 In one time. And one. That's you. That's you. Anyone want to wait? This is kind of like an era of human-a, right? Yes, any way. Alright, yeah. Are you good on the board? I think you can use me on mine. I believe... No. Just pick it up. Well, yes. We changed the structure a little bit. I can walk around for making. Yeah, we'll do that. But not yet. We're going to have a little yes. Okay. So... Oh, here we go. You know what? Actually, you're getting a very authentic experience. Yeah, this is how it is. Definitely. Yes, yes. I just did a serious part with the sentiment this morning. Yeah, Brian talks about the wine. That's important. I usually have to come in. I need like 10 or 15 minutes of complaining about what happened to me in my job that day before I'm ready. Yeah, that's how I usually like exactly what happens. I get there a little early and I just start bitching and I'm very, very busy. So Sam, did you get any emails that you were BCC'd on to get a review of your job today? I did not. No one sends a letter to say that I should be fired this week. So, it's a good week. You know what I think? I'll take it. But I'll tell you. You know you're doing something right and you don't want to fire you. So... Alright, I'm going to like bring this in. I think we're doing this. Yes, alright. Welcome to infill where we talk about local San Francisco politics and policy and today we also have special guest Laura Lowe from Seattle. And who I have heard is known as the meanest person in Seattle but is very nice compared to me. So, we're very happy to have her. And Sam Laws, Mission Housing. Thank you. I'm Hanlon, California YMV, our statewide lobbyist. We're becoming one of those organizations. 15-year-old comes rockin' me as very upset at myself. I talked, actually, when we were in Sacramento with Scavina for SB 35. I spoke with someone from League of Cities and also the trades union and I said, we have to convince Brian to go full in on the I am the millennial person and wear clothing that represents who he is as a constituent, which means like small, hateable hats. Wait, I do wear cycling caps. And they're small and hateable. Yes. Cut-offs, I think this is going to be like, we're going to have to make sure that you fully wrap. But you have to wear a tie. Carry your math book. I need to get some more guidance from the Senator kind of Bill Jackson. What exactly I may or may not wear when I'm talking about the, as we're alluding to you, I was pulled out for not wearing a tie. Yeah. There's squares up there. But Annie has reassured us that they are unable to regulate women's clothing. So we can wear whatever we want, whereas the men have to be in suits and ties, which is exactly the kind of sexes of my life. So I'm very pleased. So today we're going to do a lot of Q&As. We've got some people sending us in some questions in advance. But the main thing I wanted to have is questions we get from our family and us sort of hashing those out and how much we indulge them. Because they're the people who, when they ask us, maybe the tough questions, I remember them in quotes, that we feel like we have to fully address and not just walk away from the conversation dismissively, which is what I sometimes want to do. So I can start with my mother's question that she has asked me more at the beginning, but less lately, which is, why can't you just reassure us all that it won't be ugly? And I don't want to answer that one. I want someone else to answer it. There actually is, I think, a YIMBY design-conscious compromise here. One of the presenters at YIMBYCon yesterday suggested that, okay, let's say we have the general clients and we state everything is by right. We know what the density is, what the rules are, but local neighborhood groups are able to come together and suggest a certain architectural styles to have some say over what the facade looks like with the structures, but I can't say anything about density or parking or height. It's certainly not shadows. And well, that's not the perfect solution in my role. That's actually, it sounds like it could be workable. I mean, that would definitely foster that sense of ownership that I talked about from time to time, that if a neighbor that has a sense of ownership about a building, it will be more successful, more efficiently built. It will come online quicker. They just did that at 3700 California, actually. TMG partners took almost two years. With a legally binding agreement from the neighborhood and they really only got a say in how it looked. They predetermined all the different height limits of the buildings and all, and like that. I mean, it's not as dense as it could be. Yeah, you're talking about working in a broken system. Sorry, I hate it. I just think that we wouldn't have Sutro Tower because people at the time thought it was ugly. I agree with that. So I think that things that are in viewer are scary. Like when the printing process was around in the beginning, people were like, it's going to be end of society. And then the radio and families aren't kind of talking to each other anymore. And then the newspaper, same thing. And now it's the internet, it's people. It's like, so we're brownstones in New York. We could go again and again and again. The first time I met Sonya, she was showing me the microfiche things that she had dug up. She was going to the library looking at all the bigger each slides, like in some pieces somewhere. How does that work? Yeah, she was very proud of this. And so, yeah, so I think it's the same thing where it's always going to look ugly for a long time and then it's going to be like, I'll look at that. That's cool, or that's unique, or it's going to have some cultural reference that could appear in a movie and then it will be like, beloved and... I don't think that aesthetics are something that you can like, perhaps worse. Well, even like the question, how are you going to guarantee that it'll look good? What does that even mean, whose definition of... Yeah, it was hers. She likes her definition. Which everyone likes their definition. I like my definition. She likes hers. This one's louder. It's more, you were louder? Okay, cool. I'm going to cut that. I also like the... I first got involved in this when someone sent me a screed about protecting a little cottage that was originally built as emergency post-earthquake housing. Yeah, and it's like literally... Is that an animation? No. Where do you think it's a knowing valley? Like, come on. It's got charms, Sam. Yeah, it's got so much charm. It was intended to be torn down after 10 years and then they just didn't. There's no... It is kind of cute, but also this definition of what's good and what's bad is impossible to predict. And if you get... There are ways, I guess, that you could... If you could make it fast, then I would be maybe more for having the ability for people to have opinions about aesthetics. Because having opinions about aesthetics is never ending. I also watch people use it as an excuse. It's often the red herring that they use in order to do the parking and other things that they actually want to fight. They pretend that it's about other issues and that if we could just... I'm going to freaking bring up this stupid project in the mission where there were giant windows that were declared to be vastly large. And that didn't make any freaking sense and their solution to getting it through the planning commission was to put these horrifically hideous tan barrier things over the windows to make the building uglier, which then made everyone more comfortable with it. I was like, this is crazy. Yeah, the San Francisco Planning Commission is not staffed by those who have already the avant-garde of taste. And maybe you can slightly above the media of their level of determining what makes this a CPU. But to your point of view, how the current design process works today, the question now is that is there some hypothetical process where we could achieve our goals of form-based zoning to height, bulk, parking density, all that stuff was created on a big plan ahead of time. So I think that that's what we're going to do to provide for community input for the aesthetics. Again, that's not my preferred outcome. I think that what we'll most get is what you've seen before. You'll have tons of mission colonial style for the Victorian stuff everywhere and it will look kind of ugly in Disneyland-ish. But again, at the end of the day, I care a lot more about how we can formulate more is the first story retail activation, the ground floor stuff. Because I do think there's this fatal flaw with a lot of the modern seeming buildings, the big glass buildings, is that they have no permeability on their first story. And so the stores and whatnot, for a lot of the developers, there's no incentive actually for them to make sure that they are full of, so in San Francisco we have a problem where we're out there walking, we'll be shopping. There's actually a lot of vacancy in our retail and I think we should maybe do a fine for that. We'll also encourage people to take those spaces, but make them better. Well, you know, so a second trial is about an excellent idea, which is to give an inventory of these kind of spaces and then to permit the mayor's office of housing or some city agency to basically have pre-determined commercial rental rates and they could then, like Sutley said, to commercial entities that were being displaced for instance. In San Francisco you have a lot of one-story commercial along the transporters. What we really should be doing is knocking down this building, this building that's our housing, and then replace it with the first floor commercial. But in the meantime for your business, what do you do? 18 months is a long time. Saying that you can come back is all well and good and I do think that businesses should have a right to return, but it's one thing to be a resident and to get a relocation fee for two years and someone, you know, the developer maybe finds you a unit whereas, you know, the business is just supposed to come back in 18 months. Like 18 months is more than an entire business cycle, right, for them? I don't even know. Businesses they could take a quarter off, let alone 18 months. It'd be good to use those vacant spaces to relocate the... I'll take care of that, I'll handle it. I want to hear, so this is all like San Francisco stuff, does Seattle have similar stuff? Yes, at the University District and University of Washington and we have a bunch of vacant retail space on the ground floor and it's it gets, it's not used and it's just sitting there and I hear about it a lot from a lot of people um, can't we do something can't we do something and I've been told all the reasons why we can't and I'm definitely one of those people that is like well, we still need to figure it out and that's something, yeah, it's something I get asked about all the time. A lot of the new construction, what we're trying to figure out how to do is to have smaller narrow spaces, so like instead of one big space, four narrow spaces and Ethan helps Goodman this year at the conference from Seattle Tech for Housing and he's flipped into this a great deal about the fact that each space would need an ADA accessible bathroom and coming and a back entrance and a front entrance and so you can't just like have dividing spaces. The commercial space, most you know, dense multi-family tower or whatever developers market especially I feel like the commercial space is just this like thing after the fact that they have to build so you're exactly right and so when I spoke to a couple of developers about this idea it said perfect, yeah absolutely like it's just a loss for us we've done more than happy to surrender this right on a pre-negotiated terms and the Mayor's Office of Housing or the Mayor's Office of the new Office of you know, commercial temporary location or much better name than that that's terrible. It's not just accredited. So yeah, I mean I think it's totally doable but like most ideas the problems that the problems that like we're short on someone who's going to make this their project and spend, it takes time like anything else and who has like a real interest in doing it. I think it's I've got to come from some maybe also a small business owner or maybe it was one because if you're small business owner now you probably don't have time to do anything else in order to run a point on this or convince some entrepreneurial bureaucrat in city hall to decide what they want to do this on or political movement building around this issue where you have the pitchforks and torches on our side clamoring for it. I think the small merchants, associations and them might be a good ally, we should let's do this. We decided from a coalition to solve this issue. Can I say what my mom thinks about? She gets mad that I am still aggressive and mean to the quote-unquote white-landed gentry because I grew up in Fresno and she constantly points out that I also was white-landed gentry and she's right mom you were right but the answer to that is because we're horrible I hate the white-landed gentry they need to be put in their place over and over and over again for as many years as it takes until we can build stuff on more than one third of San Francisco so this ties into the fight I had in the hallway with Zelda from 48 Hills which I'm sure we'll be reading about soon oh that's a capture I'm sorry about how mean I am I said this was the talk to her she's supposed to talk to Nicelor she should definitely talk to Nicelor because I was not having it so she we got to this point in the conversation where she said shouldn't we ask people permission, shouldn't we ask the existing people permission before we allow more people to come in? She's written an article about this and I was like no? and also the system that you're describing encourages segregation and involves the people in the existing communities primarily white-wealthy people who can have the power to maintain what they think of as neighborhood character and have the ability to keep people out you're describing a mechanism for segregation and she said are you calling me racist? are you calling all white people racist? kind of a little do you like to choose or do you try to break down the distinction in this kind of racism and bigotry so I think this is a thing that a lot of folks don't get and maybe we aren't the best at describing there are like racism about power and systems it's not necessarily like personal bigotry you can say that like, yes like in Zelda you benefit from a racist system and you advocate for structural racism whether or not you are a personal bigot or hold any personal feelings towards any you know some group, I have no idea now I don't know if that's going to make her feel any better because I said institutional racism is what the system that you're describing is something like that and she circled back to you're calling me a racist and I was like, you have a choice right now I was pretty cool I was like, you have a choice I have told you that the system that you advocate for is perpetuating institutional racism and you have the choice right now to either hear that and decide that you care about that and decide that you want to like try to understand what I mean by that and investigate exclusionary zoning as a concept that advances institutional racism you have a decision and if you decide to ignore that that is racism like if you decide to have the opportunity to be educated about that I would say you are a racist for deciding you don't care about that issue you are just perpetuating racist institutions maybe if you just perpetuate racist institutions like without having someone check you I guess I mean you're having a lot, it sounds like better you're making more headway in going to predominantly more single family neighborhoods or is it just that there's a larger amount of land that can be debt who are you nice to and why does that hurt well we're having the same exact conversation that you had in the hallway with Zeldin and it's going the same way but I don't have that conversation very often because I think there's about based on the last city council race there was a particular candidate who ran on a political platform and another candidate who was running who the first thing she did after the election was publish a op-ed why I'm an urbanist she got almost 80% of the vote we got 20% of the vote so we can ignore that 20% in Seattle because it's 20% and we have dated a back end up we just had numbers released there was polling done for the mayoral election that's happening right now and 50 something percent of voters said that they approved changes to a single family so there's polling now to back up that we have a majority the city is like 55% renters so that's kind of the motivation for wanting to do a ballot initiative is knowing that the polling numbers are there and I will say there has certainly been some hope in San Francisco the Balboa Reservoir is a 17 acre entity parking lot that for the record never reserved one drop of water and it's half century existence that's being here nor there but three proposals went in two of them were around 1300 units but one of them was 600 units with a ginormous park that separates the units from Westwood Park which is a really old single family home very rich neighborhood and I was on a panel about development in the same area but not about that particular one and this is like 300 year old man who's been around forever and he's on all the neighborhood groups he told me he's like we just think it's despicable that Westwood Park would ever ask for something as low as 600 units and so I hugged him and thanked him for existing so I don't think that that really surprised me the fact that it surprises me is probably also really sad but there is some hope I'm trying to say there's a lot of them like Zelda for instance Zelda styles herself as some progressive radical who moved to Berkeley in the 60s and she comes to her home and attached to the family home Bishrick in the Berkeley Hills which has always been an exclusionary area based on recent class and for those folks who really developed their strong views about development and community and local control we're never going to win them for those of San Francisco and now I think it's probably a higher percentage of San Francisco and a higher percentage of Berkeley than it is in Seattle but that is not a majority what they do have is they're organized at the local level and there are people who have been organizing for many decades I think we can beat them but it is going to take some effort there are also people who can show up at 12 noon on a Thursday when the rest of us are working yes okay so Laura Lowe let's hear the question that you get from your family oh it's being recorded I mean if they're baby goers they don't even know how to work a podcast oh no they're my mom's they're both my brain so they're really good at technology so the first time I went home and told my family that I had changed my thinking around housing and started to describe it it was about a year and a half ago my father said we didn't raise you to espouse these neoliberal values so it wasn't really a question and I was like I know I know you didn't and I'm very surprised to have these neoliberal values for myself I didn't know that I had them so I think that kind of describes what I do in those situations you're totally right that's how I handle all the people that disagree with me is yeah yeah I woke up one day and I was like why are these neoliberal values that have entered my brain and what do I do with them and how do I reconcile them with the thinking that I've had my whole life about dismantling the system and burning it down so generously instilled in me as a child so yeah so I agreed with him but but here is how I got here so I think that's my style yeah you're right just because you live in a single family house you're not racist just because you're fighting for a single family zoning yeah I'm not calling you racist maybe you are racist I don't know you that well I haven't been around you to catch you being racist but in the meantime you're like super screwing up our city and I'm really sad about that and maybe I've said to many people in Seattle at this point like Zelda we can hang out but we're not going to talk about housing we can get tea we can talk about your garden and your beautiful plum tree that's blooming what class do you need we're not going to talk about housing because there's no we're just going in circles and it's just toxic yeah I've been having a little bit of like a Facebook addiction getting into terrible housing right now well so you know somebody who is very certain that they are correct in their assessment of me and what I do and who writes these like long essays that I just feel like actually make our points that he thinks make his points and so I kind of just let them sit there and then I'm like well what about this one little thing and that makes him even crazier and write even longer things in response and I don't think that's healthy for anyone so I definitely feel like maybe the let's not talk about housing strategy is more effective it's certainly what I tell other people to do I don't want to do it I tell people about the stacks people I think the same thing that you're saying about Seattle that there are many more people who already believe this and the thing about political organizing is that it's actually not your job to rebut your opposition it's your job to mobilize your base and get people to advocate for change you can't like it doesn't mean that you don't it's our job to make the pool kids table we want to know what comes to our pool kids table like the other day in the mission another non-profit that's developing housing asked was suggested by the mayor's also housing that they meet with me about parking minimums because apparently I'm known as someone that hates parking enough to like demand that no one will be parking in affordable housing they came in and they said well the north mission something something association is really starting to get loud and demand that we build some parking I was like okay what is loud is it 5 people is it 10 people we're worried they'll file a discretionary review and make us go they're probably going to do that anyway so why don't we just spend more time making sure that 40 people show up no parking and just be done with them because they'll never be happy if you build parking they're going to ask for something else and they looked at me like I was speaking Russian like it was just what do you mean we don't we don't work with them some people just you can't you can out organize them and move forward well especially when they go post move right that's the thing is like if you address for some of these things I mean I want to be a nice person that recognizes people's concerns but they move the goalposts with every project you know it's like versus the shadows then it's the parking then it's the like some abstract notion of how they feel about it and then it's something aesthetic and then it's you know the increased traffic is an example this is one group got together and objected to a building because it didn't have air conditioning and in humane to live in Seattle the second summer I was in Seattle it didn't get above 70 degrees maybe so they were yes the goalposts too that's a deal in humane and I have a commission and all the fans were going to be really loud all the 40 fans blowing into their neighborhood were going to make too much noise like this is a real thing you can look it up Erica Seabart MC is for Crank Vlog yeah I have this argument so coalition for San Francisco neighborhoods which is like the homeowners association so they're kind of like often the worst this guy was like George Wooding who runs it he's a nice person who advocates for policies I find important and he was like I'm just here to defend you all from living in places that are like too small or like not the right fit for you and I was like I just looked it up straight in the eye and I was like please stop helping and he didn't if I could actually public service announcement just for when we were getting told that units are too small for the last 50 years the federal guidelines for affordable two bedrooms have never gone the minimum we needed to be is 750 square feet people who are saying we just want this to be bigger so it's humane to have for the last half decade been okay with poor people having smaller units you don't need to like shame them into it but I have made a lot of ground pointing out well we seem to be okay with low income people in a unit this size is there some particular reason that you're not okay with me living in a unit this size and it's worked very well so I want to pivot to Brian a question that you get all the time well how do they get it all the time if we're talking about what you are why are you trying to restore my quality of life why are you trying to impact me in a high tower I'm on the lookout for the blood you went into my helicopters and this is just too much for me it's pretty easy to sway that but you know it's funny today during Yimmy town we have like a small but noisy protest for a little while people banging pots and pans opposed to our agenda thinking that alleging that we are a bunch of colonialist white supremacist pro-judication folks and that you know it sucks politics is what it is there are some reasonable folks out there to deal with what do people think maybe valid points I think a lot of the folks there as Senator Scott Wiener says you know the concerns of affordability of displacement of folks feeling like neighborhoods are no longer their own are very real even though I just agree with their solutions and I just agree with their characterizations of the Yimmy movement specifically that said like one of the folks banging pots and pans he was very close to me for a couple of days and you know it's it's sort of hard to you know to see this right to see a person who is part of this noisy protest where some of the chancer would kill all Yibis I believe it was worse it was I'm just going to say it was Sonia Trouse's white baby is going to die so that was like for me I've been in like 40 protests in the last two years and I've said a lot of awful things in those protests because you're trying to get news and the way to get news is to say awful things but and I don't believe in respectability politics I think that's a tool for suppression as well I think that you know people are allowed to say what they say but that was that was I was shocked that was the only part where I was shocked the rest of it I thought was totally legit like protesting 101 like yeah there's you know legislator here there's news here like this is where you go and you're trying to get heard like all of that was great but then that part was like okay I'm not going to try to talk to you anymore like I was out there like with the sunflower like do you want my sunflower and I was like no I don't think I want to give you my sunflower right now like that was too far and I mean like there's great pain save a home burn a developer all over this neighborhood but the anger is real like I don't I agree like I don't like that stuff is is like you're talking about like like that's I guess that's where I've run the line so this is the thing like the anger like how do we think about the anger because like I'm here this is the hard part for me and this is why I sort of don't try to I mean I I'm changing a little bit like you came out and gave them fruit and water because like the thing that's funny for me about gay shame and especially like Sonya and gay shame and whatnot is that they don't see us as and this is for Brian you know they don't see us as actually coming from the same emotional place as they are they have they have completely othered us and it's impossible actually for me to other them because they remind me so much of people who I am so close with and you know it's like I can't other these people I actually kind of enjoy their posters of me where I have like crazy dollar signs in my house I think they're fucking hilarious like I would definitely do that if I was them right exactly that's some good stuff right there yeah those are pretty tag brilliant antics work antics work antics totally work but I don't I can't turn that off do antics I didn't love it when they like try to threaten and like when they like vandalized our office and like I sort of was just like you know like I don't want to give them advice but like I also think that like I am not opposed to hearing their message at all in fact the opposite I would welcome the opportunity to have actually a full-fledged long dialogue and like and that's the part that I I also feel kind of bad because like I feel like they're used to protesting people who put up the wall and don't want like a network right and work in Seattle with the police and it's like they didn't even show up to like have a dialogue when we had thousand something people come to the University of Washington recently with the death of Charlie Maliles and they didn't at least and chief didn't come and like for legal reasons or whatever but like it's like it's like yeah if you're used to protesting people that aren't even interested in dialogue it's like and we've all I guess been our lives on the other side of protests like it's like I think that it would be great to have out of panel like like asian have a panel and talk about why they think that we're a bunch of colonizers and what is colonizing people in their perspective do we have the same definition of those things I invited them to come and present this is like maybe I shouldn't tell the membership I invited them to come present at one of our membership meetings and then but that's what I'm saying it's like I always say in Seattle like we wake up on the same side every day thinking right now someone's getting infected right now somebody is sleeping in a tent like we're we're the same 25 people that show up through the planning we're the same people that are like living in that mental space from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep that are like having a crisis having a crisis they're thinking about it as much as we're thinking about it that's what's so frustrating for us is like for free that I can see it's hard to be like but we're totally obsessed with the same crisis I think ultimately sure very long sustained engagement could yield some benefits that is a really long really sustained engagement quite frankly that is not the best way to spend our time going to political movement and initiating national victories and so while I think that Laura Lowe's exactly right that the concerns that animate these protests we do need to address and not only address but we need to think of solutions that don't just indirectly help familiar with those problems but maybe more directly address them but I don't think it makes sense for EMBs to start spending 10 hours a week per person to try to find a best friend because that's 10 hours a week that you're not organizing other folks that's 10 hours a week that you're not allowing your legislators that's 10 hours a week that you're not doing anything else and I just don't think it's worth the effort yeah no it's certainly not worth the time I do think that for me there would be emotional benefit for me personally to engage to heal to have some healing and not having to be so toxic like the toxic nature of this work needs to burn out and like I was getting at that yesterday it's exhausting I hear a lot of affirmations from our audience on that one and so when you can take the toxicity down a notch then maybe that buys you six more months of doing this work on hate or something which is not what they want I think it's a valid strategy I mean this is the it's not what they want they want to make sure that it stays super toxic because they are they're a more effective way I feel like I should consult with them they're like effective ways that you could advance your policy goals and then I'm like definitely shouldn't do that I'm going to be the litigation defender today so we wouldn't be having this conversation if they hadn't had a protest and we wouldn't be discussing these issues and we wouldn't be talking about colonialism in this podcast today so they've done their job and they've done it right and they've done it well and by saying ridiculous awful horrible things they've gotten us to change and pivot to this conversation so as somebody who protests quite a bit I'm quite a bit of issues and says a bunch of ridiculous stuff to get attention in those protests that have nothing to do with housing they've kind of like we're kind of proving their point I'm going to push back on that I brought this up just because I had a personal connection with one of the protesters and a lot of the issues that they can address in fact these are issues that they area in these that do talk about quite a bit we do talk about look it is not the case that if we just streamline housing productions and upset housing in San Francisco that displacement is all of a sudden not going to be a thing it is so like these are issues that we're already thinking about and already working on and not just on our own that are already working on with I mean San is here from the ED of Mission Housing and Non-Profit Housing Developer and Service Provider I'm working with low income advocates in Sacramento for more specifically tailored interventions into protecting vulnerable tenants I don't know Wait, I want to push back to the push back to the push back I think that actually they they picked their enemy maybe pretty well in us because I think that like pulling these two thoughts together we are way more susceptible to wanting to be open to their message than the average person that they protest most people that they protest as far as like everybody from David Campos to Scott Wiener they have picked somebody who's like in politics and has a PR form that tells them to shut up and when they picked us actually we we engaged with them we talk about what they feel we openly spoke about we analyzed our offices we processed their interaction with us pretty publicly I definitely agree with you as far as like productive protest mechanisms I think Laura's completely right about saying that we actually help amplify their message and maybe I don't necessarily have a problem with that If you look at the solutions that they don't have the community power to get and you guys have the community power to get the solutions and maybe it's like a weird way of agreeing with us to protest I like that I think it's a fair point one of the reasons that we're more susceptible to hearing these messages is that many of us come out of those more radical communities like Laura I know that Laura Lowe were engaged in all sorts of radical political action and he was anti-market capitalism before a month ago I marched in a displacement stuff Sierra Leone in the central district not that long, maybe like three months ago and that's how I got my start in housing politics was going anti-bishop protest in the mission I think they picked their enemies as well in the sense that it's more toxic because a lot of them I think the US has the possibilities if we came out of a certain radical view and then all of a sudden they're advocating for things that they find more important it's not just that we're wrong it's like my father it goes back to what my dad said because I would love to I mean this is the sad thing I would love to be able to talk to them and say, is your perspective on this like a sort of like noodling over this with them would be super fun but they've told me to fuck off repeatedly so they don't seem interested radical folks also don't think in terms of policies like these people have never read a white paper like they don't like this is just a no, I'm gonna like push back the third word like we cannot be the kind of assholes who are like you've never read a white paper so you can't like have a political opinion like I don't read the white paper as you send me it's very true wasn't that you had no right to engage in a political process if you don't read the white paper that's only a certain segment of it my point though is that there's I think there's less if we're talking about like you mentioned policy like policy is not the common ground in which to engage those folks those conversations will just not go anywhere at all like maybe like if it's like more like about like values and ultimate you know things that we care about and maybe one of the things that we hate I think that could be more true but like it's not like a policy conversation I think it's totally fruitless actually the values conversation I don't know Laura might have a different thing but like I try so I don't know all the stuff and I don't know all the steps that have happened before today it's been terrible like the struggle that I have all the time is I say these are my values is what I think and instead they're like you're a liar and you're a scam artist co-optarily language actually people feel guilty I was like I was raised in it right I was like raised in social justice language and it is like it's like some of the first language that I reach for when I'm talking about political activism because like that's what I was raised in in my like school and whatnot is like it was like a very like especially in the older I've gotten and the more I've gotten outside of the bubble you know you're like middle or middle high school bubble the more I get out of the wider world the more I'm like oh like like there's always people who like still celebrate Christopher Columbus like I thought we were sort of not doing that anymore and then like no really like culturally America was super still are and so like I I mean this residents I have with people who speak the social justice language and they definitely accuse me of co-opting the language and I don't like what can I say but I would say like it is nothing in terms of the amount of time that would make sense for us to engage but this is some like counter-faction universe where they give you movement to size to stop trying to be effective and just start trying to get involved with these folks but I do not think that this is a terrible idea and I know like I think through sustained engagement like no I think the results is going to be the link that shuts them up so it's going to be something that they're just like oh shit they like did something that we've been trying to do forever better than us and they like totally like got like homes for all these people or whatever whatever it is that they're like oh man like we we feel stupid like they actually did this amazing thing so it's going to be like a result of everybody getting ready for our ballot crop yeah that's going to be great so I think we could probably pivot away from talking about this we need some questions I think it's a question for the audience I think people have questions on the walk around but Laura you've got to get in here Bob Ack I'm a 10 listener I was debating whether or not I want to ask this question and I'm close to a lot of these so I feel like I've talked about this in bits and pieces offline already but the question I had was a piece of I got involved with this stuff in 2015 I know my story Laura made us a committee hearing for 4,000 votes program a time ago but I only recently like in the last 8 to 10 months I learned about urban renewal I learned about for the first time everything that happened in the 50s and 60s and the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods in the name of development and what the people who are now much older today what they are fighting against with us presumably because of their fear that we're going to go back to urban renewal so I'm curious I've had I've learned a little bit about this I want to talk about it probably like how do we push past the fears of urban renewal 2.0 because I don't think we're pushing urban renewal 2.0 I think we're pushing something much different and something much more holistic and productive and collaborative but I think people have fear a lot of fear so that's my question If I may as someone who's been told to stop bringing up redevelopment in conversations Laura okay so I think the best way to do it is to show the type of buildings that we want at least from the affordable like 100% affordable perspective and this does take bandwidth and time but when when mission housing wants to go build in a neighborhood that perhaps hasn't had a lot or any 100% affordable housing and when it's important remember that the baby boomers and even some Gen Xers when they hear affordable housing they think public giant concrete towers that were built to keep those people in and away from the you know good everyday citizens for lack of a better term and my industry hates that just as much as anything else but when you figure out when you come to the realization that that's what they hear that's what they think when they hear affordable housing you know you can attack it and that was so mission housing I love nothing more than to give like walking towards the mission with people from those neighborhoods in Forest Hill in San Francisco where Christian church wants to build 150 low income senior units I mean you'd think that the world was ending out there but the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition organized a Saturday van tour there were three different vans I sat in a different van each time and to be frank the most productive part of the tour was the van ride after each building where I could explain what went into building it how it's human labor and it's staffed everyday and these are the services we'll provide and this is the architect and you know they were genuinely surprised they were literally they thought that we were going to go tour like the towers and the wire that's what they thought we were going to go see and once you come to that realization I think that a lot of the negative emotions taken out and it becomes more objective like no you're just mistaken that's okay I get why you're mistaken because literally the federal government ruined the world to a certain extent and you lived through it so that probably sucked but you know we've been attacking it objectively and not with emotion just with like proving that wrong with physical examples I want to hear from Laura Lowe because I feel like you're going to have a complicated like because redevelopment so Seattle is really interesting because we have redevelopment going on our transit new transitations that are going to open up and this one community got together and wrote an angry letter about how there wasn't deep enough affordability for building they wanted deeper affordability so and this is the same neighborhood that like 10 years ago asked for the station to be moved into the heart of the community and asked for a couple of extra floors and I don't know I don't know what's I still think it goes back to the fact that we have Mount Rainier and we have the Puget Sound and we have all this wild space so close to us so close like you know 30 minutes 20 minutes away you're just in the loneliness it feels like and so people are really in this mindset of like okay let's let's do let's do density correctly and write and like let's make sure that a bunch of folks that are on section 8 housing can have access to this light rail station it's opening up in a few years so a lot of work was done a while back but I think it goes back to that strong growth management acts maybe or just the love of nature or knowing it I don't know there's not a lot of people objecting to affordable housing on aesthetic grounds there is a new project that just opened up or is going to open up in a park and this is the first time that I really seen objections from a very small amount of people saying things like we don't want to cry but that's super rare and it's a big procedure down here this is a super rare thing I want to address more rightly I'll ask a question about the fears of people that what we're doing is not just the fears of the people that Sam is aligning that we're not building crime powers to rob your children as they go to the bus stop, of course we don't have school laws and insurance assistance in your shoes look, I think that the first thing to do is to know that insurance is to acknowledge it and so thank you for doing that this is a line used a lot when James Baldwin referred to urban renewal as ego removal he was correct all throughout the United States with money back from the federal government we demolished entire neighborhoods displaced people it depends on the era but mostly all poor people mostly black people and if you look we're recording right now in Brooklyn a few blocks that way in City Center totally demolished if you go down through West Oakland if you look at the construction of the highways the construction of bars the construction of the big post office facility they used actual World War II surplus tanks to drive through those old wooden Victorians and demolish them that symbolism was not lost on those residents and there are still people around older folks they remember this, this isn't just history for then it was their fucking house that was destroyed and so I do think it is very important to know this history acknowledge it and but to talk about what we're doing is not all that and it is reprehensible that some so called affordable housing advocates in San Francisco talk about how our agenda is that of ethnic cleansing is that of urban renewal 2.0 that is not what's happening we are not looking to empower the state government to take people out of their homes to demolish those homes and then to scout them to wherever because while many of the folks that San is having to manage their fears what they remember is the aftermath of urban renewal like the new towers for the low-fronted housing that were in places we never built nearly as many housing units as we destroyed it really was flat out population displacement and so that's real but I think that we can talk about our agenda in a way that one it's just like nothing like that there is really good evidence including from the urban displacement project at UC Berkeley that neighborhoods even the one from neighborhoods that see more market rate housing development see less displacement and part of the ways to prevent this is one don't kick people out of their homes that's the same one but step two is in certain circumstances you could imagine that at some point you really do run out of developed land we're not there yet so don't let anyone tell you that but at some point you do and then you're like well some places that are like single story commercial retail with one story we actually probably should demolish that and rebuild it that said one I'm not at all convinced that the city government or the state should come in and do that two write a return how about a right to move into a place immediately and there's a way that the city could manage that if we're actually going to engage in any program where we have to demolish tenant occupied housing that they get a place to move in the same bed there's no right to return people have heard that story before I wouldn't blame anyone for not believing right to return was a redevelopment right to return after your entire life has been destroyed for 18 months if you're lucky it's going to be more like 2 or 3 years so two things I wanted one thing that I think we are tenants and we're pretty strong tenants activists I think that one of the potential solutions is making like buyout that you have strong enough protections that in order to get somebody out of an existing unit like that you would have to potentially get a massive buyout or be offered or something like that and I think that's great because also if somebody is deciding to take that buyout they might make other choices too they might decide to go back to school they might decide to invest in a small business like a buyout might be a great option so long as they have the ability to leverage it and actually get the buyout that they deserve I was living in an eating unit building in West Los Angeles going to UCLA and I was graduating and the building was getting demolished to make way for instead of eating that's around the pool it was going to be like a six-story apartment building and I got $2,000 and I felt like I won the lottery and excited to go to Chicago like that $2,000 totally changed I should have held them off for way more than that and I just got the loan the building got like like $40,000, $50,000 so you could go on all the time but yeah that money it totally I used it to move to a different city and it wasn't displaced out of Los Angeles because I was displaced out of that building but it could statistically look like that and so that's something about statistics that doesn't tell the story that went on this neat cool journey and venture because of that money so I want to circle back a little bit to Bobak's question of like onboarding actually is what I think that is also a question about and I think that's something that we were growing too quickly to like educate our members for a while and we do this whole thing now that I like want to recommend that every new Yimmy group do except that I can't really because we didn't and so like I don't know what to do about that which is like we have these like intro Yimmy 101 things where we're like this is redevelopment and these are like basic things that you should know about and like making sure that your membership doesn't sound like idiots when they open their mouths and they have those tools and whatnot to know what they're talking about rather than just having the like instincts to be like housing too expensive more of it cheaper and like give them more super cool context than that so that they understand you know when they're talking to somebody like why why would someone you know because it took it still I struggle with like how do I talk to somebody who feels like building more housing is going to make things worse I can't always and so you know you can have an endless conversation with them but you should at least understand and not just be like that person is an idiot you should like be able to understand how and why they have come to the conclusions that they have come to and have that kind of humanity to be able to hear why it is that they come to what you know suckily are long conclusions so I think that was a very long answer to your question about that so like we should ask more questions more to questions especially someone from a community that doesn't always have their voices heard like in urbanism often women's voices aren't heard so I'm just going to wait a minute to see if anyone that identifies as a woman wants to speak even a member of the press is probably not I just have a comment okay you gotta hear it take it out have a comment quick comment and it's because yeah as a member of the press I like to hear all sides and when I walked in there was a protest downstairs and I tried to talk to someone and they wouldn't talk to me so the idea of amplifying the message the idea of they're trying to expand their message by being that crude I just I mean I don't understand because I represented myself as a member of the press and I wanted to understand what it is that they're saying so nobody would talk to me that was the only comment that I wanted to because you're a member of the system yeah I am a part of the system you look just like the system that's what I think why not look at you I am a Puerto Rican woman my friends say I have white passing privilege so unfortunately some people don't want to talk to me so we're going to sort of wind it up unless we got one more that would be super quick okay eventually eventually thank you so much for all the conversations that's happened I found it extremely enlightening I have to listen to I'm from Vancouver, E.C. and one of the huge narratives there is foreign investment a lot of Chinese money tends to come over to Vancouver and empty homes so the idea around building more homes even if they're affordable homes or maybe below market but they're not reserved for under any program is that they're purchased and then left empty because someone's just stashing money there and it does happen for sure and I'm wondering that's an area that you deal with in your respective cities and how you manage that, what programs you how you advocate around that to ensure that homes are for homes and not investment because that's a huge barrier that I come up with and I don't know enough about our financial system in Canada and actually they know what to do yet so I'm just curious as to what you do in your respective cities I will say from affordable perspective in San Francisco at least and I do believe in New York also when a market rate development builds on site a market rate housing we're going to build these 100 units but 15, 20, 30, whatever of them will be for low income people the mayor's office of housing so this cycle is called a deep restriction that's legally binding for those units for between 55 and 99 years and the mayor's office of housing oversees the lease up or the sale of what's called an income certification where they meet with the tenants and they make sure that everything's okay and they recertify their income you don't get evicted if you make more money it's a lot of work is what you're trying to say I'm just saying it is possible it is possible to at least make sure that the affordable units are for people and not just for investments so I don't know I'm no expert in Canadian tax policy but I did I did read an article about F1s and my understanding is that that was an entirely predictable effect not only a sort of mainland Chinese desire to stick out the controls but also it was a very incented form of investment from Canadian tax policy more than that there's a lot in the Bay Area a very long history in the Bay Area of worrying about the yellow pedal and it's depending how you count it the first Chinese restrictions in the United States were anti-Chinese restrictions in San Francisco so there's a lot of really ugly rhetoric out there that is no basis there are undoubtedly some units that are purchased that aren't getting built now let's just I think the numbers are small let's imagine that they are and they're empty so what, these are new in San Francisco, these are good union jobs a bunch of people made working people made good money building them and they're giving money for construction improvements for the else and if they're not using those units they're not using any tax resources it's a big win for the city okay I totally disagree but we don't have time so we're going to have to pick this one up on the next episode of Anthem I think we should do it here we'll have to wrap this up I just want to say thanks to everybody thank you everybody thanks everybody bye