A YIMBY primer primer
Things to read about Housing Policy, with a Bay Area slant
This post is a little different from most that you will find on Medium, in that I intend to keep updating it over time. If you are interested in learning more about housing policy, especially in the Bay Area, these should be good places to start.
In the beginning was Burrowing Owls
First of all, you should probably read what I’ve heard described as the foundational document of the Bay Area YIMBY movement: an article by Kim-Mai Cutler titled “How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists,” which is also currently being turned into a comic.
There are a number of media stories that chronicle the rise of the movement, but probably the following from SPUR suffices, and that also allows me to plug SPUR and their magazine The Urbanist as an excellent resource.
Zoning and segregation
Like so much that is awful in American public policy, bad land use policies have their origins at least partially in racism.
The NIMBY phenomenon
Ah, NIMBYs. The housing activist’s eternal nemesis. But why are they so afraid of change anyway? Some people have actually tried to research that systematically.
Generally, http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/ is a good source of interesting ideas. Pretty much all of it. Read all of it.
Filtering
Housing and transportation people have a tendency to reinvent the wheels of economics. In particular, they come up with a bewildering variety of names for the first law of demand. Anyhow, “filtering” is an important concept. It isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be; for instance, sometimes the older housing stock in a place is just really low density, and with high enough land prices, that can make it pretty expensive even if the buildings are no longer the latest and greatest. But no matter what you’re told, filtering is real, and it behooves us to understand it.
Affordable housing and BMR
Affordable housing developers in San Francisco sometimes (not always!) tend to have “interesting” policy views, including ones that Paavo Monkkonen in the big UCLA NIMBY study classifies as “misunderstanding the way housing markets work,” but below-market-rate housing can be an important element in addressing the housing crisis. SV@Home, an affordable housing developer in San Jose, has a great policy paper, though. (Their particular figure of 20% BMR probably could stand more detailed examination.)
The White House used to care
In the halcyon days of September 2016, the Obama administration put out a white paper called the Housing Development Toolkit that is worth reading.
Transit
Unless you’re already an expert, you’ll know a lot more about transit after you read Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit book. Which is mostly compiled from material on his blog, so you don’t really need to buy it.
Some SPUR reports about specific Bay Area things that you can pick a lot of general transit knowledge up from:
And probably the best sources on bicycle infrastructure:
Donald Shoup of UCLA has forgotten more about parking than most of us will ever know. The preface and first chapter of his parking book are online. Another good summary of his arguments is this piece he did as part of a Cato Unbound debate:
Technical economics
Not sure what textbook this is an excerpt from, but it seems like a pretty decent intro to real estate economics. Mostly it’s just basic price theory with weird terminology.
https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1143374.files/Rena__Chap%202.pdf
Organizations
There are a number of organizations in the Bay Area and elsewhere that are doing some flavor of YIMBY activism. These organizations are unincorporated and incorporated, tax-exempt and not, they can be membership driven and board driven and sometimes just a mailing list, they can vary from genteel and buttoned-up to rowdy and anarchic, and may engage in a variety of tactics; it’s quite possible for there to be multiple ones where you live, and that needn’t even be a bad thing. Some of these things describe themselves on their sites as being
Here’s a partial list:
- YIMBY Action https://yimbyaction.org/
- SFBARF http://www.sfbarf.org/
- SF YIMBY http://www.sfyimby.org/
- CARLA http://www.carlaef.org/
- East Bay Forward http://www.eastbayforward.org/
- Palo Alto Forward http://www.paloaltoforward.com/
- Redwood City Forward http://www.redwoodcityforward.com/
- Imagine Menlo http://www.imaginemenlo.com/
- Campaign for a Balanced Mountain View http://balancedmv.org/
- South Bay YIMBY http://www.sjyimby.org/
And a few outside the Bay Area:
- London YIMBY https://www.londonyimby.org/ (UK)
- A Better Cambridge http://www.abettercambridge.org/ (Massachusetts)
- Abundant Housing LA http://www.abundanthousingla.org/
Still looking for:
- A good California-specific guide to local public finance, including prop 13, prop 218, how property taxes get distributed within a county, etc. Most of what I can find is either too narrow, or it’s a big book you have to go buy.
- Something about public housing.
- Something about BMR (“affordable”) housing.
- Something about inclusionary zoning.
- HAA.
- RHNA.
- Something on construction cost.
- A primer on Urban Planning that’s a bit less comprehensive than https://www.amazon.com/Guide-California-Planning-William-Fulton-ebook/dp/B00D3BF7LU/
- etc.
Change log
- 20170406: added https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/
