 I know, it's terrible. We're free! I know. I know. I know. Tell us how you really feel. I can go back to organizing. Yeah, yeah. Local. All right, if everyone wants to, like, be ready to listen to Sonya, it was amazing going to deliver our speech. I just wanted to say thank you everybody for coming out and being here all of the three days or as many days as you're here watching and it was a really good conference. It was a lot of work to put together and I am super proud of everyone who needs to be at the board for coming together and doing this all. It was a really good turnout because the board is actually really good at organizing things. Yeah! And I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who needs to be at the board. It's been doing that and it's been great and I'm going to stop hogging the mic and hit it over to stuff kind of. Victoria, how are you? Sorry, I didn't know what to talk about. Yeah, thanks so much for the time and space to talk to you. So after the talk, we'll be for recognitions and you'll finally learn who finally won for mascot. So if anybody's bored or whatever, don't wander out because I know that's the thing you really want to hear. So when I started putting this together, I thought to myself, I realized that when I'm watching other people talk, the thing I'm most interested in is their personal story, especially here. Because I know I'm interested in zoning and planning and city building, but still even after three years, even though I've met so many other people that are also passionate, they're still part of me that's like, this is a really weird topic but why do you care? So that's what I'm most interested to hear about that. And also, because the thing is, we've talked a lot about how to communicate with people who don't agree with us. I actually think that we should really always be focusing on how to activate people who already agree with us. I mean, you guys are organizers. You actually know that's like the first commandment of all organizing. But the reality is that we are not really, you know, it's some combination of personality and values, experience, lived experience, and then sometimes the right data point at the right time that convinces us. But really our experience and values is what does the most. And so, you know, I think it's important for us to like think about what in our personal story like makes us pro-housing, and also realize that when we're talking to people who aren't, they're so convinced because they also have some personal experience that leads them to feel sure that they're totally right. That's why I titled my talk, why I'm so sure I'm right. Anyway, so for me personally, what this is is a, you know, Google Maps. This is the block I grew up on in Germantown, Philadelphia. And on this block, so this being eight stories is technically high-rise public housing. Although some people think high-rise, you know, eight stories too short. It's owned by the Housing Authority. This is actual public housing. Under this tree, you can't see. This is like a half-way house for recovering male drug addicts like in their 20s. This is actually a public school. The state of Pennsylvania bought it from a private school. There's a doctor's office. This is a private nonprofit subsidized low-income senior housing. These two houses were monster homes when they were built. But then they've since been broken up into like six apartments each. And then these are twins. This is a twin. Oh, this is an apartment building, four-storey apartment building with 32 apartments. And then my house is the only detached single-family housing block. Don't tell anyone. But the point is that besides a marijuana dispensary, the block I grew up on contains every single type of thing that people are sure are going to ruin their neighborhoods and ruin their lives. And so if this is from, I mean, from the cradle, you can imagine, I didn't even find out that Sony existed until I was well into my teens and I was very surprised. I was shocked because when I went to Outlaw, all this stuff that worked out perfectly fine, I could hardly imagine it. Oh, yeah. So there was another thing that I feel like very privileged to have had a lived experience that let me in, you know, on, it was a mainstream idea that I knew wasn't true because of my experience. So this is a picture of Philadelphia. And you can see it's kind of shaped like a lot. And my neighborhood, this star means nothing. The place I grew up is like kind of around here. But like keep that shape in mind for a second. So this is a, you know, grace, this green is black people and orange is Hispanic and the blue is white. It's a pretty segregated city. And again, so I grew up like right around here. And I liked my neighborhood. I thought it was a good neighborhood. But my whole life, when I told people where I lived, people would say, oh, Germantown, that's a bad neighborhood. And first of all, it's very rude. I can't believe that people just naturally will say that in the conversation. But second of all, I mean, I eventually asked my mom, why do people think our neighborhood is bad? Like we live in Germantown, not Nice Town. And Nice Town was the next neighborhood over that was actually bad. And my mom was like, Sonya, they don't know. Like they've never been to any of these neighborhoods. To them, it's all just one big black neighborhood. So, you know, and I realized that if I hadn't grown up in a black neighborhood and hadn't witnessed people who had no idea telling me that it was a bad neighborhood, knowing that it was good, then I wouldn't know either. You know? I don't know. You just take the granted. People are like, oh, it's a good neighborhood. It's a bad neighborhood. I've never experienced that. I have more pictures. I kind of do want to take all those. Have the pictures. Rip, Sonya. I don't want to rip. Like, moment of silence. I was raised quicker, so we had a lot of moment of silence. It was just really excited. It was so happy. It was also incensed, but it was registered. It was like, what? No, this is bullshit. And it's really true. I mean, white people and white people, equally, you know, all things being equal, two different neighborhoods will judge the black neighborhood to be not as good, which is one of the things that devalues black land. You know, when you see these charts about how the network of white people, the network of black people, a big part of that is that black people just don't own as much. But the other part is that if you're black, conditional on that, likely you own property in a black neighborhood and just regular prejudice devalues your property. Even though a lot of those neighborhoods really are the best, they're like well connected to transit. You know, they have beautiful housing stock. While we're ripping, I'll second that. What? Atlanta has pretty high home ownership rates even amongst the black families. But in the after the Great Recession, you saw like the home values of white people kind of rebound where they were, where it's a home values. And like well to do black neighborhoods have like continued to like slide down sort of like maybe like 60 to 70% of their pre-recession crisis that is kind of floating there. Which is why my parents' houses are cornered despite there being like two relatively well paid professionals just like it's attractive. The American bring doesn't work for black people. Yeah, and it operates at the, I mean, I was a base. So when I looked at my so called, before I started this, I had a close friend who was a developer. He was kind of going out on his own trying to do a thing. And getting invested, it was so obvious on the ground that the type of people that control 100 million dollars, you know, to do a construction loan are more conservative than the most conservative young. You know, you don't get to control 100 million dollars by like having original ideas or, you know, you do it by being a heard, heard type of person. Anyway, oh so the other thing, this is the third thing that like really shaped my experience was living in a city where population was continually dropping. Right, so Philadelphia was the best thing since sliced bread for like 100 years with a huge anxiety. And what is it, so what does it look like when you're losing more than a quarter of your population? This is what your city looks like. That's abandonment. You know, this block isn't totally abandoned. People live here, you know, but either side the houses are abandoned, filled out. This is nice now. This is between my neighborhood and the subway on my way to Center City. So you know, you're just growing up like this. Like you live and you're like, well, yeah, there's a lot of empty stuff. A lot of extra. This is another one. This one's I think kind of pretty. Oh, this is another thing too. Sorry. You know, nature does not care about what you built. So like EIRs, I kind of laugh that a little bit. Because as soon as you guys walk away, I wait five years and nature doesn't care about the EIR. It's like your thing. The other thing is too is when people say a place is overbuilt. I'm like, I don't think you know what overbuilt is. If you build and there's people in it, it's not overbuilt. This is overbuilt. So when I, in 2001, I graduated high school in 2000. This was a huge victory. Right? Mayor Street took off this and the city celebrated because he put together this $300 million fund to tear down 14,000 buildings. You know, it's different people's cities are different. We're struggling in San Francisco, you know, to build 3,000 houses per year. And our city was at a place, and this 14,000 was really a drop in the bucket. We needed to tear stuff down. That was our problem. And Philadelphia is not all depressing. This is beautiful. This shows the most beautiful place ever. And this is beautiful. This is expensive neighborhoods. Obviously, great debts. And this was all created with that design. I do think, especially because this is a national audience, I really do believe that, you know, me starting to organize people and feeling strongly coming to San Francisco was because it was very much a conversation between different parts of America, you know, that there's a lot of parts of America that are like Philadelphia that were losing population. And then there's, you know, parts west of the Rockies that are gaining population. But what happened, my organizing was kind of, couldn't have happened without somebody from a city that was losing population having that be our crisis arrive here. And so my organizing in the Bay is very much like a conversation between those two types of cities, I think. And I think that we nationally, like we need to try to figure out how to have this conversation. So NIMBY sound like they're organized centrally because they have all the same parking points no matter where you go. But they're actually not. So it's not clear who we really talk to, but hopefully we figure it out. One thing that's frustrating here in the Bay is that people don't really seem to realize, we don't really, you know, get it. In some particular city, there's a fancy part of the city, a rich neighborhood, there's a poor neighborhood. But nationwide, there's rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods, right? Like our rich neighborhoods are the Bay, you know, L.A., New York. And evidently, I think this is a oil town in South Dakota. I'm not sure. North Dakota. Oh, North Dakota, I'm sorry, you guys. So what this map is, this map is from the United, what? It's Sun Valley, it's Suburban L.A. Oh. Wait, what? Suburban L.A. It's sprawl. It's sprawl, yeah. Stop that. Let her finish, let her finish. So this is from unitedforhomes.org, which is the website that the National Low-Income Housing Coalition put up to support HR948, write it down, HR948 at Google it. It's a mortgage income, sorry, mortgage interest tax deduction reform bill. Because the mortgage interest deduction is a subsidy basically for high-income people. Why are we doing that? And this is to show the percentage of mortgages over half a million dollars. So in these red areas, the percentage of mortgages over half a million dollars is between 20 and 50 percent. And then the yellow areas are the second highest and the dark blue is the third and then the turquoise is the fourth where there's almost no mortgages. So this is the map I used to show though that there's a lot of people in the Bay Area that feel like they're middle class because their house is like the middle cost. But you can't just compare to San Francisco because people are moving all over. San Francisco is a rich neighborhood compared to the rest of the country. This is another illustration. Somebody was tweeting about when Kid Rock is running for office. This is the $1.3 million estate where Kid Rock grew up. So luxurious, right? I was like, huh, $1.3 million estate. Kid Rock, I think you're rich because this is also a $1.3 million estate. And this is just the first floor. This is a condo. You get half a house and it has access to the backyard. It's nice. It has that even short walk to Dolores Park. But one thing I really feel, I don't know exactly how to make this intuitive and vivid to people, but I really want people to feel and notice that this is a $1.3 million estate. This is a $1.3 million estate and it's not because there's something magic or funny money or anything. Because in some sense they really are equivalent. You can get a lot of land and these markers of successful life, like a tennis court on site, that's accessible to you. But if you live here, then you're far from a major economic center. Or you could be close to a major economic center and you don't get as much land. But it's a trade-off and they're equally valuable. So please this year, try to think about how to explain that to people because I don't really know exactly. So it's only going to get worse or better depending on your point of view. So what's happening, we have people moving from all of these places to the big cities because that's where the opportunity is. And maybe ordinarily, you would think that maybe people would go back to where they came from, if prices were too high, if the incumbents were successful in not building housing, maybe people would just start to give up and a lot of people do give up. But there are actual changes happening that I think would interfere with that. One is climate change. If it's true that parts of the country, I mean there are some parts of the country like Florida that are probably going to go under. There are other parts that maybe become too hot, too hot to live in. Then places like the Bay that are temperate, it's just going to be more people wanting to live here. Oh, they're supposed to be a couple degrees by the end of the century though. Who knows? We don't know, right? So that's one of the things maybe. The other thing is, if our generation becomes permanent renters, then we're going to be a lot more mobile. We're not going to be stuck in any place because we bought there. And then the other thing is, if changes in the economy might create permanent freelancers. Changing jobs, we thought when the internet was invented that it would allow people to work remotely. But we're finding, I think the opposite is the case, that if you are hustling, and if you have many, many jobs and many clients, it's so much more important for you to be in close proximity to people because you have to be networking. You don't have to show up in person. So this is Google later, the nature of the firm, which is an incredible essay that predicts that as transaction costs go down, as it becomes easier to find and identify the people with skills, and it is now that you need, that the idea of the firm is working for one place forever is going to become less and less relevant. Here's that 1937, and I'm amazed every day watching it kind of come true. So this is the last, this is actually the fact, right? There's only one fact in this whole presentation. But this is another thing that I think is really mind blowing. It's the kind of fact that can maybe start to make a person, you know, have to shift their point of view. So in 19, the people that were born in 1960 are 57 now, right? The whole population has more than doubled since they were born. Doubled. And so these are the people that are, you know, kind of the age range that are fighting, building new housing. But if you think to yourself, you know, when I was in between the time I was like eight years old and now, the world population has doubled. Ask yourself, has the population of my community doubled? And if not, why not? You know, knowing that there are places like Philadelphia and the Rust Belt and, you know, Buffalo and where the population has gone down, there are other places where what you should expect is that your neighborhood is more than doubled. There are places, obviously, like where no one was living and huge cities have been built that are, you know, absorbing this, mostly in other parts of the world. But yeah, overall, the population has doubled and you have to ask, has my area doubled? If it hasn't, why not? And why am I entitled to live somewhere that's not, you know, building its share of housing and absorbing its share of population and race? So thank you very much, you guys, for caring about this issue and working so hard and in particular, you know what? Actually, I want to have just, this is the recognition part of it. I want to recognize the person that came here from Brothers Away, the movie guy, and also from the place that's had this problem for the longest. So I'm reading from something that was published in 1668. Oh, no, 1665 that was published. It's a little bit of a boring quote, just kind of the point. And the year is 1660 and 61. Excuse me. There ought to have been built above 26,000 houses in those 25 years. Oh, he was talking, okay, he was talking about, never mind, the previous 25 years, which is above 1,000 houses a year, the lodges increase, which are much more than have been built for it appears that Mr. Morgan's map of the city, there have not been built in this time 8,000 houses, that is not 300,000 houses one year with the other. But this is certain that there are no more houses built every year than there are occasioned for because there are tenants for those houses when built. Could have been created yesterday. Because you're part of a conversation for the last 400 years or discouraging, because you might realize that 400 years will still be having this problem. But yeah, so everybody that put this together, I'm just going to read everybody's name. So you've got to applaud the entire time. Victoria. Thanks for coming.