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PERSPECTIVE - California YIMBY has a lot of explaining to do. While middle- and working-class tenants struggle to pay sky-high rents, wealthy tech executives and venture capitalists, most of whom are based in the Bay Area, are spending big to help California YIMBY kill tenant protections. Just in 2023 and 2024, they shelled out a whopping $424,230 to the California YIMBY Victory Fund, which delivers campaign cash to politicians and assists in stopping pro-tenant policies. Multi-millionaire Kenneth Duda, founder of Arista Networks, and his wife were the biggest contributors, forking over a total of $200,000.
Eight years ago, California YIMBY was co-founded by tech executives Zack Rosen and Nat Friedman, installing Brian Hanlon (pictured above), a one-time employee of the U.S. Forest Service, as its chief executive officer.
Hanlon told the East Bay Times that he aspired to work at a natural wine bar. But when Rosen and Friedman came calling, he jumped at the chance for a big payday – he now hauls in at least $345,873 in compensation, according to a California YIMBY tax filingfrom 2023.
With Hanlon in place, California YIMBY pushed a couple of pro-gentrification bills, strongly backed by the tech and real estate industries, that were swatted down by housing justice activists in 2018 and 2020. To have legislation passed in the future, Hanlon and California YIMBY realized they needed to reposition themselves politically, framing themselves as a progressive organization that cared about the same things that housing justice activists did.
The public relations move has worked to a certain extent, but Hanlon and California YIMBY have refused to say who’s funding the organization, even though the group is trying to pass legislation that impacts virtually all of California and its 39 million residents. One would think the mainstream media would take a deep dive into the finances of California YIMBY, but reporters have largely failed to deliver the goods.
In the past, news coverage revealed that Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, tech investor Jared Friedman, and Stripe billionaire co-founders Patrick and John Collison delivered major checks to California YIMBY. And Hanlon told The Real Deal, a real estate news site, that he was “certainly willing to accept money from developers.” But since California YIMBY is a nonprofit, it can hide its contributors on tax filings, and the group doesn’t offer donor transparency on its website.
So that leaves state filings for the California YIMBY Victory Fund, a political action committee that’s used for advocacy and buying influence and favors by sending campaign cash to state and local elected officials. Those documents show exactly who’s shelling out big checks to California YIMBY, and which politicians are taking its money.
While the California YIMBY Victory Fund was raking in cash from tech executives and venture capitalists, California YIMBY and YIMBY Action actively backed Big Real Estate’s successful campaign to kill Proposition 33, a 2024 ballot measure that would have repealed statewide rent control restrictions.
AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the parent organization of Housing Is A Human Right, sponsored Prop 33, and it was supported by a broad coalition of housing justice groups, social justice organizations, and civic leaders, including U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders and labor and civil rights icon Dolores Huerta.
The California Apartment Association and many of the largest corporate landlords in the country, on the other hand, organized and financed the main No on Prop 33 committee.
So California YIMBY and YIMBY Action abandoned the housing justice movement, and then teamed up with Big Real Estate.
In 2025, California YIMBY and YIMBY Action again worked with the California Apartment Association and corporate landlords by opposing AB 1157, a state bill that would have strengthened tenant rights in California, including lowering the rent cap of the Tenant Protections Act of 2019. Big Real Estate stopped that bill, and the California Apartment Association publicly thanked California YIMBY and YIMBY Action for their help.
So, behind the scenes, an elite group of wealthy tech executives and venture capitalists delivered mounds of cash to the California YIMBY Victory Fund to finance the organization’s anti-tenant work. It’s not a good look considering that middle- and working-class residents are barely scraping by to pay excessive rents to corporate landlords and other predatory landlords.
It’s like the troubling time when YIMBY Action, another prominent YIMBY group in California, partied hard with Big Real Estate’s money, holding a “YIMBY Prom” of all things, while activists were fighting corporate landlords to pass Prop 33 and working-class families feared the real possibility of homelessness because of skyrocketing rents.
Even worse, during the Prop 33 campaign, California YIMBY and YIMBY Action worked with corporate landlords who were mired in the ongoing RealPage scandal, in which a cartel of corporate landlords were being investigated and sued by tenants, the Department of Justice, and state attorneys general for allegedly colluding to wildly inflate rents across the country.
California YIMBY’s past public relations work is now unraveling.
Housing Is A Human Right looked at the California YIMBY Victory Fund’s state filingsbetween 2023 and 2024, focusing on contributions of $1,000 or more. A number of patterns emerged.
First, a cabal of mostly tech executives, venture capitalists, and law firms had each sent $1,000 or more to the California YIMBY Victory Fund, totaling $424,230.
They include Quizlet founder Andrew Sutherland, who shelled out $15,000; venture capitalist John Danner, who delivered $25,000; Pantheon Systems co-founder and CTO David T. Strauss, who sent $5,000; and Arista Networks founder Kenneth Duda and his wife, Jen, who handed over $100,000 each.
Among others, venture capitalist Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, and Additive AI CEO Dwight Crow contributed $1,000 and $2,500 respectively.
Additional contributors that sent $1,000 or more to the California YIMBY Victory Fund include AirGarage founder Scott Fitsimones; Prisms of Reality founder Anurupa Ganguly; Kolana managing partner Hameed Abbasi; Alloy chief revenue officer Laura Spiekerman; and Y Combinator general partner Tyler Bosmeny.
Second, out of the 37 contributors who sent $1,000 or more to California YIMBY Victory Fund, 32 of them reside in the Bay Area, including such wealthy enclaves as Palo Alto, Berkeley, and San Francisco.
In fact, 19, or more than half, of the contributors live in San Francisco. So while deep-pocketed tech executives and venture capitalists live the good life in Palo Alto and San Francisco, they’re also killing tenant protections for poor and middle- and working-class renters in Fresno, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
Lastly, California YIMBY sent $32,680 to the California YIMBY Victory Fund, acting as a kind of dark-money group – because no one knows everyone that’s contributing to California YIMBY, which then secretly transfers their money to the California YIMBY Victory Fund.
Interestingly, California YIMBY quietly set up another nonprofit called the California YIMBY Education Fund, which, according to its 2023 tax filing, is trying to “shape the housing narrative in California and nationally.” So California YIMBY’s hidden contributors are pushing a national agenda that will impact Americans across the country. No small thing, and reporters should follow the money.
To better understand California YIMBY’s origins, we recommend checking out one of our most-read special reports: “Inside Game: California YIMBY, Scott Wiener, and Big Tech’s Troubling Housing Push.” It’s also worth taking a look at two other popular articles on our website: “What Is a YIMBY? (Hint: It’s Not Good)” and “Trickle-Down Housing Is a Failure. Here’s What You Need to Know.”
California YIMBY and corporate landlords push a pro-gentrification, trickle-down housing agenda to solve the housing affordability crisis, but we all know that trickle-down anything never helps the poor and middle and working class. The uber-rich tech executives and venture capitalists funding California YIMBY, though, clearly think it’s a winner.
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(Patrick Range McDonald is an award-winning author and journalist, honored by the Los Angeles Press Club as Journalist of the Year and for Best Activism Journalism, and by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia for Public Service. He serves as an advocacy journalist for Housing Is a Human Right and is a regular contributor to CityWatch, focusing on housing, homelessness, and social justice issues in Los Angeles and beyond.)
