Everybody wants to build housing, but no bureaucrat wants to give up control to saying “yes” or “no” to projects.
We need some radical anti-bureaucracy candidates, but there’s not good overlap with the local ideological demographic.
Stalemate.
We need some radical anti-bureaucracy candidates, but there’s not good overlap with the local ideological demographic.
Stalemate.
[0] https://www.sfyimby.org/endorsements [1] https://growsf.org/voter-guide [2] https://yimbyaction.org/2021/events/yimby-prom-gala-bay-area...
This is completely false. A large portion of Bay Area home-owner voters are staunch NIMBY supporters.
Even the majority of my renter friends are against development. According to them, it just makes developers rich and does nothing for rents.
The amount of voters that are against development is definitely the majority.
True, but it's also true that even NIMBY's are nominally for more housing somewhere. Just not, y'know, wherever they live, hence the name.
You see a few ideas repeated over and over in those circles. "We don't have a housing crisis, we have an affordable housing crisis." And "We have plenty of housing, but large corporations have bought it and are keeping it vacant." They do genuinely believe that enough housing already exists, but that it just sitting empty and not going to the people that need it.
How do people think these kinds of thoughts?
"Food is too expensive! We have to shut down these evil farmers! Farming just makes them rich!"
I mean this is on the same level of ideologically induced willful stupidity as "a woman can't get pregnant from rape."
Build more -> Only luxury apartments will be built -> luxury apartment builders will make money -> morally wrong
Nothing else matters.
Tidbits- One of the city councilors for Vancouver is known to be a staunch NO voter- any development that is not 100% below market will get a NO from her. Her argument is that existing 50 year old apartments are being torn down and will displace the residents.
So someone found a news article from 50 years ago, showing the same activist, decrying that the buildings are being constructed and displaced the existing tenants from existing buildings.
But somehow 50 years later she is defending the same type of buildings she was fighting against 50 years ago, using the exact same argument.
You can't reason with people like them.
It lets someone who wants to point fingers at another group and fearmonger enough folks to block anything they don't want - and among the different blocs, there is no specific thing they all agree on.
One classic recent example of this is Zoning for Marijuana dispensaries. For a long time post legalization, there literally were only 2 potential locations in SF you could get permitted to open one due to extreme school location distance requirements, driven partially by the Chinese bloc. [https://www.sfexaminer.com/the_fs/forum/conservative-chinese...]
Even now, there are only ~42. [https://sfstandard.com/arts-culture/cannabis-lounge-map-mari...]
That is a ludicrously low number for a city of San Francisco's size, even if you don't know the history of San Francisco as one of the counter culture/weed cultures epicenters.
Of course, during this entire time it was still easy to find weed - just not legally. There is a huge underground market that never stopped. And regardless of legality, there were no meaningful penalties except from the Feds (who have gotten a cold shoulder from SF for a VERY long time), as the local Police stopped enforcing anti-Marijuana rules consistently sometime in the 70s.
California overall (and the US) is becoming more and more like San Francisco. It's like a cancer, as lack of belief in social institutions or a coherent social identity trends towards 'snitches get stitches' and 'fuck you, I got mine', which just enables predators.