Planner and professor says massive increase in density and new housing didn’t bring costs down; in fact, costs are way up
Patrick Condon was once what they now call a Yimby. A landscape architect, urban planner, and professor at the University of British Columbia, he worked with hundreds of others to build a sustainable, affordable city in Vancouver, BC.
For years, Vancouver was a case study for city planning. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association used to take local officials on tours of the Canadian city, talking about the “slender towers” and grand amenities that they said come with orderly but aggressive growth.
In fact, Condon told me, Vancouver has allowed and seen built more new housing compared to its population than any other city in North America. And it was all what’s known as “infill housing,” not suburban sprawl.
So, if the Yimby doctrine is right, and removing “obstacles” to growth and adding more infill housing results in prices coming down, Vancouver “ought to be the most affordable city in North America,” Condon said.
Except it’s not; it’s the most expensive. He has 30 years of solid data: The Yimby approach didn’t work. It backfired… (more)
If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not OK.
To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.
“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”
“The [speech below] won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.
Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision…
“Mission Local besmirches the city with unbalanced coverage that only emboldens Preston, Peskin, Chan,” he wrote in November, name-checking three of the elected officials upon whom he would later wish a “slow death.”…
Amid his drunken tweet scandal, Tan paused such attacks. He hired a public relations consultant, apologized, and ceased sending out caustic tweets—temporarily. Then, on March 29, the Times published a favorable profile of him. Written by former Chronicle columnist Heather Knight, it characterized him as a “middle-of-the-road” Democrat agitating for “common sense” ideas. Tan came across as contrite and humble, a civic-minded centimillionaire who let his passion for political change get the best of him. “Mr. Tan has tried to learn from his online mess—or says he has,” wrote Knight. “In person, he speaks kindly and calmly and smiles often, frequently bowing to people while making a prayer gesture with his hands.”
Progressives groaned at what they saw as a conspicuous whitewashing of Tan’s behavior. Tan proudly shared the piece on social media. He has nevertheless returned to his old antics. “SF legacy media is dishonest and lies to you,” he wrote to his 428,000 followers on April 1.…
In the aftermath of Tan’s death threat tweets, both the Chronicle and the Standard hesitated for at least a day before publishing full stories. For a moment, it seemed unclear whether they would cover it at all. Yet despite the local media’s generally fair approach and the puffy Times glow-up, Tan continues to rage against the press. Nothing less than absolute control and fealty seems acceptable to the Network State types.
“Do not hire PR,” tweeted Balaji on April 4, days after Tan’s P.R.-wrangled Times profile. “They want to ‘train’ you to talk to journos. But journos hate you! So this is an obsolete model. Instead, just hire influencers. Build your own channel. And go direct.”
These guys are serving up a new brand of Kool-Aide to their followers. Just how far they will go remains to be seen. How far some of our less friendly politicians will bend. To their will is another big question. If they intend to dominate, they will have to curb their obvious appetite for power and revenge long enough to slip into the mire and mingle unseen among the political influencers. This is not very likely to happen soon in the Bay Area. They are too obvious to hide here. They may have better luck elsewhere.
The Democratic nominee has made “ending America’s housing shortage” a key pillar of her campaign. That pledge is light on details but heavy on vibes.
Amid a worsening housing and homelessness crisis, the defining political fight in San Francisco for more than a decade has been between pro-development YIMBYs and slow-growth NIMBYs.
Now, with a Bay Area politician as a major party nominee, Kamala Harris may become the first YIMBY president of the United States.
Tucked inside her newly unveiled economic agenda last week was a proclamation that housing activists never thought they’d hear from a presidential candidate.
“There’s a serious housing shortage,” Harris said to an enthusiastic audience of supporters in Raleigh, N.C. “In many places, it is too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up.”
She followed the statement with a pledge that wouldn’t feel out of place at a YIMBY rally.
“We will take down barriers and cut down red tape, including at the state and local levels,” she said. “And by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class.” …(more)
Houston faces choices confronting many US cities. Billions of federal dollars available for them to upgrade rail and bike transit, but some are balking.
“Houston – This epicenter of the oil and gas industry was ready to shed its reputation of being a car-centric city. Bicycle infrastructure projects were underway and the city had secured federal funding to expand public transit. Voters in Harris County, home to Houston, had approved billions of dollars to improve public transportation.
But after Mayor John Whitmire took office in January, everything changed. The city’s chief transportation planner left, bike infrastructure projects were stalled, and the region’s transit authority — largely appointed by the mayor — delayed parts of a $7.5 billion public transit expansion.
Advocates for transit and “safer streets” in Houston say they now suffer from whiplash, and fear the city is turning the clock back on transportation alternatives. It comes at a critical time for many U.S. cities that want to be part of the climate solution and make a meaningful shift away from reliance on the automobile. Whether America can make this shift could depend on the outcome of city-by-city battles.”… (more)behind a paywall
Houston is at the epicenter of the rising tides and frequently floods. The mayor knows how important a hasty retreat out of some areas is and the best way to evacuate is by private vehicle. People can take care of themselves when they have that option. The mayor may have witnessed streams of people driving away during one of their many disasters and figured that there is no way the public transit systems can handle this. People need their cars.
By Hanna King : ocregister – excerpt (audio track)
Beginning next year, local government contracts that aim to provide shelters and services to people experiencing homelessness will be exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act, thanks to legislation signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom this week.
CEQA is a state law that requires state and local governments to consider, and avoid, potential environmental impacts of proposed projects and activities.
Under the new law, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025, CEQA will exempt homeless service providers contracted by local governments, preventing their services from potentially being held up or blocked by legal challenges under the environmental law…(more)
Where is the money to pay for these projects going to come from? Will this apply to Charter cities? The jury is out of that one.
Several efforts to minimize the power and influence of the California Coastal Commission have stalled…
Housing advocates thought that this was going to be the year when they finally cracked the California Coast.
In early spring, Democratic lawmakers, and the Yes In My Backyard activists backing them, rolled out a series of bills aimed at making it easier to build apartments and accessory dwelling units along California’s highly regulated coast and to make it more difficult for the independent and influential California Coastal Commission to slow or block housing projects. The 15-member group oversees almost all of the state’s 840 miles of coastline, a stretch of land that just under a million Californians call home.
The pro-construction push built off last year’s success for the coalition when the Legislature passed a major housing law and — breaking from long-standing legislative tradition — did not include a carveout for the coast. This year’s pack of bills was meant to cement and build off a new political reality in which the 48-year-old Coastal Commission no longer has quite so much say over housing policy.
Fast forward to mid-August and those new bills are either dead or so severely watered down that they no longer carry the promise of a more built-out coastline. Whatever happened last year, the California Coastal Commission is still a force to be reckoned with…(more)
Legislature considering a bill that would make it easier for developers to build housing in high fire danger zones
If Senate Bill 610 passes, expect to see a lot more scenes like this throughout California in the coming decades… (more)
NOTE: As of yesterday SB 610 was suspended in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, meaning it will not proceed in this legislative session. However, the facts and background remain highly relevant. There is an excellent chance the bill will be resurrected next year.
By Susan Shelley : Newsbreak – excerpt Stay up-to-date with free briefings on topics that matter to all Californians. Subscribe to CalMatters today for nonprofit news in your inbox.
In November, California voters will decide the fate of Proposition 5, which would make it easier for local governments to borrow money for housing and various public infrastructure projects. Below, a taxpayer watchdog says Prop. 5 will essentially let governments increase property taxes whenever they want. The opposing view: A local mayor says the measure will help public agencies pursue vital projects that can make California more affordable…(more)
San Francisco – This morning, the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA) voted to pull Regional Measure 4, the $20 billion dollar regional bond measure, off the November ballot. Gus Mattammal, President of the 20 Billion Reasons campaign to defeat the bond measure in November, hailed the move.
Said Mattammal, “This decision is a win for Bay Area taxpayers, and a win for affordable housing. To address housing affordability in a meaningful way, we have to address root causes, not soak taxpayers for billions of dollars at a time using bonds that would waste two thirds of the revenue on interest and overhead while barely making a dent in the issue.”
The 20 Billion Reasons campaign brought together Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents in a single campaign, a rarity in recent times, but a necessity. Said Mattammal, “Actually working on the root causes of the housing crisis in California, a crisis created by our legislature and the corporate interests to which they are beholden, is politically difficult. It’s much easier to simply raise taxes. That’s why it’s so important for voters to say ‘no’ to deeply flawed proposals such as Regional Measure 4: every time we do say no, it helps create the political conditions to work on the problem in a meaningful way.”
Though Regional Measure 4 is off the ballot for now, many other expensive proposals remain on the ballot, and the $20 Billion Reasons campaign team is excited to regroup and consider the best way forward to help ensure that Bay Area taxpayers are getting real solutions for the taxes they pay.
About Gus Mattammal – Gus is an entrepreneur and educator who has lived and worked in the Bay Area for over 17 years. He is proud to work with the committed Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents who seek to ensure that the public’s money is wisely spent. Learn more at: 20billionreasons.com
TRI-VALLEY — Thirteen Bay Area residents opposed to a $20 billion regional housing bond measure filed a lawsuit last week that alleges the question to be placed on November ballots as Regional Measure 4 (RM4) is slanted to prejudice voters to approve it.
The group contends the official name of the measure, “Bay Area Affordable Plan,” is deceptive and the ballot question voters will consider contains a series of phrases that are not found in the language of the measure. The residents’ group is asking the court to rename the measure to “Bay Area Affordable Housing Bond,” because they contend it will cost residents more in property taxes.
“This lawsuit is all about the 75 words maximum that will be in the Regional Measure 4 ballot question,” said Jason Bezis, an attorney for the residents, a list of electors for the Nov. 5 election, members of county taxpayers’ associations, and a former San Jose City Council member.
Bezis’ office filed a petition in Santa Clara Superior Court on Aug. 8, demanding it be rewritten. The filing came six days after sending a “pre-litigation” letter to the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA), which placed the measure on the ballot.The lawsuit targets BAHFA and election officials in Alameda, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Solano, and Sonoma counties, along with the city and county of San Francisco… (more)
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