Yes to the City

Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing

Max Holleran

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691234717
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia urbana

A fascinating account of the growing "Yes in My Backyard" urban movement The exorbitant costs of urban housing and the widening gap in income inequality are fueling a combative new movement in cities around the world. A growing number of influential activists aren't waiting for new public housing to be built. Instead, they're calling for more construction and denser cities in order to increase affordability. Yes to the City offers an in-depth look at the "Yes in My Backyard" (YIMBY) movement. From its origins in San Francisco to its current cadre of activists pushing for new apartment towers in places like Boulder, Austin, and London, Max Holleran explores how urban density, once maligned for its association with overpopulated slums, has become a rallying cry for millennial activists locked out of housing markets and unable to pay high rents.Holleran provides a detailed account of YIMBY activists campaigning for construction, new zoning rules, better public transit, and even candidates for local and state office. YIMBY groups draw together an unlikely coalition, from developers and real estate agents to environmentalists, and Holleran looks at the increasingly contentious battles between market-driven pragmatists and rent-control idealists. Arguing that advocates for more housing must carefully weigh their demands for supply with the continuing damage of gentrification, he shows that these individuals see high-density urbanism and walkable urban spaces as progressive statements about the kind of society they would like to create.Chronicling a major shift in housing activism during the past twenty years, Yes to the City considers how one movement has reframed conversations about urban growth.

1

The Bay Area and the End of Affordability

When did San Francisco transform from a city of open arms to one of closed doors? The Bay Area was once firmly lodged in the American psyche as the place for rebels and misfits to relocate. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a former poet laureate of San Francisco who was attracted to the freedom of sexual, pharmacological, and social experimentation, wrote a 1958 poem about flute-playing beatniks feeding grapes to squirrels in “Golden Gate Park … the meadow of the world.”¹

The Bay Area was the Edenic base camp for creating a new society for the Beat generation and, later, the hippies in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, based on extending the welfare state, these anti-establishment writers and artists wanted to push cognitive horizons by challenging bourgeois morality, particularly as it related to the suburban middle-class family that was quickly becoming the symbol of 1950s normalcy and success. Indeed, as the Bay Area spread out—creating subdivisions of single-family homes—San Francisco doubled down on its existing reputation as a freewheeling port city where revelry and disregard for moral rectitude were both a credo and an effective business model.² Counterculture started as a rejection of urban boosterism and the “straight” world of capitalist marketing, but it soon became its own potent brand drawing many to the city.³

Often it was the people shut out of self-consciously “upstanding” Bay Area suburbs like Cupertino, where only freestanding single-family homes were allowed, who were forced to live in the city.⁴ They were mostly younger and single. Some chose specifically to settle away from the family-friendly suburbs, renouncing suburban conformity for the milieu of the port city. In 1959, the San Francisco Progress bemoaned the new dichotomy between city and region while commending smaller communities that rejected apartments in order to exile “unbecoming” behavior: “The number of sex deviates [sic] in this city has soared by the thousands … while other communities in this area have virtually eliminated them.”⁵

The quick death of San Francisco as the unconventional hippie haven, and its rebirth as the technology metropolis, has been a surprise to all those who have watched over the past fifty years. Part of this reputational shift can be chalked up to broader cultural and economic forces: the divestment in cities and increased urban-suburban segregation, the decline in manufacturing, and the waning of hippie communalism for entrepreneurial individualism. Out of the ashes rose a new metropolitan region anchored by military–higher education investment in communications technology that would quickly create Silicon Valley. As Fred Turner has pointed out, some former hippie utopians were involved in these ventures and saw computing and ARPANET technologies as a means to enact a better society through invention rather than new social relations.⁶ This vision, of course, was not realized.

For a time, San Francisco was celebrated as a hotbed of innovation, where young companies got matched with “unicorn” investors and emerged a few years later with initial public offerings worth billions of dollars. The city concentrated the influence of regional Silicon Valley firms, giving them new urban offices that supplied a made-over image as well as centrality to cultural amenities for employees. By the time of the 2008 economic crisis, that narrative had been rigorously interrogated as, alongside tremendous tech wealth, poverty became endemic. Quickly gentrified neighborhoods like South of Market (SoMa) provided corporate headquarters for companies seeking to cash in on the cultural capital of urbanity and escape the “silicon suburbs.” Yet, right next to the headquarters of Uber, Yahoo, and Pinterest in SoMa, one of the country’s worst homelessness epidemics is laid bare. The unhoused roam the streets in huge numbers as tech workers skitter to the other side of sidewalks to avoid them. The spaces below the elevated BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) trains have become encampments reminiscent of Latin America’s informal settlements but buttressed by the most expensive real estate in downtown San Francisco, where the average rent is the highest in the country at $3,650 per month in 2019.⁷ The story of the rebellious city has been supplanted with that of the cruel city where the nation’s highest-paid workers step over the destitute laying prostrate on their doorsteps.

Housing has become the pivotal issue in the Bay Area, as a generation of political leaders has struggled to address housing costs and homelessness, starting as early as the original tech boom (and bust) of 1995–2000. Recrimination is rife as San Francisco’s affordability crisis persists with no end in sight. In 2019, President Donald Trump, with his trademark deficit in empathy, threatened to use the Environmental Protection Agency to force California to address homelessness which, in his words, was threatening to make the city “unrecognizable.”⁸ London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, was compelled to admit that human feces on the streets was a growing problem, and she formed a special task force to address the issue of human waste.⁹ The irony that the hottest location for the US economy is also an epicenter of misery for those excluded from it is not that surprising: the dichotomy signals an ongoing bifurcation of American prosperity, especially in successful cities. In many instances, success is no longer just a normative moniker for places with well-paying jobs, but it designates what the journalist Alec MacGillis argues are hyper-prosperous cities that suck up resources and capital from entire regions.¹⁰

In response to this situation, two separate infrastructures have developed: the legacy system of rent control, public housing, and mass transit; and a new, largely private system of ridesharing apps like Uber, expensive market-rate condominiums, and company-sponsored transportation services like the Google Bus, which has become infamous for pulling up to existing public stops with shining new Wi-Fi-enabled vehicles to exclusively pick up Google’s own employees. The two-strata city, and the infrastructure that serves it, shows a welfare state going through retrenchment along with a boom in privatization: on one side there are digital platforms quickly expanding their user base and shareholder value; on the other there is a rusting, neglected system of public transit and social housing. A small number of tenants desperately try to hold on to their single-room occupancy (SRO) apartments, in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, while economically fortunate newcomers compete for the same spaces, which have been converted into posh lofts.

Often lost in the “Tale of Two Cities” argument¹¹ is the story of the middle class. Many commentators ignore this group because it is an endangered species in expensive American cities like San Francisco and because its plight seems less pressing in comparison with the risk of homelessness. In the Bay Area, those working in support services for the tech sector—cleaning, restaurants, retail, and even teachers, firefighters, and police—have been pushed far from the city and its prosperous suburbs. They have become a class of “super-commuters,” often traveling as long as three hours to reach their workplace from formerly agricultural Central Valley towns like Stockton.¹² They possess the means to pay market-rate rent (and are ineligible for subsidized housing), but only in racially segregated parts of Oakland with concentrated poverty, postindustrial exurbs like Antioch, and farther-afield farming towns. The Bay Area middle class, once encouraged to “drive until you qualify” when it came to obtaining a mortgage in outer suburbs, has now been locked out of homeownership regionally. The average home price in San Jose is $1.2 million, with prices decreasing somewhat in the other nine counties of the Bay Area, but only reaching a low of approximately $500,000 on the border of Sacramento.¹³ Often those who are employed but struggling in the Bay Area feel the most overlooked: they resent the wealth that has priced them out of the city, yet they also see both public services and the wider conversation on housing focusing on those who are entirely destitute.

Increasingly, the squeezed middle class of the Bay Area does not see the housing crisis as a natural phenomenon caused by a lack of supply due to the booming tech economy. Rather, many San Franciscans view housing prices as a problem created by an artificial limit on construction caused by opposition from existing owners. In 2018, San Francisco only gave permission to build one unit of housing per every 3.45 jobs created (the worst rate in the country).¹⁴ Seattle, which has 200,000 fewer people than San Francisco, added twice as many housing units between 2010 and 2016¹⁵ due to its easier permitting process, rather than a more vibrant economy, as the mitigating factor. San Francisco has allowed a large degree of local control when it comes to urban development, which has given neighbors greater influence when it comes to approving designs for new housing. While this was meant to forestall or quash egregiously large or excessively ugly new builds, it has often been used, particularly by wealthier places, to stop growth altogether.

This chapter explores the inception and growth of the YIMBY movement, which began in San Francisco in 2014 to advocate for more market-rate housing construction. Unlike previous activist groups in the affordable housing landscape, YIMBYs are supply-side believers who concentrate on “building more of everything,” which distinguishes them from previous housing rights groups that focused on maintaining public housing and preventing eviction in gentrifying areas like the Mission District.¹⁶ When charismatic pro-construction YIMBYs, such as Sonja Trauss, Laura Foote, and Brian Hanlon, began showing up to zoning meetings to speak in favor of large construction projects, they cut open a pathway for an underserved demographic in the housing debate: younger professionals who also felt squeezed by rent but not so catastrophically burdened that they are facing housing insecurity. The simplicity of the “build more” message quickly attracted thousands of volunteers in the Bay Area and a mushrooming network of splinter groups and regional start-ups in California and, in very little time, the rest of the United States. By 2021, there were over thirty YIMBY groups just in California with approximately five thousand total active members. This chapter explores the inception of this movement in San Francisco and why the city’s housing crisis has become a cautionary tale among density activists. As Victoria Fierce, an East Bay YIMBY organizer, puts it: “Housing is infrastructure.… Allowing more housing is necessary to contain the current disaster and provide long-term relief.”¹⁷

The creation of a middle-class social movement, with middle-class participants, advocating for middle-class policies is novel in the Bay Area. The stated original goal was to expand the total housing stock in every category, opening the door to potentially working with anti-gentrification groups to create more public housing as well as with developers to push through market-rate housing (with a certain amount, usually 15% to 20%, kept at the affordable level). YIMBYs in the Bay Area pledged to confine their activism to already wealthy neighborhoods that resist density. Yet in the Bay Area, that turned out to be manifestly untrue, and much activist energy was spent in neighborhoods like Oakland and the Mission advocating for large new projects that attracted the ire of local residents and anti-gentrification activists. As Deepa Varma, of the San Francisco Tenants Union, noted of the new focus on supply alone: “[The] ‘just build’ mantra put forward by opinion leaders is diverting state government from the hard truth that the market has not responded to the demand of California families for affordable homes.”¹⁸ This chapter shows how YIMBYs went from an interesting activist upstart group to the harbinger of a growing rift within the affordable housing movement and, possibly, American politics more broadly.

By relying on the market in a more or less laissez-faire approach, YIMBYs attracted the wrath of San Francisco progressives. However, many within the movement would convincingly argue that some of the loudest voices protesting their efforts to build more housing were those who enjoyed “virtue signaling” from their multimillion-dollar properties, condemning the alliance between homeowners and anti-gentrification groups as partnerships that disadvantaged those with less money and more to lose. Last, the chapter shows how YIMBY activists increasingly refocused their efforts from citizen-led grassroots speaking out at meetings to expert-led legal challenges and even running for office on a purely housing platform. In doing so, they hope to gain more control over city regulatory agencies as well as to make advocating for urbanism as a way of life a political brand for millennials.

The Roots of the Affordability Crisis

San Francisco was the emblematic western boomtown. Between 1849 and 1851, it burnt down six times, only to be frantically rebuilt in order to serve gold miners and frigates. New residents were so eager to get to the goldfields that sailors sometimes collectively abandoned their vessels, leaving the captains little choice but to run the boat aground and adding to the new port’s vast shipwrecking graveyard. Indeed, in what would become a pattern, basic infrastructure was not forthcoming. Wharf construction was completed by a fractured coalition of local government and joint stock companies employing low-paid Irish-Australian “Steam Paddies” to fill in harbor land with steam-powered shovels.¹⁹

By the time of the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco had become the de facto capital of the western United States, worth rebuilding at any cost. It was an economically diverse gateway to Asian goods and markets, and it took advantage of its reputation as a western Wall Street to steer shipping and banking capital into the burgeoning real estate economy. By mid-century, when the model of growth in the urban core was at the point of exhaustion, the city exploited a new growth machine:²⁰ it embraced state-funded suburbanization with the help of federal highway money while also accepting urban renewal funds to remake the downtown with more high-rises. Between 1960 and 1981, thirty million square feet of office space was constructed:²¹ one of the highest rates in the nation.²² Once concentrated on the tip of the peninsula like a thimble on an index finger extended from San Jose, the population of only 679,00 in the 1970s was insignificant in the roster of great American metropolises.²³ Instead, like other places dispersed by sprawl, San Francisco’s total metropolitan population of approximately 5.2 million in 1980²⁴ was strewn across nine counties that often failed to properly coordinate growth, transportation, taxation, and environmental policy.

In 1958, the city’s growth coalition of developers, local government, and retail businesses, which had previously accepted federal funds and encouraged new housing, met its first opposition. A proposal to create a Golden Gate Authority that would oversee regional transportation (similar to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) was vigorously challenged. Even consummate urban bo...