The Bay Area’s entrenched housing problems are famous for creating divisions: tenant groups and rent control advocates vs. landlords, for instance.
But a housing forum held last week at LinkedIn San Francisco pointed to something different: “Call to action” rhetoric that seemed to be embraced by an unusual cross-section of interested parties — real estate agents, academics, developers, public officials and YIMBY (meaning “Yes In My Backyard”) pro-growth activists. All attended the forum, titled “California Housing Crisis: Examining the Impact on the Bay Area” and organized by the Center for California Real Estate (an arm of the California Association of Realtors) and the Bay Area Council.
There was talk about mobilizing voting blocs and packing city council meetings.
Yimby Action Executive Director Laura Foote Clarke was greeted with an outbreak of applause when she said, “I do think we can out-organize them,” meaning her organization’s NIMBY (“No In My Backyard”) opponents. Decrying the “collective action failure” that she said has led to the current housing situation, Clarke exhorted her audience: “People have to yell at their local state legislator… I assure you that they will be listening to the loudest constituency in their community.”
Then she identified groups that might be swayed to support urban densification and other housing development strategies that could open up the market and bring down prices: “Owners who want their children to be able to live here and to see their grandkids… Obsessives who are so mad at a situation that they will actually go and sit at a hearing for three-to-six hours… And I think everywhere has millennials living in the basement these days — people who are really enraged by the entire situation. These are good people to activate.”
Jonathan Scharfman, general manager of Universal Paragon Corp., which has been trying for 12 years to build on the 684-acre Baylands site in Brisbane, talked about “political will.” He said it “exists in Sacramento, but not at the local level,” and he called on state policymakers to streamline regulatory hurdles to development — and to overhaul Prop 13. That would uncork property tax revenues and help fund local efforts to build affordable housing and improve schools — removing the “disincentive for cities to resist” proposals like the one at the Baylands site, he said.
Rosanne Foust, a former mayor of Redwood City and longtime environmental advocate, seemed surprised to hear herself touting a new book by U.S. Senator Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, that rails against President Donald Trump on a variety of issues.
Yet Foust — smiling at the seeming strangeness of her request — urged her audience to read Flake’s “Conscience of a Conservative” to get a sense of the “political will” that is needed across the American landscape, including in the Bay Area’s fight to expand the housing supply and bring down prices.
She said downtown Redwood City “is a very different place” now than it was 10 years ago as a result of the plans she and others pushed through to bring mixed-use housing development to the area. Along the way, she said, she became “the target of the anti-growth contingent” and lost her job as mayor.
“But you have to be willing to lose your seat,” she said. “You have to have political will.”
Photo: A new housing complex rises in downtown San Jose. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)