Several new advocacy groups have sprung up to push for better housing policies at the state and national level. Their first job: Communicating how significant the problem really is. There are already early signs that the discourse on housing is…
High housing costs are driving out lower-income Californians, reports say
California lost lower-income residents to other states over a recent 11-year period, while gaining wealthier households from elsewhere in the U.S. The disparity reflects the state’s sky-high rents and home prices, according to several reports released Thursday. The studies, produced…
Editorial | Is the California housing crisis leading to a tech brain drain?
Stories about California’s housing crisis often focus on how the high cost of shelter hammers the poor, increases homelessness and makes home ownership seem a distant dream for young people. But a new article in Chief Executive magazine offers a housing perspective…
A Tech Company Wades Into Housing Politics
Today, Stripe, the six-year-old online payments company that has been valued at $9 billion by private investors, is expected to announce a $1 million donation to California Yimby, a housing advocacy organization that was a driving force behind a recently killed bill that…
Priced out of the American dream
A decade after he moved from Nevada to Silicon Valley in search of his slice of the technology boom, Victor Barrera’s tenuous toehold in one of America’s most expensive property markets finally slipped. Since March the landscaping worker has been…
Who will control land use in California?
California, state officials say, needs to be building 180,000 new units of housing a year to keep up with population growth, replace housing that’s lost to fire and old age and make a dent in the backlog. However, the state…
Why Was California’s Radical Housing Bill so Unpopular?
What Wiener and his co-sponsor Nancy Skinner, representing the East Bay, proposed was nothing less than to upend the entire framework for the past century of American racial politics and wealth building. But by forcing politicians and organizations to lay…
Opinion: Real progressives would embrace Scott Wiener’s SB 827 housing bill
For decades, efforts to restrict new housing in Berkeley and the broader Bay Area have driven up housing costs, pushed out low-income residents, and reinforced historical, racially discriminatory housing policies. Our city’s and region’s failure to build adequate housing is…
Editorial: Defeat of California housing bill reveals a crisis of political courage
What distinguished and doomed Senate Bill 827 is that it would have overruled local officials’ use of planning, zoning and other barriers to block new housing, particularly high-density housing in existing neighborhoods, which they reliably do at the behest of…
The Urban Housing Crisis Is a Test for Progressive Politics
Opponents of allowing more dense housing construction associate the solution with gentrification, but this gets the question backwards. Gentrification is the result of artificially constricted housing supply, which pushes the demand for new housing into poorer neighborhoods, where new entrants…