style growth in “My Back Yard” or suffer legal and financial consequences.