When I moved to San Francisco 3 years ago, I expected to get the impression that the city was full — brimming with tall buildings with no more room to grow. I heard stories of artists, blue-collar workers, and minorities being displaced by young techies. California’s tech boom catalyzed growth that causes rents and home prices to increase, but land-use policies are what continue to sustain inequality and concentrate wealth in the hands of landlords, keeping rents unaffordable and homeownership unattainable. Let’s explore these policies and how we can change them.

Apartment bans

What it is: Apartments are illegal to build on over 60% of land in the average California city.

Why it exists: Apartments are prohibited to maintain neighborhood character and preserve property values. Some of the first apartment bans can be traced back to a policy called “redlining” that was designed to keep black and poor Americans out of wealthy neighborhoods.

Why it’s problematic: Apartments being illegal in most of California is the leading cause of high rent, displacement, and wealth concentration. In San Diego, LA, and Santa Monica, San Jose, and San Francisco, it’s illegal to build more than one single-family home on a property.

San Francisco zoning map — the red areas are the wealthy, affluent areas where it’s illegal to build apartments.

Urban planners call the policy prohibiting apartments single-family zoning — one parcel, one family. Some homes were even restricted by deed so that only white people could own them. These “racial covenants” became illegal, but single-family zoning became the implicit way to ensure only wealthy, white people could afford to live in an area. In the map above of San Francisco, notice new housing is illegal in affluent Western neighborhoods and construction is concentrated in lower-income industrial areas.

The framework for why apartments are more affordable is this: imagine a house worth $1,000,000. If there were 4 apartments on the same parcel, each apartment would sell for around $250,000 — making room for more families at lower prices.

Rafael Mandelman, one of the few pro-housing San Francisco Supervisors, points out it's easier to build a mega-mansion with 22 rooms — a bowling alley and all — than it would be to construct a four-unit apartment with the same number of rooms.

Solutions: End apartment bans, especially in wealthy areas. By ending exclusionary zoning, we can lower housing costs and create more diverse communities, not just suburbs for techies. The city of Berkeley, CA was one of the first to implement single-family zoning, but now it’s leading the way by voting to end it.

Prop 13

What it is: Prop 13 freezes assessed property tax values at their 1978 level on residential, commercial, and industrial properties.

Why it exists: In 1978, voters passed a ballot initiative in response to increasing California state taxes, sponsored by an anti-tax group called the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer’s Association.

Why it’s problematic: Prop 13 is a regressive tax because it benefits people who own expensive property the most — instead of people you’d expect tax breaks to help like low-income residents. Prop 13 also applies to commercial real estate companies, and these benefits can also be passed on to heirs, creating a class of California real estate nobility. This policy has led to underfunded schools and slow housing construction. Prop 13 is a market distortion that stops land from being used to its full potential. Many of the homes in San Francisco are $2m or more, and higher property tax would encourage homeowners to add an ADU (accessory dwelling unit) or build a duplex and house more people.

The Prop 13 assessed value can only be increased by a capped amount determined by the inflation index each year.

In a natural land use cycle, something like this would happen: Property near jobs, beaches, transit, or schools gets more valuable as people move in. Taxes increase on that property, so some homeowners convert properties into duplexes or apartments to pay for increased taxes, and the increased housing supply creates lower rents for everyone. Property taxes are an incentive to use land for a higher value purpose, like housing more people.

Instead, apartment bans and prop 13 have neutered incentives for building new housing, resulting in California having the most expensive, exclusive real estate in the country.

Solutions: Repeal Prop 13. Prop 13 is a regressive tax. While I’m for a full repeal, a common-sense start would be repealing it for commercial properties and for landlords who are renting out properties, especially those with multiple properties.

CEQA

What is it: California’s Environmental Quality Act is a law that requires environmental standards and impacts to be met, analyzed, and reported by California cities.

Why it exists: Passed in 1970 and signed into law by Ronald Reagan, the law was intended to protect natural resources like rivers, clean air, and wildlife.

Why it’s problematic: The law was passed with good intentions but has been weaponized to stop housing from being built. One person can tie up housing developments in court for years by filing an environmental appeal with CEQA. Even trivial things like casting a shadow are grounds to bog down projects with litigation. Housing deferred is housing denied. CEQA has been used by wealthy neighbors to prevent affordable housing developments and stymie transit projects like transit-only lanes and bike lanes by claiming taking away car lanes leads to more emissions because of gridlock.

Solutions: The obvious one is appeals should require some minimum number of people, say 100, to be considered.

Conclusion

Under California’s current land-use policies, people who bought homes before 1980 and wealthy techies are the only ones who can afford homeownership. Landlords and commercial real estate owners continue to profit from a system where housing is scarce.

This is because apartments, which provide cheaper, denser housing are illegal to build in most areas, Prop 13 has reduced incentives to build housing and use land for higher-value uses, and 100% of affordable housing demands end up kill housing projects. With the right incentives, cities have the potential to be economic mobility accelerators.

Why housing is important to our future

Environment — Building dense housing near transit and prioritizing walkability is key to a sustainable future. The newly built San Francisco neighborhood Mission Bay has among the smallest carbon footprint of any American neighborhood because it has medium-density buildings, mixed-use development that provides easy access to essentials, and abundant transit lines. Ironically, environmental groups like the local chapters of the Sierra Club are often among the largest detractors of housing, ostensibly to protect urban wildlife and open space.

Diverse communities — Housing supply is key to making sure all income groups and backgrounds can coexist. Building adequate market-rate housing and affordable housing can stop the displacement of original residents and increase affordability.

Opportunity — The fact that cities with jobs and transit like San Francisco are exclusionary and unaffordable hinder economic mobility and the output of the US economy more broadly. Cities are economic accelerators, especially when they have enough housing, transit, and diversity.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to stay in touch on twitter. This was originally published on my website, scottfits.com.

How California is Making Landlords Rich was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has been two weeks since the shooting in Atlanta and days since the attack on an elderly Asian woman in New York. Let us not forget.

YIMBY Action stands in solidarity with our Asian siblings and categorically denounces the hate expressed towards them, be it verbal, physical, mental, or emotional. The murder of six Asian women in Atlanta, Georgia, is undeniably a hate crime. We honor them by stating their names: Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim, and Soon Chung Park.

We stand with the racial and social justice movement and demand justice for the lives that were taken. We call upon our elected leaders to pass laws that protect us because we know guns make hate deadlier.

We also acknowledge our racist and anti-Asian past. From the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Japanese internment camps during WWII and redlining, our country has a history of anti-Asian policy. We are committed to putting an end to continuing impacts of our racist past.

Words are where we start, but they are insufficient. Antiracism must be incorporated into every part of our society. As we fight for fair housing, we must take action for justice in every aspect of our organizing and every part of our government. With this statement, we reaffirm our commitment to creating a society free from hate, racism, sexism, misogyny, and women’s objectification.

If you or someone you know has been a victim of Asian hate, please report it to Stop AAPI Hate.

Stop Asian Hate was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is economic collapse good? No. No, it isn’t. Stuart Schuffman is only the latest to float the benefits of recessions — lower rents, “those people” leaving town, “taking back their city.” But when he opines on the silver lining of pandemic-induced economic collapse, instead of acknowledging our decades-long public policy failures, we know that we’ve gone through the looking glass.

Recessions are when people lose their jobs. Recessions harm working-class families. If you see an upside in economic catastrophe, check your privilege. This kind of thinking will set us up to repeat all the mistakes of the past decade. With a chronic housing shortage, we’ve created a nightmare where the boom times are bad, and the recessions are worse.

The same argument pops up over and over in cities and towns everywhere: Why can’t the jobs go elsewhere? Why do we have to “accommodate” growth?

Deliberately stifling jobs causes harm. This isn’t “let’s regulate to protect workers,” “let’s increase the minimum wage,” “let’s give people healthcare,” — all admirable goals. No, this is misanthropy: “get those workers away from me.”

We had jobs. Lots of jobs. Corporate jobs and nonprofit jobs, nightlife jobs and theater jobs, restaurant jobs and tourism jobs, jobs from businesses large and small. We had a vibrant, exciting city. People moved here wanting to share in that richness.

But instead of building homes for immigrants, young families, folks with degrees and without, some people decided this was a “culture war” and that newcomers were the problem. Shortages bring out the worst in people, and a housing shortage is no exception. People blamed one another as they fought over scraps. They blamed the renter for paying $3000 for a one-bedroom and not the system that was ripping everyone off. They imagined themselves the colossus athwart municipal history, hand outstretched to new arrivals at our city’s golden gates signaling, “Stop! Thou shalt not pass.”

Who is harmed by a downturn? Tech workers? Corporate lawyers? Longtime homeowners? No, and progressives should know better. Artists, waiters, bartenders — these are the folks who are left unemployed, displaced from our vibrant city. Recessions suck vibrancy away — bar by bar, restaurant by restaurant, nonprofit by nonprofit. It may sound obvious, but taking a sledgehammer to the economy does not help working people.

For decades we failed to allow more homes, causing a shortage, driving up rents. Will we seize this moment and change our ways? Will we change our laws to allow missing middle housing to be built when demand — when people — return to our prosperous shores?

Cities have the opportunity to adopt a pro-human, pro-growth, pro-tenant policies that do the work to lift all boats. Building more housing addresses the demand, lets prices fall and gives us more tax money to spend on subsidized affordable housing, transit, and the social safety net. We can use strong tenant protections and direct subsidies to stabilize communities through booms and busts. Prosperity and taxes allow us to invest in equity. This future is possible.

Or we can repeat our mistakes: reject prosperity and pray for catastrophe. When good times come again, our Supervisors can again wage a mean-spirited, ineffectual culture war. Politicians can ban cafeterias and go to war with scooter companies. But these culture wars accomplish nothing. This sound and fury has exhausted policy and entered performance art.

This is the choice. Do we build back better? Do we make building missing middle housing easy and fast? Do we use economic growth to fuel a welfare state that actually uplifts people? Or do we fail again?

I hope instead we decide to thrive. Together.

Should People Lose Their Jobs? was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How 2020 made me housing insecure and drove me into the pro-housing movement.

2020 looked grim from day one: COVID-19 getting out of control in China, wildfires burning simultaneously in various continents — what else could go wrong? So much. The pandemic got personal.

Between my husband Kasey and me, we lost four family members to COVID-19. That’s simply unfathomable.

When I lost my job in the summer of 2020 and our roommate moved out due to the pandemic, we also almost lost our apartment. Because in California we don’t build enough housing where we live, rents are astronomical. Our rent was way too much to afford on one income.

I had done everything right! I’ve worked in top companies spanning multiple industries my entire career. I was recognized as a high-performer and strategist. I led marketing teams for Nestle and Intel in numerous countries and most recently led a product launch for Google. Coming from a working family, I knew that socioeconomic mobility comes through education, networking, and hard work. I took this seriously, and I did my part. But here I was, on the brink of losing my home.

We were saved by a kind and creative property manager and rental assistance from the government. But too many families are not so lucky. Too many folks have to move far outside of where they work, spending less time with their families, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions because they simply have to drive more. Other families have to crowd in with relatives — which is what we would have done if our housing had fallen through. Throughout the Bay, too many families are living on top of each other to subsist. This is never acceptable. Subsisting isn’t living. We want our communities to thrive. But COVID-19 makes overcrowded housing deadly — when one person becomes infected in a multigenerational home, it puts so many at risk of infection.

I also know that the unlucky ones often look like me. Communities of color are disproportionately affected by the housing shortage. The spread of COVID-19 in overcrowded households is a huge problem for the Latinx community. I was recently on a video call with four Latinas, and ALL of us had lost family members to the deadly virus.

As the horrors of 2020 unfolded, I took the opportunity of being back on the job market to focus my talents and experience on making a positive change. I took a temporary job with the California Democratic Party as the field coordinator for the Peninsula. Immediately I took a strategic approach to my work and established partnerships with multiple volunteer groups, resistance groups, and like-minded organizations. In a matter of months, my field office became the largest, and we ultimately made over 5 million calls with over 10,000 volunteer shifts.

When the election season ended, I made an even more significant move. Earlier this month, I accepted the position of Marketing Director for YIMBY Action. The new job was a significant pivot for my family and me since I have an extensive corporate career. But after everything that happened to me and my community in 2020, I knew I needed to focus my career on making our cities inclusive and livable FOR ALL.

Fighting to end the housing shortage is critical for climate action, healthcare, and racial and social justice. All roads lead to housing. In 2020, I experienced the effects of the housing shortage, personally. So guess what, I’m joining the fight.

All Roads Leads to Housing was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In order to more completely address climate change, we need to think beyond energy infrastructure and tackle our housing crisis as well. To do this, we need to change the way we build, and in doing so change the environmental rhetoric around new housing. This change requires us to build dense infill developments as well as “ missing middle housing “ (like townhouses, fourplexes, and courtyard apartments) in existing communities, while discouraging sprawl development in high risk zones most vulnerable to climate change.

Simply allowing for more people to live in Bay Area cities is one of the most potent means of reducing climate pollution with local policies. According to research led by UC Berkeley’s Chris Jones (available interactively at coolclimate.org), it could be the single most impactful measure for Bay Area cities ranging from San Francisco to Oakland to Mountain View. This is because cities in the inner Bay Area already have relatively low carbon footprints, particularly within the transit-rich core.

Housing we don’t build in cities ends up in outlying suburbs where folks are forced to drive for most daily activities, burning gasoline and necessitating far more asphalt, steel and concrete. A drumbeat of reports from state and national organizations, including the California Air Resources Board, have said that the continued upward trend in miles driven is a threat to our emissions goals, even considering a continued shift to electric cars. Moreover, continued development on the suburban fringe threatens the very natural and working lands we need intact to reach carbon neutrality.

Infill housing (built within areas that are already largely developed) is one of the best ways we can drive down emissions, while also allowing us to limit further sprawl and displacement. Yet time and time again, when new infill housing is proposed, there are almost always people opposing the project for “environmental reasons,” usually citing issues around traffic and green space.

What they should instead come to realize is that infill housing supports the environment and represents a critical solution to both the climate and housing crises. Building more housing in existing communities will allow more people to live in walkable neighborhoods, reducing traffic and opening the possibility of returning urban space from cars to people and trees. Eliminating mandatory parking requirements and instead charging fair prices for use of public street space are key steps to ensure this outcome.

Low income and communities of color are already disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, and the compounding effects of gentrification make it even more challenging to live in the Bay Area. Rising rents are displacing lifelong residents, forcing them to move to the outer edges of the region. When we add new housing, we need to prioritize the considerations of communities that have borne the brunt of disinvestment and displacement.

At the same time, there are a myriad of affluent communities that have been the direct economic beneficiaries of redlining and unfair housing laws. In places like Marin through San Francisco’s west side and south along the Peninsula, it is clear that legalizing apartments would help integrate neighborhoods and expand access to opportunity. In fact, reforming the exclusionary zoning barriers to infill housing now represents a consensus policy for national Democrats from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to President-elect Joe Biden, and the national Sierra Club platform calls for “affirmative support” for infill housing and inclusive communities.

Unfortunately, though infill housing is one of the main climate interventions that is squarely within the power of local governments, there are still racist and exclusionary policies which continue to get in the way of creating the healthy, resilient communities we need. In many communities around the Bay Area, affluent homeowners are resisting needed land use change. Just this past election, the city of Alameda had the chance to repeal a racist housing law that prohibits multi-family homes by passing Measure Z. Instead, they voted no.

Housing activists and environmentalists need to work together as climate champions for our region in order to promote development, reduce sprawl, and protect our critical natural and working lands. Throughout the Bay Area, we see nonprofit organizations stepping up to make the case for infill housing as a climate solution, beginning with removing barriers to building homes in high-opportunity neighborhoods. Organizations like SPUR, Greenbelt Alliance and the Greenlining Institute are building platforms for housing advocacy that support our environmental goals and redress our inequitable residential patterns. Additionally, a group of us co-founded Urban Environmentalists in 2019 to bring together voices for housing and for climate action. Join us with your ideas and your volunteer hours to help build an inclusive, climate-resilient Bay Area.

Zack Subin is a volunteer co-lead of Urban Environmentalists, living in San Francisco; Zoe Siegel is director of Climate Resilience at Greenbelt Alliance, living in Oakland.

Originally published at https://www.sfchronicle.com on December 18, 2020, without the charts included.

Infill housing is critical for a healthy region and climate was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Besides experiencing homelessness, I have close to 20 years of working as a case manager in San Francisco, providing direct social services to one of those cities’ most disenfranchised communities, the tenderloin. As a case manager, I have worked with clients who were homeless for many reasons. Some of my clients were homeless due to losing a job, and not being able to afford the rent any longer. Some of my clients were victims of domestic violence and had to flee the home for safety. I have worked with clients whose mental health issues contributed to their homlessness. The list goes on and on. My friend Angie B told me, “I had to leave, he would not stop hitting me; He was going to kill me if I had stayed.” In all my years of being a case manager, and my experience being homeless, I have met very few people who outright just chose to be homeless.

I also want to dispel the myth that homeless people are bad people, whatever that means. I have met some incredible people in both San Francisco and Oakland who took shelter nightly in tents, an assembly of cardboard boxes, a doorway, a bus stop, abandoned homes, under the bridge, and at times the sidewalk. If you have ever been downtown SF, you have undoubtedly seen someone laid out in the middle of the block on Market Street. These are the people who do not have homes. That is it, and that’s all. They are good people in a bad situation. Such a person was my friend Poet.

During my first experience of being homeless on the streets of San Francisco, I met Poet. One late night after being up smoking crack for four straight days, I walked down the Minna Street alley looking for someone with a crack pipe. I had broken my pipe moments earlier. I had crack, alcohol, and cigarettes, which significantly increased my chances of being provided a pipe. On the streets, when you need something it’s best that you have something. So back to how I met Poet; halfway down the block, I stopped and asked this Black man, who was sweeping the sidewalk, if he smoked crack. He said, “sometimes.” I asked if he had a pipe. He said, “in my tent.” I asked him if I could pay him $20 to use his pipe and smoke in his tent. He responded, “absolutely.” After he had finished sweeping, we walked to his tent. In his tent in the middle, there were layers and layers of comforters that served as the bed. There was clothing neatly folded on one side of the tent along with shoes, and books. On the other side, he had crates of food in ziplock bags, gallons of water and more books. There was also a briefcase next to his bed. The space was tight, but it was clean and comfortable.

I took a seat on the bed, smoked two cigarettes, and drank vodka while Poet looked for the pipe. He found it after looking for it for 15 minutes, which seemed like a year. I took it and loaded it up with crack. I took a hit and then passed the pipe to him. He and I smoked crack, drank vodka, and smoked cigarettes for hours. I shared with him that I had recently relapsed, and he said, “shit happens, you will be okay”.

It was during this time that I came to know that Poet was close to 70. I was shocked. He looked no older than 60. He also shared with me that he was from Texas, like myself, and had served in Vietnam. He also shared with me that he was a poet, and that’s why the people took to calling him Poet. Soon my body and mind became more interested in sleeping than getting high. I started to drift off and Poet asked me how long I had been up, and I told him 4 days and he suggested firmly that I needed to sleep, assuring me that I was safe. I took him up on his offer. His bed and pillows were heaven to my crack- and alcohol- ravaged mind and body. Before falling into a deep sleep, Poet gave me food and water. I ate two chicken sandwiches and four oranges before falling into a deep sleep.

I slept for three straight days, only waking to eat and take a pee on the sidewalk. Poet was a good man. I came to know him as the no nonsense man he was who demanded respect. Poet had a reputation of not being the one you wanted to fuk with. The alley he lived in became very active and chaotic with drug users at night. Poet had been in that alley for over five years; he was the shot caller in that alley. He was the 5 star general that kept the chaos in that alley at a minimum. He was like the Mayor of that alley; even the police officers respected him. After that initial visit I visited Poet at least 10 other times. We would smoke crack, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and talk for hours on end; but we never talked about his family, his time in Vietnam, how he had ended up in California, what his life was like before homelessness, or how he had become homeless. But what I do know about Poet is that he was one of the most respectful, courteous, caring, and generous men I have ever met. Several years ago, I asked someone about Poet and was told that he had died. I wonder if he was able to access housing before he died. I surely hope so.

Living on the streets is treacherous and very depressing. Imagine not having access to a toilet or a kitchen. Imagine every time you leave your house, you are concerned that someone may come in and take your things. That was Poet’s fear. Every time he went somewhere, he took his briefcase. That briefcase held the poems that he had written. Those poems in that briefcase were his most valuable asset, and he did not want to have them stolen.

I surely hope that he had access to stable, affordable, and safe housing before he died, a place where he could safely keep his most valued possessions, his poems. He deserved that. He was a good guy. Now I am not saying that good people deserve housing and others don’t. What I am saying is that homeless people are not always who you may think they are. And damn, what if they are? Does that mean they don’t deserve a stable, affordable, and safe place to call home? No. Everyone deserves stable, affordable, and safe housing. Providing stable affordable and safe housing is clearly the humanitarian thing to do.

Then there was Victoria. Victoria had severe mental health issues and was a severe alcoholic. She had been homeless for close to 10 years. Her place of residence was one of the alleys off 6th street in San Francisco. Her daily routine was to get very drunk, fight with someone about something, and pass out, most often in her wheelchair. Several years ago she died in one of the alleys on Sixth Street, in a tent. Her death was sad enough; however, knowing that she died as she slept in a tent alone just made her death even more painful. I remember that morning I found out that she had died. My first thought was ‘damn it was freezing last night’. No one should have to die in a tent on a frigid night in San Francisco.

Homelessness is unacceptable. The rent is too high, and the zoning laws are riddled with exclusionary values and principles that prohibit affordable housing. The lack of affordable housing fuels homelessness. Where is the humanity in that? There is none. Everyone who wants housing should be able to access housing that is affordable and safe.

That is why I wholeheartedly support YIMBY. I trust that YIMBY will move this country toward being more equitable, and inclusionary by advocating for policy changes that will open doors to affordable housing, particularly in areas that have restricted the building of affordable housing. I trust that YIMBY will be a valuable asset in the movement to end homelessness. It can be done. If you believe in this too, and you think that Poet, Victoria, Angie B, and everyone else who struggles with housing security deserves a better life, join the YIMBY movement: yimbyaction.org/join.

I’ve experienced homelessness and it is unacceptable. That’s why I’m a YIMBY. was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This piece was originally published in Streetsblog on Oct 21.

Over the last several years, local environmental organizations and their endorsed candidates have ratcheted up ambitions for tackling the climate crisis. We are hearing overdue calls for getting fossil fuels out of our buildings, our cars, and our power grid. Advocates rightly demand that we halt new fossil fuel extraction and advance a just transition to a renewable economy. And in 2020 we are reminded that in the Bay Area, respect for science and expertise are broadly shared values in the face of threats to our way of life.

The same level of ambition is not shown for tackling our housing crisis. Instead, from many of the same candidates and organizations, we hear a litany of excuses for not taking the action that experts agree is needed: build more “infill” housing of all kinds in our existing communities to avoid further sprawl and displacement. Ending exclusionary zoning is now a consensus policy for national Democrats from Vice President Joe Biden to Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Leading urban planning scholars including the former head of the American Planning Association have called for eliminating single family zoning and related barriers to equitable land use outcomes.

The link between climate and housing is abundantly clear. Simply allowing more people to live in Bay Area cities is one of the most potent means of reducing climate pollution with local policies, according to research led by UC Berkeley’s Chris Jones (available interactively at coolclimate.org): indeed, it could be the single most impactful measure for Bay Area cities ranging from San Francisco and Oakland to Mountain View. This is because cities in the inner Bay Area already have relatively low carbon footprints, particularly the transit-rich core. Housing we don’t build in cities ends up in outlying suburbs where driving is required for most daily activities, necessitating far more asphalt, steel, and concrete, and gobbling our forests and farmlands — not to mention exacerbating wildfire risks. A drumbeat of reports from Next 10, Energy Innovation, Transportation for America — and the state’s own Air Resources Board — have said that the continued upward trend in miles driven is a threat to our emissions goals, even considering a continued shift to electric cars.

Yet many local environmental organizations and their endorsed candidates ignore the issue or raise specious concerns about traffic and green space — missing the point that allowing more people to live in walkable neighborhoods will reduce traffic and give urban space to people and trees instead of cars. The most egregious example is the Sierra Club’s endorsement of Cupertino Mayor Steven Scharf, who fought housing in a long-vacant mall and notoriously joked about building a wall around the city to exclude commuters. Another deflection is the claim that market-rate housing will accelerate gentrification: a legitimate concern (though counter to initial research) in the communities of color and low income that have borne the brunt of displacement and disinvestment, who should be empowered to implement their preferred solutions. But when it comes to the string of exclusive locales that have been the direct economic beneficiaries of redlining and unfair housing laws, from Marin through SF’s Westside south to the Peninsula, the opposite is clear: legalizing apartments would help integrate neighborhoods and expand access to opportunity.

Why do we see this mismatch in priorities, when infill housing is the prime climate intervention squarely within the power of local governments? Perhaps given the state of our national politics, we have taken for granted a shallow approach to problem-solving, scapegoating instead of facing challenges head on. Taking on the fossil industry and calling for a just transition is bold and praiseworthy in Bakersfield. But in SF and Palo Alto there is no base of support for the fossil fuel industry; instead, there are wealthy, white homeowners who resist needed change and hoard their Prop 13-enhanced assets. It doesn’t help that many of these homeowners lead prominent environmental organizations and vote Democratic.

Because of this, when voting in local elections, rather than turning to environmental organizations, the best way to cast your ballot for climate solutions may be following your local pro-housing organization, such as YIMBY Action affiliates or East Bay for Everyone. Fortunately, throughout the Bay Area we do have many candidates with bold visions for addressing our housing and climate challenges and making our society more equitable: candidates like Danny Sauter and Marjan Philhour in SF, Amo Lee in San Mateo, Cari Templeton in Palo Alto, JR Fruen in Cupertino, Alysa Cisneros in Sunnyvale, and Jake Tonkel in San Jose. And of course Sen. Scott Wiener, who has been more outspoken on the need for land use reform than just about any American politician. And we won’t solve these generational problems in one election cycle: even after we bid 2020 adieu, we can use your ideas and your volunteer hours to help us build an inclusive, climate-resilient Bay Area.

Vote for Housing to Vote for Climate in the Bay Area was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some might be tempted to consider segregationist actions and events as part of the distant past, without any effect on society today. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

We know deep down that most predominantly white areas have better infrastructure, education, food, and comforts of life than do most predominantly non-white areas in our country. Why are we so segregated by geography and why, overall, do white people have more? Why is there such a pronounced racial wealth gap?

This article is for us white folks who are ready to do the work to understand the causes of housing segregation, and the ways communities perpetuate it today. Segregation isn’t just something that happened in our past. White people have been in power in a near-total sense for almost our whole history, and have built structures, institutions, and systems that create and maintain segregation and oppression.

White districts, and corresponding non-white, often African American ghettos, have resulted from legislation at local and national levels. Profitable business groups, neighborhood organizations, homeowner associations and zoning processes strengthened these divisions and led to shockingly unequal allocation of resources. City governments structured segregation into the physical landscape to funnel tax money, law enforcement, services, amenities and aid away from non-white areas and bestow them on white ones. These actions have perpetuated the second-class citizenship of African Americans since slavery and have bred unfair mistrust, discrimination and aggression toward other groups considered non-white such as people of Asian, Latinx and indigenous descent. Today, patterns set in motion by this systemic racism strongly persist.

People and organizations perpetuating these forces may not use words we associate with racism as blatantly as they might have in the last century. In fact, some may not even realize that they are participating in racist segregation. But this oppression works through everyday systems, and as such can remain hidden from our consciousness.

The purpose of this article is not to point fingers and call individuals racist. Rather, its aim is to help explain the racist systems that have created, and maintain, housing segregation. As we begin to understand our segregationist past and present, we must work to right these wrongs. The task of dismantling systemic racism is incumbent upon us today, especially those of us with a measure of resources and privilege.

Faces of Segregation

Gerald Cohn, a white San Francisco school teacher, bought a house in Berkeley. When the closing date came, he wasn’t ready to move in yet. So he rented the house to a fellow teacher, Alfred Simmons, who was African American. The Berkeley chief of police, upon learning of this rental, alerted the FBI that an African American was living in an all-white community. Mr. Cohn, who had been paying his mortgage, was now denied participation in the federal government’s mortgage insurance program for the duration of his entire life. His crime? Renting to an African American (Rothstein, pp. 66–67).

Stanford professor Wallace Stegner formed a cooperative that purchased 260 acres near campus. He wanted to commission badly-needed housing for middle- and working-class families. But his project failed because no bank would help finance construction or issue mortgages. The reason for this was that three of the 150 families slated to live in the development were African American (Rothstein, pp. 10–12).

Sing and Grace Sheng wanted to move to South San Francisco so Sing could live closer to his job as an airplane mechanic at the airport. The housing development company that had built the Shengs’ desired home didn’t like this. Company representatives notified neighbors, and tried to sue the owner of the house for the infraction of selling to non-whites. To address the dispute, homeowners convened a community meeting — in which they voted to exclude the Shengs from the housing development .

The above took place in 1946, 1950, and 1952, when government and banking institutions acted through legally sanctioned racism. The shocking injustice of situations like these, and worse, have occurred throughout our nation’s history. For too long, such incidents were the rule, not the exception. Perhaps your white parents or grandparents benefitted from these state-sponsored racist institutions. In millions of instances big and small, white families were pushed up and families of color were pushed down. Institutions, not just individuals, took wealth from the hands of African American families.

Conventional wisdom holds that our nation remains segregated due to individual private prejudice and practices. While this may be true to some extent, the reality is that government, banks, and widespread marketing campaigns worked to forcibly and insidiously segregate housing in America. This occurred in a number of ways, including: redlining, financing discrimination, restrictive racial covenants, blockbusting, segregated public housing, and state-sponsored violence. Today, white enclaves continue to wall themselves off literally and figuratively through exploitation of municipal processes to obstruct housing construction in affluent neighborhoods.

Redlining

Redlining was a principal way that banks and the federal government worked to keep American cities and towns segregated. Often cited but seldom explained, what we call redlining was a racist system of false underwriting commissioned by the federal government. It formed the Home Ownership Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the Depression to help stabilize the economy, supporting banks in extending the loan repayment time from five or seven years up to 30 years. The HOLC insured these loans, meaning that in case of default the federal government would repay the lenders. HOLC leadership used a racist paradigm of inherent non-white inferiority in commissioning real estate to survey neighborhoods and report on racial and ethnic makeup (Rothstein, 2017, pp. 63–75). Each neighborhood received a numeric designation and corresponding loan risk color code where it was depicted on a map. Both home construction status — e.g. how new the homes were — as well as racial and ethnic population went into the coding. All across the country, the designations went more or less as follows:

Green — Grade A — all- or almost-all-white area, largely new construction

Blue — Grade B — predominantly white area, not all new construction

Yellow — Grade C — significant immigrant population

Red — Grade D — hazardous, e.g. “threat of undesirable racial infiltration” to the surrounding neighborhood

As economist Richard Green put it, “The principal component that determined riskiness or safety, from a lending standpoint, was racial and ethnic composition.” The HOLC then widely disseminated pamphlets warning white prospective home-buyers to beware of “inharmonious racial elements.” The idea that the very presence of people perceived to be part of a non-white race would reduce the quality of a neighborhood was perniciously peddled by those in power for generations — and it continues in our national consciousness today. It is part of a larger, unbroken narrative of white superiority created and marketed in order to justify enslavement and colonization (Kendi, 2016). Using this narrative, entities such as banks, big business, law enforcement, and government at every level worked together to delineate specifically where people of color could live. As Richard Rothstein writes, “The [Federal Housing Authority] favored mortgages in areas where boulevards or highways served to separate African American families from whites,” and the mortgages were approved for the whites, not the African Americans (Rothstein, p. 65).

Overall, the nationwide practice of redlining meant that non-whites could rarely if ever get mortgages. The discrimination also extended to loans for renovation and upkeep. This systematic racism by our most powerful institutions, combined with the exclusion of people of color from labor unions and all but menial jobs (Broussard, 1993, pp. 38–58) led to crumbling neighborhoods. Keeping minorities sequestered in specific places also meant governments could de-prioritize budgeting for law enforcement, infrastructure, green space and other municipal benefits in these geographical areas. This still occurs in some places such as New Jersey, with recent governor Chris Christie making drastic cuts to education disproportionately affecting lower-income people of color .

Though HOLC produced the map above in 1937, current residents of San Francisco will quickly recognize that today’s demographics continue to correspond to that map. Redlined areas are predominantly non-white, while the neighborhood compositions of areas colored blue and green are predominantly white. Rothstein says, “When we desegregated lunch counters, the next day, African Americans could sit down at a lunch counter… But if we desegregate a neighborhood…The next day, African Americans can’t move to affluent [districts] just because we’ve passed a law banning segregation.”

Racism for Profit and Propaganda

Additional segregationist tactics used during the 20th-century United States included blockbusting, explicitly racist housing documentation, and restrictive covenants. Blockbusting was a profit engine for real estate in which an agent would tell white people living in a particular neighborhood that minorities would be moving in down the street and that property values would decrease. (There was no a priori reason why property values would decrease other than the scare tactics deployed by government and business.) The real estate agency would then quickly buy up houses at a low price to sell them at a high price to minority families, who had little choice of where to purchase property. At the same time, all across the country, racial covenants to many house deeds specified that only whites could live there. For example: “The…property…shall never be occupied, used or resided on by any person not of the white or Caucasian race, except in the capacity of a servant or domestic….” Neighbors in predominantly white areas mandated homeowner membership in associations, which also had rules forbidding sale to non-whites (Rothstein, pp. 79–81).

It was a restrictive covenant that formed the basis for neighbors preventing Grace and Sing Sheng, whose story is summarized above, from living in South San Francisco. Restrictive covenants and neighborhood dissent also affected the famous baseball player Willie Mays. In 1957, neighbors initially kept him from buying the house at 175 Miraloma St. in San Francisco. The contention was the view that the mere presence of people of color would depress property values, an idea widely peddled by our federal government in the HOLC pamphlets and by real estate blockbusters. Eventually Mays was able to buy the house, only to leave after a rock crashed through the front window with a hateful note attached. Undoubtedly, many non-whites, knowing they would face such conditions, did not even try to live in white neighborhoods.

The Role of Zoning in Segregation

After explicit racism in housing was deemed illegal, neighborhoods did not suddenly embrace integration. White-controlled institutions and areas turned to low-density zoning regulations with the hope that they would continue segregation. And it worked.

The first ever zoning law was passed in San Francisco in 1870. Called the Cubic Air ordinance, it ostensibly served to ensure people in boarding houses had enough space to live. However, in practice, police arrested only Chinese living in the boarding houses, never whites under the same conditions. After a court struck down the law, arrests of Chinese nevertheless continued, particularly after the state passed a similar law.

Subsequent zoning measures similarly purported at least in part to protect people’s health, but they also had powerfully segregationist elements. Many city planning commissions throughout the US explicitly relegated African Americans to the least desirable parts of town. Norfolk, VA and Kansas City, MO did this in defiance of court decisions, as late as 1987 (Rothstein, p. 48). Cities added single-family-only zoning to places where racist covenants required homeowners to sell only to whites. This way, city governments could control diffusion of non-whites and lower-income whites into multi-family properties by forcing those types of construction near industrial zones, liquor stores, houses of prostitution and the like. If African American families began to move into a predominantly white area, city planners could then zone that area to industrial, and could allow factories and junkyards to locate there (Rothstein, p. 50). These practices began in St. Louis with the infamous planner Harlan Bartholomew, who was “responsible for much of the racial discrimination that was written into zoning laws across the nation.”

San Francisco continued to participate in racial zoning beyond the Cubic Air Ordinance. By the 1920s, the San Francisco Planning Commission had carved up the city into Residential, Light and Heavy Industrial, Commercial, and Unrestricted zones. The Planning Commission during that time period openly admitted that parts of the Fillmore were designated as Residential rather than Commercial or Light Industrial areas to prevent Japanese businesses from growing stronger in that part of the city.

Later in the decade, the Commission established single-family residential areas all throughout the western parts of the city. The explanation was to encourage “desirable” neighborhoods and high property values. These benefits accrued to families — largely white families — that already owned homes in these segregated neighborhoods. The exclusion of multi-family buildings was specifically intended to keep out families of color.

Throughout the middle of the 20th century, San Francisco engaged in a practice of razing poorer neighborhoods, displacing communities of color, and zoning much of the area inside the city limits as single-family or duplex. This kept property values too high for non-whites to return. These patterns persist in San Francisco today.

The White Subsidy

Another way that whites in power have maintained segregation was through encouragement of “white flight.” The prevailing notion regarding this phenomenon is that prejudicial beliefs of white city dwellers caused them to flee neighborhoods when people they deemed belonging to another race, mainly African Americans, moved nearby. While this may be part of the story, whites often had incentives unavailable to people from racial minorities. Low-rate mortgages in neighborhoods rated Grade A or Grade B by the HOLC (see redlining map above) were available to white families in new white suburban neighborhoods. These loans were granted almost exclusively to white people on an unjust basis. Many whites received such loans when moving away from public housing, a program begun in the 1930s for working and middle class families and explicitly segregated by the federal government. While whites took advantage of the low-cost mortgages in brand new neighborhoods available to them, African Americans remained behind in overcrowded conditions, and weren’t even allowed to move into the public housing designated for whites after it became vacant. City governments disinvested from upkeep, law enforcement, and services (Rothstein, pp. 34, 50).

In a shocking nationwide wave of victim-blaming and horrific displacement, cities including New York, Chicago, San Francisco and pursued a wave of “urban renewal” in which entire neighborhoods were demolished. A notorious example of this campaign occurred in San Francisco’s Fillmore district during the 1950’s and 1960s in which thousands of mostly African American residents were displaced (Public Broadcasting System, 2000). Today, Geary Blvd still serves the function that 1956 San Francisco City Hall had originally intended: as a dividing line between the higher-income, overwhelmingly white northern Fillmore and lower-income southern Fillmore. This followed closely on the heels of the previous brutal displacement in the 1940s, when city officials rounded up all the Japanese and Japanese Americans living in the Fillmore and imprisoned them in internment camps (Public Broadcasting System, 2000).

Presumably as a mitigation strategy against demolition and displacement, San Francisco later added laws allowing for neighborhood residents to have more local control: the ability to petition City Hall, have input in local decisions at planning commission hearings, dispute proposed neighborhood changes. What this has created, however, is a system dominated by those with enough money and time on their hands to obstruct more inclusive housing in wealthy neighborhoods . As Hunter Oatman-Stanford writes: “In San Francisco…privileged neighbors have often appropriated low-income residents’ fears of gentrification and eviction to block any new housing, despite the fact that studies have repeatedly shown that in markets with high demand, adding housing of any kind typically helps decrease displacement .” Ironically, then, the local control ordinances originally created as a partial remedy to inequality are being used instead to cement it in place.

The Profound Harms of State-Sponsored Segregation

The US was not always so segregated. With the rise of industry early in the 20th century, people of various races, ethnicities and origins mixed together in working-class neighborhoods. For example, American writer Langston Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland and attested to its mixed character in his autobiography. Before 1936, Harlem, New York was a racially and ethnically diverse area. Not all neighborhoods were perfectly integrated, and some had predominantly one or another race or ethnicity. But the division and inequality was not as stark as they would later come to be due to the systematic tools of segregation. By 2010, 90% of African Americans would have had to move elsewhere to create communities reflecting the national racial proportions. This is largely because our most powerful institutions, controlled by whites, have rigidified, exacerbated and enforced segregation. They have done this through unequal legislation and application thereof, unfairly differential financing, and intensive nationwide propaganda. In this way, resources have been consistently concentrated to flow to whites and away from non-whites (Rothstein, pp. 20–34).

Although housing segregation began in its most explicit form decades ago, it is imperative that we understand and face the systems perpetuating it today. For generations, whites were allowed and encouraged to buy homes in desirable areas at low cost, with loans insured by the government, at a time when a working-class family could afford to do so. When housing developments in Daly City, California were established in the 1940s, a home costing $10,000 (Rothstein, p. 90) was accessible for a white family on the U.S. median annual salary of $3,100 . Today, an average home in Daly City costs close to $1,000,000 — many times the median US salary today of $62,000. The white working- or middle-class family of yesteryear could build generational wealth and send their children to college much more easily than others could. This amounts to what California Endowment Senior Vice President Dr. Anthony Iton calls “generations of affirmative action for whites.”

This inequality widens as children born in lower-income neighborhoods attend poorer schools funded by lower property taxes, are more likely to have to deal with instability, are farther away from nutritious food, and are less likely to be able to afford college. Economist Raj Chetty showed empirically that lower-income children placed in higher-income areas by age 13 go on to earn 31% more as adults. Across the board, little upward economic mobility is available to Americans — less so than in other countries. Many African American children have the deck stacked against them throughout life when they are born into difficult circumstances largely built by the most powerful structures in our nation.

For some people, it might be tempting to consider actions and events like these as part of the distant past, without any effect on society today. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Cory Booker*, today still a relatively young politician, was almost prevented from living in a New Jersey neighborhood when a white property owner punched Booker’s father in the face for putting a down payment on a house. Only by hiring a civil rights lawyer ahead of time, and organizing a bait-and-switch with a white family pretending to buy the house, did Booker’s family succeed in buying the house.

One reality that must be factored into the United States’ segregationist legacy is the likely millions of families of color that did not even try to live in a neighborhood they might have wanted. They knew they could face persecution and often violence without recourse or refuge. In his book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, historian Richard Rothstein catalogues cases from 1952 to as late as 1985 in which African American families were attacked with mob violence while law enforcement supported the assaults, looked on in merriment, threw white families in jail for selling a home to African Americans (Rothstein pp. 139–151).

If these cases seem surprising, they also remained off the radar of five justices of the US Supreme Court in 2007. The court struck down a public school racial integration plan on the ground that segregation did not arise because of government action or inaction (Rothstein, p. 151). Unfortunately and painfully, government policy, action, and enforcement or lack thereof has a lot to do with segregation. This Supreme Court decision did not take into account the systemically racist history of our nation.

Fair Housing In Name Only

In 1968, just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, the federal government passed the Fair Housing Act. This law made it illegal to discriminate based on race in renting, buying or selling homes. George Romney*, who was governor of Michigan and father of Senator Mitt Romney*, became the federal secretary of Housing and Urban Development shortly after the Fair Housing Act was passed. The law required cities receiving federal funds to affirmatively advance residential integration. The elder Romney urged President Nixon to carry out the Fair Housing Act by withholding federal funds from areas of the country that fought desegregation. Nixon stopped this at every turn.

Anti-density zoning practices continue to this day, functioning to increase racial segregation. In an article published by the National Institutes of Health, Rothwell and Massey report a definitive link between housing density and desegregation in U.S. cities. When housing density increases — multi-family units are allowed — segregation decreases. When cities implement laws to allow only low-density housing, such as single-family construction only, segregation increases . In order to start to undo the pernicious effects of racial segregation and finally comply with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, anti-density zoning must end. We can, and must, encourage more families of color to join our overall better-resourced, predominantly white neighborhoods.

What happens often today, unfortunately, is that residents in wealthy white neighborhoods oppose new and inclusive housing construction to preserve “neighborhood character” or “way of life.” This perpetuates the harmful, unjust, segregationist status quo built throughout our history by government, business, and private citizenry alike. For the good of society, we have to work toward equality and call out actions that would keep us segregated, regardless of conscious individual intention.

Because rich people often don’t let new housing into their communities, builders turn to lower-income communities, sparking debates about gentrification and displacement. What we as a society need to do instead is put lower-income housing in wealthy areas, and encourage integration, in order to help protect communities in other parts of the city from displacement. Indeed, even allowing housing of any kind in wealthier communities could help decrease displacement in lower-income communities (see Oatman-Stanford, 2018; Badger, 2016; Zuk and Chapple, 2016; Reizenwitz, 2017).

These problems are enormous, and most of us here today didn’t start or cause them. However, those of us who live in the more wealthy, predominantly white areas have to get involved. Our neighborhoods prosper at the expense of communities of color. If we face our segregationist past and how it still acts upon all of us today, we could work toward better overall economic production, happier and healthier children, less violence, less fear and mistrust. Doing this doesn’t mean pointing fingers at individuals and guessing at their intentions, but instead coming together to understand our past and make a better future.

Let us stop looking the other way, citing difficulties in solving these problems as reasons to forget about them. As James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Sources

Badger, Emily. “The poor are better off when we build more housing for the rich.” The Washington Post, February 15, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/12/the-poor-are-better-off-when-we-build-more-housing-for-the-rich/?noredirect=on

Baldwin, James. “As much truth as one can bear.” The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962. Retrieved from https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/01/14/118438007.html?pageNumber=120

Broussard, Albert S. Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954. Lawrence, The University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Chetty, Raj, Hendren, Nathaniel, and Katz, Lawrence F. The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment. National Science Foundation, NIA Grant R01, August, 2015.

Department of Justice. Fair Housing Act. Updated August 6, 2015. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-2

Einstein, Katherine Levine, Glick, David M., and Palmer, Maxwell. Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Elberling, John. “Racism — and politics — in SF Redevelopment history.” 48 Hills, February 22, 2017. Retrieved from https://48hills.org/2017/02/racism-politics-redevelopment/

Glenn-Gregg, Simon. “Why Is America’s Housing so Segregated?” The Century Foundation, May 5, 2016. Retrieved from https://tcf.org/content/facts/americas-housing-segregated/?agreed=1

Goldstein, Dana. “Chris Christie’s education plan is shocking.” Slate, June 24, 2016. Retrieved from https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/06/chris-christies-shockingly-regressive-education-plan.html

Greenhut, Steven. “Affordable Housing Debate Pits California Cities Against Suburbs. Both Need Freer Markets.” Reason, April 26, 2019. Retrieved from https://reason.com/2019/04/26/affordable-housing-debate-pits-california-cities-against-suburbs-both-need-freer-markets/

Guerrero, Susanna. “How Bay Area maps drawn 80 years ago still impact residents’ health.” SFGate, June 4, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/bay-area-redlining-maps-asthma-health-oakland-sf-13923112.php#photo-17599632

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law.” ProPublica, June 25, 2015. Retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law

Jacobs, Ben. “Cory Booker: Ivy League elite or hunger-striking hero?” The Guardian, March 13, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/13/who-is-cory-booker-democrat-2020

Kahlenberg, Richard D. and Quick, Kimberly. “The Government Created Housing Segregation. Here’s How the Government Can End It.” The American Prospect, July 2, 2019. Retrieved from https://prospect.org/civil-rights/government-created-housing-segregation.-government-can-end-it./

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Bold Type Books, 2016.

LaBounty, Woody. “Streetwise: Willie Mays. The Giants centerfielder moves to the western neighborhoods.” Outsidelands.org, Western Neighborhoods Project, August, 2000. Retrieved from http://outsidelands.org/sw5.php

Moore, Eli, Nicole Montojo, and Nicole Mauri. “Roots, Race, and Place: A History of Racially Exclusionary Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley. October 2019. haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/ rootsraceplace

Nittle, Nadra Kareem. “Blockbusting: When Black Homeowners Move to White Neighborhoods, And Why White Flight Ensues.” ThoughtCo., October 28, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/blockbusting-definition-4771994

Oatman-Stanford, Hunter. “Demolishing the California Dream: How San Francisco Planned Its Own Housing Crisis.” Collector’s Weekly, September 21, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/demolishing-the-california-dream/

Pittsburgh Main Streets. “Perry South in the 1970s: Blockbusting.” February 12, 2013. Retrieved from https://pittsburghmainstreets.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/perry-south-in-the-1970s-blockbusting/

Politics and Prose. (2017, May 21). “Richard Rothstein, _The Color of Law_, with Ta-Nahisi Coates [Video].” Timestamp: 28:51. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pb6y9rNKmo

Public Broadcasting System. “Fillmore timeline 1860–2001.” PBS, 2000–2001. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore/learning/time.html

Reeves, Richard and Krause, Eleanor. “Raj Chetty in 14 charts: Big findings on opportunity and mobility we should all know.” Brookings, January 11, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/01/11/raj-chetty-in-14-charts-big-findings-on-opportunity-and-mobility-we-should-know/

Reizenwitz, Cathy. “Housing More People Doesn’t Cause Displacement [Unintended Consequences].” Bay City Beacon, July 11, 2017. Retrieved from https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/housing-more-people-doesn-t-cause-displacement-unintended-consequences/article_3b07300c-726c-11e7-9a4c-07eedaae3b87.html

Ross, Janell. “A rundown of just how badly the Fair Housing Act has failed.” The Washington Post, July 10. 2015. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/10/a-look-at-just-how-badly-the-fair-housing-act-has-failed/

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017.

Rothwell, Jonathan and Massey, Douglas. “The effect of density zoning on racial segregation in urban areas.” U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. July 7, 2014. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4083588/

Squires, Gregory. “The Indelible Color Line: The Persistence of Housing Discrimination.” The American Prospect, December 10, 2001. Retrieved from https://prospect.org/civil-rights/indelible-color-line-persistence-housing-discrimination/

The Two Hundred. (2019, February 20). “Redlined, A Legacy of Housing Discrimination [Video].” Timestamps: 2:35, 3:30. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_sCS2E8k5g

United States Census Bureau. “Income of Families and Persons in the United States: 1949.” February 18, 1951. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1951/demo/p60-007.html

United States Census Bureau. “New Data Show Income Increased in 14 States and 10 of the Largest Metros.” September 26, 2019. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/us-median-household-income-up-in-2018-from-2017.html

Urban Displacement Project. (2018, April 25). “The Legacy of Redlining [Video].” Timestamp: 1:15. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRiOCEaFr0U&t=236s

Wilson, Michael H. “The Racist History of Zoning Laws.” Foundation for Economic Education, May 21, 2019. Retrieved from https://fee.org/articles/the-racist-history-of-zoning-laws/

Yang, Joshua S. “The Ani-Chinese Cubic Air Ordinance.” The American Journal of Public Health, March, 2009. Retrieved from https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2008.145813

Zuk, Miriam and Chapple, Karen. Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships. Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley. May, 2016.

Why Are We Still So Segregated? was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The current vacant lot at 1846 Grove

Update: this project has been further delayed for five weeks, and the Board of Supervisors will now be hearing it on September 29th. Please continue emailing your supervisor in support of the project and mark September 29th on your calendar to call into public comment!

Where exactly does “missing middle” housing get lost in San Francisco? Let me tell you the story of almost five years of process, and the housing that a self-identified “progressive” Supervisor is holding hostage.

In 2016, Troy Kashanipour, an architect, and two partners (a home-builder and a small business owner) purchased a vacant lot at the intersection of Grove and Masonic, close to exact center of San Francisco. The lot had been vacant for decades, despite the location and easy access to the rest of the city (a 25 minute bus ride to downtown). While San Francisco continued to suffer from a major housing shortage driving some of the most expensive rents in the country, the lot remained stubbornly vacant.

Home prices in the blocks surrounding 1846 Grove (according to Zillow)

Surrounding this vacant lot, the typical home goes for >$1.5M dollars. Building a small complex of mid-sized homes would provide an option for middle class families that want to live in the neighborhood but would be unable to afford a $300k+ down payment to buy one of the existing homes in the area.

Architectural drawing of the proposed homes at 1846 Grove

Looking at the project itself, it’s hard to find a reasonable complaint: the homes are at most a couple stories tall, with a remarkably unobtrusive design. There is plenty of greenspace and sustainable design principles. Personally, I think it looks pretty cool, if a little boring. In a sane world, where San Francisco celebrated new homes on a vacant lot, a project like this would undergo a straightforward safety and planning review on a reasonable timeline. These homes would be built without unnecessary delay. But we do not currently live in that world.

In 2017, Troy submitted a pre-application — to the Department of Building Inspection and SF Fire Department. From that day, it took almost three years to even get the project in front of the Planning Commission. Countless community meetings, delayed hearings, and an employee change at the Fire Department meant three years of bureaucratic nonsense.

When 1846 Grove Street was finally reached the Planning Commission in December 2019, it was not approved. The commission punted, “continuing” the decision until March. After a delay due to the pandemic, the Planning Commission unanimously approved the project in April, thanks to dozens of supporters calling in and providing testimony in favor of the four homes.

You would think that would be the end of it. Instead, a small group of NIMBYs filed an appeal to stop the project. Since almost every permit in San Francisco can be appealed, there are numerous ways to jam up any proposal. In what appeared to be a stroke of good fortune, the haters were unable to get the necessary 20% of signatures from people within 300' of the project to successfully bring forward an appeal. It seemed the vast majority of neighbors near the project either supported the project or were ambivalent, choosing not to join the appeal.

If you thought that was the end of this byzantine ordeal, you would be sorely mistaken — the Board of Supervisors has the right to appeal any project, forcing it to undergo a hearing and approval vote in front of the entire Board. Given the COVID-19 pandemic. a massive budget crisis, Caltrain on the brink of destruction, and our housing shortage, you’d think that our Supervisors would have more important things to concern themselves with than four homes being built in an empty lot. But no, Dean Preston, who has made his NIMBY preferences clear time and time again, got four of his fellow supervisors (Ronen, Haney, Peskin, and Mar) to join his appeal of this project.

When asked why he appealed the project, Dean refused to provide any substantial reason to oppose the four homes, instead nonsensically dismissing the entire project offhand as being “landlocked.” He smeared supporters of the project as believing a “twisted ‘all housing matters’ theory”. Yes, Dean Preston compared people who support building four homes in a vacant lot to the racist morons screaming “all lives matter”.

This isn’t the first time Dean has come out with absurd anti-housing stances. While he claims to be an “affordable housing advocate,” he refuses to commit to building 8 stories (the maximum height permitted by current zoning) of 100% affordable housing at 730 Stanyan, a city-owned parking lot. To those who have followed Preston’s career, this shouldn’t be surprising. He has strong ties with the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC), a NIMBY group that consistently opposes building housing. Preston’s NIMBYism also makes sense when you consider the fact that the mansion on Alamo Square he bought for under $1M twenty years ago is now worth $3M (according to Zillow, many experts believe that it’s likely worth significantly more than that due to its unique location across the street from the Painted Ladies). Dean Preston has been a direct beneficiary of the housing shortage and has a personal financial interest in exacerbating it.

Dean Preston is right about one thing: why should anyone care about four units on a vacant lot? These four homes are just a tiny portion of the tens of thousands that need to be built in San Francisco. What he fails to acknowledge is that by forcing four units on a vacant lot in an affluent neighborhood to take half a decade to even get approval, we are forcing a city-wide debate for every little scrap of housing, generating a chronic housing shortage, astronomical prices, and a displacement crisis beyond comprehension.

This project perfectly illustrates why we are in such a severe housing crisis: A maze of bureaucracy, politicians who find every opportunity to placate NIMBYs, and a system that finds any excuse to stop home-building while blaming everyone else. Instead of rolling up their sleeves to try and find progressive solutions to our housing crisis, elected officials are constantly granting small favors to NIMBYs, blocking “just” this little housing project over and over and over again as our housing shortage keeps getting worse. We shouldn’t need petitions to get four homes approved on a vacant lot.

Although the fate of 1846 Grove remains up in the air (it will be put in front of the Board of Supervisors A̶u̶g̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶2̶5̶t̶h̶ September 29th, and if approved, the project would need to wait up to a year to receive final permits from DBI and DPW), we need bold systemic change to fix the broken process that has gotten us into this housing crisis.

We need to vote for pro-housing candidates in local elections. We need to organize in support of building more housing. We need to push for legislation that streamlines the homebuilding process and places the needs of renters and the housing-insecure over that of millionaire NIMBYs.

We cannot accept a status quo where it takes more than four years to get approval to build four homes. Join me in growing the YIMBY movement and fight to legalize housing.

Furthermore, to take action on this project, PLEASE email all the Supervisors indicating support for the homes at 1846 Grove and rejecting this merit-less and obstructionist appeal. Please include the Address in the subject line. It would not hurt to indicate which District you live in, if possible, in the body of the email.
Matt.Haney@sfgov.org
MandelmanStaff@sfgov.org
Gordon.Mar@sfgov.org
Aaron.Peskin@sfgov.org
Dean.Preston@sfgov.org
Sandra.Fewer@sfgov.org
Hillary.Ronen@sfgov.org
Ahsha.Safai@sfgov.org
Catherine.Stefani@sfgov.org
Shamann.Walton@sfgov.org
Norman.Yee@sfgov.org
Please cc: sasha.dzin@gmail.com”

Four Homes, Four Years: The saga to build four homes at 1846 Grove St. was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the horrific murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery launched a nationwide reckoning with the depth of structural racism, YIMBYs knew we also had to do our own reckoning. We are part of an urbanist movement with a long legacy of building spaces that have marginalized Black communities and excluded Black voices from our decision-making, even as we have fought against segregationist housing policy. We have so much work to do. So YIMBY Action is conducting a series of conversations called “Making Urbanism Antiracist.” Our hope is that these conversations can help us do the work with intention.

Our third conversation in this series was with Michael Lens, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He began his career studying subsidized housing and opportunity, and has since studied a wide array of housing issues, including eviction, homelessness, zoning, and housing supply. Late last year, Michael published (along with his colleagues Michael Manville and Paavo Monkkonen) a cri de coeur titled “It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning” in the Journal of the American Planning Association, which has advanced the academic argument for the idea of ending apartment bans completely.

Michael spoke about how people who are making new commitments to racial equality need to look carefully at their neighborhoods:

A strong subset of those people are also saying, “What can I do? What can I read? How can I help? This is terrible, I hate this, and I feel sadness about the state of Black America.” You have to take people at their word, and if you’re a city council person in a very segregated place or a place that is 90% single-family housing, or if you’re a parent whose child goes to virtually all White or all White and Asian school, the answer is right in front of you: you need to push for integration of your community by all means.

Watch the video to see Michael discuss:

• Why a paper like “It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning” is a bit of a “post-tenure luxury” in an academic setting (7:40)
• His start in policy as someone interested primarily in poverty, and how that led to an interest in housing (10:00)
• The ideal of exchanging information between academia and the policy world, and why it doesn’t always work out (14:40)
• How he modulates his housing message depending on the audience when working with policymakers (17:50)
• Why the American myth of the level playing field is an important tool to get white folks to recognize inequities in their neighborhoods (29:40)
• The tensions between YIMBYs and tenants organizations around the best solutions for displacement and what “the easy answer” is (hint: it’s not actually easy) (31:25)
• The difficulties of modeling high opportunity areas and communities of concern in legislation such as California’s SB50, and how data may not always match our qualitative instincts (37:50)
• His family background, and how his trajectory from benefiting from section 8 vouchers as a kid to being a professor as an adult reminds him why he does the work (39:30)
• Why the home ownership gap for the last 70 years is one of the best arguments for reparations (48:50)
• Whether single-family zoning is inherently racist (50:05)
• How we can integrate neighborhoods while protecting people of color (55:00)

Thanks so much to Laura Foote of YIMBY Action and Roderick Hall of Abundant Housing LA for conducting the interview. Thanks also to Board Member Sasha Aickin for compiling this blog post recap.

If you enjoyed this talk, please consider attending our next talk in the series, catching up on the entire series, or joining YIMBY Action as a member!

Join us for the next in the series: Dr. Andre Perry, author of Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities, joins us on Tuesday, August 11th at 5pm PT / 8pm ET. This event is cohosted by YIMBY Action, YIMBY Law, and the East Oakland Black Cultural Zone Collaborative.

Michael Lens on Making Urbanism Antiracist was originally published in YIMBY Dispatches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.