Editorials

From a 2004 Planet editorial about a fundraiser for the developers’ candidates in a Berkeley election:

Berkeley author Thacher Hurd has a book for the 4 to 8 set which, with wonderful pictures, tells the story of how Miles Possum and his band of little swamp critters are invited to play for the Alligators’ Ball. After the music stops, the alligators are hungry. “What’s for dinner?” says Miles. “Something tender! Something juicy!” says an alligator, holding a menu behind his back that features “Swamp Band Soup.” On the next page, “the alligators snapped their jaws and snapped their lips” as they drag the struggling band members ever closer to a big boiling pot.

As a Cajun might say about an Alligators’Ball, “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. ” In colloquial English: “Same-old same-old.”

Last week, more than a decade later, someone sent me an emailed invitation to what’s billed as the YIMBY Gala, featuring a curated selection of Bay Area elected officials as the tender and juicy menu items du jour. 

It’s headlined as A Party You Don’t Want To Miss! 

Here’s the pitch: 

“Join us for an evening of beautiful company, food, drinks, and revelry in celebration of a year of wins for the pro-housing movement! Our Fifth Annual Bay Area YIMBY Gala is on Friday, November 5th at 6:30p. 

“The YIMBY Gala is bringing together housing advocates, elected leaders, lawmakers, home builders, architects, and members of the housing community.” 

All you need to do is: BUY YOUR TICKET. It’s access on tap, right here in River City. 

But just a minute, before you click through to buy those $125 and $250 tickets, you might ask who/what a YIMBY is. 

The acronym comes from Yes In My Back Yard, but it really means Yes in Your Back Yard. 

Most often, a YIMBY is an under-forty who’s still a fervent believer in the old supplyside economic theories they learned in their high school economics class or in the watered down Econ 101 dicta they imbibed in college. 

For a great insight into a typical Yimby mind, read this op-ed on berkeleyside.org, and don’t miss the comments. 

People like this guy believe that if we build a whole bunch of market rate (i.e.here in the Bay, pricey) apartment developments, some sort of housing will surely trickle down to supply the low end of the market. They also believe that there’s a housing crisis because, simultaneously, a lot of people are moving out of California and a lot more are moving into California. 

That stuff is just not true. 

Granted, we have an affordable housing crisis, but there’s no overall housing shortage. It’s too much for me to explain here--the academic consensus is conclusive but complicated. 

If you don’t already understand this, you should read Tim Redmond’s excellent piece in 48hills.org and click on the links in it for the full picture. 

But if and when you click on BUY YOUR TICKET you’ll learn a number of valuable things from the Yimbys’ event page. First, take a look at the section headed “Sponsors” at the top. You’ll learn that it’s the logos of a list of developers, plus some of the lawyers, political consultants and flacks who cater to developers. You can click on each logo icon to learn more about who they are. 

Then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, where you’ll find an orange strip with more clickable logos. These belong to just some of the many fronts who claim the YIMBY mantle. Besides these, there are even more YIMBY groups whose agit-prop hits my email daily: e.g. California Yimby, East Bay for Everyone, Yimby Law and even, god forbid, Yimby Jewish. 

These numerous organizations seem to have interlocking directorates and memberships as revealed on their web pages. Several of them include Sonja Trauss, foundress of the immortal SF BARF (Bay Area Renters Federation). Collectively, they’ve developed a good grip on how you turn out the virtual troops when there’s a Zoomed hearing anywhere and the use of real names or locations is not mandated. 

If you get most of your news from what our brethren on the far right call the MainStreamMedia, some of this might be news to you. At my house we look for Bay Area news in two print papers, Chron and NYT, and we often listen to KQED on the radio. We also sometimes look at a variety of online publications, notably Berkeleyside, 48 Hills and the Marin Post, but if we only saw the NYT, the Chron and KQED we might believe the developers’ narrative, that there’s an overall housing crisis instead of what there really is, an affordable housing crisis 

The front page of Sunday’s Chronicle is a case in point. 

Headline: S.F.’s real housing crisis? Project-killing supes. 

What’s the San Francisco supervisors’ crime? 

Supervising! 

Keeping tabs on what’s getting built in their city, and hearing legally sanctioned citizen appeals to decisions of the quasi-adjudicatory agencies they’re tasked with supervising by the city’s charter. The nerve! 

The Supes sent a proposal to build a luxury housing project for about 500 units back to their planning commission (which functions to review project plans like Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustment Board) to complete the environmental impact analysis. The site in question is unstable fill land—a risk which supervisors said was not addressed in the project’s EIR.. In a city where the Millenium Tower is sinking, sinking, sinking, that’s inexcusable. 

The Sunday story quotes an executive of a developer-backed Yimby associated organization to justify the writer’s conclusion that ”… adding housing of all types tends to bring housing costs down for everybody and reduces displacement”, a theory which has been widely discredited, though you wouldn’t know that from reading this piece. 

So who’s on the menu for the 2021 Alligators’ Ball.? The invitation promises that “… you’ll get to hang out with Senator Scott Wiener”....and so many other City Councilmembers, Supervisors, and Housing Heroes! 

But since this is a Berkeley publication, we think the pièce de resistance, the juiciest entrée on the menu, is this one: Berkeley Councilmembers Terry Taplin, Lori Droste, and Rashi Kesarwani. Yum, yum, yum. 

Since these folks constitute the final appeal destination for decisions of Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustment Board, they presumably will have to recuse themselves if Yimby-backed projects are on their agenda in the future. And that goes for the other elected officials from various jurisdictions on tap for the Friday festivities. 

Since there’s no “Social Notes from All Over” in any Bay Area news source these days to report on who’s hanging out where and when, most Berkeleyans probably don’t realize that they’ve elected three Yimby Councilpersons with whom they’re invited to mingle at Friday’s Yimby Ball. 

Why don’t they know this? 

Why do the Chron and the NYT, the major print publications supposedly covering this area, consistently fail to report the mounting evidence that supply-side economics doesn’t work for the environmentally constrained Bay Area housing market? 

A quick study of the huge glossy real estate sections in Sunday papers confirms what Upton Sinclair figured out long ago: 

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” 

A wildly inflated real estate sales top end and accompanying market rate development fuels the printed press. Affordable housing doesn’t do that. 

And by the way, that goes for KQED radio too, where there’s a lavish study of housing needs underway with major funding from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, an outpost of the Facebook empire, which is a participant in the ongoing drive by big tech corporations to control Bay land use….but that’s a topic too large to discuss here today. 

Anyhow, Zelda Bronstein has documented it extensively on 48hills.org. Take a look. 

And if you buy a ticket to the Yimby Ball, let us know how it goes, if you don’t get eaten.