 I have a couple of housekeeping announcements. First of all, if you have bags and you don't feel like holding them, you can put them along the wall near the green room and if you don't know where that is, ask Jesse at the front desk and they will point you in the direction of putting your things somewhere. The other thing is the data and advocacy session that was going to take place in Merritt is cancelled and Eric Penzer is going to be co-facilitating the hashtag content panel in Mandela later this afternoon. We have mascot voting. Who here knows about mascot voting? Some people. If you don't know about mascot voting, voting ends at 12 p.m. this afternoon. Sonia Trouse, who is not here right now, is coordinating that and has more information. I can pull up more information for you later if you have questions. So the first round of voting ends at noon today. The results of that will be announced at 1 p.m. Sorry. The results of the first round of mascot voting will be announced at 1 p.m. The voting ends at 12 p.m. And there is another round tomorrow. It's sort of like primary. It's very loud music. Someone please fix that. Thank you. That's better. Yeah. And the guidebook. We have an app and our guide is on it. It's called Guidebook. If you search for YmbiTown, it should come up. It has, you can take notes, you can plan your own schedule, you can talk with other people, you can follow the tour hashtags and the app is called Guidebook and then just search for YmbiTown 2017. The last housekeeping announcement that I have is there are bathrooms on every floor. There's two on this floor, one on the landing floor and two on the bottom floor. They are all gender neutral and they are all labeled with what is inside. So if you're looking for stalls, look for the ones that say stalls. The one on the middle floor, the landing floor is an accessible bathroom. So that is available. I think that is all that we have. The emergency exit is that way. It is an emergency exit, so only use it if the building is on fire. Thank you. Greg, you are the one. Welcome to YmbiTown. How is everyone doing this morning? Good. Good. I was actually just commenting to some people about the setup of the room and I'm kind of glad that you guys are split up because it makes me feel less nervous. If I had you all together, I'd be oof. So, as we just mentioned, I'm doing the morning address. So I'm so excited that everyone's here and I'm really happy to welcome any of you who weren't here yesterday to Oakland, beautiful Oakland, the beautiful Bay Area, the very beautiful and expensive Bay Area. So, we wanted to have this conference here in Oakland because Oakland is a place that is going through a lot of change and I think we're being very cognizant of what change means here. So, although a lot of new stuff is going in, we're trying to be thoughtful about what that means to our city and how to protect the communities there. And part of that is kind of what I'm doing. So again, I'm Greg Magafia. I am one of the co-founders and the co-executive now of East Bay Board. So East Bay Board is the group throwing this conference for you guys right now. We're so happy to welcome you all. And at East Bay Board, we are basically a network of citizens fighting for the future of housing, transit, tenants' rights and long-term planning here in the East Bay. We believe in more housing, more rental protections, better public transit and better infrastructure. So I want to thank all of you guys for coming. And I especially want to thank the volunteers of East Bay Board. So anyone you see with a pink shirt or the pink badge that are volunteers and we can just give them a really big round of applause. I want to specifically point out some of our organizers, our mayor, Karen, Victoria over there and one other person, Libby. So we were the main conference organizers and we worked really, really, really hard to bring this to you. Like we worked over our vacations, we lost sleep, and we had a lot of fun. And we want to make sure you guys have fun too. So before getting to that, I also have to recognize our sponsor, Open Philanthropy. They sponsored this year's conference and they sponsored last year's conference in Boulder. And I also want to thank... We have a scholarship fund and we actually had some really generous donations from some of you guys, some who chose to remain nameless. And I want to recognize one person, Chicago Cityscapes and Stephen Vance, for giving us a big donation for the scholarship fund. And I just want to also say we're very, very proud at this conference we awarded 30 scholarships. And that covers hotel, flight, conference fee waivers. So actually one quarter of all of you out there are scholarship recipients and we think that's really important because the Holy Indie movement is about being inclusive. And that's kind of something that we want to... a message that we want to send home. And in fact, that's the only way I was able to attend last year's conference. And I want to recognize Ken from Boulder over there for hosting last year's conference. And what was really great about it for me was I had no idea that there was this much passion across the country. I knew that I felt a certain way. I knew that other people felt a certain way. I know that housing in Twitter feels that way. But I didn't realize just how much this sentiment was taking over the country and I was so excited to go last year. And it was really interesting to hear all the stories. We had some people who faced the issues that were facing here where home prices are going out of control. We have other people who are facing neighborhood opposition but not in the same way. It's more against affordable housing products. I was just chatting with someone who was talking about vacation rentals in their city. And I think the lessons that we take away are very useful for all of us. We all have different situations but there are some themes. So I'm really proud to welcome you all. I just want to recognize yesterday we kind of introduced ourselves but at this conference here we have a huge delegation from California at the Bay Area. So we have people from here, from San Francisco, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz LA. We have a giant Massachusetts delegation. I think half of the Massachusetts population may be here right now. I don't know how that happened but we're very excited. We also have people from DC, New York, Portland, Austin, Denver and Boulder, the Twin Cities, Seattle, Spokane and Vancouver, Washington and Canada and also have a friend from London. So I just want to remind everyone of the purpose of this conference. It's a gathering for grassroots community organizers, political leaders, educators, housing developers and everyday people to come together to identify problems, create solutions, share resources on the issues that impact housing on the local, state and national levels. So really what we want to do is provide a place for you all to talk, to listen, to learn and really to have the difficult conversations that we're not having. So in that vein really quickly I want to celebrate some of our successes. So a few people wrote to me about their successes but YMDs are succeeding at coalition building in Massachusetts and DC. They've connected building to climate change in Washington. They're becoming a bigger part of the input process in Austin. They're honestly talking about and addressing housing justice in DC. They're mobilizing people in Massachusetts and otherwise and they're dealing with parking minimums in Portland. They're very excited about that. So now let's talk a little bit more about why we're here. And we're here because we're here to say yes in our backyards. And the question is really why are we saying yes? Why is there such a big group of people saying no? And a lot of it comes down to kind of the fear of the unknown. In my conversations with people what I'm finding is not that they think of new development as new neighbors and new enriching community members and new artists and new friends. They think of it as a big, nameless building. It's inhuman, it's very scary. So because of that we were inspired by what Seattle and the Hall of Folks did around housing stories and really humanizing it. And we saw a little bit about that with Houston yesterday, with the say yes campaign. So super cool you guys should look it up if you weren't here yesterday. So I would like to for all of you guys to imagine what your housing story is. So what East Bay Board has been doing is we've been going around to different community events. We have a whiteboard and we ask people what their housing stories are. So let's start with some of them. So our first housing story is, if you can't see it, I will read it for you. It is really expensive. And for some people they would actually say that it's expensive as... So I want to tell you a little bit about my housing story. So I'm actually a local Bay Area person. I grew up here and I'm being priced out. So my housing story is that I recently got engaged and my fiance and I are stuck in my 345 foot square foot rent control department. And this is kind of the story that isn't really told. A lot of what's happening especially here is it's the insider versus the outsider, the newcomer versus the people who have lived in the neighborhood. But there are also other people like me who grew up here and can't afford to stay here. So there are some people who are lucky. This woman right here, her apartment where she stays, they were going to sell the house, but they actually decided to just rent it out so she gets to stay in the apartment and she's very lucky. This next person here, she lives with her boyfriend and because her boyfriend was able to purchase her house, she gets to stay here and she has a huge smile on her face. So some of us are lucky but others of us are not. Our friend Ernest here moved from Atlanta, he went from paying $700 for a luxury apartment to now paying $1,400 in Oakland to share with three others. We also are facing sub-park conditions. This young man has lead in his water, he's a student at the UC. I don't know what keeps happening, I'm sorry. They're just very powerful stories. This woman right here pays $1,900 a month, she can't move out and she can't get any sleep either because of her neighbors. It's just really, really loud. A personal friend of mine has been looked for over six months for a place where she's like, can I get some support here? This is a friend of mine, spent six months, super sweet girl. This was two months ago so she spent six months looking for an apartment. This is a friend who had to room in with this friend for three years. So this is another friend, a very close friend. She's in a wheelchair, hers reads, I'm clinging onto my wheelchair accessible red-controlled housing. So this is kind of the situation that a lot of people are facing. Someone else, when she first looked at houses in Berkeley, the basement flooded to her ankles and that's the house they ended up buying because they couldn't afford anything else. We have another guy here and this is really what's going on and really what's being focused on because we know that we live in certain conditions but this is what gets the news. So this guy used to work in Berkeley, he recently got married, he's pushing a stroller, they can't live in Berkeley anymore. This woman moved here to be near her two sons and one of them left the state because his rent went up $700. This is someone who wanted to remain anonymous. She's been couch surfing for the last three years. She's one of the hidden homeless and she got kicked out, she was evicted and she can't go anywhere. She's just lucky she has a friend who is letting her stay there. And these are real stories and this is really what's going on. Here's another thing. There is a new apartment building that went up. The rent, this woman says she didn't want to show her face. Rent's are going to go for $7,000 and she lived next door and she had to move out due to their construction. So I did support this building, but it doesn't mean I support what happened to her. And that's really what this is about. It's about humanizing what's going on. And that's if you're lucky enough to find housing. This woman's been looking for housing for quite a while. This woman was looking for housing so long that her Section 8 voucher ran out. But some people are lucky. This guy pays $200 a month for a rent-controlled apartment that he can only afford with the Section 8 and he's very grateful. And this brings me to kind of us and why we're here. This is our friend Paul who is actually here at the conference. His housing story is he's watched his neighbors on fixed incomes get priced out and his wife and he don't think they can afford to make a life here. There is hope though. This really happy couple. Huge supporters of affordable housing and public housing. The man in this photo actually designs public housing. So I want to talk more about us and about that last couple. About people who are saying yes in our backyards. And I think I can only really speak with expertise on the conversation that's happening here. But it is a conversation, as I said earlier, about insiders and outsiders and newcomers and people who've been here. And as I said, the conversation can be about gentrification where you are. It could be about changes. But I think why we're all here is we see that something's going on and something's not working. If these policies worked, we wouldn't need to be having this conference at all. And I just want to tell you guys a little bit about why I became a YMV. It's kind of a strange story. So I worked for a local elected official who was super cool, I would say, like the original YMV. And I worked actually on economic development for him. And transportation. I was working with startups. I did car share and bike share around here. And I thought that was really cool. And then I just started listening more. I was like, why are we getting all these emails about this five-story building? Why does everyone hate it? And it was really interesting. So my old boss, I would say he was a quick-essential YMV official. He was 72 going on 27. He loved walking. He didn't know the car. He used to bike, but actually he preferred walking. But I think he just, the bike was broken and he was too lazy to get it repaired. But he really emphasized wanting a vibrant city with life and culture and things to do and people outside enjoying it all times of the day. But boy is it hard to get anything done in my town. I actually got a lot of resistance when I was working on Parkless because people did not want one parking space or two parking spaces taken away. So it was really interesting. And from my experience with that, I started paying more attention to what people were saying no to. So I heard stories, just anecdotal stories from people who wanted to take their one-story house to two stories, but their neighbors in the two-story houses didn't want that built because it would cast shadows on their lungs. So it was a very, very interesting thing and just try to build a building if you can to build a floor. And that's why I joined together with some people to form East Bay Board. And I'm sure that this is probably relatable for a lot of you out there. And East Bay Board has really come a long way. We started with four or five people in a cafe and now we're throwing this conference. So... I think one thing that I want to emphasize is that the narrative is very, very binary where we are here today. It's very much either us or them. In the Bay Area, you are either a conservative, which is a national super progressive, or you are an extra super progressive. And East Bay Board doesn't fit that binary. We support new housing and we support market-grade housing. We also support affordable housing. We also want to house the homeless and we don't want that to get caught up in bureaucracy. We support rent control and eviction protections. Now, wouldn't we in a perfect world? I don't know. We're in the Bay Area. It's not a perfect world. And ideally we wouldn't have to have these protections. We support inclusionary housing fees, which developers hate. We also support union labor. And at the same time, we support pre-fab units. So I don't know if you guys are dealing with pre-fab. It's cheaper, but you don't get local union labor. So it's all confusing. I don't know what to do. But the point is... The point is really thinking about this and really being nuanced. And I think that's a big lesson we've learned. I think we are really looking at something that I think a lot of Americans have forgotten and really a sense of civic duty and civic responsibility and looking out for others. So it's interesting. Recently I went to a conference at UC Berkeley held by the Turner Center for Housing Innovation. And boy, are those guys smart. They're super smart. However, I didn't actually learn anything new. So I learned that gentrification is happening. It's not happening as much as if you build. I learned there are ways to make things cheaper. Or, I'm sorry, I already knew there were ways to make things cheaper. And we heard about the challenges of building affordable housing. And the question is, if we know all this, what's going on? Why are we in this situation? And the answer always came back to political will. And unfortunately the conference didn't talk about it. But that's why we're here. So we are leaders in this movement. This fight for equality. You, me, all of us in this room. And it's interesting. I've had a lot of meetings with people who are very excited about the IMBI movement. And they call it the new progressive movement. And they talk about how there's all this energy and it's really great to see young people energize. And it was even compared to the movement, the anti-war movement, when the people I were talking to were younger. So I just want to make sure that you all recognize in your own little ways that you are leaders in this movement. And we need to keep this movement going. But we do have some challenges. So my survey that I sent out to you, all of you here, I have a very scientifically, what is it, statistically relevant? I don't remember the term. I have 15 responses. And I'm just going to say that. They represent us here. And I asked about challenges. And the challenges all came back to what can be called in political speak entrenched special interests. So some of you may call them Nimbis. Other people will call them neighbors. I don't know. So what the survey showed over and over is that there's a small yet organized and loud contingent of people who want to preserve neighborhood character. They're worried about parking. They're worried about shadows. And they don't want developers to make profits. So guess what? They're right. A wise man once told me that everyone's right, even when they're wrong, they're right. And that's something that politicians know very, very well. And guess what? We're right too. We're all right. The reason that the people feel these things is because that's what is happening to them. And what we need to do is get more people... What are my phrases? More people like us who believe in our rights and our rights to housing and our rights to inclusive societies to these meetings. It's one thing to talk about it, but we really need to activate people to get out there. And I think that's what GMB's are doing. We're putting in the political will. It's one thing to sit on Twitter. Twitter's great. It starts the conversation. It's anonymous. You can make obscure 18th century Marxist references that I don't understand. Maybe I'll look up, but probably not. It's really about what these people are feeling. And politicians know that. We live in a post-fact era. It's just a post-fact fact. And we need to get people out to those meetings. A very good local council member, friend of mine, who may or may not be in the room, looked at me, had a battle about a round-down zoning in Berkeley just... I'm sorry, in a local city. Just last week. And this council member got studies and got experts to write in. Letters from universities and letters from housing centers. All the data showing that this would be bad. People who are experts said it would be bad. But that doesn't matter. We weren't able to get people into the room every single meeting. The first time we got people in there, but you know what? We're all busy. So, I'm running out of time. And I guess what I, since I'm going to cut it down short, I want to emphasize to you guys is the importance of local politics and I think you know it. But it's also talking to your friends so that they understand the importance of local politics. We obviously had high voter turnout for this election and it affects... National politics affects us a lot more people with the ACA, but the national politics don't exactly fix our potholes or affect our parking or affect whether we walk or drive to our nearest corner store or grocery store. So I really would like you guys to reflect on what activism means in the digital era and how we turn our Twitter followers into our friends at the council meetings. And I think a lot of you have been really good at building coalitions and working across divides. And I think that's something that we're actually here to learn. We're here to hear from each other and really quickly I'm almost done my very scientific survey also asked about hopes and aside from growing the movement what came up again and again in the responses for Yipi hopes were to create an inclusive intersectional movement with more options for home ownership and different models of living like co-ops stable, expansive and inclusive housing systems fighting against exclusionary and disenfranchising neighborhood character rhetoric and segregationist zoning policies and really getting back to the American values of welcoming all to livable inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities. We also had one person who wanted to defund subsidies for parking. So with that I want to welcome you all to Yipi town and I look forward to talking with you all and learning from you all. We're going to call up our actual keynote Laura So if you haven't had a chance to read about Amazing Laura on our website I will read your bio aloud for you. So Laura Lowe Lowe Yeah Laura Lowe is an educator musician and partner from Columbia, New York, LA and Chicago who has lived in Seattle since 2009. Her writings appeared in the Urbanists the Seattle Globalists South Seattle Emerald and International Examiner She was elected to Sierra Club Seattle group in 2016 and chairs the housing workgroup. She's passionate about passionate about women spelled with an X for the second ballot. I don't know how to say that. Urbanist Voices Climate Justice, Community Ownership, Equitable Community Development and Renters Rights and I don't think I need to say any more. We're about to see how amazing she is. Hello everybody. I'm going to try to move this. 35 minutes about my story how I came in to be in a very unique way and some of you will identify with my story. There's a lot of people here this year. It's very different than last year. Very different. So I'm really excited to see how much progress we've made in one year getting people in this room that weren't in the room last year but we have a lot that we can always keep so that's kind of a theme. I use the hashtag share the cities. I was trained to be a teacher that leads with questions. My name is Laura Lowe. I live in Seattle, Washington. I have a background in fighting for food justice, immigrant rights, environmental justice. That's my background. So I was asked to speak on intersectional urbanism and I first wanted to think about what land we're on. We're on stolen land. And today in preparation for today I researched about the Honi people and how they maintain self-determination and resilience and the basic colonization. And I want everyone to go back home and learn about the land that they're on and learn about the people whose land it is and learn about how it's stolen. I think that's the first place that we need to start if we're going to be land use educators is to educate ourselves about that land. So what is intersectional organizing? A lot of you know what that is, but some of you may not and that's totally fine. I didn't know what intersectionality was not that long ago. So intersectionality comes from Kimberly Crenshaw's essay, 1989 essay demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex, the black feminist critique of anti-discrimination doctrine, feminist theory and anti-racist politics. So we're talking about something that has a really important history as well. So again, knowing the history of the words you're using. So intersectional organizing to me it means it's about me, I look inside myself first. How are my visible and invisible identities and how do your invisible identities impact the way that you organize? So I'm a renter in Seattle with class privilege, skin color privilege and education privilege. I don't experience discrimination based on the color of my skin. I never have. I don't have to live each day struggling with housing insecurity. I've never experienced houselessness. I was raised in an intergenerational Spanish cooking household. My grandparents came from Cuba to the US in the late 1930s and I've adopted too as born in Bogotá, Colombia and became a citizen when I was five years old. So those are a few of my identities. And in the last few weeks I asked a lot of people in Seattle if they thought I was intersectional in my organizing. And a lot of people told me you embody it. So why should you use an intersectional organizing framework when you do your work? So I'm kind of like this is like my intersectional organizing sales pitch. Many of you will nod your heads when I say that urbanism is too white in general, too male and we need to make space for the voices of women and voices from communities of color to be centered in the yes and buy back yard movement. We need to go deeper. Who defines urbanism? What is the impact of policies that have been shaped by privileged systems and privileged perspectives? And who does the current system work for? And who is it working against? And when you're doing intersectional organizing you're going to have a lot more questions that are almost impossible to answer in an emotionally satisfying way and it's going to get awkward really fast. You should feel uncomfortable. You should feel awkward. And I really appreciate the leadership and in particular the mayor of the MB town here in Dark Water and Victoria Pierce because they work in that awkward space of intersectionality towards not just models of equality but towards a goal of equity. And so this year they've really prioritized based on feedback from last year workshop titles this theme for the event today spaces and scholarships to create a more welcoming environment. So they're practicing kind of some steps towards an intersectional movement. So I'm going to talk about my unlikely path to YMD whose voices we need, why we need more voices why I use YMD not YMD how I do my elevator pitch at parties tips for success or kind of like bitty bad take-aways for things that we can do right away and then question and answer at the end. So I was a slow growth campaign manager and some of you know but not just a slow growth campaign manager like the slowest growth person out of 50 people running for our newly restricted offices so it wasn't just like any old slow growth campaign managers probably the most one. And I was kind of nimby curious about myself I was really excited about this candidate because he ran the Northeast District Council meetings in my neighborhood and he ran like the best meetings because his meetings were the best and he was really sweet and we became friends and I was the editor of the book newsletter and he wanted to run for office and he kept asking me and I was like you think that bike lanes are going to have small businesses and I just don't think that's true and you think that we need to go even slower but I don't know it doesn't really make quite sense to me but you really like historic preservation and my parents have both studied our history and historic preservation is an awesome thing that I want to make sure that we do and you're always talking about how we need to have access to government and more voices involved in the conversation and I fought for that my whole life so we kind of have shared values and he ended up asking me six times to be his campaign manager and I finally said yes so I actually didn't know what I was getting into and we knocked on 15,000 doors in North East Seattle voter stores and I knocked on 5,000 voter stores in North East Seattle and through those six months I heard stories of why people were objecting to the growth and the more and more and more doors I knocked on the more I got troubled to hear the reasons why people didn't want changes in their neighborhood they were worried about the history the few blocks they walked with their kids to school or the path that it took them in their part of their grocery store and they weren't thinking beyond that they weren't thinking city-wide growth or regional growth they weren't thinking about welcoming new people they weren't thinking collectively it was extremely individualistic thinking and their fears about new housing seem to be rooted completely in fear and I heard racist things xenophobic things that's going on in Seattle I thought you were progressive I guess you're not progressive so the other people in the race the urbanists Rob Johnson and Michael Maddox they were saying things about Maddox is a single gay dad and a renter and Rob Johnson has three beautiful daughters and they were talking about family friendly cities climate friendly cities Maddox was always talking about missing middle housing that's how I found out about missing middle housing they were doing EMP education on the campaign trail they were talking about a shared vision, their shared vision a local radio station called them BFFs they would take car tools together to go to campaign forums and they would build off each other's ideas Rob Johnson's background was in transportation we would talk about how we needed to speed up mass transit regionally and Michael Maddox again was talking about those pathways for renters like himself who were extremely in rent for rent to move into a ownership of opportunities that existed so I got really excited about their shared vision of the future and the voters did too and both of them moved on past the primary and after that the campaign ended I kept being engaged in the conversation and got really excited about housing I started going to council meetings yeah is anyone here ever been to a council meeting is anyone here gone to like three in a day yes so we're all kind of council nerds but who has time to go to council meetings so I started going to council meetings after I was done with the campaign season to stay engaged in what I've learned were all the different overlapping things going on in my city and I went to meetings about housing, transportation human rights, investment many other topics and I looked around and I was like who are these people that are in this room and one of them are paid to be here they work for nonprofits or whatever and then there's all these other people like do they have jobs what's going on I was in school at the time to be a counsellor to be a therapist for kids with learning challenges so I had time during the week to go to council meetings so there were other students like me and I'm not going to show it to you but if you haven't seen don't listen to me I'm a crazy video from Laura you definitely need to watch it I watch it when I'm kind of it's almost painful because it's so true but don't listen to me I'm a crazy video it was amazing and it's basically imploring council members to consider who's not here who's not in the room right now think about who actually are the people to show up again and again we're not like maybe the most stable bunch of people in cities so by January I was becoming kind of obsessed with going to council meetings I was reading anything with the word city in it, city observatories city lab, greater greater Washington I was reading about the urbanists in Seattle blog and I wasn't doing any of my homework so I decided to put this pool to teach folks about land use my background to middle school math and science and so I had started going to all these meetings and people were like what's far what's in my fee people figured that we're at the meetings and they asked me all those wonky acronyms and it was really fun to be able to teach people like in the moment at the council meetings like what was going on so I started tweeting as UMBC in January 2016 and when I started tweeting as UMBC I didn't tell anyone it was me I kept it a secret I told like five people and I did that for months and when I finally told people that it was me a lot of people were like I was a woman or someone must have been helping you I mean you don't have a background in this stuff you were like a middle school science teacher like wait like they just had no idea it was me so a lot of people today I reached out and said what do you want me to talk about and I got tons of Twitter direct messages and Facebook messages and emails from women asking me to talk about mansplaining so I said oh mansplaining so a little awkward my whole life like 95% of my best friends have been men anyway so we have an abundance of great envy women Sasha yesterday, Madeline in Portland Susan in Texas, Becca in Boulder Maya in San Diego, Alex in Ohio Lauren, Sonia in Victoria and so many others in the Bay Area I'm leaving out a bunch of you I'm going to meet a bunch of rad women today but envy dudes in general, don't mansplain to us if we don't know about something and if we want to hear about it we're going to ask don't watch into a lecture at us at a party or a bus stop or a public meeting choose your moment to talk to us about your passions ask us if we have time to hear about it the assumption that if we don't know everything at that exact moment on Twitter or Facebook or in real life right before our workshop at the IMB conference is the time to talk about Ambassador's thesis on bike lanes in Miami well guess what, tiny is everything and chronic mansplainers so there's like the accidental like, I'm really excited to teach you about this mansplainer and then the chronic mansplainers that never let anyone men or women or anyone to get a last word try for a week in real life if someone's kind of pulled you aside say, hey you're kind of one of those chronic mansplainers try for a week in real life and online to make space for a woman or anyone, especially someone from a historically oppressed community to have the last word in a conversation don't always try to have that last word just like, let it hang there let, even if it's wrong or whatever and even more importantly try to let people have the first word so when I was a teacher we talked as a math teacher we talked about wait time and you know, you don't have to be always the first one to comment maybe there's a woman that wants to be the first one to comment or someone that is scared to be shut down but wants to be the first person to comment in a thread or in real life so this is part of the reason we need to seek out and fund leaders for land use conversations that have similar stories and backgrounds as the folks that are often shouted down in their lives not inviting to participate in policy conversations don't have time for those policy conversations or land use decision making women, immigrants, people of color queer folks experiencing houselessness people with invisible disabilities that have a chronic illness and can't make it to council there's such a long list of people that aren't, it's not easy for them to access this stuff and pay them, pay them to show up pay them to organize, pay them to participate in engagement and pay them to help them to go back to talk to their communities and really fund those people for their time so we need to think about the serious part how do people in positions of power maintain the power how do their words and actions continue to perpetuate inequities I was thinking of a good example that in King County in Washington state we still have women making 76 cents to the dollar that a man makes couple more anecdotes about manslating so I walked into a meeting for transit in frozen Seattle and a super wealthy young dude asked me tell him your bambi advocacy is working and I was like nice to meet you never meant to work first thing he said so I felt really unprepared to answer that question and I'm one of those people that I'm like I'm back and I like get defensive and look like that's, you know I'm just gonna, I just didn't say anything and I really wanted to just leave the event I was like this is not a place that I want to be right now also recently a wealthy older homeowner dude in a leader in the 43rd legislative district in Seattle sent an email to the environmental portion of their mailing list referring to me as the worst urbanist propagandist in Seattle I've already struggled with like being a lifelong green party member and joining the devs for burning and leaving or staying whatever and stuff like that just makes me want to spend my time somewhere else so microaggressions are when you experience something over and over and over again and you're just like I'm over it like I'm not going to be part of this so I would love to be involved in all sorts of the transit community in Seattle and the Democrats but if I'm made to feel unwelcome like there's other ways that I'm going to spend my time so we need to think about that we need to look at how people are forming their opinions about housing policy we need to look at them in our cities holistically and make clear pathways pathways into our movement so that more people can join us and feel safe here and comfortable and see themselves as yes in my backyard advocates so alliances and messengers my friend Alex from housing now Seattle and I had a fundraiser in my backyard and it was a super interesting fundraiser we had a member housing developer David Neiman he's written about how Seattle's over-regulated micro housing he's a wonderful names educator and we also had Socialist City Council member Shama Sawant back to back and they supported us and asked people to donate to us and another hero of mine a hero of mine, Kate Burnett who exemplifies intersectional organizing in the work that she's doing in Seattle also is there and the last person that spoke was Myra Lara who's here going to be doing the Zines & Neams workshop later so I'm going to share with you what Myra had to say at this event so Myra as an artist had her first little art show recently and used prints pins, zines other formats to indicate how we don't have infill development in Seattle in 60% of the city lots of amazing all of you can't do this so there's the little legalize it for the duplex and then over here is explaining how few how only 11% of the land in Seattle is really developable for multi-family housing so land use education and through art are really important her show was really creatively titled not even fairly legal, desperately creative infill development it was packed packed packed packed event there was people there I had no idea I feel like I know everyone in Seattle and I didn't know most of the people in that room and I think that says a lot about the kind of communities that Myra can reach into that I can't so Myra is someone I think exemplifies the kind of messengers and messages that we need and she spoke at the event and she's given me permission to share her words from a few weeks ago so the next words were her words that she said at this event though I studied architecture my path towards being an urbanist was through urban sociology which looks into the social structure of peoples and how that is spatially and structurally expressed once I saw the connection between race, urban space and opportunity I couldn't look away just in one week in Seattle last month we had a super offensive very racist puppet in our socialist parade an article about moral-versed wealthy families proclaiming Black Lives Matter wasn't appropriate for their elementary school children to be taught and we had the unjust murder of Charlene O'Wiles and this was all in the background of a London tower burning down because high income tastes were given priority over people's safety and all of the background noise feeds into how one group or another group contextualizes housing policies like mandatory housing affordability I want to remind you of two things what's visible speaks louder than theories and ideals and that learning is listening we know our ideals we want affordable housing for everyone we don't know what these ideals mean to other groups what shapes they take, where they happen how they happen a high rise to some can mean luxury views security and a high rise for others can mean isolation, a trap and many are still hurting from the ills of affordable housing efforts long past so what do we know what's true there's not enough housing but also communities of color are leaving the city and they don't want to and that's what's visible that's what Barnards mistrust and further isolation and Myra's mom would always say to her and I apologize I'm going to sound like George Bush in Spanish no, agos cosas buenas que pasan malas I hope I got that right don't do good things that look like bad things don't do good things that look like bad things perceptions speak multitudes so how do our current housing policies look like to communities of color we say we are doing good everyone here says we are doing good if all one sees is just white wealth enjoying the beauty of a city how can we say we are growing equitably so say what you mean be specific with what you mean who benefits immediately be honest about who leaves who stays, who arrives start with reality not with ideals ideals mean nothing to someone facing housing insecurity and racism every day for me, for Myra art is one way to initiate conversations on housing and engage perceptions via the imagination lastly, always ask yourself these questions, they're from the Helix Clear performance network who thrives, who dies who's history survives who gets policed, who is safe who is missing so Myra is an inspiration to me it's in many of us in Seattle with the capital renters initiative and many other things it's been so delightful and energizing for me to see and hear emergence in the Indian movement in Seattle so as I said before I was trained as a teacher and I was trained to lead with questions I was trained to be a teacher and I have a background fighting for food justice environmental justice immigrant rights and I have a lot more in common with a group of youth organizers blocking a new hotel in Chinatown international district in Seattle than most of the people that I spend time in urbanist heat-ups with and I've been really impressed with the organizing meetings hosted by the CID coalition they have food they have translators they have enough volunteers so that all the attendees have feel connected can ask individual questions they focus on stories, emotions and people they've knocked on a tremendous amount of doors they've helped me and people gain access to these conversations that I've never been able to access I've spent a lot of time with the CID coalition listening to their work and just listening and learning about exactly all the reasons why they're objecting to this new hotel project I also attended the city the special review district international special review district meetings and wrote an article called acronyms for action something even more inspired about teaching people about land use so it's just an article of sharing information here's what ISRD is here's how to get involved it could be used by someone who wants to fight the hotel or not and at the ISRD meetings I heard a lot of folks who were really supportive of the changes happening in their community and they also had plenty of stories about all of the past land use wrongs that that community had faced so when it came time to testify for the rezone hearing, the up-zone hearing to unlock MHA mandatory housing portability in this neighborhood I didn't speak for or against the project what I said instead was that it was fake equity to be rezoning this community where we hadn't touched 60% of the city we had moratoriums and 60% of the city and multi-family housing we had billion dollar infrastructure, light rail infrastructure and the historically wealthy white community of Montlakes and they weren't asked for any zoning changes so that was my testimony and sometimes we need to take a step back why do we think that we know it's best for another community? when we're listening to a systemically oppressed community who perceive a threat how am I standing with them to find solutions that are more widespread and long-lasting and equitable housing outcomes that address the root causes of our housing crisis so for us to grow a healthy and successfully ambient movement we need to continue to acknowledge past land use wrongs know the history, connect with communities connect with the passengers that can connect with communities we can't connect with fund us, pay us, pay them and I use the hashtag share the cities in Seattle to talk about housing but we need to share our space better again, like I said at the beginning we took a picture of last year's room and we took a picture of this year's room side by side we're getting there we're making progress but there's still more we can do so now I'm going to talk about why I use Yobi so I use Yobi not NIMBY and I use Yobi for a lot of reasons it's hard to pronounce and people don't know what it means I don't like NIMBY I don't like to define myself about what I'm fighting against I like to talk about what I'm fighting for so YIMBY automatically people are like you just hate NIMBYs, you're just fighting NIMBYs and it's like Yobi it's like well what's that and it makes people have all these questions and so I'm already getting them to like what are we saying yes to and I'm like oh it stands for community ownership it stands for collective thinking it stands for our and all of us together we might have to make some sacrifices in some communities and we might have to think about other people besides the path to the grocery store having public buildings or whatever it is you're objecting to or parking spaces or whatever so Yobi gets outside of the mindset of that I'm just anti-NIMBYs because I'm not anti-NIMBYs which we'll hear about in a minute and if I'm at a party I don't tell people I do YIMBY or Yobi I say I'm a citizen journalist and I tweet as NBC and then I kind of like get to the Yobi part and it allows me to have control over where the conversation goes but the other person is asking the questions I'm not explaining or they explain it or whatever so the pitch so I get to the pitch eventually by like elevator pitch you all have an elevator pitch right for your activism you should develop an elevator pitch because if you're running on that platform so my pitch you know it would be super great if we could have public housing dollars and it would be super great if we could have community ownership models and we could give loans to tenants to buy their naturally affordable buildings and we really need limited equity co-ops and we really need all sorts of really exciting solutions but 500 people are coming to Seattle every week and zoning sucks zoning super sucks and design review is like the worst and people aren't getting their electrical boxes you don't even know how bad it is you've got to come with me to these design review meetings and see these folks blocking ridiculous things for ridiculous reasons and we need all those things we need community ownership we need limited equity co-ops we need creative solutions have you heard about Vienna and I don't know why I say that but we need to also connect the fact that the reason we have so many people that are houseless is we don't have housing and so I think that I always bring that up is that in Seattle most of the people I know believe that there's economic root causes of why people are experiencing houselessness but they don't think about the fact that there's not enough housing people necessarily is the root cause so connecting not enough housing to people not having housing you have to make that connection explicit so sometimes I'm presenting myself as a reluctant envy and that doesn't mean I don't think that envy is awesome and the envy movement is awesome and we don't need it I just think that the biggest challenge I face is that people think that if I say envy and they can kind of feel that I'm trying to get them to be a envy that they think that means that they have to be a market urbanist and that's my biggest challenge in Seattle is I mean at my area-wide caucus for Bernie it was 96 for Bernie and 4 for Hillary so yeah so my particular flavor of urbanism it's not settled it's like a bunch of ice cream scoops on top of each other I hate the word envy I hate it so much I save it for folks that oppose safe consumption sites promote needless homeless sweeps or ask people living in their vehicles those are the numbeases I call numbeases I have my mom is an envy she's changing over time so you know that's my own preference so I'm going to ask everyone this is a little engagement part so I keep talking about the room so everyone kind of look around who's in the room and think about how you're being perceived by others think about your power how you show up in spaces how you might be being perceived by all sorts of things and always do that always think when you're in a room you're kind of judging other people but think about how you're being judged by not just what you say but kind of some invisible assumptions that people might make and think about how we can improve that this room is more reflective of the communities that we're from or that we're not from but that we want to make sure of our conversation so we need to listen to the very specific reasons why people are projecting a new housing I wrote about how to talk to your numbing parents and it was really interesting the reactions to that mostly positive there's this awkwardness with intersectionality and part of the awkwardness listening and having an openness that you might be wrong about a lot of stuff and that gives cover to the other person to also be in that space where maybe some of their thinking isn't exactly right either but there's a vulnerability that you need when you're doing intersectional organizing so when I'm connecting with people in real life I use everything that I know so I place bass guitar this was a housing living house party and the guy who sang he was the guy that was running for city council with Rob Johnson so that's Michael Mattis we ended up being in a band together and where maybe had was a housing living fundraiser but you know that was super fun it brought people to the event that probably didn't really know anything about housing policy I was a middle school math and science teacher from talking to a teacher or parent I really talked about how youth voices have impacted me I was elected to Sierra Club in winter 2016 and if I'm talking to one of those urban tree fanatic people you know urban tree canopy people I mentioned Sierra Club right away I have a dream type biology I love trees Sierra Club we protect trees yes and when I'm talking to an EMB that's trying to convince me that there's this data set it's one chart but if you just show everyone this one graph and you explain this chart really well like it's almost like they're saying like you're still like human rights oriented maybe you didn't study how to read statistical analysis I have a dream type biology like I can read your graph I know understand data but expecting some statistical analysis to change hearts and minds about housing colors and how our humanity present out front everything we do forming relationships at the base of any movement building and community organizing work we need to reach out to people that have a lot of mistrust of urbanists and urbanism with radical openness that we're both going to change our thinking and we need to do a hard awkward work first in our organizations and inside of ourselves to examine the impact historical oppression of certain communities that shape the systems that their system exists today many of the systems that exist right now are still there to continue the oppression of non-white folks and women towards maintaining white supremacy and patriarchal systems and because just because you go to one anti-racist training or like your job sends you to an anti-racist training that doesn't mean you've done the work you have to keep doing it and you have to keep revisiting it and it's going to benefit you in many aspects of your life so the main thing is we must build more housing so many more people have housing and everyone has housing eventually we must build more entry points to our YIMBY movement so many more people see themselves as YIMBYs and I hope you're inspired to do the work to seek out, listen to and learn from and highlight unconventional messages and stories within our YIMBY movement and pay us to do the work and fund us so ok, so tips for success so I want everyone to take out their phone take out your phone take out your camera part of your phone and if you have a green dot that means you can take a picture, you have a yellow dot you have to ask permission and there's another dot where you don't want pictures and I want everyone to get next to someone and you're going to take selfies so my first tip for intersectional organizing is to take selfies so we're going to take 10 seconds and everyone takes selfies with someone around take a picture selfies hashtag, some of the funny hashtags are your selfies deep in underneath city hall no windows, awful, real so smelly these folks here live in a skull of a 50 shades of grey building and they did not want this new housing that was going in across the alley and they knew that they weren't going to be able to block it so they were going to stall the project as long as possible and they came up with all sorts of reasons stupid reasons so someone on line started using 50 shades of stupid so I live treated the eating using 50 shades of stupid some of the other hashtags I use are share the city yes and our backyards yvmv which I didn't come up with someone else and holly yes which I didn't come up with which is excellent housing now is my friend Alex welcome communities also uses that not yvmv is also a really good one and then when I do events like yes and our brunch yes and our book club so hashtags and selfies that's my first tip to you and the 50 shades of stupid one of the stupidest things is they had sugar the dog who was going to lose his patch of sun and they had expert testimony that sugar the dog was going to be depressed like this is not right like it was really upsetting that they were sugar the dog was going to lose his patch of sun there's more dogs in Seattle than kids so that's something you should know about Seattle um the next tip is to power map so I could do like a whole workshop maybe I don't think I'm going to but we'll workshop on power maps um this picture with Shama Salon over here I was like ugh she's like we need to get more comfortable to a raised fist like you this is yeah socialist city council member Shama Salon and so when you do your power map don't just do it inside your organization like call some of your friends that are maybe I have some friends that are maybe not so YIMB I have them that look at my power map um you don't know all the ways that power looks none of us do power looks different to all of us it impacts us differently that's part of intersectionality so power map could be like this is kind of a power map if I ask people in Seattle to come up with all the organizations that they think it was YIMB this is just a like tiny fraction of the YIMB organizations we have in Seattle we have like hundreds of YIMB organizations it's an abundance of YIMB too much YIMB sometimes um there's a lot of power in YIMB in Seattle which can be really intimidating to people about it and Seattle for everyone the urbanist and Seattle subway and sight line and I could go but there's different kinds of power I mean when our power map we need to consider all the ways that power shows up so um the Duwamish tribe is the land that we stand on in Seattle and we need to be really conscious of that so listen differently so my next story is kind of um I listened differently story I mean you can think of when listen differently is oh it's that CID thing that I talked about so when I showed up to the CID meetings I listened differently then maybe when I showed up to a meeting in northeast Seattle and I listened to these folks here there was translators and then the other picture is a group of security officers that were contracted by Amazon that weren't being allowed to pray um they were told to go in their car to pray um so we did a big protest on May Day and I got to be a part of that and that was really exciting so um show up to spaces where the voices of communities of color centered and listen um listen to what they need and if there's a way for you to help and sometimes you can't help and it's not your job to help people and they see a way for you to help that's great um and if you're invited back, keep showing up so keep showing up keep showing up, keep showing up and always send the same person if you're like the director or something don't like send different people every time send the same person because you're trying to build relationships so it's not like oh I'm just trying to get my message in that community you're at council like it's like oh wow Laura always shows up or whatever or in Seattle there's this Seattle freeze so one of the ways to thaw the Seattle freeze is you keep showing up and they're like oh I guess I have to go figure out why she keeps showing up like you know so yeah you can thaw the Seattle freeze uh keep showing up online I had you know 650,000 impressions over 60 days on Twitter if I don't tweet for a few days people are like what's going on like is there some secret thing you're working on like why aren't you tweeting so be consistent and keep showing up so neighbors for more neighbors we'll get a lot of shout outs this weekend from a lot of us they are so funny so funny so this is the avocados and some of you know the story about avocado toast being the reason millennials can't have housing avocado toast is delicious so the avocados was an excellent way to get people to talk to your friends about zoning and then talk to your friends about zoning like campaign there's some posters outside you can buy and stuff please support neighbors for more neighbors they're out of Minnesota so be funny in your work hire people that are funny pay educators pay people that we're trying to teach and so be relentless so be relentless is different than showing up to me be relentless means iterative organizing we are always going back to the same people I sometimes meet someone in my calendar and I'll sit in my calendar like two months from now to check back in on them so I don't forget and maybe that first meeting there wasn't like a match I couldn't really help each other but eventually maybe hopefully we can so keep meeting with people be with openness and kindness I always say to people is there an article you want me to write is there something you need me to tweet you have a fundraiser coming up you want me to promote what can I do for you and then eventually over time if you keep going back you keep showing up you find ways to help each other and you don't want anything at the beginning and you're just like oh that was a terrible meeting old-pack fashion paper thank you notes please send paper thank you notes so I sent all my council members the neighbors for more neighbors valentines roses that are red rumors they're cool I'm reasoning my heart since missing middle is you there's some more neighbors right so all the council members in Seattle they get like call names from like morning to night they get death threats especially the female council members they get I mean the things that are said on the phone to their legislative aids who are finding like could never even repeat in public the things that get said to them so here they are getting this like ridiculous valentine's card for me and they hang it up and the next time they see me they're like oh it's so great to look at your card at the end of my long day and just be like okay well there's just one person that likes me in the city there's just one of the council members that I don't like so sorry I don't like some of you but I found a way to say something nice in the card like thank you for that my plan or whatever so be relentless disarm people be funny check out our areas of mutual self interest I wanted to talk about like an example of success with all of this so kind of a successful I don't know how my hauls fly okay so Hala is the housing affordability and livability agenda and how many people were at MB last year okay so last year Sarah Maxana talked about Hala and we're going to hear more about it this year from Sightline but the housing affordability and livability agenda is 65 policy recommendations to address the Seattle's housing crisis and it's super comprehensive but the piece that's kind of gotten pulled out as like highlighted is the inclusionary zoning which is now the mandatory MHA program and in order to unlock the MHA percentages and get the affordable housing money we have to do up zones so we're doing neighborhood by neighborhood up zones so one of the successes that me and the organizer that's paid to do the work Erin from Seattle for everyone we had a hundred people come to a meeting a night meeting in the U district in favor of the up zone a hundred people we ran out of like our paddles and that's an example of we had labor in support we had environmental groups in support we had tenants rights groups that had questions but didn't stand in opposition we had not getting someone to stand in opposition as a woman and so please fund organizers because Erin's paid to do that work I don't have to think about it and I get to do all this other cool stuff and I get to go beyond how I think what's next and start building bridges for an initiative I want to do an initiative called four floors and corner stores to use on the single family zones so I can start working on four floors and corner stores so pay people to do like the kind of grind work and then you'll have other activists that step up that aren't paid I wasn't paid for the first few months and now I'm doing Patreon because last time I was down here I was doing Patreon and I'm like okay and I have 37 supporters I get about $800 a month from that so my last tip is to write articles you have no idea how weird these articles can go out and get retweeted and spread to weird communities and you get into spaces that you wouldn't expect how to talk to your NIMBY parents and the acronyms for action ISRD are just two examples but try to be funny and be educational and maybe if you have a really strong opinion on Twitter and Facebook you don't have to put all of that into like an article you could be more presenting both sides and more measured in your approach in your articles the last thing I think it's the last thing yeah self care so this is another good website planninglove.org so this is my heart is known exclusively for you which we could like talk about how it's kind of a weird message this is a different this might be a different community that's using this message so self care I know I'm in the way of this so self care can mean a lot of things for me self care is having people with me I'm not going alone to these meetings I've stopped going alone to the meetings where I know people there are going to be there to attack me the anger has come up often in the work that I do it's made me scared for my safety a lot and I posted in the Abitown there's a Google group from Abitown and I posted asking for stories of other people that I felt threatened and we all started sharing our stories at all the times we felt threatened and how our partners and our loved ones are impacted by the work that we do so we've had a lot of verbal assaults in public meetings one of it and Ethan Phelps Goodman who's here from Seattle tech for housing literally had to step in between me and someone that looked like they were about to attack me this work we do this YMB organizing is really intense many people here have a story of a stranger from a meeting following them to their bus stop confronting them at a grocery store sending awful awful messages like that you don't even want to read over social media and when we do the work in this community people feel threatened that we're taking something away from them and guess what as a socialist I do want to take something away from them I want to take from wealthy home owners and profit motivated banking systems I want to redistribute the land more equitably I want to use a lens of historical and systemic racial injustice that's not just historical those systems are here working against people every day so I do want to take things from people and they're going to be angry wealth and power is going to be angry at me if they have a system working well enough for them it doesn't even have to be working that well but they don't want it to be working any less well so people are going to be angry so to not burn out you need to be safe and kind when you're doing this work to others and to yourself and also sometimes you have to remind yourself I have to remind myself that I can't be the soul bridge builder there are different factions factions of war and urbanists so much of my energy is just like oh why the urbanists are fighting again children so take selfies, power map, listen differently keep showing up, pay organizers be charming, disarm people, be relentless send old fashion paper notes write articles about housing pitch them to local editors constantly lead with kindness to others and yourself so we're going to go to the Q&A one last thing so I was a Catholic middle school teacher and a lot of the parents did not know what to make of me and this is a super shy girl she was defending me to her parents and she goes, that's Miss B she's unconventional so please fund organizers fund unconventional organizers look for people who are trained educators seek out storytellers with unique perspectives to make a stronger unique movement so thanks for listening we love in the housing club okay, the housing levy was $290 million and it was historic to pass a levy that big on property taxes I'm not an expert on it, I just played a punk rock show to support it but the housing levy is it was an example of again those coalitions that were formed over the 20 months when they were planning Paula the housing affordability and livability agenda which is 65 policy recommendations to get to a more affordable equitable Seattle the housing levy was one of those 65 recommendations in Paula and it was one of the first things and so this coalition formed called Seattle for everyone that was for-profit developers, non-profit developers environmental groups Puget Sound Sage was involved there South Seattle focused human rights and justice focused environmental justice group and the coalition labor was involved and that having things for that group to come together on over the course of as we're passing these up zones and as we're doing these pieces of Paula it's been really critical we've passed a bunch of venture protections we've moved in few reforms in Seattle and so the housing levy was just another great example and the vote ended up being over 70% of Seattle approved sales tax in Seattle in Washington so the fact that voters who are feeling pretty property tax burden are still willing to pass it at 70% was really exciting and this is my opinion I'm sure there's other people that have a different opinion in this room of the housing levy there's like 10 people from Seattle so I would talk to them too any other questions? yeah this is actually an announcement sorry so the first primary for the official mascot right after this you can come over like this area I bought these this morning this is the mascot friend this is a little subversive like please get the sunflower and then also during lunch I'll come around so if you don't want to see the list of them if you go to as if you via Twitter or ask a friend or if you know then count other people also you guys should be campaigning for the thing sunflower the description of sunflower is amazing I didn't know I was like all avocado like as our mascot and then I read the whoever wrote the sunflower one and I was like oh it's so brilliant well I would I had a question that I wish somebody would ask about Sierra Club and why Sierra Club so envy in Seattle um why is it I asked the one they didn't raise their hand asking but my plant over there okay maybe ask a question actually um it's different I just wanted to like read you over this a little bit but when you're talking about your successes and she mentioned 100 people that came out to the meeting I just want to say I was clerking that meeting on behalf of like City Council and it was a meeting to up zone an area from in some places 85 to 320 feet in terms of height and you can imagine what that kind of meeting looks like 85 to 320 feet yeah and it was like I think in general the sense was like 60% for 40% against and if you've ever been to a land use meeting 30% of people coming out for an up zone is just unbelievable I've never seen anything like it Ethan Phelps Goodman's here he did a lot of work on that too so it was such a victory I can't even imagine anyway so my question for you is one of the coalition partners that we're really lucky to have in Seattle is the Sierra Club there are a lot of people in Seattle who are like progressive on the environmentalist but they don't get the land use connection so having a cover of the Sierra Club so thank you so I want to there's going to be an article that's going to come out in like October in the Sierra Magazine nationally about green infill development and Sierra Club's offices are here in Oakland so the people that work in the office are really aware of conversations around green infill development you can even go back to the 90s and there was papers written internally that you can read in Sierra Club about green infill development so I would use the Sierra Club to talk to the Sierra Club so go back to your Sierra Club and talk to them about infill development talk to them about why it's important we're really lucky in Washington State we have the Growth Management Act which is really strong boundaries and targets around growth regionally and that helps us there's that shared ethic of like we do need to make urban density a priority to protect wild spaces and farmlands and a lot of communities don't have that growth boundary we saw it in Boulder too that their strong growth boundary helped them have a really good envy movement so those things are connected but I also want to say we had we have Mike O'Brien who's a national board member he's a council member in Seattle and he's a national board member for Sierra Club we have Mike McGinn who was an environmental lawyer and he was in charge of Sierra Club and he's the mayor so Seattle has had this long history of YIMBY Mike McGinn made YIMBY t-shirts back in 2010 Frank City YIMBY so he was using YIMBY to talk about urban density a while ago so we've been really lucky in Seattle but I do think that there's going to be an article in October or so about brain infill development in Sierra Magazine that will go to everybody's household and you could use that with your Sierra Clubs to say like time to make this a part of your conversations I think the art especially of getting an institution like the Sierra Club to come on board with some of the YIMBY stuff is really awesome I'm kind of curious to hear about other long standing maybe older guard institutions within Seattle that you think might be more tipping towards some of this density stuff who were some of these newer messengers that might be old guard institutions but could continue to do it Well we have like splits from the actual there was someone here that I was talking about this with from LA last night and he pointed out and we were discussing about how the people that are on the boards of these institutions are coming from a background and have ideals that were formed in different times around environmentalism and so that's again an example of listening so you're listening to like why they're objecting you're not just humanizing them for objecting so Seattle for everyone is the organizers funded by FutureWise and FutureWise is an environmental board but there's board members of FutureWise that led the charge to halt background cottages so you've got within organizations those dynamics that they're struggling with and Sierra Club the same thing we had over the carbon tax we had to push around people seeing that from a lot of different angles but again it goes back to listening and meeting people and having conversations and again being open and maybe having your mind changed a little too and not just humanizing them because if you've been a board member for 30 years for an environmental nonprofit maybe it's time for you to go and maybe it's time for new people to come in I'm the oldest person on the Sierra Club Seattle I'm 41 and everyone's younger than me and the current leader actively recruited folks that had a social justice urbanist mindset lots of one-on-one meetings lots of coffees lots of one-on-one meetings to change minds don't do it don't call someone out in public they're not going to change their mind in public they're going to double down on their wrong thinking Madeline what's been some of the best tactics and some of the errors you've seen in more kind of we'll call them typical YIMBs trying to work with affordable housing developers and providers so the question was YIMBs typically YIMBs which I don't know what that means but YIMB mistakes around working with affordable housing um I think there's there's I think that there's a time and a place for saying that there's a non-profit industrial housing complex like like I understand I understand I am not into charity models for helping people like I think that you know again giving loans to tenants to buy their own buildings giving doing community land trusts and like helping people walk in affordability um all those things are great I think that's much better than giving somebody section 8 voucher right um but the name calling like it serves two purposes so um you know you have the it gets headlines it gets press you get you know the Seattle Times paying attention or you get NPR paying attention and all of that press is helpful because then all of a sudden people are contacting you for a quote and then you can and then all of a sudden you're you're able to give your message to even more people so so being controversial can be really helpful for generating press but demonizing non-profit housing developers that would be something that really bothers me um even if I understand the like thinking behind that label I you know I struggle with in this I'm I am uh definitely one of the invasions more aggressive uh and I fully own that um I struggle with the people who say that one thing but and I'm listening to their words but actually that's not what they're talking about um so I get into this conversation with people over and over again where they'll say it's about affordability and then I'm like okay great here are all these things that would solve that problem and then they're like oh but then things would look different yeah they would and so then it's like oh they put a category of solutions actually subconsciously off the table and I'm wondering that's the point where I get mad and yell at them and I wonder like what do you do that maybe is not that the urbanist vlog it's a land use vlog that has a diversity of opinions about the best way to win me and there's people that are more um the voices that like call people in on their hypocrisy and then there's voices um that are more the well I can see why you'd say that but you know like the more like slower approach so I do think you need some of the loud strident setting the edge of voices and now I get to come in and be like this one so there's a rule for that but at the same time um who are we so who are we doing that to is my biggest struggle in Seattle right now are we doing it to the people that are taking phone calls every day from tenants that are like crying and stuck in abusive relationships and don't want to move out of their housing because they're going to be living in their car and they're asking for help for location assistance um do we want to demonize those folks that are on the front lines of like the impacts of the housing crisis or we or is it someone who's in like a $3 million home in Laurelhurst like who are we yelling at um is it worth yelling at someone that um it's that idea of like every Marvel comic book and every like movie the developer's always a bad guy um who's the villain and who's the hero this is something Sierra Max say on the speech was you can watch it from last year she talked about heroes and villains um that's a really important thing to think about is if somebody's already like naturally going to be on the nightly news as like the hero um when we attack them then oh well you must be the villain so it's like thinking about again like how does power and privilege show up um sometimes we're not going to be able to turn somebody into the villain and then we're the villain we turn ourselves into the villain in the story we've seen a little off the beam but as I was coming here walking there was a stencil on the ground Queer's hate humans and I thought myself that's weird funny I took a picture of and I said is that something that's all of the country are all over Oakland the Bay Area is this a group of people that are getting involved in understanding or hating what human beings so called are doing? it's a personal thing in this community that's not my experience in Seattle um Seattle like I would say at least half of the urbanists um were queer like at least half of us um like are mayor right now this is for Yimmy I think I think that's a local I think there's a local conversation happening and people are I always talk about like proxy battles it's like we're not gonna like I consider myself a socialist and my taxid developers we're not gonna necessarily get to socialism like it's like you have to like which battle are you fighting that's a battle that's being fought like six ways down you know six degrees of separation away from it yeah unfortunately I know all about it we're all interested after you I may have told that I can't take any more questions one more one more okay um yes Jesse Laura I want to ask you a question on the combatant's topic of mansplaining mansplaining well I mean I remember you know I didn't want to talk about it today no I think it's great I think it's important for those of us who are men or you know sometimes do mansplaining we need to we need to talk about it you and I had an experience I remember we talked about in line where I thought it was to be very helpful about whatever the topic was and you said wait a mansplain that to me and I as someone who I don't actually no no it was great because I don't generally think of myself as someone who does mansplain was this last year or this year no this is online but it really made me think so the question is how do those of us with the propensity to become mansplainers to be mansplainers how do we know that we're doing it and for those people who maybe get mansplained too but aren't as straightforward as you can be I have an analogy in this video you should all watch called if you Google racist spinach in your teeth and it's this amazing amazing video of how do you call people in on being racist and it's the same thing with mansplaining if you make a culture in your friend circle in your world that like when I call you mansplainer it doesn't mean I don't love you and I don't think you're amazing and I don't value your opinion and it's the same thing like we're all we're all part of racist institutions and systemic racism and we all have the propensity to say and perpetuate and do racist things so how do you create a culture in your work environment in your family or whatever to be like hey that was hella racist or wow you just totally mansplain to me thanks Jesse you have to like set it up ahead of time that at some point in our friendship I'm gonna be like that was really ridiculously mansplaining I did not need to hear that at that moment or wow did you know that that was like super racist if you could be able to create like ahead of time that's gonna be something that's part of the relationship here as you know this is like a conference to un-conference so today we're really proud to have you all having sessions so we have if you haven't taken a look a very actually I looked at it and I was like oh I do understand the building so a very good path here and we are going to spread we have our organizers for the day right over there organizers please raise your signs at order hands and you can go with them to the different rooms and just a reminder tomorrow morning we're going to have the un-conference planning so if you're inspired by what you're hearing and you want to share your own experiences think about pitching it tomorrow morning and talk to people that you might want to be on your panel today, tonight to get them together from tomorrow so with that welcome everyone and we will be breaking up into the rooms okay so international and please download guidebook if you haven't okay international international downstairs hall of musical chairs with Alan Burding okay yeah so