When a woman stood up and waved a courgette in the air at a City of Berkeley council meeting this summer, complaining that a new housing development would block the sunlight from her zucchini garden, she probably felt confident that the community was on her side. After all, hers was the kind of complaint – small-scale, wholesome, relatable – that has held up housing projects for years in cities around the world.
She didn’t expect the wrath of the yimbys.
“You’re talking about zucchinis? Really? Because I’m struggling to pay rent,” retorted an indignant Victoria Fierce at that 13 June meeting. Fierce went on to argue that it was precisely the failure to build new housing that is causing rents to climb in San Francisco, to the point that she can barely afford to live anywhere in the Bay Area.
Fierce is a leader of one of a series of new groups that have sprouted up in cities from Seattle to Sydney, Austin to Oxford, lobbying not against development but for it. They say their lives are threatened by housing shortages and skyrocketing rental prices. Calling themselves yimbys, they are standing up to say “Yes, in my back yard” to any kind of new housing development. And courgettes be damned.
In the California state legislature, yimby activists have helped Democrats pass a sweeping new package of legislation designed to spur the creation of affordable housing. In San Francisco, supporters have even formed a yimby political party and signed Trauss up to run for a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors in 2018.
Assembly member David Chiu said that when he was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before being elected to state office in 2014, residents would rarely speak up in favour of any local development projects.
“Often the only voices we would hear would be neighbours who were opposed,” said Chiu, who called on yimby support to get affordable housing measures through the legislature this year. “I think they’ve provided a counterbalance. They’ve been changing the conversation on the local level as well as in the state.”
Nowhere have these battles been more fiercely fought than in San Francisco’s Mission District, a historically low-income, Hispanic neighbourhood, which has been rapidly transforming into an upscale enclave for mostly white, well-heeled tech workers. The huge number of tech jobs created in San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley has pushed up rents in the Mission to a median of $4,250 a month.
Due in part to evictions and the lack of affordable housing, the number of Latinos in the area has been dropping sharply. A 2014 study estimated that between 2000 and 2020 more than 10,000 Latinos, or a third of the Mission’s Hispanic population, will have disappeared from the area.
Angry protesters have vowed to stem the gentrification by stopping any further development that doesn’t include significant amounts of low-income housing.
Yimby groups have jumped right into this debate, arguing that any new housing is better than none at all. On 14 September, Trauss and other yimby activists went to the San Francisco Planning Commission to argue on behalf of a proposed 75-unit development in the Mission that would be mostly market rate. Hispanic activists argued against them.
“Eighty-nine percent of the units that are to be constructed are going to be out of income range of the vast majority of the Latino population living in the Mission District,” argued project opponent Carlos Bocanegra of La Raza Centro Legal, a legal aid group.
But Trauss countered that not building is not the answer to the housing shortage.
“The 100 or so higher income people, who are not going to live in this project if it isn’t built, are going to live somewhere,” she said. “They will just displace someone somewhere else, because demand doesn’t disappear.”