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.
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 boosters, like the mayor of Berkeley, came out against it, proposing instead a toothless Association of Bay Area Governments that would only pen recommendations rather than wield any true power.25 Those against regional control presented arguments in the vein of Jane Jacobs, emphasizing that coordination at a higher level would devolve into a big money plot that would destroy their existing communities. They managed to block the measure in a first blow to more streamlined governance of development and transport as a harbinger of things to come.
As historian Alison Isenberg has shown, there was also much to fear: in pursuit of urban renewal goals, real estate boosters often sought to tear down historic harborside warehouses and erase existing streets into the footprints of shopping malls while underpaying the city for their privatization. Networks of housing activists were continually mobilized in the 1960s: they could quickly turn up to protest buildings that were too large or that threatened to increase rent; even projects to refurbish public housing were viewed as likely accelerators of displacement and were resisted. Justin Herman, San Francisco’s urban development czar, was baffled by the ferocity of resistance, commenting with Robert Moses–like certitude: “Meaningful and productive involvement can be done only by private citizens who have the time and capacity to become thoroughly acquainted with complex problems—otherwise, they are prone to condemn what they do not understand.”26
Unlike in other cities going through similar changes in the 1960s, urban renewal in San Francisco faced a coalition of artists, preservationists, designers, and self-taught urbanists who vociferously objected to large-scale projects. They distrusted the expertise of urban renewal professionals and were disgusted by the scale and aesthetics of modernist glass towers. Housing activists from groups like Yerba Buena Tenants Union, Western Addition Project Area Committee, and San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Aid Foundation demanded that the municipal government improve the quality of housing stock while remaining skeptical about the government’s desire or ability to address issues that primarily affected the urban poor.27 The shock engendered by the forty-eight-story Transamerica Pyramid (built in 1969) created an effective coalition enforcing constraints on vertical development.28 The structure was seen as a grotesque imposition onto the city’s mostly horizontal surface, with one letter writer derisively saying it “would be ideal for Las Vegas.”29 San Franciscans from many walks of life began to appreciate vernacular urban landscapes of wharfs, decaying Victorian homes, and brick warehouses, and they fought off those who demeaned this aesthetic as shabby or antiquated out of true stylistic preferences as well as a knowledge that with development, displacement would most likely follow. This often took the form of defending public housing and rent control in central neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, including mass tenant organizing within the San Francisco Housing Authority.30
The anti-growth sentiment continued throughout the 1960s, as Californians worried that the image of a temperate coastal paradise broadcast to the rest of the country had been a little too successful. In San Francisco particularly, the rallying cry was to stop the “Manhattanization” of the city. However, the real villain of uncontrolled sprawl was Los Angeles, its rival to the South, and well before Richard Nixon became president or Ronald Reagan became governor the two cities had begun to define themselves against each other, both politically and in terms of the built environment. Objections to growth were a mixture of forces: from suburban homeowners in places like Santa Clara County that zoned 70 percent of all land for single-family homes exclusively31 to more environmentally inspired objections in Marin County. Some calls to halt planned highways and housing were unabashedly racist: in 1964 Californians nullified the legislature’s fair housing act so that landlords could continue to discriminate by race. The ballot proposition was overturned by the California State Supreme Court, and then by the US Supreme Court, but not before anti-growth sentiment attracted national attention that led then Governor Edmund Brown to excoriate the state’s voters for endorsing a law that seemed more in keeping with the politics of Mississippi or Alabama.32 Other objections to growth capitalized on a broader sense of regional competition to maintain housing prices, retain a bucolic environment, and limit the burden on public services. California became, in short, a laboratory for NIMBYism after a century of unrestrained growth.
NIMBYistic objections are often well founded. They do not just represent the selfishness of the homeowners looking over their shoulders and resisting anything that may depress property values. Concern about one’s backyard is often a deeply deliberative form of community engagement33 that addresses the carrying capacity of land with on-the-ground knowledge that is attuned to environmental quality and social cohesion. However, it can become a mindset that denies all changes made at scale, embracing some of the more pernicious aspects of American federalism and home rule. Preserving independent, devolved decision making can come from overall skepticism about “big government,” but also from latent racism or an unwillingness to share space and resources with others. In California in the 1970s, this was what was beginning to develop, and after reshaping the state’s tax codes and housing policy, it would also become a major force in Goldwater and Reagan Republicanism. Fear of regional coordination and a revolt against taxes (often in racialized terms that decried progressive taxation as a form of unjust redistribution to inner-city African Americans) spurred Californians to hunker down in their suburbs and resist infrastructure meant for broad public use.
In 1978, the California slow-growth movement lodged an astonishing legislative success with the passage of Proposition 13 that fundamentally reoriented urban development and property taxes in the United States. The ballot initiative, named People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation, was the pet project of anti-tax millionaire Howard Jarvis, who sought to cap property taxes out of not just a sense of runaway rates but a distaste for what he regarded as government tyranny.34 The law, which is still in effect, limits property taxes to one percent of a home’s value. The impetus for this, as stated in the initiative, was to protect Californians on a fixed income, especially retirees. However, as a number of policy analyses have shown,35 it has acted as a regressive tax allowing wealthier homeowners to claw back payments that once supported municipal services. After passage of the law, cities struggled to fill their budget gaps, which created a new sensibility around land use. As the geographer Alex Schafran has shown, Proposition 13 marks the increased financialization of land use but its ideological origins have more to do with traditional liberalism and “home rule” rather than neoliberal marketization. It created a new economy of most desirable development: commercial strip malls were at the top (because they paid communities impact and linkage fees that could be channeled into cash-starved public services) while affordable housing, with almost no tax revenue, was at the bottom of the hierarchy.36 This helped speed the inequality between suburbs: some attracted high-end shops and luxury homes as others became more and more defined as worker cities for blue-collar employees. City managers maximized payments coming from new development because of constant budget emergencies while ignoring the social and environmental consequences of towns filled with strip malls but few apartment complexes.
Although city managers were at first fearful of Proposition 13, it was a hit with citizens, and facsimile policies were put into law in other states. San Francisco in particular took the slow-growth ballot measure as a sign of a new public appetite for restricting development, even if that meant saying “no” to new businesses. In 1986, the city passed Proposition M, which limited office construction to 950,000 square feet a year. At the time, it was the most restrictive measure in the United States. Political scientist Richard DeLeon notes that by the 1990s, NIMBYistic thinking in San Francisco had become a kind of “urban feudalism” that was often defended solely on the basis of complicating regional power. The appeal of this stance often rested on a radical legacy: throwing a wrench into large-scale plans was viewed as a means to keep elites from amassing power and a way to protect the “little guy.” DeLeon argues that San Francisco—instead of taming a typical urban growth machine by moderating development—created an “antiregime” that “regulates by impedimenta.” This antiregime went far beyond simple quality control and became fanatical, maintains DeLeon: “The antiregime is protective, defensive, and obstructive. In the domain of land-use planning and physical development, its written and unwritten constitution can be boiled down to a single word: no.”37 Yet, the coalition of “no” was surprisingly diverse and enduring.
The new slow-growth sensibility had a tremendous impact on housing. Its backers were a coalition of downtown commercial real estate owners hoping to maximize value, activists from low-income neighborhoods seeking to stay in their homes and avoid gentrification, environmentalists, and affluent homeowners. Many of them came together as early as the 1960s to protest against the double-decker coastal Embarcadero Freeway, mobilizing tens of thousands of protestors who ultimately prevented substantial sections of the project from being built. By the 1970s and 1980s, the coalition had grown both stronger and more radical in their anti-growth demands. They fought mega-projects and new housing, sometimes projects with significant affordable housing contained within their plans. They first elected the liberal mayor Art Agnos and then became a thorn in his side by thwarting his pet projects for housing and economic rejuvenation. For example, in 1990 a proposal to build ninety-one units of housing with twenty-nine low-income apartments for artists was vociferously opposed by neighborhood residents. When the no-growth coalition lost, they claimed the site was potentially a habitat for the rare Harvestman spider, further delaying the project and adding to construction costs.38
San Francisco’s low-growth activism was particularly adept at stopping the overhauling of planning codes to allow larger and taller buildings in the process known as “upzoning” by urban planners, which adds density and frequently multistory buildings to flatter urban neighborhoods as cities grow (it can also change codes from residential only to mixed-use commercial-residential). Many neighborhoods successfully organized against upzoning in the 1990s, often galvanized by large-scale opposition to new developments, such as the 1990 Mission Bay mixed-use harborfront project. At the same time, the tech economy was growing by leaps and bounds, putting pressure on previously low-income neighborhoods such as South of Market Street. Even high-crime neighborhoods like the Tenderloin felt increased pressure on the rental market, leading many community members to fear for their homes. Anti-gentrification groups such as the North of Market Planning Coalition were successful in protecting single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings (in contrast to other American cities). This group also downzoned the Tenderloin in 1985 to make all new structures a maximum of eighty feet rather than the previous 130 to 320 feet.39 This created a unique swath of prime downtown real estate that was protected from development as the city around it became ever more affluent: leading to the jarring juxtaposition, described in the beginning of this chapter, of affluent tech employees going to work just blocks from the severe poverty and addiction in the streets surrounding the Tenderloin. While low-income residents have been temporarily spared being priced out of the Tenderloin, the overall strategy of a development moratorium has been utilized in much more affluent neighborhoods, helping to choke off the housing supply.
When the first dot-com bubble burst in 2000, there was a temporary reprieve for communities in San Francisco threatened by gentrification, but it was short-lived. Housing became a crucial concern because of the city’s geography and its decades of slow-growth legislation. Lighter-footprint tech firms began moving from Silicon Valley to the city itself, drawn by urban amenities. As tech companies focused more on lifestyle products, they began to believe that their office parks in the suburbs were producing “silicon nerds” rather than cosmopolitans, making the relocation to a downtown office not just a means to ensure the happiness of the workforce but an attempt to produce a certain kind of worker.40 Many of the companies that moved to the city center either had a skeletal start-up staff of under 100, paid very well, or both, making housing affordability and the quantity of new units available less of a workforce challenge than it would be for other industries.
By the time of the 2008 economic crisis, these firms were assisted by city policy as well. Incentives to move to San Francisco’s center abounded. Mayor Ed Lee sought to steer growth to the Tenderloin as an economic development project although few existing residents would find employment in tech offices. In 2011, he created the Central Market Payroll Tax Exclusion that waived payroll taxes for six years for large companies. The measure was spurred by Twitter’s threat to abandon their Mid-Market neighborhood central office. By the 2010s, these companies relied on public funds while eschewing local infrastructure: they made their own high-end cafeterias, provided in-house fitness services, and created party-equipped offices that replaced local happy-hour destinations. Companies like Google supply their own buses, other tech workers rely on ridesharing apps for transportation instead of taking public transit, and many companies have a fleet of bicycles that undermine public bike-share programs. The only necessity not provided is housing—at least not yet.
Private infrastructure is, of course, a perfect fit for a certain brand of technophilic libertarianism. The welfare-state public infrastructure of the mid-twentieth century can seem passé and sometimes even an impediment to creating new “smart cities” that enable mobility, employment, and services through new spatial and online interactions.41 These new private systems denationalize previous forms of infrastructure by taking away a sense of collective ownership. For many people, this is a good thing: few feel pride in the rusting antiquated systems of the federal government. As the architectural theorist Keller Easterling has shown, local and state governments have willingly given up some sovereignty in terms of infrastructure provisioning, both as a form of cost-cutting and as an acknowledgment of their lack of capacity in the digital age.42 Public infrastructure has become a temporal marker, signifying an era that has come and gone, eliciting sorrow from big-state progressives and glee from small-government conservatives.43 San Francisco tech companies, more in line with the latter ideology, seek to create a new, privatized physical infrastructure to complement the digital systems they have already erected.44 The problem is that they cannot marshal control of the municipal government. So, for the time being, they have built an auxiliary infrastructure on top of the dying public system. While many tech companies earnestly engage with urban problems and attempt to harness big data to find solutions, they rarely see a meaningful role for the public systems of the past.
The move from Silicon Valley office parks to downtown San Francisco shows a fatal flaw in the privatization of infrastructure: tech employees do not want to live in suburban tech campuses. They want to be amidst a thriving urban core, problems and all. In terms of housing options, tech employees often seek out the charm of bay-windowed Victorian houses, where they can realize not just a sense of urban authenticity45 but also considerable investment potential from the rent gap of socioeconomically changing neighborhoods.46 Their employers can take advantage of tax incentives for relocation (such as those provided by Mayor Ed Lee) while also transitioning from pricey suburban Silicon Valley locations to up-and-coming—that is, gentrifying—urban sites. This increasingly forces out low-income urbanites living at the center of the city, creating an image of a “whitened” city in which people of color are disappearing. Indeed, San Francisco’s African American population declined by nearly 40 percent between 1990 and 2010.47 The city government, long beset by the problem of low growth, could finally strike back at the anti-development coalitions: politicians like Ed Lee were able to welcome new businesses without building significantly more housing or constructing new office towers because of the light footprints of most tech companies and their penchant for refurbishing older buildings (at first).
In this sense, the welcoming of tech into the core of San Francisco was an attempt to prop up failing infrastructure with jobs and tax revenue, reminding us, in the words of geographers Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, that infrastructure plans, “instead of being static material artefacts to be relied on without much thought, … are, in effect, processes that have to be worked towards.”48 Politicians hoped to save transit and other municipal services after the 2008 economic crisis, and they sought the help of the growing downtown tech industry. Yet, San Francisco made few inroads toward building new housing even as job growth soared and defied the downturn of the Great Recession. Soon the problem would become emblematic of the city, and the lack of solutions would paralyze municipal agencies and bitterly divide neighborhoods.
In 2014, the YIMBY movement was born with the ignominious name BARF (Bay Area Renters Federation). The name was thought up by the transplanted Philadelphia teacher Sonja Trauss, who sought to grab people’s attention and also to adequately express the housing situation in San Francisco: it was so dire that just thinking about it made people want to vomit. Trauss and other founding members of BARF believe that housing activism needs a sense of levity and a more practical orientation: activists have to stop saying “no” to development projects that are not perfect. This primarily meant standing up for proposed apartment buildings that mixed market-rate and affordable dwellings, rather than holding out for wholly subsidized projects. BARF activists supported the idea of public housing, community land trusts, and other novel means to offer not-for-profit shelter, but they did not believe these ideas were sensible or scalable in the booming San Francisco real estate market that followed the expansion of app-based tech firms into the downtown. As Steven Buss, an early volunteer with the group, put it: “In order to be a YIMBY you need to say ‘I want subsidized and market-rate housing’ because if you only want one or the other it is unworkable. The market will never provide for very low-income people and the government in America is just not capable of building the amount of housing that we need to build.”
Early BARF organizers began setting up meetings for like-minded renters at happy-hour teach-ins on urban density. Buss, who started attending these meeting in 2014 and works in tech like many other participants, described them as small and very DIY:
We met at this warehouse in SoMa. The warehouse had no heating and no cooling, and I am pretty sure we were illegally running this operation out of the warehouse. Which is just pretty “on brand” for us. It was full of people like me: who were young and pissed off about the mismanagement of the city.
Buss had recently moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles and was astounded at the price of accommodation. Six months before moving to the Bay Area he began searching for an apartment for him and his fiancée, but looking on Craigslist, he found that prices kept going up. Eventually a colleague told him that his roommate was moving out and he and his partner could rent the room (for slightly more than they had paid for an entire one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles). A couple of months later, Buss and his fiancée split up, and he was back searching for a place to live. He remembers this time as extraordinarily frustrating:
I started to search again and everything had increased in price.… I ended up sleeping on the couch in my ex-fiancée’s apartment for a couple months and that’s not pleasant.… That was the last place I wanted to be. And that’s the thing that radicalized me.
For many YIMBYs the language of radicalization is relative: their solutions are in keeping with mainstream urban-planning dogma, palatable to municipal governments, and downright thrilling for developers. The reason that YIMBYs often have a conversion story at all is that they are often comfortably middle class and did not previously feel the need to defend their economic interests. Yet, the extent of unaffordability in urban housing markets changed their own sense of financial security and forced them to advocate for their interests in a more assertive style. At early BARF meetings, Buss was introduced to other YIMBYs who were equally angry about the rental market. Many were tech workers with good salaries who simply could not understand how prices had gotten so out of control in San Francisco. They quickly settled on a reason: a lack of construction and an arcane permitting process that allowed existing residents to block new construction. As Buss put it:
Discretionary review is the process that allows any random person in the city to appeal any project. They can just pay a couple hundred dollars and say: “I don’t like this” and they can hold the project up for years. Literally years. The majority of the time, it is not good-faith opposition but millionaires fighting millionaires. Occasionally you get a millionaire fighting a billionaire.
The idea that San Francisco’s NIMBY thinking was a battle between elites was a common thread at YIMBY meetings. If they had to choose, YIMBYs tended to side with the wealthy developers, because at least developers’ aims could be tempered into a socially useful outcome (more housing). They saved special ire for progressives who bought their mansions at a discount when the city was a cheaper place. Laura Foote, a prominent YIMBY in San Francisco, said: “everyone was sick of being told they were a newcomer because they hadn’t lived in the same house for thirty years.” During zoning meetings for new construction she added there were two types of NIMBYs: the growth denialists who say, “I don’t live in a place where I think there will have to be any growth, so smart growth isn’t an issue,” and those with murky ideas about how to get things built: “there are people who, when you ask them if we should have more housing, they say ‘absolutely,’ but if you say ‘do we need more development’ they’ll answer ‘not at all.’ ” This thinking also echoed the idea that residents of wealthy neighborhoods frequently conflate community development and construction, both of which they feel should take place in lower-income places.
Early meetings were often led by two of the rising stars of the YIMBY movement, Laura Foote and Sonja Trauss, but they were collaborative affairs, sometimes starting almost as a venting session over drinks and snacks. Buss remembers one early meeting in the cold SoMa warehouse when they got out a piece of butcher paper and started jotting down ideas. Other meetings were held at bars in the hope of attracting walk-ins who would come for a brief pitch talk and stay for drinks and chat about housing or other topics. For Foote, this was all about creating low-key spaces that were welcoming for those without much of an organizing background: “Get beers afterwards. Can’t overestimate that. It is critical to community building. Nurtures the quality and not quantity of your community,” she told me. Joe Rivano Barros, another early YIMBY participant, confirmed this, saying that meetings could last up to three hours: “YIMBYs are very social, and if you don’t make your political home a social home, people will stop coming. There are always snacks and drinks,” he said. Foote and others said that these social ties—and even the kvetching about housing prices—were essential to group solidarity: common grievances got people activated. As she put it:
Someone will come out once because they are really angry; they’ll come out twice because you guilt-tripped them; but if they didn’t have a good time, and if they didn’t bond with people and feel like they were appreciated and what they did matters, … they won’t come back.
This early collaborative and horizontalist approach was meant to get as many people in the room as possible. It succeeded in attracting a wide swath of the political spectrum, from those working in the real estate industry to anti-capitalist organizers, although this compromise would prove to be short-lived.
The first goal of YIMBY activists in San Francisco was to create a platform to amplify the voice of renters. As of 2018, 65 percent of San Franciscans rent their apartments. Of those, almost 60 percent enjoy rent control: a tremendous number for an American city. Yet, the other 40 percent are left at the whim of the rising housing prices, and some of them, with below-market apartments, may face displacement.49 Trauss and other YIMBYs felt that renters, who spend nearly 40 percent of their income on housing in San Francisco–Oakland–Hayward,50 were pitied but not heard. Their voices were present in debates on gentrification but not at city planning meetings that discussed expanding the housing stock. Instead, these meetings were dominated by homeowners who consistently argued against apartment buildings for reasons such as traffic, casting shadows, and depleting “community character.” BARF activists were skeptical of community character, and when it was invoked, they heard hints of self-interest and protecting the status quo rather than defending a group of actual people tied together by social bonds. As Joe Matthews, a California writer sympathetic to YIMBY views, put it:
The dark political genius of the “protecting the character of the community” argument is that it allows those who employ it to avoid responsibility for their obstructionism. They portray themselves as “stakeholders” merely trying to keep their neighborhood from getting hurt. Even worse, at a time that celebrates activism, many of these community-character protectors pose as righteous neighborhood activists.51
YIMBYs saw themselves as the true activists, while depicting those who resisted change as selfish and out of touch with how cities mature. As Matthews puts it: “The defense of community character is a lousy argument in normal times, because neither character nor community is static. Housing, buildings, streets, economies, and public spaces all age, and all must be maintained, updated, and renewed.”52 One of the countless YIMBY memes on the topic shows Spongebob Squarepants considering NIMBY logic in front of a smelly trash can with text that reads: “The laundromat that no one knows about that got the city to designate a historic place,” riffing off a real struggle for historic designation in the Mission spearheaded by a city supervisor.53 Given their frustration with community character and the perceived need to defend the spatial and aesthetic status quo, YIMBYs were determined to fill planning meetings with their own coalition of, mostly, market-rate renters who had neither an endangered rent-controlled apartment nor a home with a mortgage to protect.
Many of the first people to join BARF were newcomers to San Francisco who struggled to find and stay in a reasonably priced apartment. They often felt both cash-strapped and targeted for destroying existing communities. One tech worker described the group as a safe space to “be both privileged enough to be paying $4,000 in rent a month but also worried about that price.… The meetings were a place where no one would tell you ‘You don’t belong in this city’ or ‘[You’re] just another tech bro.’ ”
Early YIMBYs disdained NIMBY activists for their inability to see the housing crisis as a matter of supply. They also disliked many existing neighborhood groups who demonized all newcomers. Tim Redmond, writing in the now-defunct San Francisco Bay Guardian, a left-leaning paper focused on city culture, responded negatively to the YIMBY movement, implying that previous migrants to San Francisco had been beatniks, hippies, and gay people motivated by cultural reasons and that newcomers were motivated only for economic reasons.54 YIMBY activists were quick to ridicule Redmond for his stance on closing the gates to the Bay Area on “greedy” newcomers because he lived in a $1.4 million house that had quadrupled in value since he bought it. Thanks to Proposition 13, Redmond only paid a 0.4 percent annual tax55 on his home while complaining that “When you are in a hole, stop digging. If you’re in a crisis, don’t make it worse. And right now, building luxury housing is a net loser for the city.”56 YIMBYs see this kind of concern about housing affordability from the San Francisco old guard as disingenuous, asserting that the latter are less concerned with gentrification and simply annoyed that they will have endure more people and larger buildings. The activists roundly mock the people who “just came for the culture” as selfish and out of touch with housing economics, highlighting their incredulous attitude as proof of their provincial suburban mindset.
“Cities need to expand at some point,” a woman who worked in tech and attended YIMBY meetings in Oakland and San Francisco told me. She added:
We were really tired of being told “you’re rich so shut up” because many of us either didn’t feel rich because of the prices here or … believed, like I do, that, hey, someone has to spend money in this city and get the economy going. So, is it really so bad to be a city that attracts people who earn a good income?
In many cases, YIMBYs felt that their education and prosperity was exactly what allowed them to be good neighbors: they could devote their time to activism that required a high degree of urban planning knowledge, and they felt that their efforts would make communities more livable for all residents.57
By 2016, San Francisco YIMBYs were already thousands strong and expanding into new organizations and neighborhoods. Trauss had jettisoned the name BARF for the less humorous California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund (CaRLA) while also lending a hand to start YIMBY Action with Laura Foote, a group that encouraged pro-density political candidates, and California YIMBY, a group that lobbies in Sacramento for new housing policies. Along with these larger organizations, neighborhood groups sprang up around the Bay Area coordinating support for individual projects seeking zoning approval. There was Grow the Richmond, Oakland YIMBY, East Bay for Everyone, Palo Alto Forward, and Livable Berkeley, to name just a few. Trauss, considered by many in the media as the main spokesperson for YIMBYs and the movement’s founder, encouraged the decentralization of efforts and the creation of offshoot organizations. This was both a means to encourage localism but also a broad tent approach that allowed for a range of groups: from YIMBY socialists to YIMBY free marketeers. By the time that Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the movement was moving forward at a running pace thanks to community interest, a pithy name, and several hundred thousand dollars in grants from tech philanthropists, including the founders of Yelp and Facebook.58 The backing of tech money at this early stage would come to haunt YIMBY groups as they sought to mediate disputes between their socialist and libertarian members and to protect their brand image as an authentically grassroots network of “pissed off rent-payers.”59
YIMBY members were speaking at local meetings about their right to be in San Francisco, while growing their local organizations through payment of small dues, online brand-building, and relying on volunteers in lieu of hiring professional staff. They continued to attract newcomers to the city who were appalled by the mismatch between housing and jobs. This was often explained in terms of economic opportunity: people should be able to move to the center of the technology job market, where they can reap the rewards of a thriving economy. Further still, Trauss and others often reframed it as a kind of internal provincialism that mimicked Donald Trump’s xenophobia. In November of 2016, Trauss, speaking in defense of an apartment project in the Mission neighborhood in front of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said: “In Trump’s America, we’re already disturbed by nativism everywhere.… When you … say that you don’t want new, different people in your neighborhood, you’re exactly the same as Americans all over the country that don’t want immigrants. It’s the same attitude.”60 For YIMBYs, saying “no” to development or to newcomers was akin to shouting “Build the wall.” Yet, for Latino and undocumented San Franciscans, this comparison was ridiculous and demeaned their own life experience of living off the legal radar.
Yes in My Backyard activists tried to show that people should be able to move toward opportunities, but their increasingly bellicose attitude was quickly making them notorious in San Francisco. This was not at all troublesome to early YIMBYs. Sonja Trauss told me that the point of showing up to so many meetings was to “hear people’s bullshit excuses” for why development cannot happen and then “call them on it.” Similarly, Laura Foote, explained that
The worst advice is to be nice and be positive and make sure you are only always bringing locals from the neighborhood.… We are not playing that game. In order to enact real structural change you need to be loud enough, you need to be shrill enough to actually attract the people who are sitting on the couch, because that’s your audience. The people who are actually at that meeting don’t really matter because everyone who is there came in knowing what decision they were gonna make.
Indeed, YIMBYs were gaining a reputation in San Francisco for a confrontational style and a bawdy sense of humor that belied the earnestness of most activists. Some longstanding housing groups accused them of showboating and creating unnecessary vendettas, such as when they would research their opponents and publicize the value of their homes, but the high-visibility strategy was effective, especially on social media and online forums where moderation is seldom rewarded.
Another viewpoint that made YIMBYs anathema to much of the previous housing-activism community was the notion that developers could be the best allies for those worried about affordability. Anti-gentrification activists saw developers as caring little for the well-being of their tenants: they actively displaced people in order to maximize land value. In San Francisco, this meant uprooting people in places like Oakland and the Mission in smaller mid-century homes, knocking down those structures, and replacing them with larger apartment buildings where the majority of previous residents had no hope of landing one of the few affordably priced units agreed upon during planning negotiations (if there were any at all).
YIMBYs sought to change the tone of the debate. Vilifying developers was counterproductive, they believed: developers were needed to get projects built. YIMBYS reasoned that nonprofit institutions and the city government were incapable of erecting new housing at scale, and a more useful strategy was to vet developers’ projects for affordability and to help the more capable ones get planning permission. This more macro viewpoint was frustrating to traditional activists because it said exactly what hostile city planners and economic development organizations had been telling them for years as housing prices rose, in effect: “Yes, people will have to leave the neighborhood, but these new buildings are part of the big picture.” As one Oakland anti-gentrification activist commented: “YIMBYs are all about saying ‘Wait for it—affordability is coming, but while you wait, can you just move thirty miles away and get out of my sight?’ ” Indeed, the promise of YIMBY groups to work with developers to get the best possible deal to expand the housing stock for everyone rang hollow to anti-gentrification groups: for them, YIMBYs were not negotiating with developers, they were developers dressed up as activists.
In most accountings of the San Francisco housing crisis the reigning emotion is pathos, not bathos. Activists recount evictions, homelessness, and the destruction of community in order for policy makers and the general public to comprehend the enormity of housing precarity in the Bay Area. Yet, many of the YIMBY tactics have been comedic and even irreverent. Early in her career as a YIMBY provocateur, Sonja Trauss expressed her frustration with anti-development forces in the Bay Area by saying they would even resist building on a vacant lot because they had their first sexual experience there.61 Other activists relish using memes about their NIMBY opponents. One such meme shows a stick figure wearing a NIMBY mask, and a passerby says, “Why do you always wear that mask?” He gets no response, so he lifts the mask off to reveal a face that says, “Fuck the poor.” He then pulls down the NIMBY mask, remarking: “Let’s keep that on.” These memes are distributed on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and various blogs almost daily. They testify to the pro-development, pro-density savviness for reaching people with humor rather than with pleas for earnest conversation.62 However, for many critics of San Francisco YIMBYism they are a testament to a lack of seriousness and, worse yet, a kind of crassness and meanness that has taken housing politics to a new level of rancor. As one online poster commented about this approach: “I actually agree with most of [the YIMBYists’] points, but they take a lot of their tactics and attitudes out of the Trump playbook.”63
One moment that stands out is the “zucchini lady” incident. At a Berkeley city council meeting in 2017, a property owner was seeking to build two units where a single-family house was located: exactly the kind of micro upzoning that density activists favor and feel should be inoffensive to neighbors. A homeowner living adjacent to the proposed project stood up during the public comment portion of the meeting and brandished a zucchini. “I brought a zucchini, because I love to garden,” the woman told the council. “And in order to garden, you need sunlight. But this zucchini exists because I don’t have a big two-story house next door to me right now.”64 This moment was meme-making gold for YIMBY activists in the audience. They wasted no time in ridiculing the concerned neighbor on social media, as well as speaking afterward at the public comment session, where a millennial stated: “I don’t have a zucchini—it’s a really great prop—but I do have my debit card.… It has maybe $800 on it. This is all the money I have,” and going on to say that they will never own a home with a garden.65
The strategy of combining humor with indignation was not a new one,66 but it gets at a central tactic of YIMBYism: make opponents look ridiculous and uncompromising and show how intransigent they are even on the smallest issues. This approach is meant to draw to the movement younger digital natives whose political sensibilities were shaped by watching The Daily Show rather than 60 Minutes. This is perhaps most evident in urbanist groups such as New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens (NUMTOTs), which has over 200,000 followers on Facebook. Posters offer ribald “hot takes” on urban planning issues for a constituency of young people who use public and alternative transit and have no hope of buying property for the long-term future. This shift in tone concentrates on mirth making in order to uncover hypocrisy: it primes potential supporters to not trust assessments of slow-growth advocates who say that a building will be too big. It casts neighborhood groups as “hysterical hippies” who care more about their vegetables than about people becoming homeless.
Making YIMBYism fun was aimed primarily at those who opposed growth in wealthy neighborhoods, like Berkeley, but also to compete with progressive housing groups. Many of the YIMBY activists interviewed expressed their frustration with what they saw as left-wing “purity testing.” They interpreted this as a self-sabotaging desire to get perfect projects approved (such as ones that contained 100% affordable housing) rather than to move along a larger quantity of projects with fewer affordable units. One example was a 2019 Board of Supervisors decision to block a sixty-three-unit apartment building with fifteen below-market apartments in the busy, already gentrified SoMa district because it would cast an 18 percent shadow on Victoria Manalo Draves Park.67 One YIMBY activist, when asked about the tactic of mockery via online memes, said, “Well, this is San Francisco so they basically satirize themselves.” Laura Foote told me that “some of the environmentalists make me crazy; … one literally had a funeral for a tree the other day.” She added that this kind of behavior was indicative of what pro-growth activists had to deal with: the constant invocation of homeowners’ rights for petty infringements on their quality of life. Foote often quips that she is a “ground truther,” or a believer that the scarcity of urban land requires greater density but also a joke remixing the same science term with the similar-sounding “flat-earther” internet conspiracy theorists. It is a nod to how any too tightly held conviction can become dangerous. For YIMBYs, ideological flexibility is useful for getting things done.
YIMBY activism mirrors new trends in online political participation that diverge sharply from the door-knocking community efforts of the past. While housing affordability campaigns had previously been neighborhood-based, YIMBYs have broader scope because they explicitly represent people who are not yet in a place or are priced out of where they would like to be. This shifts the conversation from displacement to mobility. Also, given that many of those drawn to YIMBY groups are millennials or younger, online activism comes as second nature. They brought a new tone eschewing the earnestness of some progressive causes that played on a sense of moral grievance and embracing online snark and humor. As Laura Foote told me, “[a lot] of YIMBYism is against the virtue signaling of the traditional left” in San Francisco. Understanding the benefits of density necessitates a crash course in urban planning, but according to YIMBYs, it should be delivered in a series of humorous tweets mocking the narrow-mindedness of NIMBY thinking rather than a two-hundred-page white paper.
YIMBYs often attacked neighborhood groups personally for not wanting newcomers in their neighborhoods and caring more about their comfort than about housing affordability. One such YIMBY called out the head of a Bay Area slow-growth group, stating, “I’m really happy that she doesn’t have to be bothered by bicycles or fourplexes.”68 This personalization of the struggle for urban density was perhaps inevitable because the YIMBY action plan is to speak out about specific proposals when they come for review in front of Bay Area councils and zoning boards. It also means that any level of abstraction that would allow for a more measured discussion is stripped away: it is about actual people and the homes they live in. Yet, while YIMBYs like to portray themselves as unmaskers of the sanctimonious San Francisco Left, they actually join a long tradition of theatricality in urban activism that has flourished in San Francisco since the 1960s, from Yippie street theater to environmentalists wearing giant fur animal suits. The desire to provide a generational boundary in both group composition and tactics speaks more to the groups’ need to portray themselves as a new beginning, rather than a radical divergence in activist methods.69
“No, you do not get total control of this little micro-unit fiefdom place you call a neighborhood. That you have whittled down into the perfect size that lets you do whatever the fuck you want. So yeah, basically: fuck neighborhood control.” A YIMBY activist told me this while we were drinking mid-afternoon Tecate beers from the can in an otherwise empty San Francisco bar. We had been working up to this crescendo from a conversation about YIMBYism as a basic challenge to the scale of government control, and she had elegantly held forth on the history of suburbanization as a means for elites to exercise the maximum amount of control over their chosen communities. Now, polishing off beer number three, she was ready to take the gloves off: “Local control is my big red-flag phrase, but I can’t really say that because it makes it seem like I am anti-grassroots … and, well, hey this is America. Everyone, Right and Left, wants to say they love localism.… Well, I’ll say it now: I do not.” The woman, who did not want to be identified due to her sense that this opinion would not go over well with colleagues, used slightly more colorful language but reiterated what many YIMBY activists believe: localism breeds selfishness, inefficiency, and shortsightedness. Instead, they maintain people need to plan cities on the scale of the entire metropolis and not through consensus within neighborhoods. This view, which some feel is anti-democratic, is defended as both practical and a response to history: where people live is no accident, neighborhoods are not naturally arising conglomerations but are intensely stratified by race and class.70
The idea that San Francisco is fractured in its urban governance is not new: many policy efforts have tried and failed to enact more universal codes that cover development across the Bay Area. In 2019, the Bay Area’s nine counties took a step forward by proposing the CASA Compact in which the Metropolitan Transportation Commission would create nine Metropolitan Housing Enterprises to build more housing in each county, but funding would be pooled in order to give poorer zones extra help.71 YIMBY activists support this plan because it has provisions to build quickly near transit, as well as rent control and eviction protection. Yet they also want to go a step further by stripping away community control of the development process altogether. Letting decisions be made on the city level will, they argue, decrease the ability of people to think about their interests alone. It also universalizes procedures for building that are often ad hoc. At the same time, the “3Ps” of the CASA Compact (preservation and production of affordable housing along with protection from displacement for tenants) is often the major point of controversy between YIMBYs and other housing activists: to many the “build more of everything” philosophy runs counter to the last goal of protecting vulnerable low-income communities.
“We want more rules, not less rules,” a young YIMBY in Oakland told me. “That is the big misconception: that we are all about getting rid of urban planning,” he said (while also mentioning that he had studied planning at Berkeley). “We actually just want rules that can be followed.” Sonja Trauss mentioned something similar, reflecting on why universal regional rules would make development more transparent:
Planning and design reviews don’t need more amateurs with half-baked ideas. There are enough of those already. We don’t care as long as it follows code, and we don’t think that everyone should have a right to hold up the process for years over the color of someone’s shutters. Just because you live nearby, nobody gives a shit what color you think someone else’s shutters should be.
Trauss and many other YIMBY activists believe that not only are community concerns often frivolous but they are distracting from the big picture of getting more housing built. On a more basic ideological level, the activists dislike the community benefits process in which developers propose structures and then local governments wrangle for affordable housing within the plan or demand new parks and schools. Their feeling is that this process works well for communities that have a lot of resources and place-based advantages that attract competition. However, by making each project unique, community benefits are a constant struggle. Laura Foote, concurred saying: “We need to undermine the narrative of hyper-localism.… Lots of people bought into the idea that we should only organize in our backyard, but the whole message of this YIMBY thing is that everything has regional implications.”
Regional cooperation is seen as not just an economy of scale when it comes to making urban policy but a means to decouple people from their neighborhoods and the self-interest that comes with them. The emotional bond of place and community for San Francisco YIMBYs is not a benefit; it is what makes people start acting selfishly and irrationally. Joe Rivano Barros, who describes himself as a progressive YIMBY deeply concerned with both housing supply and gentrification, said that community groups in wealthy parts of the Bay Area had often ginned up the opposition by failing to accept any kind of middle ground when it comes to neighborhood change:
There’s a real failure of imagination to think about what dense neighborhoods will look like. There are not usually twenty-story buildings, like you might see in a financial district and you won’t be able to see the sun ever again. We are just talking about a few stories. If you go to European cities this is the norm, and it makes very charming very walkable neighborhoods with a high quality of life. There’s a lot of fearmongering.
As YIMBY groups grew in size and capacity, they began to target areas outside of San Francisco proper in order to show that the burden of new housing would have to be spread equally: most notably in wealthy suburbs that have consistently resisted anything but single-family homes. Sonja Trauss started a group called Sue the Suburbs, taking advantage of a little-known state law that mandated affordability, using it to threaten wealthy towns to build more housing. Her most notable battle was in Lafayette in 2015, in which YIMBYs sued the city for additional affordable housing. They petitioned on behalf of a housing project in which even the developer had agreed to downsize its plan, arguing that the original number of units was needed and the developer should be given permission to build the entire project.72 While the suit was ultimately unsuccessful, it put YIMBYs in the spotlight and helped bring about negotiations with other Bay Area suburbs—including Sausalito, Calabasas, and Los Altos—that were seeking to avoid similar lawsuits and negative media attention. When Trauss was asked about her aggressive tactics in the suburb of San Bruno, she told the publication Next City: “We’re not creating conflict—we’re uncovering conflict.… This is Martin Luther King, Jr. 101—this is Politics 101. These people are trying to promote a [housing] shortage. The conflict is when you’re like, ‘Fuck, my commute is an hour each way and when I get home my kids are asleep.’ ”73
YIMBYS are often dubious about suburbs as a lifestyle choice, nonetheless they feel that many suburbs could be densified if they were near a train line or closer to the city. Laura Foote clarified the split: “The difference between a town and a suburb is a town has apartments, and suburbia is a residential-only sprawling hellscape.” Yet part of this attack was an even broader assault on the conventions of twentieth-century zoning dictating that residential and commercial areas should be divided from each other. As Steven Buss put it: “If I had to pick [the one most effective thing to change] it would be form-based zoning. This takes into account the political realities in San Francisco. Form-based zoning would let you put whatever you want, at whatever density you want, in a building that meets particular physical characteristics. It gets rid of exclusionary zoning; there’s no such thing as residential and commercial zones. It’s just: this is how big the building can be in this part of town.” While this opinion may sound unprovocative, it is in fact a severe departure from the current use-based zoning that dominates most of American urban planning. Only small experiments have begun to use it but, if put into effect widely, it could spell the end of purely residential areas as we know them. On the other hand, it could also create a hodgepodge of uses in which car garages are next to yoga studios abutting marijuana grow houses. However, few people expect it to result in this kind of mishmash. For the most part, it is like many YIMBY solutions: middle-of-the-road practices long advocated for by the planning establishment but repackaged with feisty language and GIFs.
The growth of the YIMBY movement in San Francisco was achieved through confrontation: first, by calling out homeowners who resisted development; then by haranguing municipalities that would only allow single-family homes to be built; and last, by deriding established housing activists for being do-nothings who prevented expansion of the housing stock. “They started to really piss people off,” a housing activist from Oakland in her sixties told me. “People were like, ‘Who are these bros and why are they shouting at people who have been in this movement for twenty years?” the activist said. For her, YIMBYs were not activists at all but angry rich people trying to use dubious housing economics to gain popular support for gentrification. Indeed, she noted that YIMBYs had purposefully alienated other housing activists in San Francisco, and this view, according to the YIMBYs themselves, was not entirely false.
Sonja Trauss and Laura Foote noted that their movement was a complement to corollary public housing campaigns, but they quickly began disagreeing about the specifics with on-the-ground groups. Trauss stated it simply: “For those people who say that you can’t grow your way out, I have asked them, ‘What do you think we should do?’ and they don’t have an alternative. There’s no other plan but to build.” Growth also means gentrification for many unless it could be put in the very wealthiest neighborhoods. This is what YIMBYs had promised in their platform: they would seek to upzone the most desirable places where people wanted to live and that are already expensive. As well-educated upper-middle-class white people, they would pressure others with a similar socioeconomic background to “move over” and allow some apartment buildings in their prestigious neighborhoods. This would, in turn, take pressure off quickly changing areas like the Mission and Oakland, where less-wealthy communities of color were getting displaced. But two things began happening around 2016: YIMBY activists reneged on their promise to advocate for growth only in already-wealthy neighborhoods, and they de-emphasized affordability mandates in all of the projects they advocated for.
At the start of the YIMBY movement, the pitch to members was that they would help get the best deal possible from new developers: if someone wanted to build a thirty-unit apartment building in downtown San Francisco, they would assist in getting the community and Board of Supervisors to agree to it, but they would also push for the maximum number of below-market-rate apartments possible. This effort did not satisfy some who held out for 100 percent affordable and started splinter groups with names like PHIMBY (Public Housing in My Backyard). Sonja Trauss, and several other informants, said that this was basically a false choice: “We are led to believe that market-rate housing has to compete with affordable housing because we don’t have enough room for both kinds of housing. In fact, we have plenty of room.” Other activists stated that taxes from building market-rate dwellings in the more prosperous West Bay generated revenue for subsidized housing in the East Bay, creating a symbiotic relationship. Yet, mainstream YIMBY groups also began to subtly change their attitude, arguing that all new housing was good because even if a building was entirely made up of apartments priced at $4,000 per month, the people who would fill them would not be moving to transitional neighborhoods (and pushing out poorer residents). The sites of new projects were of utmost importance. The initial mandate was to create more housing in wealthy previously closed neighborhoods. This was accompanied by a tacit agreement with anti-gentrification activists that YIMBYs would both stay off their “turf” and not campaign for large developments that could possibly change neighborhood demographics. This quickly fell by the wayside as YIMBYs began to make the low-income, heavily Latino Mission neighborhood—which has quickly gentrified in the past twenty years74—a center of their efforts.
YIMBYS endorsed specific projects within the Mission District as early as 2015, leading to a head-on clash with anti-gentrification activists in the area. The optics of majority-white and young YIMBYs facing off with older and largely Latino anti-gentrification activists at city meetings also created an unwanted image for the movement, which had already been criticized for accepting tech money to fund their efforts. Sonja Trauss was blasé about building in the Mission, telling me that the group was open to partnering with anyone in any neighborhood as long as they were committed to getting things done: “We want to build more, and that’s the most important thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s libertarians or developers, or anti-gentrification housing-justice people. Intentions are less important than action.” Others online were less diplomatic. As one Reddit poster mentioned in reference to the debate over gentrification versus construction of housing: “I’m so sick of people blocking housing in a housing shortage and then giving a flaccid lecture about how it’s the wrong housing. They gentrify themselves by letting perfect be the enemy of good. We need more housing. Full fucking stop.”75
Trauss’s framing of YIMBYism as post-ideological was not satisfying to many in increasingly unaffordable neighborhoods who stood to lose their apartments. Her bluster did not help, often creating attention but also bringing avoidable controversy. Trauss tweeted in 2016 that “gentrification is revaluing black land and rewarding those who held out,”76 by which she meant a windfall for property owners of color who had suffered. Yet, others decried it as a condemnation of those “too soft to stay the course” that ignored the vast majority of Black renters forced out of neighborhoods. Critics of the YIMBY movement quickly pointed out that the tweet was not just insensitive, but it also showed that Trauss did not understand that they were fighting to preserve the social bonds of a community, that even if people could make a bundle by selling their house and relocating, they should not have to, as doing so would sever essential friendships and support networks.77
Individual YIMBY groups also began to campaign for large projects in the Mission, Oakland, and other low-income communities. The 2000–2070 Bryant Street Project in the Mission was one of the largest of its kind in the neighborhood, and the original plan, endorsed by YIMBYs, included 16 percent affordable housing. Opponents began calling the plan “the Beast on Bryant” and lamented that it would force out a local performance center called Cellspace. One of the artists told a local newspaper that “We’re on a mission, in the Mission, to save the soul of San Francisco,”78 and many other local residents agreed with him. Yet, YIMBYs argued that the new units were a good deal and were desperately needed in the neighborhood. The developer also promised to include subsidized artists’ spaces within the new development. During the course of 2015–2016, plans for the site broke into open hostility between neighborhood groups and YIMBYs that was abundantly covered in local media.79 However, when the final project was approved—now with 139 affordable units, making up 41.5 percent of the project80—YIMBYs chalked it up as a grand victory. For them, the conflict had been generative and had helped pressure the developer. If opponents had won, they reasoned, nothing would have been built and Latino families would have slowly, and more quietly, continued to be displaced apartment by apartment whereas now there would be 139 new places for low-income families to live. Similar to the pattern in many other cities, this conflict also showed how the spats over development in gentrifying areas was not always between low-income longtime residents and newcomers but between first- and second-wave gentrifiers, the former lamenting the loss of their bohemian haunts and the latter criticizing them for hypocrisy.
Another large project in the Mission preempted criticism of a proposed high-rise using YIMBY-like tactics, but this time deployed by a real estate firm. In 2017, the developers of 1979 Mission Street spent over $340,000 in marketing their residential project even before any hearings were scheduled.81 The plan had attracted the unflattering moniker “the Monster in the Mission,” and the developers attempted to counter-spin the project with a website called “mission4all.org” and train station ads featuring diverse San Franciscans, working as teachers, paramedics, and union laborers, under the banner “I am Not a Monster.”82 The local Mission newspaper called it a “downright Orwellian use of language” but also noted that it was very savvy because, quoting a city official, it showed that developers were no longer willing to sit back and allow their opponents to define them.83 Many YIMBY activists also supported the project, which consisted of 331 luxury units with the promise to buy two additional parcels for 192 affordable units (most likely constructed at the city’s expense).84 On February 8, 2019, the project proposal was heard before a packed planning commission meeting with more than twice as many opponents as supporters.85 Neighborhood residents called the development a form of “urban apartheid” and jeered at those who talked about job opportunities and adding to the housing stock. Shortly thereafter, the plan went back to the drawing board but, under such withering criticism, it was officially dead by early 2020.86 While the “Monster” met the litmus test for the YIMBY build-more-of-everything philosophy, it was controversial for two reasons. First, the plans were vague, and second, the developers had attempted to co-opt YIMBY language using their own PR firm. This offense not only watered down the movement’s own message, but it threatened to confirm the idea that the groups were nothing more than the henchmen of developers: “astroturfing” as a social movement.
Development in the Mission also began to fray the marriage of convenience between libertarian and progressive YIMBYs that had emerged in San Francisco. For the former, it seemed as if density activists were now in the building-affordable-housing game rather than just encouraging market forces. Ben Woosley, who worked in San Francisco and identified more with the libertarian side of YIMBYism, calling himself a market urbanist, was not keen to be identified with subsidized housing: “There’s a nonprofit housing organization nexus that basically receives large amounts of government funding, in the hundreds of millions at least, and they are motivated to have development happen and have government funding continue.” For him, this ground was well covered by other groups. Other YIMBYs were dismayed that the movement was electing to work in socioeconomically transitioning neighborhoods. Joe Rivano Barros noted that there is a lot of temptation to build in poor places: “the only areas of the city where density is possible are areas that house low-income and nonwhite folks living there.” Part of this was zoning, he reasoned, but he was also very uncomfortable with YIMBYs concentrating their efforts on the Mission. He and others said that around 2016 they formed a new faction of the YIMBY movement, called YIMBY Socialist, setting up hashtags and memes about the importance of public housing, inclusionary zoning (mandates for affordable housing across neighborhoods that structure all new construction), and below-market subsidies. As he put it:
[It was an] attempt to create a space within YIMBY Action for left-leaning members who were not interested in building housing in gentrifying neighborhoods. We’re interested in building affordable housing and we’re also interested in tenants’ rights. That only lasted a few months because it seemed like the organization wasn’t really favorable to that point of view.
In response to the push by YIMBY progressives, another offshoot group called YIMBY Neoliberal was set up by Steven Buss and others. While the name was “100 percent a troll,” Buss said, and most of the members supported subsidies and social housing, they did not want to crush capitalism. They hoped to make sure that the movement was identified with their perspective, rather than that of the socialist wing. As Buss put it: “[It] started to blow up on Twitter as a defender of progressive democracy and a response to the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) an ostensibly democratic group, who knows, but if you look at the DSA’s platform, they want to end capitalism.… To my dismay, the YIMBY socialists kind of faded out, and they weren’t really happy with all the policies or embracing the big tent.” Indeed, venturing into fights over gentrification in the Mission District alienated many members and caused them to leave the YIMBY movement for good. Rivano Barros agreed: YIMBYs began to defect to anti-gentrification groups for their social justice emphasis and focus on the struggles of poor urbanites, while YIMBYism held on to a centrist stance even amidst energized progressive organizing around climate change and Black Lives Matter.
Laura Foote was unconcerned with the growing strife within the major San Francisco YIMBY organizations: “We probably have more socialist members than libertarian members. We probably alienated the libertarian members by being vehemently pro-affordable housing. But we have won no points with the purist socialist crowd.” Both Trauss and Foote told me that if people were not “pissed off at you, you probably were not getting much done,” and this maximum seemed to exist internally as well. Yet, by 2017, the major YIMBY leadership had emerged as a distinctly center-left lobby that supported public housing but put the issue on the backburner in order to focus on new development with affordability clauses. These leaders were also increasingly looking beyond council meetings and online activism. They saw their movement as having developed a permanent constituency. Seeking elected office seemed like the next logical step.
Most social movements do not seek to immediately translate their on-the-ground wins into electoral politics.87 However, YIMBY activists in San Francisco were far less concerned with appearing to be grassroots. They had already accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from tech entrepreneurs and worked with developers, so their sense of positive and negative optics was far different from that of most Bay Area activists. Additionally, they had always prized activism done by highly educated “insiders” rather than rank-and-file “boots on the ground.” After several missteps in 2016 regarding gentrification, they sought to reorient their network toward public policy, capitalizing on the expertise of their members. In many ways, they wanted to build an activist think tank that would help to draft policy and explain the benefits of their proposals to the wider public.
Brian Hanlon, an early YIMBY, was one of the people tasked with this responsibility, and the group he led, YIMBY California, was the flagship operation. It put pressure on state lawmakers in California to approve accessory dwelling units, it argued for transport-oriented development, and it sought to enact the “sue the suburbs” strategy on a regional scale by targeting the many municipalities that did not build apartments due to single-family zoning. Most of all, the new YIMBY electoral strategy was meant to enact a regional plan, finally bringing together the patchwork of land regulation around the Bay Area.
The chance to embed the build-more-of-everything idea into a political platform came in 2016 during a state senate election that narrowed to two Democratic members of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors: Scott Weiner and Jane Kim. Kim, the candidate viewed as more progressive, argued against gentrification. Weiner took a line straight from Sonja Trauss saying that the city must build more housing in order to stop escalating prices. Weiner won. He quickly became the YIMBY political mascot because of his single-minded focus on housing in the state legislature, establishing himself as the go-to person to introduce housing bills. He often received cooperation from other pro-density legislators such as Nancy Skinner and David Chiu (both from the Bay Area), and many YIMBY activists felt that his election was a watershed moment in forming a political alliance around the issues of public transport, renters’ rights, and affordable housing. As the early YIMBY Joe Rivano Barros said:
YIMBY took off like a rocket ship; usually nonprofits don’t have the national profile that we do after so little time. It could take decades. But because the housing crisis was so severe here a lot of activism got noticed as novel. It gave YIMBYs the confidence to think of themselves as an important constituency that wasn’t going away and could start to kind of play a role in the mayoral election.
Rivano Barros insisted that the Left would have to take advantage of the housing crisis by passing sweeping statewide laws while the issue was on people’s minds due to rent burden, homelessness, and homes being destroyed by wildfires. He saw YIMBYs in the California state legislature as a first step in making housing a human right but also acknowledged the danger in associating the movement with individual politicians who might tarnish its reputation while in office.
Weiner himself was an ideal match for the YIMBY movement and very much represents the kind of politics they strive for. While he has some typical “pol” qualities—a JD from Harvard and a towering stature (he is 6′7″ tall)—he is not exceedingly charismatic, and as an officeholder he is unabashedly meticulous. He loves detail and takes pride in crafting intricate bills. In this sense, he is in line with YIMBY prerogatives by seeking centrist and often technical fixes for the housing crisis. However, despite being supported by a number of mainstream politicians, his proposals have often fallen flat. He found early success with Senate Bill 35 (2017), which streamlined approval for apartment units and mandates that cities meet Regional Housing Needs Assessments to build more affordable housing. Nevertheless, the final version of the bill was toothless, with little enforcement power and plenty of opposition from Southern Californian cities wishing to retain local control. So far, it has only been used to build a handful of new developments with below-market-rate apartments in the Bay Area.
After the disappointment of SB 35, Weiner and his YIMBY allies sought to think bigger and enact a piece of legislation that would truly force noncompliant municipalities to build more apartments. Laura Foote described Weiner as a politician who had always seen the need to grow San Francisco’s housing: “Some politicians realize that we should have been building housing for a long time, so they’re grateful when a group comes along and builds them the runway they can run down. That’s Scott Weiner.” State Senator David Chiu said this explicitly, noting that YIMBYs had given politicians the wherewithal to be pro-growth in a city where so many community meetings were dominated by those who did not want to see changes to the built environment: “I think they’ve provided a counterbalance. They’ve been changing the conversation on the local level as well as in the state,” he told the Guardian.88
Weiner proposed the much more sweeping housing reform Senate Bill 827 with behind the scenes support from YIMBYs in drafting its language. The proposed law sought to rethink density in California neighborhoods: no more would communities enjoy both good transit and single-story skylines. Senate Bill 827 sought to automatically upzone areas within half a mile of a high-frequency transit stop (mostly trains) and within a quarter mile to 45–85 feet of bus stops, depending on the characteristics of the location. This meant that many places with single-family homes near mass transit would soon have neighboring buildings that were four to eight stories tall. Predictably, there was tremendous opposition from wealthy neighborhoods, such as Beverly Hills, which built no apartments in the 1980s and 1990s and few since.89 The bill would also allow apartments to be built without minimum parking requirements, motivating developers to force new residents to rely on public transit. The hope was that these sweeping measures would begin to chip away at the neighborhoods that had resisted multiple-unit dwellings (many cities in California are zoned 75% for single-family only, and the overall amount is 58%).90 This legislation would transform not just urban areas close to commuter hubs, frequently scrutinized by planners, but it would have a far-reaching impact on the built environment: allowing suburban apartments in places where developers had not thought to build dense housing for decades.
The opposition to SB 827 was fierce and fast. It came from traditional opponents such as wealthy communities of homeowners in Southern California who did not want “apartment people” living in their neighborhoods but also from more surprising places. The mayor of progressive Berkeley said that it was “a declaration of war against our neighborhoods” and it was even opposed by the national Sierra Club.91 Most of all, it publicized the growing rift between pro-density growth activists and anti-gentrification groups. An LA activist descried the bill as “ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and compared it to Andrew Jackson’s expulsion of the Cherokees.”92 Many neighborhood activists in Latino or African American neighborhoods believed that the law would not be enforced to actually build affordable housing in new developments, or that what was labeled as affordable would actually be middle income and completely inaccessible to people already living in the community. They saw it as gentrification on steroids and a Trojan horse for the real estate industry. Sonja Trauss told me that these laws always attracted protest from people who warned against “corporate Democrats” and that many politicians were scared of alienating drivers and homeowners. She insisted that YIMBYs were the true progressives and that the alliance between anti-gentrification groups and homeowners was unfortunate. Laura Foote agreed, saying that people in low-income neighborhoods would be the ones to lose out when the housing stock was not expanded.
Senate Bill 827 was killed in a committee meeting, only to be instantly revived by Scott Weiner in the form of Senate Bill 50, modified to mandate more construction in wealthy communities even if they did not have transit hubs.93 By 2018, when the new bill was moving forward, the YIMBY movement had won more important political allies: the new mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, was an avowed YIMBY and took a more tolerant stance on construction than some of her opponents in the election. However, Breed’s election had also galvanized progressive housing activists, who now saw any YIMBY endorsements as a scarlet letter of developer involvement and corporate interests. Weiner’s SB 50 was particularly suspect and began to attract significant ire in anti-capitalist organizing circles. “He reframed it as housing to prevent climate change,” a Latino activist from the Mission told me, “but this is really just a giveaway to real estate interests.”
Protests against SB 50 continued, invigorated by opposition from communities of color as well as mainstream lawmakers: what was particularly controversial was the clause that protected vulnerable (low-income) communities. These neighborhoods had five years to plan for new density, but they sought to have an exemption in perpetuity. They began to organize and even attracted support from transport-oriented development advocacy groups—normally the most fervent allies of such of bill—who said that the gentrification risks outweighed the benefits. Meanwhile, progressive groups trashed the bill and Weiner personally, drawing attention to contributions to his re-election campaign from developers and stating that when he took office: “the professional class, particularly those in the influential real estate industry, thought they had a winner.”94 Due to the crescendo of negative voices around the bill, many politicians who originally supported the measure as a resolution to California’s housing crisis began to back away, including the governor, Gavin Newsom, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti. By June of 2018, activists were turning up to most of Weiner’s public engagements to denounce him, including an event at UCLA where three silent protestors stood with a sign reading “WEINER OWNED BY BIG REAL ESTATE.”95 In 2019, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously opposed the bill.96
In January 2020, SB 50 was officially killed. Despite the breadth of the YIMBY coalition in support of constructing new housing, the unified opposition was more numerous and more vocal. Orange County conservatives with expensive homes joined forces with Latino activists from low-income communities. At issue was the uniformity of the new law and its ability to demand new housing despite context (although the enforcement mechanisms were actually fairly weak). Progressive would-be supporters worried that it would produce the same story as always: wealthy communities with superior resources would mobilize while demographically changing areas would have new projects dumped on them before residents could prepare. As a Curbed writer put it: “[T]o my eye, my sensitive community has already contributed more than its fair share of new housing, and then some, while weathering more change than most LA neighborhoods.”97 Those who may have been YIMBY allies in the past felt that the compromises that Weiner made in the legislative process were too great, and they began to question his loyalty to the idea of housing affordability rather than just plain growth.
Yet, the main fight of YIMBYs to end single-family zoning has been remarkably successful: recent laws were passed in Sacramento and Berkeley to end the practice. Berkeley, where zoning began over 100 years ago, was a particularly strong symbolic win for YIMBYs. While their groups remain controversial, the YIMBY mission is making its way into public policy: the state of Oregon has put a blanket ban on single-family zoning as well. State Senator Weiner also passed two long-campaigned-for bills in September of 2021: one reduced lengthy and expensive environmental reviews (often dominated by NIMBYs) for multifamily homes and the other legalized duplexes on any single-family lot. If enforced as written, this will end single-family zoning in California. However, it is worth noting that the bills, after passing through the California legislature, were only signed by Governor Gavin Newsom two days after his failed recall election: a strong signal that challenging the housing status quo still necessitates a tremendous amount of political capital.
With the defeat of SB 50, many housing activists began to ask themselves if living near public infrastructure had now become a burden: not only was it overused but it was also the focus point for new development. While some people in the Bay Area felt blessed to live near a BART stop, others worried that their proximity would make them a target. Indeed, those who are reticent about YIMBY goals and the agenda of transport-oriented-development say that similar bills, if enacted, may make it harder to build future transport hubs in wealthy communities because residents will organize against the taller buildings that go with train stops. This further endangers the already beleaguered public transit system, stigmatizing it as a potential harbinger of more (and potentially lower-income) residents. In a city already riven between the newly privatized infrastructure of the technopolis and the rusting state-run systems of the twentieth century, this strategy faces an uphill battle.
While YIMBYs helped popularize more intensive land use in the Bay Area with higher buildings, they never achieved identification with renters’ rights in the ways that they hoped. Instead of successfully framing their platform as expanding renters’ options to move or to stay in place without being priced out, they were increasingly seen only as the “build, baby, build” movement, cutting them off from other housing activists. In some ways, their notoriety was the product of a very successful marketing campaign around normalizing new growth and construction, but the campaign also tended to lose the more emotional stories of rent burdens and displacement that were occurring on a daily basis in San Francisco.
Bay Area YIMBYs unequivocally achieved a reorientation of the housing affordability debate around generation, rather than class, lines. They increasingly marketed their movement as a break with the past to rebuke single-family-home suburbs and embrace compact neighborhoods and walkability. Yet, just like their efforts in the Mission and other neighborhoods, the recasting of the struggle for housing affordability as a battle between baby-boomer homeowners and millennial renters highlighted a generational dispute at the expense of economic realities, namely the mass expulsion of low-income renters from the centers of cities.