Comments
YIMBY WATCH - Last year, while Californians battled Big Real Estate to pass a pro-rent control ballot measure called Proposition 33, corporate landlords and other uber-wealthy real estate insiders shelled out cash to pay for a YIMBY Action “prom” at the swanky Terra Gallery in San Francisco. YIMBY Action, one of the leading YIMBY organizations in the country, worked with corporate landlords to kill Prop 33. If the initiative had passed, it would have thrown a life preserver to seniors, working-class families, students, and millions of others who continue to drown under California’s housing affordability crisis.
For nearly 10 years, the YIMBY movement in California has aggressively pushed Big Real Estate’s pro-gentrification, trickle-down housing agenda, routinely clashing with housing justice groups and social justice organizations in the process.
In April 2018, for instance, YIMBYs shouted down activists and residents – many of whom were people of color – at a press conference outside San Francisco City Hall. The YIMBYs got so out of hand that an elderly Asian woman fainted and was rushed to the hospital, with sheriff’s deputies forced to break up the YIMBYs’ menacing counterprotest.
“Our members were intimidated by YIMBY,” Wing Hoo Leung, president of the Chinatown-based Community Tenants Association, told the San Francisco Examiner in 2018. “They felt threatened.”
Leung added: “I think the YIMBY have no heart.”
Describing her interactions with YIMBYs, Bay Area activist Shanti Singh told Shelterforce in 2019: “It’s been absolutely ugly. A really nasty three years.”
Maria Zamudio, another Bay Area activist, told In These Times, “They’re like, ‘Just build housing, you stupid brown people! I moved here last week, and I need a place to live!’”
Fernando Marti, co-director of the San Francisco-based Council of Community Housing Organizations, wrote in a Shelterforce column: “But according to the YIMBY leaders, now we equity advocates are the problem too, little different from the NIMBYs, rabid progressives who are too naïve or ideological to understand how the market really works. In this story line, in the name of fighting evictions and displacement, we progressives, we communities of color, we poor people and immigrants, we working-class queers stupidly don’t realize that luxury development now will eventually become the affordable housing of the future!”
(For more details, read “Inside Game: California YIMBY, Scott Wiener, and Big Tech’s Troubing Housing Push.”)
The YIMBY movement, led by YIMBY Action and California YIMBY, hasn’t stopped clashing with housing and social justice activists.
In 2024, a broad coalition of labor unions, housing justice groups, social justice organizations, and civic leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Maxine Waters, and labor and civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, worked to pass Proposition 33. The initiative would have repealed statewide rent control restrictions in California and allowed cities to pass updated rent regulations. Prop. 33 was sponsored by AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the parent organization of Housing Is A Human Right.
Many of the nation’s largest corporations financed the No on Prop 33 campaign, which was sponsored by the California Apartment Association. AvalonBay Communities, Essex Property Trust, Related Companies, and Equity Residential were among the big donors. Prometheus Real Estate Group, a prominent corporate landlord in the Bay Area, also shelled out campaign cash to stop Prop 33. In total, Big Real Estate raised a whopping $89.4 million to successfully kill the initiative.
In the run up to Election Day, YIMBY Action, led by executive director Laura Foote, and California YIMBY, led by chief executive officer Brian Hanlon, publicly endorsed Big Real Estate’s No on Prop 33 campaign. The YIMBY groups even wrote an “open letter” that opposed Prop 33 and ran as an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times. The pricey ad was paid for by the California Apartment Association, the powerful lobbying group for corporate landlords.
Then, while activists fought the real estate industry’s No on Prop 33 campaign, and while California’s homelessness crises continued to be fueled by unfair, excessive rents, YIMBY Action decided to party, holding a “YIMBY Prom” at the posh Terra Gallery in San Francisco on October 5, 2024.
“The year’s biggest YIMBY party,” the YIMBY Action website proclaimed.
The upscale event featured an exclusive VIP-only reception and a “Prom Court”made up of California’s political elite, which included, among many others, former San Francisco mayor London Breed and State Sen. Scott Wiener. Tickets weren’t cheap: between $200 and $500 each.
Big-time players in the real estate industry paid for the prom, including corporate landlords AvalonBay Communities, Related Companies, and Prometheus Real Estate Group. Summerhill Homes, Lexor Builders, and Reuben, Junius & Rose also shelled out cash as sponsors. To no one’s surprise, Scott Wiener and London Breed were declared the YIMBY Prom king and queen.
(A couple of weeks before the coronation, Wiener playfully campaigned for the dubious honor in a YIMBY Action post on X.)
In the meantime, as Wiener and Breed collected their crowns, the Department of Justice was investigating corporate landlords for colluding and wildly inflating rents in California and other states; corporate landlords, including AvalonBay Communities, were targeting Black tenants for predatory evictions in Los Angeles; and the California Apartment Association and corporate landlords were spending major cash to sway local elections and upend tenant protections in Larkspur, Fairfax, and Santa Ana.
YIMBY Action didn’t care. With Big Real Estate footing the bill, YIMBYs just wanted to party.
Follow Housing Is A Human Right on Facebook, X, Instagram, and Bluesky.
)Patrick Range McDonald, author and journalist, Best Activism Journalism: Los Angeles Press Club, Journalist of the Year: Los Angeles Press Club, Public Service Award: Association of Alternative Newsmedia, advocacy journalist for Housing is a Human Right, and a contributor to CityWatch.)
