Who are the Bay Area’s NIMBYs—and what do they want? [Correction]

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The caricature of a NIMBY is someone with a screw-you-I’ve-got-mine attitude, either a wealthy, white homeowner who thinks renters lower property values or a nostalgic progressive opposed to neighborhood change.

In reality, NIMBY stands for “Not In My Backyard.” And in the context of housing policy, the abbreviation refers to residents who broadly oppose new housing construction in their communities. NIMBYs have become the scapegoat of the Bay Area housing crisis.

Darrell Owens, a housing commissioner for the city of Berkeley and pro-density advocate with East Bay for Everyone, is one activist who sees NIMBYism as harmful. “A NIMBY is somebody who is opposed to housing in their neighborhood, oftentimes for aesthetic or economic reasons that are anti-poor and anti-middle class,” he says.

Owens categorizes concerns that welcoming apartment dwellers into the community would lower single-family property values or harm the reputation of local public schools as “classist reasons” for opposing new housing construction.

Because the term is a pejorative, identifying NIMBYs in the Bay Area can be a fraught exercise. But some activists are embracing the word and its message.

The NIMBY platform

Marin County-based activist and founder of Livable California Susan Kirsch sees no problem with the NIMBY moniker.

“It’s about people being stewards of what they love and care about,” Kirsch told City Lab in July. “It’s care-giving, not excluding care for others.”

After over a decade of local organizing, Kirsch founded Livable California as a hub for sharing resources among like-minded activists. The organization has opened a stream of communication for anti-density activists across the Bay Area. Palo Alto for Sensible Zoning, Better Cupertino, Good Growth San Carlos, and Orinda Watch are just a few of the groups that organize with Livable California across the nine counties. Livable California also leads the anti-development charge in San Francisco, where leaders of homeowners collectives like the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council and the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods are regulars at meetings.

However, not all of these activists feel as warmly as Kirsch does toward the NIMBY label.

Kirsch, who has stepped down from Livable California since its founding and current leadership, denies the categorization of their organization with the anti-density movement. Their official mission statement is to “Advocate for the empowerment of local governments to foster equitable, self-determined communities offering a path for all to a more livable California.” And its current board president, Rick Hall, is a self-professed anti-gentrification activist in the Mission District of San Francisco where he volunteers with United to Save the Mission.

Elsewhere, the Palo Alto, Cupertino, and San Carlos groups prefer to say they advocate for “sensible” development. Others borrow from prodensity and environmental groups and call themselves “smart growth” advocates or “preservationists.” In the spirit of neutrality, I call them anti-density advocates.

What unifies these groups is an opposition to high-density housing development, which they say will strain city services and threaten neighborhood character.

“What we don’t want in our backyards—or yours, for that matter—is more gridlock, crowded schools, an overtaxed infrastructure and ecosystem,” says Better Cupertino officer Caryl Gorska, though she makes it clear she’s only speaking for herself. “I really want to eradicate this idea that all growth is good, or even inevitable.”

Neither Kirsch nor Gorska thinks the Bay Area is experiencing a housing crisis.

“We take offense at referring to it as a crisis,” says Kirsch. She disputes the widely recognized report that estimates California has a shortage of over 3.5 million homes. Livable California and its allies claim these numbers are used by politicians like state Sen. Scott Wiener as a pretext for pushing through top-down housing policy designed to erode local control.

What they are concerned about first and foremost is control over community planning.

“Local control is the foundation of which we have democracy,” says Kirsch.

This platform is predictably controversial. Anti-density advocates have come under fire for defending a status quo that critics say is exclusionary.

Emeryville City Councilmember John Bauters claims that buzzwords like “community character” and “quality of life” are dog whistles.

“There are fair arguments to be made about who the housing is for,” notes Bauters, referencing arguments that new housing construction is often unaffordable to low-income renters. “But the people who come to the argument from an exclusionary standpoint don’t want people added at all. They say it’ll detract from the neighborhood or community services.”

Laying roots

NIMBYism emerged in American politics in the 1970s, when the public began to understand homeownership as a way to acquire wealth.

By the 1990s, neighborhood character was a talking point, according to former commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development in New York City Vicki Been.

“It’s moved from just being ‘I should have a right to confront something that hurts my house’ to ‘I have an interest in this neighborhood as a whole,’” Been told the New York Times in 2018.

In the Bay Area, the anti-density movement has roots in the home of limousine liberals: Marin County. Kirsch has been involved for over a decade.

Kirsch got her start in housing politics with her local neighborhood association in 2006. From there, she founded a citywide organization called Friends of Mill Valley. In 2008, her advocacy had expanded to the county level when she founded Citizen Marin, along with Novato-based Leslie Peterson Schwartz, to provide resources to like-minded organizers.

“I realized what’s happening in my organization is happening in other neighborhoods,” she says. “We could all be stronger working together as a county.”

Citizen Marin gained momentum when it united community members around opposition to a regional planning program called Plan Bay Area in 2013.

Plan Bay Area revolutionized the way the Bay Area does planning. The long-range regional transportation plan was adopted at the directive of state Senate Bill 375 to lower emissions from cars by 2040. Plan Bay Area was the first region-wide housing and transportation plan developed in the Bay Area. Prior to this point, planning had been at the city or county level.

Anti-density activists in Marin County were outraged, and Citizen Marin was there to organize the fuming brood.

Groups including Marin Against Density (MAD) and Larkspur Fights Back held info sessions that drew crowds in the hundreds to hear critiques of the plan.

MAD member Bob Silvestri told the Marin Independent Journal in 2014 that Plan Bay Area was a transit-oriented, high-density development plan that simply didn’t fit in Marin County.

“Larkspur will never be a transit neighborhood,” claimed Silvestri.

After the Plan Bay Area battles, Kirsch and her Marin cohorts felt emboldened. Kirsch filed to run for a seat on the Marin County Board of Supervisors in 2016; her allies, Al Dugan and Kevin Haroff, soon followed suit. The three ran on MAD’s reform slate against incumbent supervisors. But in a blow to the movement, all three candidates lost.

Livable California was born from the ashes of the failed election in February 2018. After attending a town hall on state Sen. Scott Wiener’s housing development bill SB 827 in San Francisco, Kirsch and some of her Marin allies met up with 20 anti-density advocates from across the Bay Area.

Organizers were inspired by the momentum Citizen Marin had gained during Plan Bay Area. They were reinvigorated by a desire to stop new statewide development bills, and once again figured they would be stronger organizing together.

Kirsch stepped up to lead a new organization alongside former oil and gas executive Rick Hall of San Francisco—and thus, Livable California was born.

Housing denied and housing delayed

Though movement leader Susan Kirsch failed to reach public office, the anti-density movement has influenced policy that affects thousands.

Citizen Marin’s organizing against the sweeping public transportation plan generated results.

The Marin Board of Supervisors was originally considering designating Marinwood, Tam Valley, Strawberry, and part of San Rafael near the county Civic Center as “priority development areas” under the regional plan.

All four of these areas were abandoned in the plan’s final 2014 iteration. The county lost out on nearly $200,000 of funding from regional government as a result.

The final map of priority development areas looked remarkably similar to the redlining maps that restricted where people of color could buy homes in the mid-20th century. Development was only planned in formerly redlined communities, not in the suburbs where anti-density advocates were the most active.

In protest of the Plan Bay Area process, the North Bay town of Corte Madera pulled out of the Association of Bay Area Governments entirely, and instituted a year-long moratorium on new housing development. Larkspur, Corte Madera’s twin city, abandoned plans to open a transit hub in the city, sending $600,000 down the drain.

The coalition also had success lobbying for statewide bills. Marin County’s state representative, Marc Levine, passed a 2014 bill reclassifying Marin County as “suburban” rather than “urban” for planning purposes. The bill has been criticized by nonprofit Housing Association of Northern California for allowing Marin County to get away with building little to no affordable housing.

On the Peninsula, success has come to area NIMBYism in the form of delaying high-density housing projects. In Cupertino, anti-density advocates have been fighting the development of both office space and 2,400 homes at the abandoned Vallco mall. Better Cupertino successfully mobilized around a ballot measure to defeat the project in 2016. The group is now suing the developer while the developer attempts to use a state law to override community opposition.

A 100 percent affordable housing project in Moss Beach has now been delayed for four years and 50 community meetings, in part due to efforts from a group called Resist Density.

The list goes on—and on—and amounts to thousands of proposed homes delayed or denied in the suburbs. It’s impossible to estimate how many homes were never proposed in the first place due to community opposition or Levine’s legislation.

NIMBYs gain political power

Kirsch says one of her proudest accomplishments with Livable California was inspiring other like-minded souls to run for office.

Anti-density advocates claim over a dozen city councilors across the Bay Area among their ranks. In 2018, four candidates endorsed by Livable California won a seat on their local city councils.

Cupertino mayor Steven Scharf and new city councilors Liang Chao and Jon Willey are all affiliated with the anti-density movement. Also on the Peninsula, Livable California has allies in Palo Alto city councilors Lydia Kou and Tom DuBois, as well as Sunnyvale’s Michael Goldman and Mountain View’s Alison Hicks.

In the East Bay, Livable California-endorsed candidate Julie Testa was elected in Pleasanton.

Marin Supervisor Damon Connolly was endorsed by Marin Against Density when he won his seat in 2015, according to local blog the Greater Marin. And while Kirsch’s slatemate Kevin Haroff was not elected to the Board of Supervisors, he continues to serve on Larkspur’s City Council. Kirsch cites Novato’s Pat Ecklund and Mill Valley’s John McCauley as other allies of the movement.

Though these candidates are celebrated by staunch supporters, their elections have also been enveloped in controversy.

Mayor Steven Scharf, shortly after his election, came under fire for joking that Cupertino should build a wall around its border with less-affluent San Jose.

“This is the wall around Cupertino,” said Scharf. “San Jose will be mainly paying for it, so it’s not coming out of our own taxes. Saratoga will give a little bit too, since they are a big contributor to our traffic issue.”

There's plenty of housing, you just need a superb Realtor, like me @lydia_kou https://t.co/pNwQljBBCG — Lydia Kou (@lydia_kou) April 25, 2017

Housing activists criticized Palo Alto councilwoman Lydia Kou after she tweeted a denial of a housing shortage, saying, “There’s plenty of housing, you just need a superb realtor, like me.”

And the list goes on.

As the anti-density movement has come under fire from housing activists, NIMBY organizations have closed ranks and tightened their lips.

When I asked Gorska of Better Cupertino about the organization’s political allies, she was evasive: “Gee, I’m not sure I should reveal that! Suffice it to say that we talk to residents and elected officials of other Bay Area cities.”

Some anti-density activists have been targeted for their beliefs. Gorska says they’ve been “threatened, followed on foot, had their cars towed, and physically and verbally harassed by paid goons daily while we gathered signatures.”

Though anti-density elected officials are concentrated in just a few regions of the Bay Area, Owens of East Bay for Everyone emphasized the importance of considering their impact regionally.

When communities in Silicon Valley add jobs but not housing, “it leads to displacement regionally,” says Owens.

Last year, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf slammed Cupertino for adding 12,000 jobs with the opening of Apple Park in 2017, while simultaneously permitting only 27 new homes. Schaaf chalks up much of the discrepancy to community opposition.

“There were offensive things that were said during these hearings, about low-income people, ‘uneducated’ people, moving into the community,” said Schaaf. “That is racist. That is classist. It’s NIMBYism, and it does not serve our housing or environmental agenda.”

Owens also spoke about the effects of anti-density policies in Marin County. Though Marin County has added fewer total jobs than Silicon Valley, the ratio of jobs added to new homes permitted in recent years is higher in Marin than any other Bay Area county. Between 2010 and 2016, Marin County added 20 jobs for even one new home, according to the Association of Bay Area Governments.

“There are lots of nannies that commute from Richmond to work in southern Marin,” said Owens. “They can’t benefit from Marin’s quality schools despite contributing economically to the region.”

Both proponents and opponents of anti-density advocates’ agenda agree their policies have had a major impact on the region.

A growing movement

A desire to fight statewide housing legislation brought activists together to form Livable California in 2018. Opposing statewide housing policy remains a priority for anti-density activists in 2020.

Key to anti-density activists’ success in 2020 will be their ability to resolve internal conflict.

The coalition is not ideologically united.

In 2018, Livable California awarded local candidates that were members of the Green Party, Democratic Party, and Republican Party, along with the Democratic Socialists of America.

When Citizen Marin campaigned against Plan Bay Area in 2013, it was nicknamed the “Herbal Tea Party” by critics for its close association with the growing Tea Party movement.

One recognized candidate, Eva Chao, would have been the first Republican elected to public office in San Francisco in a decade. In a 2018 public comment, Chao said that regional housing policy was “enslaving property owners.”

“This is not called progressive, this is called plantation class,” claimed Chao. “It is socialism.”

But in the same election cycle, another candidate awarded by Livable California in San Francisco, Tony Kelly, ran as a vocal socialist.

“To me, socialism is a demand,” noted Kelly. “It’s a demand that everyday people should have real democratic control of our economy, our neighborhoods, and our city.”

While Chao and Palo Alto councilwoman Lydia Kou railed against California’s 2020 Tenant Protection Act, which enacted statewide rent caps, Livable California pursued partnership with Larry Gross of Tenants Together, a group that promoted the bill.

The discord within the NIMBY machine is enough to give the casual observer whiplash.

Due to disagreement over strategy, Kirsch resigned from the board of Livable California in June. She remains on good terms with organizational leaders and plans to continue her advocacy in other capacities. Kirsch is succeeded as president of Livable California by Rick Hall.

East Bay for Everyone’s Owens isn’t surprised by the division within the organization.

“Depending where NIMBYs are located, they’ll adjust their rhetoric,” says Owens. “They’re ultimately pushing policies which are antagonistic to the working class.”

Resolving these internal tensions is important for the organization, because it will impact anti-density advocates’ ability to work with other opponents of statewide housing legislation.

The group recorded a huge win in January when Wiener’s Senate Bill 50 failed to advance for the second year in the row.

The high-profile bill, sponsored by California YIMBY, a pro-housing group aimed at housing reform, would have changed zoning statewide to allow for higher-density housing construction near public transit and job centers. Intended as a play on NIMBY, “YIMBY” stands for “Yes in My Backyard.” YIMBYs describe their priorities as lowering rents by fighting exclusionary zoning, supporting high-density housing construction, and advocating for tenants’ rights.

But the SB 50 debate proved more complex than a YIMBY-versus-NIMBY debate. In addition to anti-density advocates, anti-gentrification activists in San Francisco and Los Angeles opposed the bill.

In the Bay Area, the bill drew ire from a broad coalition, including the San Francisco Tenants Union and the Housing Rights Coalition. They argued that incentivized market-rate development could cause further displacement by way of eviction and accused Wiener of using low-income communities as “collateral for an urbanist vision.”

SB 50’s endorsements from landlord groups and the California Association of Realtors fostered further distrust.

Complicating the debate further is the fact that some suburban tenants’ rights groups endorsed SB 50. The Marin-based Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California (FHANC) argued that so long as anti-density advocates hold power in exclusionary communities, local control will inhibit the state from meeting its housing and climate goals.

“By overriding restrictive zoning in segregated areas, [SB 50] has the power to reverse the trend of ongoing segregation in California,” said FHANC director Caroline Peattie.

Though SB 50 failed to advance, the fight is far from over.

The day that SB 50 failed, Wiener announced his intention to introduce two more housing production bills. Though it was buried in the news cycle, a housing production bill from Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks passed out of the assembly the same week.

Anti-density advocates will be focused through the remainder of the legislative season on opposing these bills.

There are key differences between anti-density advocates and anti-gentrification advocates that could make long-term coalition building challenging.

Hubs where anti-density advocates hold power, including Marin County, Orinda, and Cupertino, are categorized by the UC Berkeley Urban Displacement project as regions experiencing “advanced exclusion.”

Bay Area tenants’ rights organizations that opposed SB 50 are concentrated in gentrifying communities. They support leftist housing initiatives such as rent control that many anti-density advocates oppose.

Livable California is aware of their optics issues. In an internal email last year, Livable California discussed their intentions to rebrand, because “housing activists... are deeply suspicious of white suburban NIMBYs and the objectives of Livable California.”

The group has since opened a political action committee (PAC) under a different name, A Better Way Forward to House California. A Better Way raised over $169,168 in 2019, including a $50,000 donation from San Francisco-based affordable housing developer TODCO. They want to use this PAC money to launch their own statewide initiative—a ballot measure protecting local control.

Anti-density advocates are making some headway. Gabriel Medina, the former president of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club, sits on the board of A Better Way. Isaiah Madison of South Los Angeles recently became the first person of color to join Livable California’s board, according to the Mercury News.

Other anti-gentrification activists remain skeptical. Jackie Fielder, endorsed by the San Francisco Tenants Union, is challenging Scott Wiener in San Francisco. While she joined the SF Tenants Union in opposing SB 50, she has ruffled feathers at Livable California by admonishing NIMBYism on social media.

“Cupertino, St. Francis Wood, the Marina, Beverly Hills, and other ultra-wealthy neighborhoods in California need to allow more housing so moderate and above-moderate income earners don’t displace people in gentrifying places like the Mission and the Bayview,” Fielder tweeted.

Cupertino, St. Francis Wood, the Marina, Beverly Hills, and other ultra-wealthy neighborhoods in California need to allow more housing so moderate and above-moderate income earners don't displace people in gentrifying places like the Mission and the Bayview. — Jackie Fielder 傑基 菲爾德 (@JackieFielder_) January 13, 2020

As the housing debate marches on, Californians will continue to grapple with fundamental questions about how to shape our communities.

“What I tell other urbanists is that supply alone does not end homelessness. Supply does not solve the housing crisis,” says Emeryville Councilmember Bauters.

Still, Bauters notes that Livable California as an organization chips away at inclusion.

“People pretend communities have always existed the way they exist today,” says Bauters. “The reality is that there are a lot of discriminatory policies that helped shape their whole communities.”

Correction: This story has been updated to include corrected information about Larry Gross’ relationship with Livable California. He does not sit on the Board of Livable California, but held a teleconference with the organization last November.