Reading Part 1 isn’t necessary but provides some economic context I’ll reference in this piece.

Why are we doing this upzoning plan in Berkeley, and what’s it got to do with destroying Berkeley shops? A quick history lesson:

In 1916, the developer of exclusive Berkeley neighborhoods got the city council to pass an ordinance prohibiting multi-family housing and later segregating commercial uses in Elmwood. Although there were competitor ordinances elsewhere, housing academics typically cite Elmwood as the birthplace of exclusionary zoning.

In 1963, Berkeley activists attempted and lost a Fair Housing referendum banning race and sex consideration in housing. Eventually Fair Housing became national law in the Civil Rights Act of 1968. “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” was put in the law by Senator William Proxmire, who argued that banning race discrimination was insufficient because suburban communities were using low density zoning to keep out multifamily homes, which were more affordable. The 1964 NBC segment Segregation: Western-Style showcases how the Claremont-Elmwood area practices this.

In 2018, California mandated that “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” in zoning practices must encourage multi-family housing in wealthier areas to expand housing accessibility. (The Obama Administration pushed these guidelines in 2015 but Trump suspended it in 2020.) In 2022, Berkeley’s Planning Department identified planned population increases (known as up-zoning) for West Berkeley and BART station zones as sufficient for 9,000 more homes.

West Berkeley councilmembers noted this didn’t conform with the new rules. Since 1980, Berkeley has focused thousands of new homes and households on commercial zones in the working class and campus areas. Meanwhile, wealthier census tracts like Elmwood-Claremont, Shattuck north of Cedar Street, and Solano Avenue have added only a net increase of 58, 35 and 0 homes since 1980, respectively.

In 2022, the city council selected North Shattuck, College Avenue (Elmwood) and Solano Avenue commercial zones for upzoning, because they have frequent bus service, are in or near “high income and resource zones” (while not being in fire zones), and are in or near historically white-only districts. Northbrae–Thousand Oaks (Solano and North Shattuck) and Elmwood–Claremont rank first and second among Alameda County’s most segregated census tracts by share of non-Hispanic white residents. Therefore, Claremont-Elmwood and North Berkeley are classified by state as “Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence” and by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute as “High White Segregation.”

This rezoning plan had been supported by pro-housing and YIMBY groups, and principally by East Bay Housing Organizations, which advocates for low income non-profit developers. In contrast, the city’s biggest market-rate developer, Patrick Kennedy, said he didn’t think the plan was worth the backlash. YIMBY groups had called for expanding the upzoning two blocks into the adjacent residential areas to increase housing and discourage business disruption, but planning staff shot the idea down due to Middle Housing.

In 2022, when Berkeley submitted these corridors to the state for planned upzoning, staff had failed to set any specific housing goals. HCD then declared that the city’s zoning plan was “out of compliance.” If the deadline has passed and the state rejects a city’s zoning map, a penalty is activated known as Builder’s Remedy, where developers can build high-density apartments almost anywhere in a city, provided a portion of the project is low income or completely middle income.

Santa Monica was the first city to fall out of compliance and the city was besieged with proposals for 4,000 homes, mostly in towers, within one week. No Builder’s Remedy projects were attempted in Berkeley because it was untested law, but by 2024, the legislature codified and cleared legal ambiguities. Dozens of cities throughout California are currently affected, and the attorney general is fining cities that don’t comply.

In 2023, the city of Berkeley and the state finalized three concrete pledges on Page 144 and 157 of our zoning plan that puts Berkeley back into compliance and restored local zoning:

1. At least 2,000 more homes particularly on College Avenue (Elmwood), Solano Avenue, and north Shattuck Avenue commercial areas;

2. Consistency in zoning between high-income corridors and corridors in formerly red-lined neighborhoods (West and South Berkeley);

3. That points 1 and 2 are completed by the deadline: December 2026.

If Berkeley is “out of compliance” come January 2027, not only could our local zoning from the waterfront to the hills be suspended, but the state could also withhold funding for our low-income housing projects. The initial rejection already said on Page 3 that Builder’s Remedy would be activated if the city’s plans weren’t completed:

Please be aware, if the City fails to adopt a compliant housing element within one year from the statutory deadline, the element cannot be found in substantial compliance until these rezones are completed

Then the community feedback process began. A city poll of 1,000 found most respondents supported increasing height limits on the three corridors, but that two-thirds of Elmwood neighbors were completely against increasing theirs.

Then a group of citizens formed Save Berkeley Shops with two primary arguments well-emblazoned on their lawn signs: that upzoning and housing construction would evict merchants and destroy vibrancy; and that high-density housing would ruin their suburban way of life.

They frequently point to Downtown as ruined by housing, although Berkeley’s sales tax data shows that Downtown grew much faster than Elmwood and Solano Avenue in shopping activity between 2014 and 2022—but has stagnated since. Downtown has a lot of issues, but that’s a complex problem for its own story. A stalled housing project downtown have caused a lot of fear of merchant displacement and blight.

Given the limited geography of the upzoning upon only small commercial districts, there is undoubtedly higher risk of merchant displacement from future housing projects. Rumors spread that a 20-year old North Shattuck cafe was evicted in anticipation of upzoning, despite its parcel being too small to build on. People feared Elmwood Theater could be demolished despite it being both a landmark and owned by a nonprofit.

At least half the city council voiced support for equality of zoning between West Berkeley and the high-income corridors—meaning 7 story zoning universally. But, at the recommendation of merchant advocates who wanted housing but without disruption, the Planning Commission made a compromise ordinance that reduced the upzoning to big parcels: mostly banks, supermarkets, parking lots and strip malls.

The commission set height limits for these specific parcels to 5, 6 and 7 stories for College, Solano and North Shattuck based on a measurement of street width comparable with San Pablo Avenue’s with an extra floor to compensate the removal of zoning changes from the vast majority of shops.

The Planning Commission is only an advisory board so this plan will be edited and debated when it goes before City Council.

On the positive side, the current plan accomplishes an estimated 1,700 homes best case scenario. Even universal, 7-story up-zoning was only 1,800 homes because the smaller parcels with most of the businesses were too small to fit modern apartments.

However, there is an issue that supporters of the upzoning have complained about. The large parcel zoning isn’t being done for San Pablo Avenue, which is also being upzoned to 7 stories and which relates to point 2 of the state agreement: zoning equality.

Save Berkeley Shops doesn’t appear to include West Berkeley—either on their website or at the hearings. Because West Berkeleyans are historically supportive of new housing, opponents have argued that Berkeley can get by just with upzoning San Pablo Avenue, but the state has already said that high-income neighborhoods must contribute or else.

The Planning Commission’s recommendation has so far been applauded by North Berkeley and Elmwood’s councilmembers as a major compromise that exempts a majority of the shops and build homes. However, Save Berkeley Shops hasn’t appreciated any of it. After most shops were exempted, they voiced opposition to making any ordinance at all—despite state mandate—and said that these exemptions probably wouldn’t make any difference. After the commission heeded their request to ban lot mergers, they followed up in their newsletter only to say that Elmwood and North Berkeley faced an “existential threat” of “Manhattanization.”

The vast majority of upzoning opposition is coming from the Elmwood district, even though its total contribution is just 140 expected homes versus 1,400 in North Berkeley. (The Elmwood shopping area is only 2 blocks in length; hence enhancer upzonings have since been proposed for southeast Berkeley to actually contribute more housing). Elmwood opponents argue that just one housing project can destroy the businesses simply by being adjacent to construction sites or eight story buildings.

This argument doesn’t work well in North Shattuck since its southern end has gradually absorbed denser housing over the past 20 years with improved diversity and business vibrancy. An 8-story apartment was just completed next to a dense cluster of popular shops without issue, and a popular cafe opened next door during construction.

The housing issue is more theoretical and intense in Elmwood because gradual housing growth of all types has been blocked there for 40 years:

• In the 1980s, the Claremont-Elmwood association locked the University of California into a 50-year development agreement prohibiting more housing at Clark Kerr campus until 2032.

• By 1990, Elmwood and North Berkeley broke Berkeley into a district-based election system after the city council proposed 2-story public housing in their neighborhoods.

• In the 2000s, Elmwood merchants and homeowners opposed adding a single story of senior housing above Elmwood Hardware to finance renovations, causing the closure of the district’s major anchor business.

• In the 2010s, the Claremont-Elmwood association fought 4-story condominiums at the Claremont Hotel.

And I won’t dwell on it, but I feel disproportionate opposition to the Middle Housing ordinance from last year came from Elmwood residents.

Nevertheless, the case for housing in these neighborhoods should stand by itself, not because of state mandate or Builder’s Remedy. Homes on these corridors would offer aging in place opportunities to many seniors, like my neighbor who struggles on her stairs but doesn’t want to lose her friend groups and local businesses by moving away.

A lot of seniors have been moving down from the Berkeley Hills due to fire risk and inaccessible homes, looking for condos and apartments close to Solano, Elmwood and North Shattuck. Most of the older apartments built around North Shattuck were banned in 1978, so there aren’t any modern ones with elevators.

New, multi-family housing on these corridors without displacing businesses that make these corridors great is a win-win. I wish that Save Berkeley Shops would come together with the pro-housing groups and push forward on this compromise.

I confess that the zoning plan put forward isn’t equal to West Berkeley, but this plan is a good, minimally disruptive, 8-year introduction of housing into neighborhoods that haven’t seen apartments in a century. San Pablo Avenue also has a lot more parking lots and autoshops, which developers prefer over dense business clusters.

There’s a lot of policies I wish we were talking about, like design. We could incentivize use of classical ornamentation rather than misguided obsessions about stepbacks and massing that make new buildings look like ugly Lego. Faux-classical buildings downtown played a major role in de-stigmatizing Berkeleyans to high-density housing. North Shattuck’s new 8-story building is welcomed in a neighborhood already supportive, but it resembles a Kleenex box. Solano and Elmwood would probably warrant some classical facade for their very first projects.

Renderings and conceptual height limits are often frightening and obsessed over, but nobody in the real world notices the difference between a 3 versus 8 story building while walking on a corridor. Although provisions were inserted to curb excessive height increases with the density bonus. Pedestrians engage with buildings on their ground floors. New buildings have so far put uninviting resident services in front rather than maximizing ground floor retail. Retail needs to be in front on commercial corridors, resident services on side streets or minimized on commercial corridors, and retail spaces subdivided into smaller units so they lease up faster at more affordable rents. It’s the big retail floor spaces staying empty for so long.

I talk to the Save Berkeley Shops members a lot. A few are my neighbors, whom I love and respect, and with whom I sometimes spend hours arguing at Saul’s Deli. I know some of them don’t believe it but I do listen and agree with them more often than they think. These people are not anti-fair housing or prejudiced. They love their communities as much as I do. I feel their fear is often rooted much deeper than policy. They fear that the places they love will change into something unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

I get it. I’m deeply sentimental about University and California Streets. I grew up on that corner. I took dates to the pizzeria. My friends smoked there. My family ate there constantly when I was growing up. And now it’s gone. In its place is a tall, modular apartment building.

I can appreciate the benefits of that housing pushing area rents down and bringing much needed businesses and customers, yet simultaneously mourn the loss of an experience that I’m sometimes unwilling to admit was changing anyways. Same with the loss of downtown movie theaters that opponents of this plan invoke constantly as a negative against building housing.

Blaming housing downtown distracts from the reality that Berkeley lost 30 movie theaters citywide; most of which are repurposed husks. Blaming housing distracts from why we’re older now and don’t fit in on Telegraph anymore. Blaming housing distracts from why your favorite diners downtown got replaced with new cuisine. Or why all the commercial districts in actual decline are hardly building any housing.

Elmwood is a lovely commercial district; one of the most well-kept in the East Bay. Today its main anchors are regionally-appealing food businesses. But the original preservationists of Elmwood in the 1970s fought the perceived invasion of restaurants appealing to outsiders with a business quota system to protect neighborhood serving retail and services. Yet obstructing housing ultimately did not save neighborhood-serving retail and service businesses and perhaps worsened it in Elmwood Hardware’s case. Were it not for the apartments being built in Southside and younger families moving to South Berkeley, packing Elmwood cafes and businesses with young people and families, Elmwood may be struggling like Solano Avenue clearly (and measurably) is today.

Twenty years from now, I’ll be sitting at the Elmwood Cafe with my family. Hopefully it’ll be more pedestrianized by then. I’ll be telling my children about the apartment with some popular shop beneath it that will have replaced the 7-11. I’ll tell all the stories about the failed predictions of doom and ruin that building was supposed to cause to the Elmwood.

And after hearing the story for the hundredth time, they’ll say: “Shut up, Dad. No one cares.”

—

If you want a lawn sign in support of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing re-zonings, you can order one here.

—

In the 1960s, backlash to California handling of post-war population growth by building apartments in residential neighborhoods led to statewide down-zoning, limiting new housing. By 1980, the state began requiring cities to plan for population growth every 8 years by allowing for more homes via up-zoning. The city of Berkeley has historically identified declining commercial areas for mid- and high-rise housing development.

Recent state and federal laws mandate that cities add new housing in state-designated neighborhoods with high incomes, with the intent of making unaffordable neighborhoods more affordable. The Berkeley City Council committed to the housing authority that we would increase height limits on Solano Avenue and Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley, and the Elmwood shopping area on College Avenue.

Opponents of this plan argue that Downtown has been ruined and hollowed out by housing development and that these three commercial areas without new housing are far more vibrant because local businesses are spared disruptive housing construction. Others disagree, saying that Downtown is overall vibrant, despite the presence of two stalled housing projects in the area. It has become clear that people do not share a common definition of what makes a place feel vibrant.

Inspired by MissionLocal’s reporting, calculating vibrancy through sales tax revenue is a wise empirical approach. Sales tax actually tracks where people are spending their money. I’ve compiled the sales tax data from a public records request. Values are reported in nominal dollars, so I inflation-adjusted them to measure consistent purchasing power in 2025 dollars.

A district-to-district comparison of revenue doesn’t work without accounting for differences in size. So the sales tax values are normalized to the year 2014 (sales tax revenue = 100 in 2014), so that vibrancy is measured by how much a district’s sales tax revenue has increased or decreased since then. You can see the geographic boundaries for these commercial districts in the city’s annual reports. The year 2014 was firmly out of the Great Recession’s influence, it was the start of Downtown’s building boom, and it was key to another major event to be discussed at the end.

There are limitations with sales tax data. Industry-heavy West Berkeley heavily depends on bulk purchases of materials, while South Berkeley car dealerships are a major contributor to sales tax. These things do not translate to vibrant street areas and high foot traffic. Moreover, every commercial district in Berkeley has seen a decline in inflation-adjusted total sales tax revenue due to the pandemic and the decline of retail.

But the city tracks sales tax data by business type: food and beverage, retail, personal services, and other. Food and beverage is the city’s fastest-growing commercial activity. It became the primary sector in every commercial district except West Berkeley in the mid-2010s as retail declined. This sector typically results in the highest foot traffic: cafes, restaurants, bars, etc. Both total sales tax and food-based sales tax will be examined.

Let’s start with commercial districts in the city’s most middle and lower-middle class areas: University Avenue (west of MLK Jr. Way/excluding Downtown), San Pablo Avenue, South and West Berkeley.

Before the pandemic, West Berkeley had already declined by 20% in activity as big-box retail died out or moved to Emeryville, and industrial employers closed. San Pablo Avenue’s performance was stable but flat, as automotive businesses declined due to the rise of EVs and better vehicles. Simultaneously, new cafes and restaurants opened around University Avenue and Dwight Way intersections. Only South Berkeley grew before the pandemic, by an impressive 21% between 2014-19. Since 2022, South Berkeley has slowly declined every year and is currently down 25% compared to its 2014 performance. San Pablo Avenue has not recovered from its pandemic lows, tumbling down 35% since 2014.

Examining just food and beverage sales tax revenue alone, San Pablo Avenue’s performance is erratic. It had a powerful but brief post-pandemic recovery, which has stumbled since 2022. Even as industrial employers and retailers vacated, West Berkeley’s food and beverage sector had stabilized before the pandemic. West Berkeley’s recovery since the pandemic has been L-shaped. Population densification along San Pablo Avenue and in West Berkeley has been rather dispersed and infrequent since it was zoned for 4-stories in 1993.

University Avenue (which had distortionary outlier values in 2017 and 2018) is in long-term decline. Before the 1990s, it was an automotive drive-in destination, but now, new eateries have opened like Jaffa Coffee and Good Eats, alongside a few new apartments utilizing the rarely-used 4-story upzoning of 1996. Commercial activity around McGee and California Streets has been revitalized recently. After years of decline, 2025 was the first time since the pandemic that University Ave. posted positive food-based sales tax growth.

— North Shattuck, Solano Avenue, and The Elmwood —

In addition to the major commercial districts in the planned upzoning, the sales tax data also includes the Neighborhood Commercial (C-N) areas. Tiny commercial districts are scattered around MLK Jr Way, Gilman Street (Westbrae area), Hopkins Street, and along Claremont Avenue (Uplands and Domingo Avenue). They’re all grouped into one. No rezoning of these areas is planned, but they are in the higher-income districts of the city.

North Shattuck and Elmwood appear to be performing exceptionally well post-pandemic, which explains the high merchant sensitivity about their rezoning. Yet, North Shattuck had grown by 4% by 2019, while Elmwood shrank by 15%. The Elmwood’s decline in the late 2010s was noticed by newspapers, such as this Daily Californian excerpt on its high vacancy rate and issues competing with Rockridge in 2018.

Elmwood in the 1980s modeled itself on 1940s nostalgia and neighborhood-serving businesses, explicitly resisting transformation into a regional-oriented dining and shopping area. Nevertheless, Elmwood saw the closure of retailers, laundries, groceries, and old-fashioned businesses like Ozzie’s Soda Fountain for food-based businesses. The theater was bought by a nonprofit funded by a city loan. The city council recently deregulated limits on the number of restaurants in the corridor. Post-pandemic, Elmwood has glowed up rapidly with cafes and eateries. Elmwood now has double the share of food-based businesses than the city-wide commercial district average, putting its once high vacancy rate to the lowest in the city (1.35% by square foot).

In contrast to Solano and Elmwood, North Shattuck is no stranger to new housing. Once controversial housing developments in the 1990s were built around Rose Street, and denser buildings between Hearst and Francisco on Shattuck in the 2000s. Commercial developers have turned declining department stores and gas stations into food courts like Epicurious Garden and the Crepevine building. The corridor is currently in the midst of two high-density housing projects and a cafe boom on its southern section. Before the pandemic, North Shattuck grew by 4% in total sales tax since 2014, and has shot up by 18% since 2022.

Solano Avenue has changed the least of the three districts and hasn’t had two consecutive periods of positive total sales tax growth since 2014. Opposition to upzoning has been smallest on Solano, and my neighbors feel the district is struggling with demographics. Total sales tax revenue was down 10% by 2019, and since 2022 its down another 17%. While North Shattuck and Elmwood have transitioned to a food-based economy, Solano’s food sales tax is down by 7% since 2014, although it has been improving since the pandemic.

Solano’s movie theater closed in 2010, and it’s not as populated with cafes besides Peet’s Coffee. The Thousand Oaks-Northbrae area has added 0 net housing units since 1980, per the Census, and is entirely zoned for single-family residences for over a mile in radius. Solano’s demographics are among the most elderly in the region because families with children cannot afford to move there. Yet, Solano has the second-lowest commercial vacancy rate in all of Berkeley (2%), showcasing how low vacancy doesn’t always explain high vibrancy.

— High-Density Districts: Downtown Berkeley and Southside Telegraph (between Dwight and Bancroft, only) —

Overall sales tax performance reveals that Southside Telegraph is the best performing commercial district over the last decade in Berkeley — and it’s not close. Telegraph had the smallest total sales tax contraction since 2014 of just -8.9% with second place North Shattuck at -15%, and +18.6% growth in food and beverage sales since 2014.

Downtown Berkeley is one of only four districts showing long-term positive growth in food and beverage. In 2025, Downtown’s food-based sales tax is up 5.4% since 2014 as new eateries like boba shops, organic bites, pizza and mainland Chinese cuisine have sprung up around Downtown. In 2010, two-thirds of city voters upzoned Downtown for residential mid and high-rises with the Downtown Plan of 2009, ushering in a building boom several years later. Total sales tax revenue increased in Downtown 10.3% by 2019.

The state of Downtown is typically compared to Elmwood and North Shattuck by opponents of the latest zoning plan, and this graph best lays out their differences in taxable activity over the decade.

Downtown Berkeley actually performed quite well between 2014 and 2019, considering it was the focal point of the city’s old department store buildings, which had closed or wound down as retail declined. Downtown also handled the pandemic well and outperformed Elmwood, North Shattuck and most Bay Area downtowns during the worst parts of the pandemic in 2021. New population growth downtown was supporting local business.

But after 2023, Downtown suddenly slipped, and has steadily dropped by 10% in total sales tax between 2022 and 2025 while Telegraph, Elmwood and North Shattuck recovered and surpassed Downtown last year. The cause appears obvious. In 2022, the stores under Shattuck Hotel were supposed to briefly close during construction next door, but the out-of-state commercial landlord who owned Shattuck Hotel’s retail space neglected to refill the stalls. Then the Walgreens closed Downtown, as they did throughout Berkeley, but the downtown location was earmarked for an embattled high-rise housing project whose conditions of approval took years and were quite expensive. It has since re-applied under the state’s new density bonus laws.

The redevelopment of the Center Street businesses for 456 housing units and pedestrian-only ground floor retail was uncontroversial during its permitting process. But approval of the project took 3 years, and by then, interest rates had shot up, the merchants were all relocated and now it lays vacant. Although the Center Street project appears to be resuming, these closed businesses have dampened downtown’s vibrancy for some time.

Rents in former department stores (many of these buildings are landmarked and not planned for development) have been increasing by commercial landlords as property values increase — creating vacancies. In today’s food-oriented economy, which requires only small stalls, the bigger the floorplan the more expensive the lease. The departure of Half Price Books from its building is another distressing sign for Downtown. It lacks class A facilities big retailers prefer that Fourth Street and Bay Street have, while also lacking low rents due to UC campus proximity inflating property value.

Southside Telegraph was upzoned by city council first in 2017 for mid-rises and again in 2022 for high-rises, with support of UC student leadership, but in an environment where the state had passed laws erasing many of the issues and years of obstruction Downtown dealt with. Several of the downtown projects (like the one behind Shattuck Cinemas) were fought for years and began construction a decade after they were proposed. By the time Southside was upzoned again in 2022, anti-high rise attitudes had dwindled.

Moreover, the Southside Plan differed from Berkeley’s old approach of only upzoning commercial corridors by broadly upzoning commercial and residential areas. Developers are often building over old houses and small apartments around high-intensity commercial buildings rather than exclusively over Telegraph’s commercial areas. The 2009 Downtown Plan limited upzoning to only commercial areas and actually downzoned adjacent residential areas. By the late 2010s, a lot of the old parking lots and auto shops downtown had been developed or were entitled and only commercial buildings were left.

— Final Rankings —

Taking the simple difference between 2025 and 2014 isn’t holistic because the revenue is often erratic, the economy changes throughout this period, and any start or stop year could be easily cherry-picked to change outcomes. When looking at the health of a commercial district, there are two important factors: growth and stability.

Averages are the ideal metric for stability. Sales tax reporting years can be broken down into three sub-categories: pre-pandemic (2014-2019), pandemic (2020-2022), and post-pandemic performance (2023-2025). Because University Ave.’s 2017 and 2018 data points are outliers, I’m excluding it from the final rankings.

Commercial Areas With Consistent Stability: Average Total Sales Tax Performance Index from 2014 to 2025. Averages closest to 100 had the best consistency and least volatility since 2014.

1. South Berkeley — 98.0

2. Southside Telegraph — 93.3

3. North Shattuck — 91.5

4. Downtown Berkeley — 90.9

5. San Pablo Avenue — 86.7

6. Elmwood — 86.3

7. Neighborhood-Commercial — 86.2

8. Solano Avenue — 83.6

9. West Berkeley — 80.9

Best Post-Pandemic Recovery: Average Total Sales Tax Post-Pandemic (2023-2025) divided by Average Total Sales Tax Pre-Pandemic (2014-2019):

1. Southside Telegraph — 82.39%

2. North Shattuck — 76.72%

3. Downtown Berkeley —76.19%

4. Solano Avenue — 73.80%

5. Elmwood — 72.20%

6. South Berkeley — 72.13%

7. San Pablo Avenue— 70.33%

8. West Berkeley — 68.47%

9. Neighborhood-Commercial — 64.41%

Food Economy Growth: Post-pandemic average food-based sales tax (2023-2025) divided by pre-pandemic average food-based sales tax (2014-2019):

1. Elmwood — 96.52%

2. San Pablo Avenue — 94.45%

3. Southside Telegraph — 94.40%

4. Downtown Berkeley — 94.03%

5. North Shattuck — 93.80%

6. Solano Avenue — 84.71%

7. South Berkeley — 73.57%

8. West Berkeley — 72.06%

9. University Avenue — 68.05%

10. Neighborhood-Commercial — 49.31%

There are two clear best-performing commercial districts in Berkeley, and it’s Southside Telegraph and North Shattuck. Downtown Berkeley also consistently places third or fourth among the top growing districts and only began faltering after 2022. Elmwood is the inverse in that it spent most of the decade declining and since the pandemic has found a strong growth spurt.

Telegraph, North Shattuck, Downtown and Elmwood — the city’s best performing districts — all have something in common. All are within walking distance of each other and within a 1-mile radius of UC campus. Elmwood is just four blocks away from the Southside-Telegraph district, and most people would be hard-pressed to find the demarcation between North Shattuck and Downtown Berkeley, especially since apartments with vibrant ground-floor commercial replaced the parking lots between them in the 2000s.

A theory is that population growth in Downtown and Southside, along with increased UC enrollment, increased demand and vibrancy on North Shattuck and Elmwood. Thousands of new residents in Downtown and Southside can and do obviously walk or take a very short bus ride to North Shattuck and Elmwood. It would explain why Solano Avenue and the neighborhood mini-districts, which are not as close to growth areas and have demographics similar to North Shattuck and Elmwood are struggling.

There are districts in Berkeley whose performance could be classified as in decline, and the worst appears to be West Berkeley. In 2014, voters in Berkeley were given the choice to upzone sections of West Berkeley for 7-story dwellings. This would’ve expanded the housing projects around Fourth Street and University Avenue to several parking lots and commercial areas. The arguments for and against Measure T sound very similar to our zoning battles today. The rallying cry was “SAVE WEST BERKELEY”, a coalition of anti-development activists and prominent merchants. Councilmembers and early urbanists argued that West Berkeley needed population growth to survive de-industrialization, while opponents charged that West Berkeley’s historic commercial sector and industry would be destroyed by developers.

The upzoning lost by 500 votes. Eleven years later, West Berkeley is the worst-performing commercial district in the city. Manufacturing has vacated, retailers went to Emeryville (which now has a fiscal capacity 2.4 times the size of Berkeley’s per-capita), and small businesses specializing in food and beverage are down by 35% in taxable activity compared to 2014. It’s doubtful the modest re-zoning would’ve saved West Berkeley, but it is our largest commercial district contributing the highest sum of sales tax to our annual budget, and its future requires more radical attention than we’re giving it.

I’ll talk about what conclusions can be drawn from all this in Part 2. But it’s important that as these debates about commercial vibrancy repeat every few years that we have some measurement for vibrancy and not just vibes. Today it’s Corridor Upzoning and Downtown, tomorrow it’ll be the Hopkins bike lanes battle, soon car-free Telegraph, and in 2032 the next area rezoning.

Lastly, as someone from West Berkeley, just because a district’s activity is down does not mean its merchants and residents are disposable. This data should start conversations, not end them.

—

I’ve been studying commercial real estate. That includes spending a lot of time walking around the cities of the Bay Area, looking at ground-floor retail, and trying to get a sense of commercial markets. Many communities are frustrated by the lack of essential commercial uses like hardware stores and groceries in vacant commercial spaces.

There is a consistent theme I keep seeing in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley when commercial space do eventually fill up: cafes and food. I was even seeing cafes and food & beverage spots replace non-food retail in the suburban strip malls of the South Bay.

Coffee shops have always been popular in Berkeley, but they’ve been especially popular lately. Whenever I see a commercial vacancy in my neighborhood, there’s a 50% chance of it becoming a cafe or 50% any other commercial use.

Cafes are the simplest uses for commercial buildings. They don’t require much beyond a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bar for the baristas, and some amount of seating space. Some coffee shops are so simple that in the suburbs they’re run out of drive-through booths.

Urban commercial landlords prefer to lease to cafes because they’re profitable, require minimal construction that the landlord would be liable for, and get started much more quickly than other commercial use.

Cafes fall under most municipal zoning ordinances as “Food and Beverage for immediate consumption” and are typically restricted to the commercial buildings of limited commercial areas. With high demand for cafes, even greater now because of the rise of work-from-home, this could be crowding out non-food and beverage retail from commercial buildings in a limited number of commercial zones. Commercial zoning usually consists of less than 10% of land-use in most U.S. cities. Unusually large amounts of commercial retail floor space are now occupied by cafes and food & beverage spots.

Why not let people operate cafes out of their homes or allow new cafes in residential areas? Cafes and coffee shops are something most people wouldn’t actually mind in their backyards, especially if they’re working from home.

Commercial uses like hardware stores, trinket shops, horticultural shops, pet stores etc. need to be in limited commercial zones due to activity that is more likely to be considered a nuisance. Or that those types of businesses do not have a walkable business patronage and require real estate for parking and larger floor plans.

Why mandate that cafes (and other low-intensity food and beverage businesses) lease valuable and large commercial space that could go to non-food retail, when cafes themselves don’t need to depend on a customer base driving in or have on-site uses that are a nuisance to residential neighborhoods?

If cafes were allowed in people’s neighborhoods, then people would have cafes within walking range to patronize instead of getting in their car and driving to a commercial building farther away. In addition to work-from-home benefits, this would allow for new community gathering spaces directly within neighborhoods that many cafes functionally act as now.

Cafes in residential areas would also lower barriers to operating a small business by allowing people to operate cafes inside their homes without the need to post high profitability margins to pay for high rent commercial leases.

This argument could be made for the legalization of most food and beverage for immediate consumption businesses, but cafes would be a small enough starter for Americans unaccustomed to this convenience.

Americans love traveling to Paris, Milan, Tokyo and the like, and are amazed at how close cafes, lunch spots and bakeries are to residences and lodging — even in their nation’s suburbs and rural areas.

There’s little reason we should ban that here.

Like other urban areas, downtown Berkeley had many movie theaters, and now it has none. With the rise of streaming and cheap, widescreen LEDs, movies are more accessible than ever to the general public. Streaming is becoming more economical for families since it’s pay-by-program, rather than per person at the cinema, and that’s excluding concessions.

Movie theaters have long been difficult to operate because companies distributing the movies take about 80% of the ticket sales revenue, and theaters overwhelmingly rely on concessions for income. The popcorn, snacks, pre-credit advertisements, and 20% of the ticket price fund the jobs at the theater, the rent being paid, and the capital costs like seats and lighting.

Corporations like AMC and Century built modern theaters with lots of food, seats, big screens, and put hundreds, if not thousands, of independently-owned theaters out of business decades ago. Since the 1970s, studios and theaters have depended more on younger audiences for high-volume ticket sales, but young people now watch programming on their phones nonstop.

Although cinemas were declining in frequent patronage, which was essential for a theater’s survival, people still go to cinemas at least a couple of times a year, particularly for the big-budget movies. I, like millions of others, stepped into the theater this year to see Superman, K-Pop Demon Hunters, and Avatar on the big screens, Wicked and several classics at a neighborhood theater in Oakland.

There’s actually been a measurable resurgence of youth attendance at movie theaters who are looking for a reprieve from endless scrolling. Young people seem to swell theaters for culturally cool movies like Super Mario Bros., Spongebob and Minecraft.

Cinemas provide unique entertainment in an era where urban commercial districts are becoming nothing but restaurants and cafes. They help the local economy by drawing people into neighborhood businesses before and after the picture.

Berkeley attempted to save its local cinemas through development projects and landmarking. Both of which have failed, and our downtown — finally ripe with a high density of young people who could walk a block and watch the movies — is worse off because of it.

I won’t be pointing any fingers of blame at our loss of theaters in Berkeley. It’s pointless. Oakland lost almost all its downtown theaters. Most city centers in the Bay Area lost their theaters. It’s easy to break every issue down into pro- or anti- housing and preservation, but reality is always harder.

I’d like to see a cinema in downtown Berkeley again that I can go to a few times a year instead of venturing to neighborhood cinemas in Oakland. Most communities would like at least one centrally-located theater to go to.

How did we get here, and what can be done?

After years of losing cinemas citywide, a small, off-and-on downtown theater (Fine Arts) in 2002 was redeveloped into a cinema-themed apartment building with a new cinema built in it. But the old cinema owner could not raise the capital to equip the theater, so the screen auditoriums lay dormant in the apartment complex to this day and are probably used for storage.

Shattuck Cinemas, owned by the Landmark corporation, closed after a long, slow death. It was the prettiest of our three big theaters, but Landmark always sent the big box office films to the California Theater, its other theater a block away. Shattuck Cinemas was targeted for a new housing project that had originally been planned as a 17-story apartment with a revamped theater, featuring 10 modern screen auditoriums.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but this was Berkeley’s last chance at remaining a cinema town. Modern theaters with IMAX or large-format screens and large sound systems are the only for-profit theaters being expanded or proving very profitable post-pandemic. They’re successful at drawing crowds when playing big box office movies because streaming has not yet replicated these immersive experiences. Emeryville’s AMC theater had long been successful at stealing Berkeleyans and Oaklanders away from our older, local theaters.

But the project became a massive, political tug of war between people who wanted to preserve a historic landmark and people who wanted a modern theater with housing on top. Voter referendums, lawsuits, hours of testimony, and millions in non-theater community benefits. The project couldn’t handle it, and financing collapsed after 7 years of battle. Another developer later bought the site, and Landmark Corporation closed the cinema down. The developer demolished it for a small apartment complex. As of now, it’s a gruesome metaphor for that period of Berkeley civil war with no winners: a big pit in the ground.

A year before Shattuck Cinema’s demise, the California theater was closed in 2021 by Landmark Corporation, which also shuttered a dozen others, including cinemas in San Francisco. The property sat in limbo before a developer bought it and proposed a housing tower over it with the theater converted into a playhouse. This development failed, and the site is now back in limbo. Since then, Landmark has shuttered other California theaters, including its Albany theater just outside of Berkeley.

Lastly, the United Artists theater, a popular theater with a grand Art Deco lobby, closed after its owner, Cineworld, filed for bankruptcy and shuttered 39 locations nationwide. A developer had already bought it, intending to turn it into apartments with the Art Deco facade mostly preserved. This has spurred a preservation group to fight for the theater building to be preserved as a landmark.

And that’s how we lost all of our big theaters, except for one small, independently-owned neighborhood one. Most theaters outside of downtown have not been targeted for development, but they’ve ceased being movie theaters nevertheless. My neighborhood theater, Oaks Theater, had its exterior preserved in the 2010s, and it is used as a climbing gym.

There’s a lesson here, and it’s not relitigating the past.

The best public services are paid for by the public. A big mistake we made, among many, was depending on unfunded mandates from borrowed capital to fund what was increasingly a public, not necessarily profitable, desire.

Understanding this, local governments should subsidize nonprofits or small local for-profit companies to acquire at least one movie theater. This is what nonprofits are best at: things that aren’t life-and-death essential public services, but are still pleasant, yet not easily or always profitable.

What Berkeley should have done was use a low-interest loan to help a non-profit cinema company purchase and operate a movie theater. It could be funded through a bond measure, and I’d happily vote for that.

The New Parkway Theater in Oakland has successfully pulled this off. It’s an independent theater with a variety of concessions, very comfortable seating, and a showing of the latest blockbuster movies. It saved a dying downtown theater through community support. For non-IMAX movies, I usually go to the New Parkway.

Independently run, they depend on the generous donations of community members and patrons to operate. The New Parkway also doubles as a community space and has an expansive concessions stand and comfortable couches — better than even big corporate movie theaters. I go to the New Parkway and young people who now reside en masse in downtown Berkeley would certainly patronize it as well.

A non-profit or publicly-subsidized small cinema can show a variety of programs that a corporate cinema can’t, such as niche films and historic films. Those programs attract a crowd of movie buffs who actually care about films and are less likely to whip their phones out during a movie.

While many have dismissed the death of movies as inevitable, cities need a diversity of things to do beyond just eating and sleeping. Our urbanizing districts have mostly become high-density residential communities with restaurants. In addition to cinemas, we should have more playhouses, concert venues, bars, lounges, and night markets. They don’t all require subsidies like a cinema, but require some vision vibrancy beyond just population density.

We should raise a modest tax to either purchase or subsidize the current owner of the California Theater, to transform it into a non-profit or independently-operated movie theater in Downtown Berkeley. If not this one then possibly the vacant venue at Fine Arts. Although I’m not tied to any one venue.

I don’t think most theaters should be preserved, but cities should have at least one. I’m willing to work with the preservationists like Save United Artist on this task and pro-housing and pro-preservation people should see common ground here.

The California Theater seems like the obvious choice since the housing project has failed this year. The city could offer to buy the parcel and deliver it to a nonprofit or local cinema company with a low-interest loan, or the city could help fund a theater in a new building, and not just mandate it without a subsidy like the flop that was Fine Arts Theater.

“Theater deserts” are becoming common throughout small-town America. They will also hit parts of urban America unwilling to support movie theaters. I’m not looking forward to a future where children and community members just sit inside and scroll all day.

Where Berkeley lacks in cinemas, it excels in playhouses, but the market didn’t make our playhouses happen by itself. The city issued low-interest loans and bond measures to help playhouses like our famous Berkeley Rep. Berkeley is considering a tax measure to help playhouses and performing arts in 2026.

I think helping a single cinema company get started downtown should be included.

Disclaimer: This post and all posts on my Substack do not represent my employer or any public bodies I serve on. The opinions in this piece only represent me.

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Although I’m a gentile, Hanukkah is my stomach’s favorite time of year. There are latkes as far as the eye can see in Berkeley. Every other house puts their candles up, and my neighbors offer me tons of latkes. With my latkes, covered in apple sauce and sour cream, I take my walk to Indian Rock Park and overlook the beauty that is the Bay Area. It’s such an East Bay experience that I’ve taken for granted my whole life, and I fear that 2026 will jeopardize what I have.

A lot of my neighbors, former schoolmates, and mentors in my area of Berkeley are Jewish. Some of my classmates’ parents around here supported me from childhood to adulthood and treated me as if I were one of their own kids. My old mentors were retired civil rights lawyers, radical activists, and sometimes just everyday liberals. Though they varied in political opinions, they instilled in me a set of convictions about tolerance and justice that are the foundations of my beliefs today.

Berkeley gets lampooned as a kind of hippie liberal granola haven. Well, it is, and I love that. I love the big farmers’ market, the grocery stores with fresh produce, and the quirky shops. The old white people in Berkeley — an often ridiculed demographic in the media — can be some fearsome people. They’re unafraid to tackle even taser-wielding agitators at protests. They can argue with me at a Planning Commission hearing on Wednesday night, and then talk about how their kids are doing while we wait in line at the Peet’s Coffee the following morning. We argue about city politics on Nextdoor, and then the next day, they give me cooking advice at the supermarket. It’s not always pleasant, but hey, that’s home! And I love them.

Black Americans like myself are often classified as poor, but growing up in Oakland near High Street, I had the privilege of seeing a wide diversity of income distribution among Black people. At the bottom of High Street are the survivors of American poverty, encampments, and the lower-middle class living in old Victorian houses. They know how to take care of themselves and keep themselves safe. In the middle of High Street is the heart of the Bay Area’s Black middle class. Home to Black hospital workers, public sector workers, school teachers, and small business owners. You go further up to Maxwell Park, where the Black middle and slightly upper class live. At the end of High Street is Redwood Heights, where the Black landlords, white-collar professionals, and lucky retirees dwell in the mid-20th century modern houses. The Black CEOs and millionaires live at the very top in the Oakland Hills. Make no mistake: the rich are not better than the poor.

The increase in the Hispanic population in East Oakland has made the news on ethnic tensions, but what doesn’t is the day-to-day interactions of peace and co-existence between black and brown people. As a kid, my friend group included Mexican and Central Americans from my neighborhood. I look fondly back on a city worker who would come into the Walgreens where I worked and teach me Spanish. Black families like my own went to cookouts at Mexican neighbors’ houses. Every morning, Black, Asian, and Hispanic kids play basketball at Wilma Chan Park in Chinatown, blissfully unaware that this country’s discourse is consumed with the idea that they can’t get along.

Fremont is an East Bay community I’m surprised I fell in love with. Before I met my partner there, I thought it was a boring suburb in every way. But it wasn’t the town, it was the people in Fremont I fell in love with, particularly the Asian communities. Being very familiar with the intense discrimination against Chinese people in California, despite not being Chinese myself, I feel immense pride that the Chinese American community today is now such a powerful and successful diaspora across the land.

Anti-Indian sentiment has emerged as a prominent political force on the very far-right, targeting JD Vance’s wife and Republican presidential hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy. Well, I lived in Fremont, and it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Indians and Pakistanis here have good jobs and are so friendly. They make excellent food and do everything they can to educate and propel their children into great futures. I’m a tech worker, and I admire the hard work of the H1-B workers and American citizens who do such impressive and groundbreaking work in Silicon Valley, leading the globe in software engineering. In the morning, they pray, often repeating Sanskrit scripture or Islamic prayer at dawn. Their children go to tutoring centers, play basketball in the suburban cul-de-sacs or play cricket in the baseball diamond. It’s a beautiful and very American community.

I can’t forget the agricultural communities just outside the East Bay area. Whenever I visit my family farm, I pass by the thankless service that mostly Hispanic agricultural workers provide to bring in the food to the Bay Area. It’s Latino hands that pick the crops at 110-degree weather, and Latino men and women who work the meat processing plants and grain factories to put food on our tables. It’s Sikh truck drivers and farm owners who bring the produce to our local grocery stores in the Bay. These are the folks who drive into the Bay Area for an hour or more each way to do domestic labor. Honorable Americans — citizen or not — just trying to get by, empowering our economy, with lower crime rates than U.S.-born citizens, and above all, are so friendly.

Why the President of the United States and an emerging extremist sect of the country despise these people, terrorize them, frighten their children, abduct their parents, even after a large chunk of them voted for him, I will never understand.

The Bay Area is a beautiful place with even more beautiful people. Yes, we have our problems and conflicts, as a cosmopolitan, ethnic conglomeration of people with different beliefs has done since time began. But for many years, we’ve been a peaceful society, well above the American average in tolerance and economic strength, and as a consequence, a lot of us aren’t ready to defend it against emerging anti-American extremism seeking to divide us. We take for granted that in our community of different races, language some wearing hijabs and others wearing kippahs, that we work and live together and love this country, together.

I’m Black. I’m not White, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, homeless, transgender, gay, non-citizen, or a temporary resident. But all these people are my people — the American people. An attack on any of them is an attack on America and on me. We see in the news that many of these aforementioned groups are under attack, from vicious hate crimes to discriminatory public policy, all by emerging political extremism that has flourished online. The decline of community, of informed and substantive conversations between our neighbors, and the outsourcing of our news to online demagogues (many of whom don’t even live in this country) is causing tremendous damage to the American project.

The trajectory of America towards ethnic nationalism and essentialism is disturbing, and it’ll be center stage in Election 2026. In addition to the xenophobic, anti-Indian and Antisemitic currents trying to take over the conservative CPAC event this year, the comments from our vice president at that event were also senselessly derogatory. J.D. Vance’s declaration that Christianity is our national religion despite knowing what our Constitution says was anti-American, and I say that as someone from a Christian family. His senseless demeaning of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis who have never done him any harm should offend us all. As does his and other speakers’ constant disdain for hearing any language other than English in the United States. I love being in Richmond or Oakland and hearing Spanish fly. I love sitting at a park in Fremont and hearing so many languages: Hindi, Farsi, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Dari. These people haven’t hurt anyone.

Vance’s whining about “apologizing for being white,” which is a variant of the alt-right sticker campaign “It’s Okay To Be White”, was a tremendous low in our nation’s history. This line is designed to provoke liberals into explaining the history of white supremacy, which will inevitably be clipped by operatives as an attack on white people. The answer to the bait is simple: it is okay to be White, and no liberal leaders have said otherwise. No one is responsible for the actions of other members of their race, their national origin, or any other immutable characteristics in this country. Odd that many of the speakers there who proclaim to understand this principle for White people do not extend that grace to immigrants and non-Christians.

Social media is a major contributor to the disunity in this country. Social media has constantly elevated the extremes, fueled by losers with nothing to lose or anonymous accounts. Cranks once relegated to street corners now have the ears of our national leaders. Fanatical podcasters have now captured entire sections of political parties. The White House puts out meme content sourced from far-right imageboards. Global leaders are declaring war based on batshit theories propagated on social media. People are so focused on having their own communities explained to them by demagogues thousands of miles away, while having no conversations with the actual neighbors right beside them.

Our political framework should not begin with national political pundits; it should begin with our neighbors. And yes, despite my glowing love of the Bay Area’s diversity, we’re not going to come together and sing Kumbaya. We’re still going to have bitter debates with our neighbors. None of us is immune to offending people or causing harm, no matter how well-intentioned we are. But be wary of this emerging idea that we should never reflect or apologize for anything we say, and to declare war on empathy, as Elon Musk repeatedly states. Insecurity about criticism is the mark of a weak, insecure people and nation.

We’re going to offend each other and make mistakes. We should learn that there’s nothing weak about apologizing and rectifying harm. We should try to exercise patience and have meaningful discussions with our neighbors. I’ll continue to talk to my Republican neighbors and associates, with whom I struggle to agree on any topic. Many nice people occasionally say something prejudiced or misguided, and they’re not above talking to. They were Asian Americans with conservative beliefs. Out in the Central Valley where my family farm is, the whole area is majority Republican. A lot of the fellow farmers are Sikh and Hispanic, as well as white longtimers, and they mostly vote Republican because they like low taxes and want to keep to themselves.

Our country needs to rally behind Americanism. No individual, under any circumstances, is guilty or can be judged for their race, orientation, gender, religion, or national origin. No exceptions. Americans come from a variety of backgrounds that are often in historic conflict with each other, and this warrants debate and discussion, not warfare, hate crimes, and slander. I know this sounds like an obvious PSA, but it’s clearly not to an ever-growing share of people, particularly younger Americans who get their politics from online content.

Around 2022, I knew a regular at a bar, a White male, who was slowly getting radicalized by xenophobic content online. Despite being revolted, I tried my hardest to talk sense to him, and I genuinely think that that human connection offline kept him from the brink. I didn’t see him for a few years, but later on, I found out he quit his tech job, dropped his social media, and spent his days helping immigrants. He told me he found a community in real life that gave him more meaning than scrolling content all day.

A lot of people are just bigots that can’t be reasoned with. Sometimes you have to walk away from them — for your own health and sanity. But getting people offline and having conversations and confrontations, through community groups and neighborhood organizations, could help revive some unity in this country. I’m going to aspire to do more of that in 2026. We should all leave the social media bait and radicalizing algorithms behind

Lastly, if we want to convince people of immigrant ancestry who believe in the American Dream to back liberal democracy, we shouldn’t have to wait for demagogues dressed in U.S. flags to attack them. Patriotism should not be a monopoly of those looking to exclude people in our nation. The American flag should be the most inclusive icon in our country. Everyone should see themselves in our flag — citizen or not.

This article and every article on my Substack do not represent my employer or any public commissions I serve on.

12/02 UPDATE: Berkeley City Council passed the 26-foot rule but will refer the rule to a committee to discuss potential changes, adjustments and feedback in April 2026. This is a good outcome for both the Fire Department and Traffic Safety advocates and I’m certain all parties will eventually agree on a safe regulation.

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People in mobility advocacy and traffic safety have known this issue for a very long time, and it’s never been popular to say publicly. Nobody wants to bad mouth the fire department. Nobody, myself included, questions the hard work of firefighters, from the volunteers, to the emergency service responders (EMT), to the marshals and chiefs, who save lives every day through rescue and preventative measures. This is just a disagreement on the application of a specific regulation, and does not call into question anyone’s fitness for office, the need for fire departments, or any department’s skill overall.

But this topic needs to be out in the open, because there’s been a hidden conflict going in city halls across the nation between resolving the escalating issue of traffic mortality and fire officials trying to keep streets as wide and open as possible for swift fire response time. Our fire codes regarding street designs is increasingly contradictory to public safety, and enforcement is too arbitrary.

This conflict came to a head in Berkeley, California this week. Our street festivals that have existed for generations in the same places were, out of the blue, canceled by the leadership of our fire department (although by which officials is unclear). One fair, (Telegraph) on a small, one-way street that will be eventually pedestrianized, and the other (Juneteeth) on an 80-foot wide, 6-lane stroad. For months, no explanation was given to the public as to why. Instead, unclear explanations were finally given by city staff, claiming: “unprecedented amount of [high density] housing” warranted wider streets and no street festivals on small streets as part of a “renewed focus” on the state fire code.

Putting aside that dense cities around the world in high-income nations have the liveliest street festivals, this rule was being applied to quadrants of Berkeley largely unchanged with new housing. Moreover, our downtown farmer’s market adjacent to a park had to cut the market in half and maintain a 26-foot wide clear space. A bewildered public and city council asked why this was happening. The fire department, through city officials, argued that Appendix D of the state fire code — requiring streets with a building taller than 3 stories to have at least a 26-foot street width of through traffic — mandated this change.

First, Appendix D in the state fire code is an optional code meant to be tailored for jurisdictions’ unique features. A street clearance of that sort exists so that fire trucks can use apparatuses to reach taller buildings and so that space is clear for emergency vehicles to get through streets. The intent is logical, but the U.S. fire code encourages sprawl by discouraging tall buildings and mandating wide roadways in front of each house. Thus, the state code was made optional to give flexibility intended for prewar cities not designed this way. Why was our fire department enforcing this rule for the first time and unilaterally, without any review by our fire and safety commissioners?

(12/02 edit: It’s been revealed that the city of Berkeley actually adopted this optional rule 17 years ago but the fire department hadn’t enforced it until a renewed interest in standards by recent leadership. Most people including existing councilmembers were unaware of this history. Therefore, primary blame for this rule would fall upon the bygone council and not the fire department).

As one of the festival organizers put it:

How has this been OK for 42 years, and now all of the sudden it’s not?

Second, if the 26-foot rule was consistently enforced, Berkeley would have to remove at least half of its street parking. Our average road widths and current vehicle sizes does not leave 26 feet of through traffic on residential streets. Our high fire risk hillside is lousy with cars parked on the sidewalk, making it impractical for fire engines to navigate quickly in emergencies, yet the fire department was not prohibiting street parking. It’s eminently easier to move tents and festival equipment out of the way for a fire engine than it is to move a parked car.

The festival saga elicited a high amount of press attention and public backlash, and thanks to a negotiation organized by our council members, fire officials are approving at least one street fair. But this is the only fire department intervention that received significant press attention. In the past couple of years, our firefighter union has been supporting Berkeley’s plans to reduce traffic deaths and make alternatives to driving safer, yet without documentation, some fire officials have been vetoing and altering the city’s bike, pedestrian and scooter mobility infrastructure projects.

In a less publicized example, Berkeley used to erect roundabouts with planters at intersections to make drivers slow down on streets rife with speeding, stop sign violators, or adjacent to bike ways. These are popular and beautiful, and in 2024, Berkeley voters and the Firefighters Union supported the installation of more. But fire officials allegedly altered the roundabout changes to make them mountable by autos. No rationale was ever given, but what I’ve been told is that the officials felt engines needed to swiftly drive over roundabouts, making the infrastructure completely ineffective at its goal.

A firefighter sympathetic to the fire officials argued to me that traffic calming slowed the fire department’s ability to respond to fires. But firefighters and EMT affiliates spend far more time collecting bodies from car accidents enabled by car-oriented road design than they do fighting structural fires. Between 2010 and 2022, structural fires in Berkeley injured an average of 2 people per year, while between just 2017 and 2022, traffic accidents injured or killed an average of 694 people annually. (Report here). This is proportionally true of most cities in the United States. This month, a cyclist was hit and killed on one of the streets fire officials want to keep free of street festivals.

To be clear, our fire department and EMT affiliates do an outstanding job and are underpaid. My heavy reluctance to criticize this particular code enforcement is out of a deep admiration for the department’s work overall, which continues to keep fire deaths low. I’m not criticizing rank-and-file firefighters and my town has a great fire chief. Not only did our Firefighter Union endorse the pro-traffic safety measure in Berkeley, our department is the first department in the nation to initiate a “Street Trauma Prevention” program. Meaning that the fire department will begin examining and studying street designs that prevent auto accidents and pedestrian deaths.

The rather inconsistent enforcement of the 26-foot space feels like our fire department’s internal struggle within leadership to transition from a department singularly concerned with making roadways wider, to a proactive department preventing health emergency calls as well as fires. Although fire deaths continue to decline in the U.S., traffic deaths are reaching record highs.

I live right by a fire station. Engines and ambulances come blaring down my street with sirens on an almost daily basis. The vast majority of the obstacles slowing response times are automobiles and street parking. High car traffic on urban streets, both flanked by on-street parking, slows engines down dramatically and requires unsafe maneuvers by motorists and the engine’s driver. If a smaller percentage of the population had to depend on automobiles to get around the city, streets would be more readily available for firetrucks to use.

If I had safe cyclist infrastructure on my street so that I could use my bike or my elderly neighbor could use his mobility scooter without risk of being run over, we would have zero impact on response times. But since such infrastructure was opposed by officials several years ago, I’m now forced to use a car. So when the fire engine comes blaring down the hill, all I can do with my fat automobile is try to go a few feet to a side lined with parked cars, and I, along with hundreds of others, contribute to slower response times.

Not only do cars slow fire and emergency response down, but car crashes are often the cause of fires. According to the National Fire Protection Association, 16% of fire department responses were about vehicle fires, with car crash fires killing more people than non-residential and apartment fires.

[Vehicle fires] are estimated to have caused more civilian deaths than non-residential structure fires and residential apartment fires. Only structure fire incidents in one- and two-family homes had higher death rates per fire than vehicle fires.

Fire departments across the United States are vetoing or butting heads with street safety measures. The San Francisco Fire Department fought against the city’s Slow Streets program where pedestrians and slow speed vehicles mingled on crowded streets. Oakland’s Fire Department also tried to enforce a 26-foot rule several years ago, foreclosing traffic safety measures on high injury streets in a city notorious for vehicular violence. Whereas Berkeley’s progressive firefighter union backed safer road design, Los Angeles’ was completely against and made that clear.

I suspect some U.S. fire leadership usually have few words for traffic congestion and parked autos causing the overwhelming majority of slowdown in response is because the fire officials drive themselves. Which is fine but like many people, if you’re not thinking about other modes of transportation, issues like these are not obvious.

Fire departments are also frequently solicited by salespeople trying to get them to buy ever more massive and inflexible equipment that appeals to the American desire for large vehicles. (I should note San Francisco & Berkeley’s FD is actually opting for smaller sizes). Like American building practices as a whole, fire vehicles in Europe, Asia and Australia are more standardized and efficient, while in the U.S. we depend on expensive customization from a couple of manufacturers who are not producing compact models and selling ever bigger trucks.

American justification for such large engines is that they carry a larger amount of water, which is crucial for the initial response to fire before tankers and neighboring departments respond. This is a good point, particularly for rural fire departments where hydrants are not in abundance. But hydrants are not lacking in most urban environments. In suburban areas, this may depend as typical American houses are combustible wood-frame buildings without sprinklers, but new subdivisions usually have more hydrants.

Vehicle size is not as simple as hydrant access or any one issue, and there’s a lot of levels from vendors to regulations that make our fire engines the largest in the world. But in the rest of the high-income, developed world, which boasts lower or equal fire deaths than the U.S., the fire vehicles are usually smaller. Smaller engines are more flexible to navigate through cities, thus the fire code accommodates the city rather than the city being built around the code. American officials and firefighter enthusiasts argue that the younger age and abundant land of the USA warrant larger vehicles. But similar countries like Australia do not boast large fire vehicles, either.

U.S. local governments should send fire department staff, especially leadership drafting local fire codes, on educational vacations to cities in Europe and Asia for collaborative experiences with foreign fire departments to compare and contrast operations. Such trips would encourage institutional change in departments, showing them alternatives in vehicles, traffic design and code that might be compatible with American skill in fighting fires back home.

For street safety activists, we should work with fire departments to adopt “retractable bollards” from Europe. This relatively new invention is becoming the norm in European city centers. Being able to retract bollards on streets by remote control so that areas for pedestrians and cyclists can be automatically converted to use by emergency vehicles and fire would address the genuine concerns of fire officials about permanent traffic calming obstacles. American firefighters are skilled at fighting fires and responding, hence our low fire injury rate. Fire department’s concerns are not frivolous.

All city councils should refer to civilian fire and disaster committees to work with our fire departments to craft street design standards that can accommodate sustainable population growth and quickly fight fires. If Austin, Texas could get traffic safety advocates and fire officials to work together, the rest of urban America can too.

It is likely that street safety infrastructure and non-automotive activities on the street have to change and adjust for fire safety. It’s not so much the rules but the process that needs to be clear, the enforcement of the code consistent, and agreed upon by fire officials and local government experts in a documented manner. I thank firefighters and emergency service responders, who in their often overworked and underpaid roles, not only protect people from fires but also help people injured and dying in traffic accidents as well.

The video below is a demonstration of a retractable traffic bollard:

Disclaimer: this article and every article on my Substack do not represent the opinions of my employer, or any affiliated organizations and public bodies I volunteer with or serve on. These posts are my private opinions in my individual capacity.

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San Francisco is in the midst of a political war over its plan to rezone commercial corridors on the west side of the city for higher-density apartments. Oakland has already re-zoned its iconic Rockridge district along College Ave. for mid-rise buildings several months ago. Last week, Berkeley had a hearing on its proposal to upzone a smaller portion of College Ave. known as The Elmwood, and two linear commercial districts in North Berkeley. The first council hearing on the upzoning witnessed significant opposition from merchants. The reason cities are doing this is that the federal government on condition of receiving public funds, has begun enforcing “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rules, which require equality of residential land uses between low-income and high-income neighborhoods. This framework began with the Civil Rights Act of 1968, but enforcement was started by the Obama Administration.

At a high level, I’m excited about our proposal. I have long wanted dense, new housing on transit corridors in my neighborhood in North Berkeley, which is rapidly aging at the rate of Floridian retirement communities, rich with 4 supermarket grocery stores, and inaccessible to middle-class young people. Voters appear supportive of these initiatives, too. The notoriously anti-growth and affluent towns of Marin County saw two major issues, commercial upzoning in iconic Sausalito and the recall of a pro-development councilmember in Fairfax, pass and fail this November with strong margins.

There are valid concerns that need addressing with commercial upzoning, especially as cities dictate more density to commercial areas over existing residential ones. At Berkeley’s first council meeting on the subject, there were the usual anti-development regulars but the vast majority of merchants who spoke were not NIMBYs. They were earnestly worried that development would lead to their removal and replacement with chain stores that can afford the new commercial rents or survive the construction period. While research suggests that new housing lowers area residential rents and increases residential mobility, it’s not as clear that new housing is good for incumbent businesses as proponents of commercial upzoning imply it is.

How effective were previous commercial corridor rezonings at accomplishing increased commercial uniqueness, sustainability and vibrancy? There’s no better case example than Berkeley’s downtown plan. At the council hearing, anti-upzoning opponents frequently cited that downtown has two blighting development projects that have stalled and implied this may besiege their quaint districts.

One of these projects, colloquially referred to as Harold Way, although now largely forgotten, was the product of a decade-long showdown of lawsuits and meetings that piqued my personal interest in housing as a freshman in high school. It shouldn’t take the duration of three presidents to approve and build a rather common high-rise apartment. The state passed a law (S.B. 330) written in response to Harold Way that capped this situation from happening again. Unfortunately, we lost our great children’s museum, Habitot, and I encourage you to donate if you can.

The other, more egregious blight by a developer named Chicago Ventures sits as a vacant husk on Center Street, which was once a bustling strip of daytime shops nestled at the gateway to UC Berkeley. Chicago Venture’s stalled project, its widely disapproved method of local merchant replacement, and its tight-lipped public communications to a supportive public have been the biggest poster child for a bad outcome of commercial redevelopment. Although I’ve been told by city staff that the project developer is actively planning to resume work next year, until this project moves forward, this developer will continue to be held up as the worst-case scenario.

Note that preservation has not shielded downtown from vacancies, either. The Downtown Plan was a compromised and sometimes incoherent document that protected many old buildings as it encouraged new development. These old buildings, such as the Shattuck Hotel, the Post Office, old department store buildings further south, and soon to be the former location of Half Price Books have been and will be riddled with unsightly vacancies.

As bad as vacancies and stalled projects are, nobody remembers them once they're completed. “Telegraph and Haste” was synonymous with Center Street today: an ugly, blighted, empty lot for over 20 years. But housing was finally built over it, and a 20-year association with “blighted lot” was erased from local memory, overnight.

Overall, since the passage of the Downtown Plan and the influx of downtown residents, the amount of foot traffic in downtown is quite high, and on par with San Francisco and Oakland’s downtown. Downtown nightlife hasn’t been this plentiful with clubs, bars and restaurants in decades. But there’s no disputing that downtown has struggled thanks to stalled development projects and vacant older buildings. The southern part of Shattuck has not seen any street vibrancy despite the development of high density buildings, but I argue a major culprit is the hostility of the freeway-like multi-lane roadway.

All commercial districts in Berkeley are great districts and Solano and North Shattuck are no exception. I frequent the Elmwood (College Ave.) area some weekends and it’s lively. Solano has less foot traffic on it, even at noontime on the weekends. I walk Solano almost daily, and outside of the Peet’s Coffee patio, it can feel like a ghost town sometimes — except at random peaks when schoolkids come walking about. North Shattuck and College Avenue have a decent smattering of people, especially in the morning and noon hours. College Ave. benefits from proximity to UC Berkeley so on weekends its often packed with college kids and neighborhood seniors getting brunch.

Dining on North Shattuck is some of the best in the world, and it’s seamless with the dining on the downtown portion of Shattuck north of Allston Way. However, downtown feels more lively after hours, thanks to the collection of clubs and lounges alongside the dining spots. The same is true for downtown Oakland, which has seen an explosion in eateries and restaurants meant for after-hours crowds post-development.

Where North Berkeley and Elmwood beat downtown is the weekends. They do feel, relatively to their size, much more vibrant than downtown on Saturday and Sundays, particularly at 12 PM. I don’t ever remember weekend mornings ever being vibrant downtown due to the decline in commuter traffic, but downtown lacks as high a concentration of brunch diners and morning cafes, which has gotten more desolate since the pandemic. Although new cafes are opening downtown once again, part of the problem is neglectful commercial landlords like the blighted property beneath the Shattuck Hotel.

So downtown isn’t perfect and it has many issues, but it’s not dead. It’s definitely changed in a lot of ways, particularly in the kind of cuisine we have. Many of my favorite hot dog and burger joints downtown have been replaced with international Asian cuisine like hot pot, barbecue, ramen, boba and dumpling shops. I love the old food and I’ve also learned to really love the new cuisine popping up downtown. There has also been a boom in Hispanic and organic restaurants. The new places downtown are packed with diverse crowds, but it sucks to see them intermixed with vacant properties.

But has this housing boom been good for incumbent businesses as it has been for newcomer restaurants? If the business owns its building, yes. They’ve gotten lots of new customers, or they were happy to sell and retire in peace. Some local shops, like Endless Summer Sweets, a sugarbowl for high schools and college kids, returned to its spot after development and is packed at lunch time. Others, like the New York Times-acclaimed Rose Pizzeria, quickly nabbed an expansion into a coffee shop at a newly built retail space beneath an apartment.

But in most cases, a lot of stores that weren’t cafes or restaurants have not returned under new housing projects downtown. Nearly all of the ground-floor commercial spaces in new developments in Berkeley and Oakland have been cafes, restaurants and food-related services, gyms, or banks. These businesses post higher profits and stand a better chance of surviving a 10-year commercial lease. Many former merchants downtown have been frustrated with the process of eviction for new housing and the commercial stalls replacing them are not as accommodating or affordable. After their lease ends, there’s really little other retail space available in the area.

Older commercial districts, which make up Solano, North Shattuck and Elmwood, were built to initially house high-margin retail businesses of their period. Through generations of filtered commercial rents, they now house unique, low-margin shops you don’t normally find in new developments. It is nice that older commercial districts have a variety of businesses like gift stores, trinket shops, hardware, salons, and furniture stores that wouldn’t return the revenue to survive in new development. The fear of upzoning is understandable.

The declining diversity in commercial districts is many years old. People now shop online for clothes, medication, and trinkets, and mostly go out for food and beverages only. Commercial stalls in new developments are fast-forwarding what is inevitable for many commercial districts. Right now, gyms and fitness are all the rage, replacing once vacant spaces around Berkeley’s commercial strips. There will be new commercial activities with high margins that dominate the future stalls of mixed-use developments.

But the local city government also has responsibility for the merchant struggles, specifically the ease and cost of getting permits and licenses to open a business. Berkeley has historically been an anti-business city, which only passes policies that give advantages to incumbents over chains and newcomers. What incumbent businesses fail to understand is that this hurts them too, because it makes turnover and evolution unnecessarily long and complicated here.

While Solano Ave. in Berkeley has struggled with vacancies and foot traffic, the Albany section of Solano is significantly more vibrant. In Albany, Solano is rich with new restaurants, which aid the non-high-margin businesses like toy stores, spice stores, and trinket shops by putting more patrons on the sidewalks to stroll by. When I talk to merchants on Solano, they tell me that the hurdles to getting permits and business licenses in Albany are much easier than in Berkeley, and that Albany city staff dedicate tremendous time to assisting local businesses.

Local and state permitting for businesses is cumbersome and expensive. This results in prolonged periods of vacancy, not only in downtown but also in the small, commercial districts. I’m reminded of this Chinese entrepreneur, shocked at how long it takes to get permission to renovate in the U.S., just due to the lethargic responsiveness of local government.

Wang said the biggest cultural shock for her is the time it takes to open a store in the US. Ningji decided to take over the fully functioning venue of a shuttered beverage store in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale last November, but as of early February, Wang was still waiting for the license to be approved to start the renovation. “I am speechless,” said Wang. “We open a new store on average in 20 days in China.”

In the US, especially with inattentive or underfunded local governments, the timeline and process require consultants and lawyers. The local city government is often so understaffed that the issuing of permits takes months on end. The entire process takes years. We really need a YIMBY movement for retail and commercial activity, the way we have one for building for housing. The time it takes to get permits and licenses to open up businesses kills local businesses, which kills the prospect of walkable cities, even with density. Without an easing in the opening and operation of local businesses, development means almost certain closure for businesses without decent margins.

Moreover, city councils are signaling their desire to drop ground-floor commercial requirements. I strongly oppose this. While not having ground-floor commercial makes sense for residential-only or primarily residential neighborhoods, to replace commercial slots in existing commercial places with residences forecloses any business ever operating there. Shattuck Avenue from Francisco to Virginia has a dead zone of residential-only mid-century apartments with only their gaping parking garages to greet you before the vibrant commercial activity re-commences. When commercial space is lost for development projects, it inflates commercial rents and reduces mobility and opportunity for future businesses.

If American cities persist with this path of least resistance by only placing high-density housing on commercial strips, we’re at risk of cities becoming high-density suburbs without walkability that made the commercial areas ideal for density in the first place. So what should accompany commercial upzoning to guard against this?

1 — Opening a business should be doable in 6 months to 1 year.

This isn’t specific to upzoning, this is a local government administrative issue. Commercial building permits need to be streamlined substantially, and commercial licenses that aren’t required by state authorities should be dropped or streamlined. The California legislature recently passed a law known as the “Housing Shot clock” where if city governments fail to issue certificates to housing developers within 30 days, a third-party reviewer can grant it to them instead. We need to bestow that same grace onto local businesses and commercial interests. If non-life-threatening licenses aren’t issued within a month or two, let a third-party review get it for you.

2 — Require Commercial Ground Floor and Expand Commercial Zones.

I’d favor abolishing commercial requirements for new housing if we were expanding commercial zones, but we’re not. Commercial zoning shouldn’t even exist. Anyone should be allowed to open a restaurant or non-industrial, non-hazardous retail store wherever they want. That would take a lot of power away from commercial landlords, where many cities are dominated by a handful of commercial property owners who have a monopoly over commerical buildings.

Add a commercial buffer of two or three blocks from existing commercial strips, along with upzoning. Berkeley’s commercial zoning (like SF and Oakland’s) is silly and based on where old streetcars used to have stations. Allowing adjacent houses and properties to become or include commercial use could mitigate the immediate harms of redevelopment and open up opportunities for relocation during construction. Several cities have passed laws legalizing retail uses on corner lots citywide.

3 — Give Benefits, Exempt Impact Fees, and Offer Tax Abatements to Mixed-Use Developments Protecting Incumbent Businesses.

Mixed-use streamlining can incentivize commercial companies to build apartments. Costco is entering the apartment business by developing a new supermarket with homes on top in Los Angeles to take advantage of state law streamlining home construction with commercial components in commercial zones. With the boosted incentives at the local level, cities can get the commercial industry into the housing business and expand ground-floor vibrancy.

Living near grocery stores is as important as living near public transit for reducing carbon emissions and vehicle travel. I would pass a local grocery streamlining ordinance exempting a suite of fees, hearings, and taxes for new housing projects with ground-floor grocery stores. I want the grocery stores in North Berkeley not to leave, but to rebuild their old facilities with housing on top, like what’s being proposed in San Francisco. This is, in my opinion, the most important outcome for commercial upzoning.

Same with local business preservation. It’s not practical to mandate it, but incentives would work. Any developer that commits to returning a displaced business to their ground floor retail and assisting their relocation during construction, I would exempt from any additional hearings beyond the issuing of a building permit by the Planning Department, and offer abatement and fee exemptions to help compensate for the expense of relocation services.

Commercial areas are not just places to add housing units with the least political resistance; they’re infrastructure assets that make possible low-carbon lifestyles and should be treated as essential as a transit line. The survival and expansion of commercial corridors is as essential as the housing units themselves.

• Historic Preservation : When it should and shouldn’t take precedent over growth and progress.

• Modern Architecture : The design of new apartments and whether they homogenize cities.

• Displacement and Gentrification : How it manifested in Oakland based on Census data.

• The Downzoning of the East Bay : the origins of our modern housing shortage and whether the backlash to dingbat apartments was justified.

• The Aftermath of Urban Renewal : what lessons taken from this period protected people from government projects and which made it impossible for government to serve the people.

• Origins of the YIMBY Movement : whether people’s lived experiences and feelings towards new housing development versus general empirical consensus on housing supply and prices is understandable.

• Lessons from Public Housing : why housing is so expensive to build today and what modern nonprofit housing does better than the projects of old.

LISTEN HERE.

To understand Proposition 50, you can’t start with Texas and gerrymandering. This began in 2020:

In 2020, Donald Trump did something unprecedented in American history: he blatantly and illegally tried to change the presidential election results. First, he called Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia to create voters who did not exist. When that failed, Trump launched the alternate slate of electors scheme, which is similarly unprecedented, far more criminal, but less understood by the broader public.

Our electoral college is a very old and outdated system based on when state legislators would send people known as electors to vote for president instead of a direct vote of the people. Now, we the people vote for the president, and our state legislators ceremonially send electors representing our votes to tally them in Washington, with the Vice President giving the final sign-off.

Trump and Rudy Guiloni tried to override the votes of the American people by lobbying Republican state representatives in swing states that voted for Joe Biden to not send the electors that would vote for Biden, but an “alternative slate” that would vote for Trump. This plot got quite far but failed because Trump’s Vice President, Mike Pence, refused to accept the alternate slates, because he was a Republican who was loyal to our Constitution, not Trump. Trump then sicced thousands of protesters onto the Capitol with the explicit intent of coercing Pence into overriding the election or lynching him if he refused.

This is corruption unheard of in modern American history, and many of Trump’s lackies went to prison or were convicted over it (and he pardoned all of them this year). Social media, from the top down, algorithmically replaced bad memories of this plot with pro-Trump memes for the famously inattentive and short-memory span American public. By 2024, the shock had become numb, and the man who launched the biggest attack on American democracy since the Confederates declared secession in 1861 was re-elected in 2024.

Here’s where Proposition 50 becomes relevant. Suppose in an alternative universe that Trump had a loyalist like J.D. Vance as Vice President in 2020 instead of Mike Pence. Suppose J.D. Vance agreed to override the official electors for Trump’s fake and criminal electors. Suppose that several red states decided to override their Trump-voting electors with another undemocratic slate for Biden, counter-balancing the election back to its rightful outcome.

This is what Proposition 50 is attempting to do.

The current gerrymandering crisis is Trump re-doing his attack on democracy, but because of his successful 2024 election, he has been granted total criminal immunity by the Supreme Court. This year, Trump called Governor Greg Abbott of Texas to find him votes. This time, by using gerrymandering — the act of drawing congressional boundaries in unfair ways to guarantee a party victory — to suppress, nullify and segregate the votes of urban, minority and college-educated white voters in Houston, Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth.

Gerrymandering is how many Republican-majority states maintain majorities even when in the national or local minority. Today, it’s primarily exclusively practiced in Republican states, with the biggest Democratic state practitioner being Illinois.

States that ban gerrymandering and draw congressional maps through fair, nonpartisan commissions are 100% Democratic or swing states, including California. This is why Californians must vote on Prop. 50 rather than accept a decree by the legislature, like in Texas. There was a bill to ban gerrymandering nationwide and mandate that all election maps be drawn by nonpartisan fair commissions that passed the Democratic-majority House of Representatives in 2021 on a party-line vote (all Democrats in favor, all Republicans against), but it did not have 60 votes in the Senate to proceed. Democrats wanted to abolish the filibuster to pass the bill on a simple majority vote, but Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked it.

The Republican-run Texas state legislature, fanatically loyal to Trump, re-drew its congressional maps right before next year’s midterms to prevent a Democratic retaking of Congress. Their maps shrink the proportional voices of urban and suburban dwellers who are disproportionately Hispanic, Black, queer, or White people with college degrees and are more liberal. Texas Democrats in the legislature then fled the state to not allow a quorum to approve these new maps, begging a brave blue state to counter-balance Texas and restore their voice.

After a brief period of cowardly blue states comforting themselves in moralist appeasement, Gavin Newsom and the California legislature stepped forward to offer support to the marginalized of Texas. Proposition 50 will counter-balance the 5 Democratic votes Texas stole by adding 5 Democratic districts in California, temporarily suspending our fair and nonpartisan district system.

Other Republican-run states, astonished that feckless liberals are for once not engaged in suicidal pacifism, have announced that they will suppress their city dwellers and non-white voters even harder, irrespective of California’s decision. Whereas Proposition 50 is merely temporary and ceases once Texas stops its hardcore gerrymander — not even all gerrymandering, just Trump’s commissioned 5 additional Republican seats — red states have unapologetically decided to enact one-party rule in Congress.

Trump has now successfully gotten enough red states to add 12 additional Republicans to Congress ahead of the 2026 midterms, chosen by Trump’s gerrymandered districts and not the people. No red state will put its maps up for vote like California and most blue states are still pretending that the way to beat a rigged election is to play fairly. Despite Trump’s unpopularity growing rapidly and voters itching to replace Trump loyalist Republicans in Congress in 2026, Trump’s gerrymandering will keep him and his party in power, irrespective of the American people’s voice.

If Proposition 50 passes, this will reduce the Republicans’ gerrymandering advantage to about 7 additional seats. The American people will have a non-zero chance of flipping the House in 2026 if Democrats overperform. If Proposition 50 fails, Trump will have nothing to stop him from stealing the 2028 election, and elections will cease to matter.

That is what Californians will vote on come November. Many of you reading this have received your ballots by now. As with trials of the past, the forces of democracy today must deal with a clique of appeasers — some mix of MAGA supporters who support gerrymandering and honest people who are easily fooled — telling you not to vote for Prop 50.

I’ve heard so many people, particularly infrequent voters in California with the privilege of fair voting rights, argue that this is a cynical attempt to make Newsom look good. So what? Many actors in politics are conducting politics rather than practicing pure ideology, but that doesn’t invalidate the merits of the proposal.

Gavin Newsom didn’t ask for Proposition 50, the disenfranchised people of Texas asked for Proposition 50. When you don’t vote or vote no, that’s who you’re turning on your back on, not Gavin Newsom. Their representatives literally fled their homes over this while Californians sat comfortably. They don’t get a chance to vote directly on whether they should engage in Trump’s crimes. Californians do.

I have a moral obligation to vote for Prop 50. My family still lives in Texas. They lost their power to choose who represents them in Congress. The power to vote is what my ancestors fought for in the Civil War; what my family, and thousands of others, journeyed across a continent from the violence of the South to California to obtain; what thousands marched and died for to see enshrined in federal law.

I don’t have to do even a fraction of what they did. Instead, we can take 30 seconds to make a pen mark, lick an envelope, sign a signature, and walk a block or two to the mailbox. Anything but a Yes on 50 is nothing more than a green light to Trump’s planned election theft in 2028. Trump is depending on you to console yourself with liberal self-righteousness and not fight back.

Prop. 50 is temporary, unsavory, but necessary. It’s not about being pro one party. It’s not about liking Gavin Newsom. It is about your patriotic duty to defend the right to vote. Period. Republicans and Democrats should compete fairly and should not cower to authoritarianism.

Disclaimer: This article and all my articles do not represent the opinions of my employer, its affiliate university, or any public commissions I serve on. All articles in this publication are the opinions of only me.

Note that I have not worked in state-level advocacy for two years nor on this law, so my theories as to what this law does is not first-hand knowledge, but observation and speculation.

This is a high-level map of SB 79 made by a third party. It’s mostly accurate from my observation. Contra Costa County is no longer included.

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Last Friday, the Senate passed the final vote on Senate Bill 79 — the more homes by transit bill. The passage of SB 79 ranks as one of the largest upzonings in the country. This is the culmination of 8 years of legislative battle started by state senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco to allow dense housing by transit with the intent to ensure that taxpayer investment into public transit results in a commensurate amount of riders using it. All that is left now is for the governor to sign it, which is all but certain.

Compared to SB 79’s initial version, and compared to the original vision in 2018 when it was first proposed as SB 827, SB 79 has been considerably scaled down. But the scaling down was not in its effectiveness to build housing, but in scope, and that’s a key difference than prior state laws passed in California.

SB 79 zones for multi-family housing near transit. If the transit is a heavy-rail line (a high capacity metro like BART, LA Metro Red-Line, or Caltrain), a developer can build multifamily homes as tall as 7 stories within a 0.25 mile radius of the station, or 6 stories within a 0.5 mile radius.

If the transit is light rail (small train vehicles like a tram or streetcar, or a bus stop used either by a bus rapid transit service or two high-frequency lines at a stop with a 24 hour bus-only lane), housing can be 6 and 5 stories within 0.25 and 0.5 mile radius, respectively. Providing that any portion of a parcel is within range of the pedestrian entrance of a transit station, SB 79 can be utilized. There are going to be many legal questions as to what constitutes a transit pedestrian area or whether a parcel is in range.

Many suburban dwellers will be concerned about the tall height limits, but the density limits are quite low. A 5,000 square foot lot (a common Bay Area residential lot size) allows for 13 homes near a high-frequency rail stop. 13 units is a 3-story building in most cities. The tall height limits are ideal for large lots, not small ones.

— Exemptions —

SB 79 has two exemptions. First, “urban transit categories” stipulates that a county must meet an arbitrary number of passenger rail stops (16) to be affected by SB 79. SB 79 already mandates that no train stations are upzoned unless they are served by at least 48 daily trains. Undoubtedly, this was to exempt rural and certain suburban legislators from having their commuter Amtrak stations upzoned.

SB 79 only applies to counties with 16 or more passenger rail stops: Alameda, San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties. Shortly after SB 79’s introduction, legislators sought to exempt themselves as they have with prior housing laws. This began with the infamous “Marin exemption” in SB 79’s predecessor proposal, SB 827. Originally, the threshold for urban transit counties was 15 rail stops, but it was bumped to 16 in Senate Committee. The cause of the bump is unknown, however the impact was significant and singular: only Contra Costa County and its 12 BART stations and 3 Amtrak stops were excluded with the change.

In cities with populations smaller than 35,000 people, SB 79 only upzones within 0.25 miles and not 0.5 miles. This was done in favor of small-town legislators in relatively urban areas, proclaiming to want only half the upzoning of bigger cities due to a swell in housing, causing outsized population growth. They actually shrunk the area by 75% per the formula for the area of a circle.

— Local & State Control —

SB 79 allows local communities, if they choose, to redraw alternative zoning plans for SB 79. By July 1st, 2026, SB 79 will automatically activate, absent any alternative plans. Cities can move around density within a station area or add more density to one station by taking it away from another. However, no variant of a local plan can reduce an individual station area’s upzoned density by more than 50%. These plans must be approved by the state housing agency within 90 days.

This provision was made to appease legislators who oppose state control of land use. SB 79 still allows for a lot of local control. Beyond the minimums established, cities can otherwise regulate development however they wish. That includes setback requirements, lot coverage rules etc. The only prohibition is that no regulation can apply to SB 79 projects exclusively.

However, SB 79 does circumvent local zoning laws and development requirements if it contains low-income housing, which is required of all projects 10 units and above. 1, 2, or 3 local regulations can be ignored depending on whether the low-income housing is for low-income, very low-income or extremely low or no-income households, respectively.

Density bonus projects in California currently can ignore all local zoning laws if they provide enough low-income housing to trigger a bonus. Density bonus projects in SB 79 are surprisingly more tightly restricted. And the height limit in SB 79 cannot be ignored under any circumstances. As a result, as far as building heights go, SB 79 is actually more restrictive than many local zoning laws as far as building heights go,.

— Affordability Requirements —

SB 79 mandates that low-income housing must be built in projects 10 units and greater: at least 7% extremely low income, 10% very low income or 13% low income. If housing is on transit company lands, the requirement is increased to 20% subsidized housing and 25% if its mixed use. If a local community has a higher citywide affordability requirement, then projects must defer to that. While developers do not like affordability requirements, SB 79’s affordability rate was based on existing state law that has proven widely used.

Originally, SB 79 simply deferred to local community laws on subsidized housing requirements. Statewide minimums were included after left-wing legislators and nonprofit developers objected to the lack of subsidized housing mandates in the law, especially for public lands.

In its first draft, SB 79 was designed to transition American public transit land-use standards to international standards like that of Japan, where transit agencies get supplemental income from real estate development and economic activity to fund transit service. The legislature changed it to be more focused on abiding by the existing state surplus land act standards: using public lands for public services first.

— Demolition Controls —

To prevent displacement of current renters in low-density properties affected by upzoning, SB 79 can only be used on parcels that demolish single-family homes or duplexes / 2 units. It’s a bit unclear how this works with mobile home parks and Assemblymember Aisha Wahab hinted that a fix for that can be added next year.

SB 79 cannot be used on properties that require the destruction of homes with 3 or more rental units that have been subjected to price controls. State law has imposed anti-rent gouging controls on all multi-family homes built before 2014. It’s unclear if SB 79 can be used on parcels that simply move 3+ unit homes to a different location, either on-site or off the parcel. If the 3+ unit homes on these parcels are destroyed for whatever reason, SB 79 cannot be used there for at least 7 years, regardless of whether it was vacant or occupied.

State law from 2019 generally prohibits the demolition of rent or price-controlled housing without a replacement unit at the same rent level and relocation services paid during construction. These extra provisions in SB 79 were passed at the request of tenants’ rights organizers.

— Labor Requirements —

SB 79’s passage was made possible due to the powerful Building Trades dropping their opposition and other labor unions, including the Carpenters Union, endorsing the law. The labor agreement was that housing projects 85 feet and over (so eight stories), and housing projects on transit agency properties would be built exclusively by unionized labor.

Although SB 79 by default doesn’t zone higher than 7 stories, alternative local plans can focus on higher density and height exceeding 7 stories in fewer areas. Online, some developers seem annoyed with this agreement, but 8-story buildings are usually built with steel, and typically, the labor is exclusively skilled union workers.

This satisfied the Building Trades, who are construction union laborers who prefer union exclusivity and training opportunities on building contracts. The Carpenters Union, who are primarily residential laborers, doesn’t prefer exclusivity since non-union employment allows for opportunities to organize. This labor agreement saved SB 79 from death.

— Enforcement —

Another major agreement was between the YIMBYs and housing justice nonprofits. This manifested in the delaying of SB 79 in state-designated low-income neighborhoods until the next Regional Housing Needs Allocation cycle, which won’t be in LA or the Bay Area for another half-decade. This delays almost half of SB 79’s upzoned areas and requires cities to spend five years to consider alternative transit plans or accept the default. Housing justice groups have consistently tried to exempt low-income areas in prior state housing laws because they argue that market-rate development can cause displacement and gentrification. Thus, more careful planning and time are needed in these neighborhoods. Low-resource areas constitute large swaths of Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Jose.

Any projects proposed in middle-class areas (identified as Moderate Resource by the state) that are wrongfully rejected by local governments can go through the standard appeals process in California. But local governments rejecting projects in upper-middle and high-income neighborhoods (High and Highest Resource) will be immediately penalized without appeal.

This particular provision satisfied most of the Equity nonprofits and tenant union organizers. Inner City Law Center formally announced the removal of nearly all tenant groups and equity nonprofit opposition ahead of the key Assembly floor vote. You can see a map of resourced areas here. Low Resource areas, in lime green, are delayed areas.

With all these concessions, agreements and provisions in place, Senate Bill 79 passed Senate, Assembly and Senate Concurrence. Eight years of battle over transit-oriented upzoning came to an end. It’s en-route to the governor’s desk where there is little doubt that he’ll sign it.

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Correction: Originally, this article said cities must submit alternative plans by July 1st, 2026. That was a misunderstanding: bill sponsors have confirmed that there is no deadline to submit a plan, just that SB 79 activates absent one in 2026.

Many will be shocked but I have a confession to make: many new apartments do indeed look ugly, or at the very least uninspiring. Urbanists sell single-family obsessed Americans on residential density by pointing out that Americans vacation in Europe where they greatly admire the density of places like Venice, Paris etc. But Americans get annoyed that we don’t get beautiful Barcelona apartments and Parisian Haussmanns, but buildings like the ones in the picture above.

Some argue we should regulate building design to make them attractive. I agree but here’s the thing: it’s already regulated and that may be part of the problem. Most cities and towns have a Design Review board, which gives guidelines on how to build new homes. In San Francisco, the design review process pushes new homes to have things like bay windows. Some cities regulate the appearance of balconies. There are city mandates that buildings consist of multiple colors resulting in apartments that resemble legos. A common mandate to not have buildings be a single shape which results in funky structures with peculiar asymmetry.

We ought to be honest that design reviews have not produced attractive mid-rise homes that the public appears to like en-masse. If anything, they might have contributed to the unattractiveness. In contrast, people generally like the architecture of new single-family developments and townhomes. Lennar Corporation is seen as the McDonalds of single-family home construction but few would argue their creations are unattractive. Lennar incorporate features that are aesthetically pleasing to Americans: shingles, ornaments, simple stone masonry, plastered on wooden paneling etc. I find some of these homes to look quite silly, but I don’t think the average American disapproves. So why can’t we build apartments in similar styles?

This is anecdotal but condos (or owner-occupied housing) tends to look much better than even contemporary design apartments. Most new multi-family homes are rentals and the buyers of apartments are not average people but corporate landlords. Very few prospective tenants looking for rental listings are paying an ounce of attention to the building’s exterior. (If you do, you’re a bit weird or snobbish.) A condo and single-family developer’s market is mostly average people looking to own a home, so they care deeply about the exterior. Some developers are going to invest more money into hiring architects to build their projects with homey features or go for the neo-classic look.

Because architecture is subjective in attractiveness, it’s often hit or miss. Some developers hire architects that will get the job done cheap, with minor altercations of pre-existing designs from their portfolios. Others, in an attempt to appease architecturally critical communities, will hire architects that will use more expensive materials to achieve a pleasing design.

Design review as it currently exists doesn’t seem to make people happy and probably should be abolished entirely. Any design standards that aren’t directly about public safety or are extremely vague and lack explicit design features should probably be eliminated. D.R.s are staffed with fellow architects who tend to be snobby and have very insular conversations about their industry.

It’s rather rare but some cities have begun to pre-approve architecture for developers to follow. Planning Departments basically pre-design buildings, fixtures and all, for certain building types and heights, and the developer can choose which one best suits their project and build it. This is far more strict than the current process and architects would hate it because it curbs their free expression, and in many instances ousts them from the development process entirely.

But I think a pre-approved design can be used to quell discontent with the un-attractiveness of higher-density buildings. I wouldn’t mandate pre-approved designs city wide, just in specific zones where a lot of well-liked architecture exists and the neighborhood lacks many modern, contemporary designs.

I’m not saying the blame for the distaste in new housing architecture is entirely on architects. They’re hired to minimize construction costs for the developer, use mass-produced materials like paneling and glass from known vendors that’s economical, and abide by general guidelines from cities that are often incoherent in vague design instructions. As ugly as some new apartments may be, they are considerably more energy efficient, structurally safer and less carbon intensive than the mercury-filled, lead infested, and asbestos infused old houses we idolize.

From a Planning Commissioner’s point of view, this might be frustrating since it would result in a homogeneous look. As I said, I would confine various districts of a city to specific palate of architectural, pre-approved designs. For example, in my hometown of Berkeley, I don’t think most of our major corridors or downtown area warrants any pre-approved designs. I think many contemporary designs (particularly those by Trachtenberg Architects) look quite nice.

But as we expand housing projects to neighborhoods with more upscale and old fashioned architecture, new buildings using pre-approved architecture in the style of shingled buildings or curved roofs for example, would soothe a lot of my old timer neighbors who are politically supportive of density, but are worried about chrome blocks next door.

I went walking around the Mission District yesterday and thought that the newer apartments looked unattractive compared to the historic Victorian apartments. The Victorian apartments aren’t architecturally complicated or intricate. They’re boxes with bay windows and mass-produced ornaments shipped by rail to San Francisco and a thousand other cities from eastern factories, plastered onto the roofs of apartments built in the late 1800s.

Would a faux-Victorian using materials that are mass produced today appeal to people? I think so. This low income housing project in Berkeley designed by HKIT Architects looks like it would fit right into the Mission District more than most apartments built there in the last 20 years. Although some opposition at the design hearing I attended complained about a lack of color, elderly neighbors generally thought the design looked good and appreciated the Victorian-esque elements that paid homage to the grandiose Victorians in the neighborhood.

I’m not sure how pro-development advocates and builders would take such a proposal. Some would be wary that pre-approved designs would be over-complicated with ornaments and fixtures that are not mass-produced, thereby inflating construction costs with custom materials. If this were mandated, I would oppose it as it’s not economical and even the famous Victorians of San Francisco were largely made with off-the-shelf fixtures. But the number one worry for most advocates would be that pre-approving designs would be time spent for nothing. It doesn’t matter how nice or neo-classical you make new homes look, they may say, the opposition’s issues are fundamentally about density and height.

They’re right to a degree.

In my neighborhood, an old tudor single-family house that had structural problems was replaced with a modern, contemporary design that looks very unattractive. Yet I didn’t see much backlash to it. In comparison, a decrepit and unattractive shingled house was to be replaced with an arched-roof, but still contemporary-styled townhomes that I think would’ve been a tremendous improvement, and the neighborhood had a huge fight over it and a failed landmarking attempt.

Here’s another example. A very attractive apartment house on top of a new grocery store in Berkeley was designed by an architect (Kirk E. Peterson & Associates Architects) who specializes in neo-classic designs. This building was extremely controversial in 2009, and spent six years before 2009 getting approved. It went through fights with neighbors claiming it would overshadow everything and freeze people death with imposing shadows. Wacky statements like that were said in earnest at meetings. I was in middle school at the time, largely oblivious to housing politics, and I still remember this fight seeping into my world of information via newspapers clippings and online articles.

Today, if you go to random people on the street today and ask them what their opinion is about this building’s architecture, most would say they think it’s very pretty. I sat on a bench and just asked people walking by what they thought of the architecture and most liked it, especially the old folks. Even the people who fought the project begrudgingly admitted it was a “graceful” building. Most of Kirk E. Peterson’s designs appeal to Americans who have only seen high density homes in a more European-esque look. As a result, most people I know in my town refer to his building’s as the most attractive of new development projects. His Trader Joes building is already an iconic symbol of downtown Berkeley.

Walking around downtown Berkeley, I asked some older residents for their opinions on the new, revivalist building. Particularly since their generation is so culturally traumatized by homes greater than 3 stories tall. Surprisingly, most spoke highly of the revivalist buildings! They were the only ones to occasionally rant about the buildings being tall, but they still complimented the revivalist designs and lamented others didn’t resemble them. Now again, Peterson’s buildings don’t relate in any way to the architecture heritage of Berkeley, but they look classical and for average Americans, that’s usually enough.

I’m not trying to convince the fervent opposition who is frightened of buildings taller than 3 stories, I’m trying to convince the average person to politically support density initiatives. Japanese cities are some of the world’s most impressive cities, but jumbled styles in their fashion makes for its own kind of uniqueness. I don’t think it has the political support in American cities experimenting with density for the first time. Many urbanists will disagree, but I think it’s extremely important to build political support with architecture that looks good to the widest amount of people.

Berkeley recently passed its “Middle Housing” program to encourage low-density, 3 story apartments in single-family areas. It took a lot of heavy lifting to accomplish and citizens have so far shown no backlash and have been supportive to this initiative. But now that the ball is in our court and we’re all holding our breath, waiting to see how the first batch of Middle Housing projects look in a city that hasn’t had them in a half-decade. If they look like the kind of three-story homes suburban developers like Lennar Corporation build: curved roof, wooden or stucco houses, faux-classic feature, the people will be supportive. But if the first batch is metallic structures with asymmetrical, contemporary oddities, it’s going to be plastered on every poster as a fearmonger for years to come.

(Note: after posting this, some middle density projects have begun trickling into our building department and so far I’m impressed with the reserved and lightly-revivalist designs. Skeptical neighbors have even praised the look of a 3-story apartment being built beside a Bernard Maybeck house while still offering muted complaints about its height. )

To avoid backlash, South Bend, Indiana has utilized this pre-approved design approach for their own Middle Housing projects. New state law in California allowing for multi-unit townhomes requires local jurisdictions to pre-approve architectural designs. I hope more jurisdictions including my own will experiment with pre-approved designs in limited spaces and see if it changes the political support for density.

However, there is a fear I have which is that this may not matter at all. Despite the complaining about the appearance of buildings, what the core of anti-construction complaints are is density and height. Older generations have just been infused with decades of media about how terrible buildings taller than a single-family house is. Americans are just thoroughly taught to idolize living in a single-family home.

In Berkeley, when an angry resident accosted a councilmember during a zoning meeting to allow more multiplexes, it was revealed that he himself lived in a triplex. When asked the logical follow up of why he opposes zoning reform to allow the housing he lives in, his response was that he didn’t want more of his own home.

In a twist, Grove lives in one such building. The three-story, three-unit apartment building where he lives, set among single-family homes in the Elmwood District, could be a poster child for what housing advocates hope the rezoning process encourages throughout Berkeley. An artist, Grove inherited the 1930s building from his mother and moved into it after raising his family in a bungalow elsewhere in Berkeley.

But, Grove said of his home, “This would not be the kind of construction that I would support now.”

When people complain about new apartments looking ugly, what they often mean is a non-single family houses are ugly. There’s a reason photos of the famous Painted Ladies of Alamo Square in San Francisco tends to omits the beautiful, Victorian, 8-story apartment complex right beside them. Every TV show. Every novel. Every movie. The Full House TV show was an icon of American living, but honestly a sports anchor, comedian and a musician could not afford the house at 1709 Broderick Street in San Francisco, even in the 1980s.

My hope is that pre-approved designs with classical features that are economical to acquire may push Americans, particularly of older generations, to support density in their own backyards.

The opinions expressed in this article, and all articles on my publication, represent only myself in my personal capacity. They are not the opinions of my employer, my employment capacity, any affiliate university, or any government or civic board and organization I am a member of.

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Initially I made this a paid article but today, the New York Times ran a story outlining how finished the Democratic Party is by 2030 when the population shifts give congressional seats to red states. The issue is too important to put behind a paywall.

— Original Post —

It is your duty as an American who supports the principles of democracy to vote in favor of the upcoming California ballot referendum to rid ourselves of the independent redistricting and add 5 new Democratic House seats.

We can only espouse the principles of free and fair redistricting with federal legislation banning gerrymandering. Continuing to pleasure ourselves with a moral code that Trump and his allies openly disregard with widespread disenfranchisement, is no longer tenable. Trump began this gerrymandering crisis by instructing Texas to find him five more Republican elected officials before the Midterm elections as his poll numbers reach historic lows. California has no choice but to counter-gerrymander and stop Trump’s scheme.

There is no question that the Democratic Party has no chance of victory in this gerrymandering war. There are more Republican-run states than Democratic-run states due to geography and population density. Republicans already practice gerrymandering to a greater extent than Democrats — 5 Democratic states are gerrymandered versus 14 Republican states. Red states do not have independent and fair redistricting commissions obstructing them like blue states usually do. The difference at this point is whether Democrats will be brave and counter-gerrymander and lose only 3 - 5 seats in Congress, or be cowardly and lose 8 or more before the 2026 midterms.

The other reason why Democrats shall lose the gerrymandering war is that the Census 2030 redistricting is looking horrible for California. California’s population is relatively stagnant by force due to the housing shortage, and jumps back and forth between declining or slight upticks. Texas and the South have seen tremendous population growth in the last 20 years, due to the high cost of living in California and New England, pushing families down to the South where Southern housing production outpaces expensive blue states.

As of the latest Census population estimates, Texas is on track to steal 3 Congressional seats from California in 2030, directly due to the fact that Texas has build tens of thousands more housing units than the Golden State.

It was common around 2020 to see people brush this off by arguing that California and the coasts were exporting Democratic voters and turning red states into swing states. Writers like Charles M. Blow were making the case in the New York Times that Black middle class families living in northern states should return home to the South and create economic powerhouses, particularly in Georgia. In 2020 when Georgia went blue it certainly seemed viable.

Now that theory has blown up in liberal faces. The Republican Party is going all-in on disenfranchising voters to remain in power. Short of a federal ban on gerrymandering, many liberal voters of all races are going lose their voting power in red states. Still, the presence of a growing liberal population in the South is necessary for Republicans to continue sucking away congressional representation from blue states in the next Census. Thus, Democratic voters can be used as electoral meat shields to empower red states, even though their votes count for a fraction of rural voters. The voter export theory, like the demographics is destiny theory, has not only fallen short but has now severely backfired.

If coastal blue states had grown their populations, they’d be on track to bleed red, inland states of their congressional representation in 2030. Even if red states cheated with mid-decade redistricting per Trump’s orders, Democrats could at least get additional blue state congressional appointments later to compensate and then ban gerrymandering nationwide.

Nope!

Now, the South will turn blue state migrants into political meat shields for a permanent Republican minority government. So much for the theory that California’s housing crisis was turning red states into swing states. Even if that theory was true, whatever voting power Southern, Democratic cities were gaining from blue state origin population growth shall now be squeezed into one containment district, or cut into pieces to be outvoted by vast rural areas, which Texas now proposes.

It’s going to get even worse. The Republican Party now has open contempt for the Voting Rights Act, and any day now the Supreme Court will strike it down. Southern states will then re-instate congressional representation maps previously struck down as discriminatory by previous courts, citing the Voting Rights Act. Blue states have delivered Red states electoral power on a silver platter.

What’s California doing to combat this under our newly rejuvenated governor? This month, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed three new housing production bills into law. At the signing, Republican legislators emphasized repeatedly how they were defeating California by becoming more affordable and absorbing its population. Here’s a snippet from Republican state Senator Paul Bettencourt, laying it out: “We've got 340,000 units that we need to build and we're not going to wait around like California [whose leaders] drive their people away to other states. No, we want everyone to come and work in Texas and have a place to live.” It doesn’t make the news in California but it should if Californians were serious.

Texas GOP understands the assignment: steal congressional seats from California in 2030 and carve up districts to maximum political power. California’s so delusional that we’re at the half-time mark — just 5 years left till congressional re-appointment — and the largest city in our state still doesn’t understand it’s even in the game.

Progress is being made. The California Democratic Party seems to understand the assignment, finally. Left-wing legislators on the LA City Council have been remarkably promising and clear-eyed on housing as of late.

But it’s probably too little, too late.

We’ll see if California is serious about protecting democracy by ending its exportation of working class families to the South, but California is certain to lose some amount of seats come 2030. California's electoral suicide cake’s already been baked. The best we can hope for is getting some population growth back to California before 2030, so we only lose 1-2 seats instead of 3 - 4.s.

Gavin Newsom plans on running for president in 2028 but he’ll have tough questions to answer for on California’s world-renowned unaffordability and the Californians pushed into homelessness (whose tents he’s now trashing) that worsened dramatically during his tenure in office. The very first thing Ron DeSantis attacked Newsom for on Fox News this week was the inability to issue building permits in the burned down area of Pacific Palisades. Newsom hasn’t had good answers for it when questioned about it either, and housing affordability will be an even bigger electoral issue in 2028 than it was in 2024.

Let’s be clear: the Republicans will add seats no matter what. There is no scenario here where Democrats will come out with favorable representation. We have two choices: either complete obliteration or a bruising retreat. Come November, do not be delusional and think that if California lets Texas cheat that no other red states would retaliate. Anyone arguing this unfortunately is unfit for leadership in any capacity in the party.

Democratic representatives in Red states are pleading with blue states to counteract Trump’s gerrymandering order. Any blue state Democrat sitting comfortably on the coast, reassured of their moral superiority and abandoning working-class people in Red states to feel good about themselves are unfit for office.

California has a lot of transformative work to do about how we reconcile our morals with our material reality, because our lawn signs don’t line up with our actions. This map, coupled with gerrymandering and the impending death of the Voting Rights Act, is the biggest threat to Democrats in recent political history. It should be plastered on every door in the California State Legislature.

This is a part two to my prior rant: “Why US Nightlife Sucks.”

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On Friday nights, my friends and I go out to a bar. We frequent the Temescal area of Telegraph Avenue the most. We’ve challenged ourselves to branch out to different areas, partially because we mostly live in Berkeley, so Temescal is a half-hour away on public transit. Despite our attempts, we usually fail and return to Temescal.

The causes of failure are always the same: the bar we gave a try was sparsely populated, even on a Friday or Saturday night. Even if a bar is popular or historic, like the Missouri Lounge on San Pablo Avenue, there are no other bars or late-night restaurants to patronize on foot in the area. Meaning that it’s no longer optimal to take transit, and one of us needs to use their car to drive everyone around.

Then there are places that aren’t packed but are moderately lively on Fridays and Saturdays, yet disparities in age diversity keeps us away. The collection of bars around the area east of Lake Merritt are somewhat popular in foot traffic, but it’s almost entirely middle-aged people and not exactly popping. Most of my friends are in their 30s, and we’re the youngest there.

Our bar experience is typical of young people — and I think most people — today. We don’t just stay at one bar. We hop from one bar and restaurant throughout the night, spending money at every place. We like to chat up strangers, and if we meet someone interesting we’ll stay longer. We enjoy the conversations of older patrons who exaggerate the old days of the bar and young patrons who talk about how much rent they pay. Bars that have a level of communal seating and encourage stranger conversation are ideal.

Sometimes we just sit outside and talk to other people getting fresh air and smoking. Unlike the loud blare of traffic noise that blights nightlife on Shattuck Avenue and Adeline Streets in Berkeley, or most streets in SOMA San Francisco, or the lowly populated Grand Avenue sidewalks, the shrinkage of Telegraph Avenue with parklets and a bike lane creates a large congregation for humans after hours. The more people around, the more vibrant an area feels and the longer we stay.

Telegraph Avenue is the focal point of nightlife in the East Bay. The Temescal area crowds with people of all ages on Friday and Saturday nights, particularly under 40 year olds. Temescal’s commercial activity appeals to people of all ages: dive and sports bars, wine bars, a karaoke bar and new upscale bars. There’s a mix of fast food and upscale eating and late night small bite restaurants. Older folks drive in while young people seem to come from Ubers and Lyfts, step off the 6 - Telegraph bus line or walk from MacArthur BART.

Telegraph Avenue closer to Downtown Oakland in the so-called “Northgate” district is also high in vibrancy, more than the entire downtown put together. Temescal gentrified 25 years ago, so people there are whiter and it attracts more students and graduates, whereas Northgate is closer to downtown low-income housing and attracts more of a hipster crowd and non-white youths. Nevertheless, crowds swap up and down Telegraph by hoping on the frequent 6 bus. I come down for the dance clubs. There’s fewer upscale restaurants and more Korean BBQ shops, which is great for congregate eating. But it’s the same winning formula: dense housing nearby, many bars and restaurants that appeal to a cross-section of generations, decent transit and a traffic-calmed Telegraph Avenue that encourages people to be outdoors.

As we ride the 12-line to Temescal, my friends lament how ridiculous it is that we must travel so far for a fraction of late-night vibrancy commonplace in many American and global cities. One who had just returned from Tokyo and is heavily involved in Oakland transportation politics (nerd) lamented: “It sucks that the Bay is such a boring place and that many fight to keep it that way.”

There’s only a few other places in the Bay Area that can claim to have a considerable amount of nighttime foot traffic worthy of a major city: it’s the Mission District in San Francisco, the Southside-Telegraph area in Berkeley, which is like Temescal but for college students only, and the Polk Street area of San Francisco. Maybe the North Beach area qualifies as well, but it’s too far for me to verify.

There are a few other spots in Oakland and San Francisco where there are small amounts of foot traffic (music venues/warehouses in Jingletown, a few SOMA bars, special events in Mission Bay, etc). But only Telegraph Avenue, Mission Street and maybe Polk Street have a constant semblance of urban nightlife that is more commonplace around the world and in other U.S. cities.

A lot of the Bay Area’s woes are the fault of the pandemic, but the pandemic only accelerated what was already in motion. Bad American zoning and failure to adapt to the enforcement of driving under the influence laws are the primary causes of nightlife decline. While these are problems plaguing the nation and world, the Bay Area is unusually anti-vibrant after hours. Having spent June in Japan and my July in New York City, the fact that small country towns in Japan and outer boroughs in NYC have more vibrant nightlife than the downtowns of Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley is embarrassing.

During the pandemic, a large amount of young people left the Bay Area. Housing affordability was a factor, but in San Francisco and Oakland, many realized that they’re paying New York City rents for nightlife vibrancy on par with a mid-tier town. A lot of young Black professionals I knew ditched Oakland for more “alive” towns like Houston and Atlanta. I knew several people post-pandemic who moved to Broadway in Oakland or SOMA in S.F., only to be blown away the complete deadzones beneath them and took off rather quickly. Many Bay Area locals I knew who grew up here eventually moved to Los Angeles or New York after feeling that if they were going to pay big rents, they wanted a big city. The high paying jobs and climate are often the only thing keeping many young generations around.

Lately, the media has picked up what has been obvious for 15 years now, which is that the lack of children and young people is killing the Bay Area’s vibrancy. The Bay Area has the third highest share of elderly residents of any major metropolitan area in the United States, surpassed only by Floridian retirement communities. This is due to the housing shortage giving young families no opportunities to live here.

There’s a decent amount of children and young people still in the Bay Area, but they overwhelmingly live in the eastern and southern suburbs. In the old days, young people from the suburbs would just take BART or drive to S.F., Oakland and Berkeley to party. They had nothing else to do on weekend and Friday nights. For young people today, who now can entertain themselves with a phone, to spend money and time to pack into an Uber or take transit to a nightlife district, there needs to be a guarantee that these places are going to be interesting. That they’re not just limited to one or two venues but that an overall area is easily walkable and accessible, with an abundance of dining and socializing spaces. Outside of Telegraph, Mission and Polk/Van Ness, most Bay Area places cannot offer that. These commercial districts are competing up against the Internet for the attention span of people. You can’t just have an interesting establishment—you need an interesting neighborhood.

American kids today are driving significantly less. Compare the hub of commercial vibrancy at New York City subway stations to the dead-zones of ugly parking lots and commercial-free housing surrounding BART stations. San Francisco Chronicle reports that the entertainment and hospitality industry here is so bad here that there’s a Bay Area expat community of these workers in NYC. While Houston and Atlanta are car-centric, at least their city centers are packed with entertainment to make the drive worth it.

There were places in the Bay Area that were vibrant, but the pandemic sent them into decline. Downtown Oakland was a pristine example: it was a mostly vibrant zone years ago (although sometimes it’s exaggerated), but it failed to create a truly urban experience as these bars were scattered around. As drunk driving declined and young people are no longer openly doing coke and having sex at bars, cultural icons like Ruby Room, located in the drab Lakeshore/Civic Center area, with a lack of other bars and restaurants nearby to hop around to, couldn’t survive on its own. The Avenue, a North Oakland bar which also had a famous, rowdy past like Ruby Room, continues to crowd in the evenings (but much more tamely than the 1990s) thanks to the on-foot connectivity of other commercial activity and transit in the area.

If the Bay Area wants a semblance of evening vibrancy beyond two or three corridors, there needs to be a reckoning by businesses groups and urban planners on how to do commercial areas in the 21st century. There is no greater opponent of change, in my personal experience, than merchant organizations who persist in a belief that every single person wants to drive to their business. That if they just emulate the parking and roadways of 1960s shopping malls that they grew up with and now are dying husks, that their commercial areas, no matter how urban, will be vibrant places.

Many merchants fought viciously the bike lanes and parklets on Telegraph Avenue, and yet it is because of those traffic diets that hordes of people every weekend night dine and relax along Telegraph. Yes, there were always popular bars in Temescal and Northgate but it has gotten more populated in the subsequent decades as traffic has been calmed, outdoor dining expanding and other districts decline. Southside Telegraph merchants near UC campus would have money pouring in if they pedestrianized Telegraph just a few blocks south of Dwight Street. It has the highest concentration of pedestrians anywhere in the East Bay. But, because all the merchants are old and grew up in the 1960s, they think their overwhelmingly car-free patrons are secretly drivers who want to park their automobiles at their front doorstep and they burn money. Merchants must learn to embrace successful commercial district traffic patterns, and leave middle 20th century behind.

Commercial neighborhoods have to be nice places to relax outdoors as well as indoors. You want people outside, in groups, hopping various businesses and throwing cash around. Bay Area planners incorrectly assumed that new housing units would carry neighborhoods like SOMA or Downtown Berkeley without having to do any street and traffic re-configurations. Well they learned the hard way: these places are only populated above the first floor. The streets are now ghost towns. SOMA isn’t a pleasant place to be outside. It’s both a car sewer and not well connected by regional transit. If I’m going to San Francisco on BART, I’m headed to Polk Street or the Mission.

Commercial investors and entrepreneurs must realize that while existing bars may have institutional staying power, the new establishments must serve what the new generations want: communal seating and non-alcoholic options. You can either start serving a variety of non-alcoholic drinks (something like a boba bar, these new Kava bars, or an old-fashioned soda bar), or do the kitchen option so that money can be spent without drinking.

Anti-drunk driving laws put a closing date on American bars, and COVID-19 accelerated that final death date. Transit-oriented bars close to BART stations and high-frequency bus lines or walkable areas will always be more popular than the old fashioned saloons along San Pablo Avenue and International Boulevard that are struggling to survive.

Planners and politicians need to re-evaluate their commercial districts and question what utility they serve. Commercial and retail zoning is bad. Most of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley’s areas where commercial activity is allowed is directed by zoning rules written when these cities were dominated by streetcar and horse car routes. Even though BART has been around for 50 years, its stations have little commercial activity on or around them.

We need to make it a lot easier to open a commercial business, kitchen and bars, and it begins with zoning. Extend all commercial corridor zoning three blocks from the current areas so that all the activity isn’t just focused on a few shops on one street. Next, focus on permitting reform and stop charging high permit fees to open a commercial businesses, a platform the socialist Zohran Mamdani successfully ran on in New York City. Then we should legalize most food, beverage and hospitality land use on every corner lot, without parking requirements or loading zone requirements.

This would make it easier for low margin businesses like bars, kitchens and shops to open up in residential neighborhoods. Any homeowner who wants to convert their house into a kitchen, a bakery, a bar or a shop should be able to do so. The status-quo has been to push housing into commercial areas; waiting for big developers to build highrises with ground floor retail and restaurants. But commercial spaces are purchased by commercial landlords via mortgages, so they cannot lower rents without paying money back to the bank. Since commercial leases stretch 10 years, its often a decade before these new spaces get filled. Most tiny commercial zones in cities are run by a handful of commercial landlords, and we can break their control by legalizing low-intensity commercial uses in residential areas.

In New York City, the residential areas are quiet while they’re flanked by vibrant and large commercial zones around major corridors and elevated subway stations. Bars are full of young and middle-aged people. Street vendors add to the vibrancy and many restaurants and businesses are serving mostly families and older men and women. I’m typing this from an apartment home in lower Manhattan at 11 PM. On the ground floor is a cafe and a bar. Yet because the wide street is traffic calmed, it’s quieter than my own neighborhood in Berkeley besieged by traffic. Cars are what makes cities so noisy, not people.

Even drivers don’t like car-oriented commercial districts. Santa Cruz has a very pleasant and well populated downtown with plentiful foot traffic and business. After Santa Cruz’s downtown was destroyed by an earthquake, they re-did their downtown and they made more of a pedestrian mall style with just one lane mostly for commercial loading. They redirected car traffic around the downtown rather than through it. Drivers of all ages park in garages and walk to these vibrant businesses, and it’s packed with people throughout the day and vibrancy is alright after hours for a small town.

I don’t want to hear merchants in the Bay Area crying that young people aren’t getting enough DUIs to visit them, or its Minecraft’s fault, or that everyone’s a shut-in. If your commercial area is an unattractive place with only one or two interesting places that can only be reached by car — your late-night business is going to die. No exceptions.

If you want to know what happened with the California Environmental Quality Act, read this summary and this breakdown of the politics. This article will focus on history informs the present moment, not contemporary state politics.

A lot of people have been emailing me about California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) since Governor Newsom successfully reformed the law, which is now in effect as of July 1st. Due to my work in research, I avoid giving partisan statements regarding very controversial state policy. I’ve also been a bit conflicted about CEQA. Way more prominent researchers are quite vocal about their opinions on CEQA and I suggest following them.

A lot of media coverage, particularly by papers not familiar with California like the New York Times, clearly do not understand how environmental regulations work here. Despite headlines, necessary environmental regulations are a complicated process that are still imposed on development like infill housing. It’s just done through the land-use designation rather than a project-by-project basis. The era of environmentalism that influenced CEQA’s passage was quite different than today’s. Many positive things came from this era, but mistakes were made as well. There’s a generational conflict within environmental movement borne out of the rise of climate science and the IPCC’s findings on cities and sustainable growth.

The way CEQA used to work before July 1st, 2025 was that if a project was proposed and somebody doesn’t like that, they could file a lawsuit charging that a project did not have proper environmental review. The project is put on hold as the issue is taken to court. If the judge believes there’s a valid concern, the developer conducts an environmental study proving that the project isn’t harmful to the environment. They’re also forced to study project alternatives which usually amount to trying to showcase in court that you must do this particular project. This study is known as an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and is conducted by the city or the developer, but the developer always pays and costs soar well into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

California’s bullet train is infamously delayed due to anti-train farmers trying to stall land acquisition with CEQA lawsuits. The list of eye-popping CEQA lawsuits are easy to Google, I’ve written about an infamous one, but the common denominator is that development projects in California must have a legal fund ready for CEQA in the event someone disapproves of the project. Or more commonly, development projects must preemptively do environmental studies to show their projects aren’t harmful and avoid litigation.

Supporters of CEQA reform or repeal often note that it was signed into law by Ronald Reagan as an implication it’s some kind of right-wing action, but that’s irrelevant. In the 1960s, environmentalism was somewhat nonpartisan as the ramifications of industrialization were taking a toll of the environment. CEQA was intended to force review of freeways, bay infill, airports and other urban renewal-era developments that contributed to pollution. But like most environmentalism from that era, it was primitive.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, there was a nationwide urban revolt against “growth", which opposed business interests and governments tearing down and rebuilding cities for larger populations. Zoning regulations, which had previously been the prerogative of business interests, were rewritten by neighborhood organizations and first-generation environmentalist groups. They essentially capped population growth, but the population growth wasn’t fake, it was a real demand for living quarters and infrastructure after the post-war baby boom. Most cities’ zoning and land-use maps today are relics of fairly random and incoherent reactions from the 1960s and 1970s. And most population growth was pushed outwards into newly-built suburbs rather than in the cities.

This era did not benefit from a comprehensive understanding of climate science, particularly the benefits of infill development and urban densification, which wouldn’t be fully understood until years later. Additionally, environmentalism has always been a political movement and not just a scientific discipline. Back then, it was integrated into the neighborhood preservation movement, which was a political movement to stem both new buildings and new people, borne out of the issues of urban pollution and blight, including discredited issues such as human overpopulation. This was pretty foundational to the Baby Boomers’ understanding of environmentalism, and it plays a generational conflict against infill housing today.

By 1970, most public developments that CEQA (and its federal counterpart, NEPA) were tasked to regulate were already coming to an end. Urban redevelopment and renewal had its heyday in the 1950s, and by the 1960s, de-industrialization and suburbanization were in full-effect. By the 1970s, most developed cities throughout the United States had significantly limited their population through land-use or “downzoning.” The anti-highrise movement, which was a global movement, equated tall buildings to environmental pollution and damage. Eco-aestheticism, the appearance of environmentally-friendly land-use (single-family homes and lawns) over what’s actually environmentally-friendly (multi-family, small dwellings), was common.

1970s environmentalism did get a lot right. Protecting habitats at risk of development was worthwhile. The organic movement is problematic in many ways but the fight against pesticides and revelation on the tremendous carbon impacts of factory farming were huge victories. The urban park movement had an overall positive psychological effect on city living. As much as I love the urbanist paradise of Tokyo, Japan, its lack of parks is its worst aspect. For urban development, the EIR mandates that CEQA required of public projects and zoning were good and logical.

The issue is that CEQA had mostly done its intended job. EIRs are fundamental to all government actions today, including the permitting of private and public housing development. Starting in 1970, California cities began drafting “housing elements” which were basically Master Plans for their cities with mandated EIRs whenever the zoning changed. This is the foundation of how all land-use is done in California today.

So when the New York Times says in an obnoxiously simplistic manner that California chose between housing affordability and environmentalism, that makes no sense. NYT published carbon household emissions by neighborhood on their own website showing how its not a binary!

CEQA however was very different from the federal equivalent of NEPA. NEPA only applies to public developments. CEQA, applied to anything that required public approval. This is due to a court interpretation of the legislation. No other state or territory in the United States applies environmental law in this way.

If a project conforms to the land-use outlined in the Housing Element, a developer or builder could file a “negative declaration” stating that there’s no environmental harm and pay a large fee. However, it does require a minor analysis or document to showcase that the project conforms to the required zoning. If housing is planned for a former gas station site and the zoning is residential, they have to do environmental clean-up beforehand since the city zoned it that way and did an EIR. This is how environmental protections should happen: rather than depending on lawsuits, your city, when reviewing its allowed land uses, does environmental impact analysis comprehensively and proactively. And we do that now, thanks to CEQA.

Despite the proactive studies during the housing element process, CEQA lawsuits or their threats often result in “targeted studies” on subjects, which can be frivolous like views being blocked or shade on a house. Before the 2025 reforms, plaintiffs used increasingly outlandish environmental harms like historic parking lots or student noise to trigger narrow EIRs. Even when these lawsuits get thrown out, developers and governments still waste time and money in court trying to prove it’s not a real environmental harm. The problem with CEQA is that where environment impact begins and ends has been constantly widened, abstracted and made vague since its passage.

The biggest problem with CEQA was that it only applied to new projects — not existing land-uses. Among the many counter-environmental examples of CEQA mis-use was an attempted CEQA lawsuit against the conversion of a San Francisco highway into a park. CEQA was originally envisioned to block things like highways, but because the highway was already built, it’s free of scrutiny while the proposed alternative, a park, gets challenged in court. Same issue with the bullet train: you can’t sue and force studies on the existing west coast air corridor which is a huge contributor of pollution, but you can sue the bullet train meant to solve it.

Issues like these caused the legislature to exempt CEQA lawsuits for public transportation projects and similar infill projects. Legislators up until now have continuously proposed carve outs for CEQA based on whatever wild story makes the headlines. The latest reforms were no carve-outs but a massive transformations of CEQA, orchestrated by Gavin Newsom in a high-risk budget negotiation deal with the support of super-majority of the California legislature.

The new laws make the following exempt from CEQA lawsuits. (A more detailed breakdown if you prefer):

• “Infill housing” (including market-rate, subsidized, migrant, farm worker etc.) meaning homes proposed in locations already developed like cities and suburbs.

• Commercial uses like childcare and healthcare clinics, including in rural areas.

• Green energy projects and broadband infrastructure.

• Climate adoption infrastructure such as wildfire prevention and coastal flooding prevention.

• “Advanced manufacturing” in industrial zones, meaning high-tech manufacturing like computer parts and solar panels.

There are also non-CEQA related reforms in the laws that speed up housing approvals, including a significant clamp down on the ability of the California Coastal Commission to block new homes in coastal communities. The Coastal Commission had in recent years mostly micromanaged the appearance of accessory dwelling units.

While the home building industry has been ecstatic about these changes, I have a few doubts about whether it’ll unleash a lot of housing — at least in the short term. The other big barriers to new housing construction persist such as:

1 - Zoning. Gavin Newsom still has not endorsed a bill which would rezone transit stops for denser housing. Many cities are still doing their housing elements and won’t have the zoning capacity for a few years now.

2 - Impact fees are wildly incoherent by jurisdiction, and construction costs are too high. A typical housing project is still $1 million per unit in construction costs; cities like Sunnyvale charge over $90,000 per unit for park impact fees alone.

3 - Trump continues to terrorize immigrant communities with I.C.E. patrols at Home Depots and construction sites, causing labor shortages in the residential sector. He’s still enacting tariffs on lumber and steel imports, inflating home construction to astronomical levels. The housing slowdown won’t just hit California; it’s hitting everywhere.

The biggest winner from the CEQA exemption is subsidized, low-income housing, since development is predicated mostly on taxpayer willpower. CEQA has been frequently used against low-income projects in California, and one caused a project to collapse in Berkeley. The only developer I ever worked for was a low-income housing developer, and these low income housing developers deeply fear CEQA.

A complete exemption of all infill housing projects has been consistently recommended by academic researchers. It makes sense because the environmental analysis is already done during the zoning process when cities dictate what land is used for. I also like the inclusion of climate-adoption exemptions, which helps combat that status-quo favoritism inherent in CEQA litigation. When I lived in Santa Cruz, the town was going to upgrade the city’s municipal pier with more activity and climate-resistant features, but people who wanted the pier to remain unchanged sued it on a CEQA violation, which delayed repairs for years and the wharf was dramatically damaged from a storm event.

Many California environmental organizations have a difficult relation with infill housing and transportation at the state level. They’re mostly focused on conservation and green energy mandates, which are good, but it’s only a section of environmentalism. Legal nonprofits representing low-income plaintiffs are usually opposed to CEQA reform, and large environmental organizations either take no position or oppose out of solidarity with the legal groups.

Here’s the opposition for the industrial exemption, via CalMatters:

“This law would not harm all California communities equally. This budget deal is an attack on lower-income communities of color that consistently get sited for harmful industrial projects.” — ASHA SHARMA, LEADERSHIP COUNCIL FOR JUSTICE AND ACCOUNTABILITY

The exemptions for advanced manufacturing is the most controversial of the exemption categories. Remember that the “industrial projects” in this case are high-tech manufacturing and they’re only exempt from CEQA litigation on land that has been zoned by local governments for industry. I’m very sympathetic to the argument by California legislators that the Biden Administration pumped billions in subsidies for microchip and solar panel manufacturing that California has hardly broken ground on due to regulatory hurdles from CEQA, despite its general environmental impact already being studied in the land use. I have family that live in rural areas, near agricultural, newly-built warehouses and older industrial activity and I’ve seen the severe pollution. (Some of the groups opposed to the 2025 exemptions are also on the opposition list for CEQA exemptions for transportation and student housing from 2024 ). Although much of that land for new warehouses is being re-zoned from agricultural to industrial, therefore an environmental impact report is still triggered, which is what CEQA essentially is.

What frustrates me is how unseriously we as a state have taken zoning and land-use. Curbing harmful industrial use from vulnerable communities is what zoning is supposed to do. Industrial projects are often situated near low-income areas not primarily through market forces but through zoning. The CEQA reform laws haven’t re-zoned anything. Industrial or commercial projects compliant with zoning can be rejected by city governments, unlike housing. Cities can also re-zone industrial sites for non-industrial projects. Why is industrial zoning with the uses outlined for CEQA exemption even there? It can be changed whenever any city wants to do it. Most of the toxic industrial emissions harming low-income areas — such as the oil refinery in urbanized Richmond, Calif. — are already built and therefore exempt from CEQA scrutiny.

The absence of most environmental organizations on infill housing policy is the result of a generational divide within the environmental movement. The leaders, executive directors, and lawyers of these organizations are older folks whose environmentalism is rooted in the principles of the first environmental movement from the 1960s and 1970s. This is not inherently bad, but it can be misaligned with modern climate science. For example, people of that generation will read 11% of U.S. greenhouse gasses comes from residential buildings, and think no more should be built, whereas the papers on the topic will say the need is for urban densification, more people living in shared structures, structures made of recycled material, a decrease in dwelling sizes, and location of homes in temperate climates.

Now you have a younger cohort, recent graduates in atmospheric, earth science, or marine science, and they’re on social media where urbanism is just very popular. And they’re butting heads with the older generation who grew up understanding environmentalism in California as blocking towers along the coast. That’s why many organizations neither support nor oppose infill housing policy.

You’re starting to see not just pro-housing development groups, but also exclusively and solely pro-infill environmental groups like: Greenbelt Alliance, East Bay for Everyone, Happy City Coalition in Southern California, and Prosperity California. What tends to separate these groups from pro-housing development organizations is that they’re explicitly fighting sprawl developers, as well as supporting infill housing.

Moreover, the National Resource Defense Council, a very prominent environmental organization, endorsed the infill housing by transit bill and was the only major state environmental group to do so. The San Francisco Bay Sierra Club that transitioned from opposing housing projects near transit stops in the 2010s to now becoming its biggest cheerleader at the local level. Greenbelt Alliance is perhaps the best organization we have to fight suburban sprawl, which increasingly can’t even source its own water without public subsidy. Unsustainable exurban developments like these are where CEQA should be focused.

My hope is that with this reform of CEQA that we start being more proactive in the planning of cities and towns. Because CEQA isn’t gone for the outlined exempted categories, it’s now done through the land-use or zoning process rather than on a project by project litigation. Therefore, many environmental organizations will shift their attention to the housing element and zoning process of cities and towns throughout California. Our zoning is woefully out of date and it needs to be completely revamped to adopt to the climate and conservation issues of the 21st century, not the bygone specter of redevelopment from the 1950s.

There are many countries leading in carbon emissions reduction, like Sweden, Norway, Finland. It’s a comprehensive strategy of urban densification, reuse material, green building standards, and rapid expansion of green infrastructure and manufacturing. It’s important for the future of California that everyone gets on the same page on environmentalism as inland temperatures rise, wildfires sweep the state and sea-level rise threatens the coast.

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As we all know, Mamdani has proposed making New York City’s bus system free. Writer Matt Bruenig makes the case for Mamdani’s free bus idea on the basis that school bus systems and libraries are already free and he asked for a more of an enlightened debate on the utility of bus fares rather than a hyper-charged culture war. Well, I’m here to do that!

I helped start a group called East Bay Transit Riders Union in 2020. Socialists members quickly realized that the organizers were all YIMBY liberals so they made their own socialist version: People’s Transit Alliance (PTA). While EBTRU focused more on technocratic things like bus lanes and service, PTA prioritized organizing with the transit workers union and popularizing free fares. In my article on this divide, I wimped out on taking a direct position, mainly because it felt like a culture war issue and those are boring.

So I’m going to take a position here: free bus fares is not the optimal approach to easing low-income rider burdens, but it’s a well-intended idea and would have mostly positive benefits if implemented. I don’t think Mamdani is actually concerned with the optimal decision for transit agencies but rather the politically optimal decision to build his movement — and that’s not bad.

I usually support free buses for certain lines rather than systemwide or if the system is:

1. A shuttle or feeder line to more frequent bus or rail service competing with free or cheap parking.

2. The riders are irregular riders such as the Yosemite bus shuttle or a hotel shuttle.

3. The farebox revenue is so low that it costs more to operate and maintain fare collection equipment than what is returned by fares. Places like Kansas City where public transit is exclusively a extremely low-income service fit the bill.

Nothing in NYC is 2 or 3, but every system has a few lines where it’s 1. In these cases usually a free transfer suffices but alternatively the line can be made free. Usually made free through some business or office tower tax or some local area that benefits from the service.

The free transit debate is almost always about buses and not rail lines because buses have a low farebox recovery, meaning that buses already require a lot of subsidy to operate and fares make a small share of revenue. Rail line fares come much closer to paying for their service and are harder to swap out for more subsidy.

Most research on free fares shows that:

• Transit riders tend to ride transit more when the bus is free, increasing overall ridership.

• There’s fewer fights between drivers and patrons who can’t afford fares.

• Buses can board faster because less time is spent fiddling with cash or passes.

• Transit agencies get their funding in advance rather than depending on farebox and ridership.

The issues with free fares are that:

• It’s very consistent that free fares does not compel many non-transit users onto transit compared to service improvements, therefore it has a little impact on reducing CO2 emissions.

• Revenue that could’ve gone to improving service is used to subsidize fares, when agencies already receive little federal funding for operations.

• Buses can be slowed down with increased patronage by transit riders who would’ve limited their rides.

• Transit agencies have to get more funding, not just to compensate the loss of fares from existing ridership, but for increased ridership and thus increased service demand.

The last point is often forgotten in this debate but it will be an issue if NYC makes buses completely free. Transportation expert and congestion pricing leader Charles Komanoff— who otherwise wrote a positive analysis about New York’s free fare program — notes the disproportionate increase in service needs compared to riders:

WILL WE NEED MORE BUSES? We can expect NYC Transit buses to become more crowded if fares are eliminated and our projections are borne out. Simple math suggests that a 23 percent increase in bus patronage paired with only a 12 percent increase in overall bus speeds (mostly from reduced dwell times) will result in 9 to 10 percent more passengers per bus, on average. 24 Insofar as NYC Transit buses aren’t generally overcrowded, a barely double digit increase in per-bus riders shouldn’t be detrimental. On the other hand, such an increase could attenuate the calculated reduction in dwell times — a rebound that was beyond our scope here but merits pondering and perhaps modeling.

In Bruenig’s case for free transit, he argues that fare are just one way to collect a tax and that induced cost issues like these don’t matter in the debate. If libraries and school buses don’t require fares, Bruenig argues, then there isn’t a case that bus service needs them either. I think it’s worth examining why completely free fare transit is a fairly uncommon thing in the world and is more common in the United States where transit ridership is low.

The issue isn’t a matter of public services being free but how large those public services are, what they serve and how volatile or static the demand is. The goal of a school bus networks is to shuttle children who do not have wages to school during select hours of the day. Does it make sense to collect fares? No, children don’t make any money and their ridership is deterministic so their parents pay for it through property taxes. When kids grow up and go to college, they do pay for bus fare through tuition, and generally get a local free bus pass or service. While libraries are incredible public features, they aren’t infrastructure services and they’re not usually swarmed to the extent a user fee is needed.

When a public service really starts scaling to something everyone uses as an essential utility, we generally have user fees for it especially if its variable. Sanitation and sewers are essential utilities to every day life and you’re expected to pay for them. Why do these rates exist? They discourage excessive use and put the cost of maintenance on users who use it. That’s generally the idea behind user fees and fares.

Do we have an excessive transit rider problem to warrant fares? Sometimes. At peak hours in major cities on certain lines, yes. Fares can help keep people who don’t need to take the bus from doing so. For example, I live 19 minutes on foot from my local subway station in Berkeley. I could take the bus and transfer, but I’d be crowding it up during rush hour so I just walk. The fare helps convince me that it’s unnecessary to board a bus for 10 minutes and clear up space and dwell times for those who need it. Free fares have a clear effect of convincing people to use transit for short trips.

However, in favor of free fares, I do not pay a fare to flush the toilet or turn on the faucet every time. I don’t pay on trash day every time I take out cans. I pay for these things monthly, which psychologically just doesn’t feel as prohibitive as paying a fare. Motorists do not pay to get on the freeway every time or use public roads, although New York congestion pricing is changing that dynamic and in the correction direction. There is a point that collecting fares not only discourages first-time transit users but rate-limits transit riders in a country where transit ridership is poor.

Is collecting fares at the farebox the best way to conduct a user fee? Maybe not. Perhaps everyone should just pay a monthly fare via taxes and you get a free transit card. But not everyone uses transit or not everyone uses it at the same rate, which might warrant fares to extract extra taxes on those who do. We do have different transit agencies and it’s not always clear who should pay what tax for what service, such as cross-jurisdictional commuter lines.

But what’s the goal behind free fares? For socialists, its primarily motivated by reducing hardship for poor people by eliminating their transportation costs. I’m a supporter of universal transit passes for low-income households on all modes of transit, and I think it reaches this goal better. When I was in college I could clearly see how significant the role of free buses played in the mobility of poor college students. When they lost their passes they were far less inclined to ride the bus. In Berkeley, developers of new apartments offer transit passes rather than parking spaces near transit lines.

I’m happy to pay for transit because I’m funding a service that I use a lot and my income is high enough that it’s not a burden. How else can middle and higher-income renters pay for transit? Not through property taxes because renters like me don’t pay those. Income or payroll tax perhaps? The federal government doesn’t fund transit operations to a significant extent and they take my income tax. Trump’s new bill will make the transit fiscal crisis even worse. At least subsidized fare passes can also more easily be expanded to rail lines whereas the free fare discourse is exclusively about bus service.

Although I support low-income fare passes over free fares, they both accomplish the same benefits for low-income riders. At least free fares rids the embarrassment of the very poor who have to beg a driver to ride. There’s also downsides to means-testing as well like income-cutoffs and complicated paperwork trying to sniff out fraud that ultimately discourages more low income households from getting passes.

There’s also a major psychological angle to free fares which is its biggest draw. Unless you’re extremely poor, frankly most low-income households are not harmed by paying a bus fare, especially a flat local fare. Most low-income households in the United States (not NYC) own cars which cost much more in registration, insurance, gas and premiums than a $2 or $3 daily bus fare. Since operating a vehicle doesn’t have a fee every time you use the car, it psychologically feels better than paying for every bus ride. Because you can mentally de-tangle and budget around car payments from your car use in a way you cannot for buses.

This free fares vs. transit pass debate is like debating whether I should eat out on my break or bring a lunch to work. They both have trade-offs and unique benefits but whichever I chose I’m not going to die either way. I know I should probably make more lunches because its cheaper, but its more laborious and doesn’t taste as good. That’s the equivalent of using money to improve service and target subsidies for low-income riders. Eating out tastes better, takes less time and makes me happier but it costs more money — that’s like free fares. Whether the service is better or the buses are free, I don’t think in either scenario for New York City’s bus system will have major consequences.

Mamdani prefers to lean on populism to build a political movement and I don’t see an issue with it. I suspect that Mamdani isn’t making a decision based on what’s most fiscally optimal but what’s most popular. People like free buses. Mamdani is running off the idea of reducing people’s daily costs. Yes, running more service or expanding low-income passes would benefit low income riders likely more than a free fare, but psychologically, they resent paying the fare. Eliminating it makes them feel good and they ride the bus more, which could in turn build political support for increased funding. People should like their transit agency, not resent it.

Mamdani ran a campaign on affordability above all, and if that’s your priority then it makes sense to focus more on bus fares than service improvements. Most transit experts would disagree on making fares free as a priority for transit riders, myself included, but the goals are simply different and the debate just simply misunderstands this.

Fundamentally, there’s an issue with public transit agencies like New York’s, which is the backbone of New York’s economy, having to beg for funding from the state and federal government. In Japan, it was incredible seeing how much the train company owned real estate like offices, hotels, apartments around their stations. The train companies directly collected income from the economy and returned it to riders in the form of cheap fares. But in the United States, the NYC Subway, DC Metro, SF BART etc. owns so little land despite contributing so much to the value of land. Their fares are higher and their agencies more dependent on subsidies as a result.

This is likely the final article I’ll write on this subject but Thursday, June 26th will be an extremely important vote that I encourage my Berkeley readers to speak in support of either at Council or via Zoom.

Here’s the Agenda and Zoom Link.

Councilmember and Mayor contact.

The city council is poised to pass the Middle Housing proposal I first spoke of in my history of zoning and gentrification series four years ago. A lot of hard work has been put in these last four years and it’s imperative you write to council in support and if you can, either speak at the meeting either in person or via Zoom.

I wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle this morning making the case for it. (Link for those who are paywalled).

I’ve written a history of zoning policies that created the city’s current crisis.

I won’t write much more on the subject, but there are two major changes I hope the council will amend to the final draft on Thursday.

Every neighborhood must have the same density standard. This is a must. The carving up of neighborhoods with different codes has made Berkeley’s zoning nonsensical and prejudiced. Most people don’t know what zone they live in! It is essential to the passage of this ordinance to have one, uniform density standard so that every Berkeleyan knows what can be built there.

While it’s too late to change the zoning codes, the council can set the density limit in each zoning code: R-1, R-2 and R-2A. If the ordinance passes without a uniform density limit, it’s difficult to say it’s truly anti-exclusionary.

The second issue is what density level will be chosen. The current requirement limits zones to 5, 6 and 7 units on a typical 5,000 square foot lot. This was added last year to prevent higher-density projects. But because lot coverage covers 60% of a lot, if a project were to fill the zoning limits (known as the envelope) the units would be between 1,300 and 1,400 feet in size. Many bungalows in Berkeley aren’t that large!

Some councilmembers support a low density floor to discourage studio apartments but they’re missing the real risk. At this height, lot coverage and density limit, studios aren’t on the radar. 5, 6 and 7 unit regulations (40 - 60 dwelling units per acre), especially the 5- and 6-unit ones (40 and 50 dwelling units per acre) are liable to result in large unit developments exceeding 3 bedrooms in size.

High bedroom projects will more likely result in the Elmwood and Claremont districts near campus building student housing, not family housing, that would be built and rented out by the bedroom. There’s a much larger market for this in Berkeley than studios. (Nothing wrong with student housing but that’s what the high density towers near downtown are for.)

A typical 2-bedroom home which is ideal for modern families with usually one or two kids is about 1,000 square feet. Those new homes would be expensive and less likely to be built. So one of two things needs to happen: either you can shrink the lot coverage further to fit the dwelling units per acre, which I don’t recommend since staff put tremendous time into studying these lot coverage rules.

Or the council can increasing the dwelling units per acre to about 10 units on a typical 5,000 square foot lot, which gets to about 900 - 1,000 square foot sized, 1 & 2-bedroom units. (This would be 90 units per acre). I believe this would be the safest bet to ensure a small but healthy amount of new, low-density but multi-family homes. It would re-legalize my own apartment home.

But if it doesn’t have the votes, the safest floor should be 8 units maximum on a typical lot which is around 70 units per acre citywide. A unit more than the current R-2A’s proposal since the biggest issues are really with the R-1 and R-2 zones. Unlikely many or any 8 unit projects will be built but the full building envelope would fit bedrooms of about 1,000 square feet. Fewer 1 bedroom units would be produced but it gets at what council intends which is to steer away from student-oriented housing.

I encourage readers to write to city council to change the density limits to 90 units per acre. Subject header: “Support but change Middle Housing 4/26”. If you’re someone who would prefer to start out Middle Housing even more conservatively but still want to see some family-oriented homes built, then you should ask for 70 units per acre.

But the most important thing, regardless of the final density decision, is that ALL districts have the same dwelling units per acre. It is not inclusive land use until that is done.

As a head’s up, I do expect some commentary to be hyperbolic (to put it mildly) by opponents of the plan. That’s normal for Berkeley. Don’t get baited into shouting matches if you attend in person. A lot of these folks, regardless of what they say, are usually nice people that are easily spooked by nonsensical high-rise images and false information.

Thankfully, Middle Housing is not scary. We know what Middle Housing in Berkeley looks like because some neighborhoods already have a lot of them. Here’s some photos I’ve taken over the years.

If Middle Housing passes tomorrow it is important that architects design future homes that use the aesthetic of traditional houses, use front yard gardens and landscaping, and do not squander this opportunity with too contemporary of a design. People like old density — not the mid-century apartments — and we should sample from those. Look at this gallery of Middle Homes that cannot be built today, and take notes because to most Berkeleyans these Middle Homes are beautiful.

Write to council!

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Disclaimer: This article and all articles on my Substack are my own opinions written on my own time. They are not opinions endorsed by my employer or its associated university.

This is a paid article and will be free in one week.

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Essential to Trump’s win in 2024 was the widespread dissatisfaction with housing costs among young voters. Young families and post-college graduates lack the mobility to move into communities with the highest job concentrations. First-time homebuyers now have a median age closing in on 40 years old, and those buying homes are doing it far away from city centers, not by choice, but necessity.

The housing crisis became a national crisis primarily due to the 2008 Great Recession reducing home construction for many years, even as over 70 million Millennials were coming of age and a decade or two away from buying a home. Republicans and Democrats have begun to focus on housing policy at a national level. The Democrats are in a battle between the Abundance liberals and the Antitrust leftists on how to do housing policy, with the latter trading barbs at the idea that the crisis is caused by anything other than greedy corporate behavior. The Abundance crowd appears to be winning at swaying major Democratic figures such as former president Obama, and even socialists like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have embraced many aspects of it.

Up until now, the Republicans have offered entirely demand-side solutions, namely mass deportations and reduced legal immigration. Blaming the housing crisis on the surge in migrants during the asylum crisis under the Biden Administration, and the broader trend of America accepting immigrants, has been remarkably successful (even with immigrant voters) despite how stupid the idea is. It never made any sense to blame migrants who work for the lowest wages for why owning a home in many states now costs over half a million dollars, but the American people aren’t very smart and don’t understand how economics works — housing economics the least of all.

In just six months of his first term, Trump has done everything possible to make the housing crisis worse. Short of an outright executive order banning housing construction, I can’t think of anything else I would do to increase home costs that Trump hasn’t already done. A quick summary of Trump’s inflationary actions:

1. Imposed steel tariffs on the world during his first term while U.S. domestic steel production continued to decline, and then imposed more during his second term even as foreign steel imports plummeted with a 35% drop last year alone, making construction projects over 8 stories tall ever more expensive.

2. Is threatening 27% lumber tariffs on Canada by year’s end while threatening to invade them for no reason, a nation that supplies 1/3rd of our lumber consumption, making single-family and small apartment construction much more expensive and material purchases risky.

3. Sent immigration police to arrest non-criminal workers at housing development sites and Home Depots nationwide, despite immigrants (many undocumented) comprising half or more of our most populous states’ construction labor force. Workers are scared of coming to work, leaving many housing sites unfinished, and inducing a severe labor shortage.

4. Failing to follow through on his nonsensical campaign promise to mass deport millions of people and reduce housing demand, thereby allowing the supply and demand balance to worsen. (I think this policy is terrible, but the fact is Trump has failed at his demand-side “solution.”)

5. Created mass volatility in the stock market and crucially the bond market, making investors terrified to invest in known risky ventures like housing developments, drying up funding for development projects.

6. Preparing to cut $33 billion in funding for subsidized housing programs and Section 8 vouchers, thereby putting next year’s low income housing projects into limbo and threatening homelessness for over 2 million families.

Some on Twitter have mentioned that the Supreme Court recently ruled in a bipartisan 9 - 0 decision that environmental review has been abused as a tactic to stop projects rather than inform decision making. Whether that helps housing or not isn’t clear (the case was about a coal train), but you can’t thank Trump for that because everyone regardless of ideology and partisan affiliation agreed.

In comes far-right congressman Mike Lee of Utah — who took a brief break from lying that the right-wing Minnesota assassin was a left winger — with a first major attempt at a Republican response to the housing crisis: sell public land. It’s part of the Republican’s “Big Beautiful Bill” budget that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would add $3.3 trillion to the U.S. national debt and increase the deficit by $2.8 trillion, thanks to the bill shrinking economic growth. Lee’s provisions would instruct the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service (USFS) to sell under 1% of their land to presumably private developers for housing development.

This is an idea that J.D. Vance mentioned during his debate with Tim Walz: that the federal government owns a bunch of land not producing any revenue, and therefore it can sprawl out to provide housing. Federal lands generating revenue is not some inherent need and selling land is usually a bad way to gain consistent revenue. Although land generating revenue for the government is not conceptually a bad idea either. After all, Norway funds its massive welfare state with public enterprises on public land. I imagine this is too socialistic and pagan European for J.D. Vance, though.

Emblematic of Democratic over-dependency on consultants, Tim Walz had performed poorly during this housing section despite standing on stronger ground policy-wise. Unfortunately, he spent little time emphasizing Vance’s unpopular idea of selling parks and preserves to developers. Instead, he started with this canned sentimentalism about what a house means to him, then he claimed that the housing crisis is primarily the fault of corporations buying up houses for no reason, since “folks are not living in those houses.” He did correctly identify Minneapolis as a city that had reduced rents with new housing supply but he didn’t explain it well.

Corporations are buying single-family homes to rent them out to because people want rental housing in the suburbs, but suburbs aren’t allowing the construction of rental, multi-family housing. Corporations like Blackstone did buy up foreclosed houses at auction during the mortgage crisis between 2007 and 2011, but by 2014 this scheme had begun to slow down. Institutional investors or big corporations own about the same share of houses today that they did 10 years ago, around 1-2% nationally, but with a higher share in southern and midwestern markets. In California, where single-family homes cost over $1 million, 2% of single-family homes are owned by large companies with 10 properties or more. Companies like Zillow tried to use their price-predicting software to buy and sell houses but lost a bunch of money and quit.

Walz then said that Minneapolis reduced rents but he kept stammering and abstracting it to conservative-coded, likely Democratic consultant-tested phrases like “red tape” because as Obama’s speech writer revealed, Democratic operatives think “zoning” is too wonky for average people to understand. I recall being annoyed on debate night watching Walz dance around and stammer at what exactly Minneapolis did to lower rents.

Regardless, J.D. Vance won, so now we’re following through on his promise to sell federal lands vis-à-vis Mike Lee’s bill. It’s bad politics but the policy is even worse and that’s what I’ll cover below. Here’s a map of federal lands eligible for sale. Lee dismissed this map as inaccurate to quell uproar, but as a geographic information programmer, I can confirm this map is accurate. It’s not hard to get files of BLM and USFS land.

Most generously, there are a few places where the USFS could sell or give land to small, usually tourist-oriented and resort towns in the Sierra Nevada that may lack land for subsidized housing or workforce housing. Or the bill could return BLM lands to Indian Country (although that wouldn’t be a sale) and allow nations to administer whatever developments they like. An example would be the Squamish Nation in Canada building North America’s biggest, most futuristic city on tribal land smack dab in Vancouver, developed entirely by indigenous peoples for the explicit purpose of combating Vancouver’s housing shortage and providing revenue to the Squamish. (Sen̓áḵw deserves its own article.)

But for the vast majority of the United States, these federal lands are not a solution for high housing costs. Even in Western states, where housing costs are disproportionately higher than the national average and federal land is most concentrated, the federal land isn’t located anywhere close to where people want to live. There’s no BLM land except for very few remote reserves around coastal California and its vast interior. There is more BLM land in Oregon, but it’s not located near Portland. These Oregon areas are mostly open space reserves and state parks and are adjacent to small towns without much economy.

Mike Lee’s plan is part of Trump’s “freedom cities” idea where federal lands can be sold to developers to create innovative cities that have low taxes and tons of economic growth. But we already have these without selling federal land: they’re called exurbs and they innovate nothing but sprawling houses and freeways to serve people priced out of the city. People want to live where there’s access to diverse economic engines, universities, major investments, mass transportation infrastructure, and housing availability. That requires a lot of public investment to work, and Trump’s cutting that.

Mike Lee is also announcing one extra provision that for the land to be sold at below-market rates, the homes have to be restricted to single-family houses only. I’m unsure why a revenue scheme involves the government selling land below its price. But it’s not even going to be freedom cities; it’s going to be freedom suburbs which we have a million of and we’re building every day. This is just a stupid idea. Whatever edge cases where there are merits to sell public land are just squashed by the horrible bill it’s located in, the particular agencies chosen to sell land, and the weird social engineering about single-family housing only.

I’m not conceptually against federal lands that aren’t parks, preserves, and wildlife habitats being used for housing or development purposes. We could be more like China and build new cities in the United States, even if that’s done on federal land. However, we should prioritize urban and suburban infill and repurposing ineffective existing land-use on already developed sites for high or higher-density housing. This is environmentally superior since these lands are already developed and don’t require consuming open space or building more expansive infrastructure projects.

To be frank, only 3% of land in the U.S. has been developed for suburban or urban uses, so we don’t have an open space shortage. But it’s neither good for the environment to endlessly consume land in the least efficient way possible (single-family houses), nor is it good economics since the opportunity for income mobility is in the cities, and it’s awful politics. National parks and the forests are a rare, bipartisan popular use of federal land.

If I were to choose two federal agencies to start building homes on, I would’ve chosen the United States Postal Service (USPS) and the military. USPS, which is increasingly outperformed by private postal and delivery services, can diversify its revenue streams to include real estate development of its properties. A whole parcel of urban land doesn’t have to be dedicated to a small mail station with declining traffic. There can be apartments and shops around post offices that the federal government either owns directly or collects rent from. Postal services like Japan Post have collected revenue from renting out properties and providing housing in well-located urban and suburban areas.

Properties owned by the military is another no-brainer for housing. Unlike forests and empty BLM plains, military property and bygone bases that cost a lot to maintain and have dwindling use post-Cold War are often located near population centers and exist in surplus. The Department of Defense owns prime land rights in the core of major economic zones with severe housing costs like the Bay Area and San Diego. But developing military properties for housing wouldn’t appeal to Mike Lee’s pro-military base, and calling out the wasteful budgets and surplus real-estate of the Pentagon is not something Republicans (and many Democrats) do.

I hope that environmental and conservation groups do some reflection on how the American climate movement has failed to be as strong on infill housing policy as it has been on conservation. This has specifically been activist groups and nonprofits, because scientists themselves have been quite diligent on this issue of needing to accommodate population growth in urban areas, such as the major 2018 United Nations/IPCC report on the importance of densifying urban areas to combat climate change. Urban areas like New York City and San Francisco have significantly smaller carbon footprints per household than the suburbs and exurban areas that we continue to build out and develop.

California can call itself a leader in climate science, but our land-use betrays that notion. Despite the IPCC report and top climate scientists in California identifying the need for urban infill to combat climate change, the technology epicenter of the world, the San Francisco Bay Area, bans housing that allows for more than one family on 85% of its residential parcels. In Southern California, the entertainment epicenter and major economic capital of the western hemisphere, bans housing for more than one family on 98% of its residential land. Even as California activists decry the selling of parks and wildlife in Trump’s bill, everyday development projects on the fringes the Bay Area and Los Angeles destroy habitats and open space for new plots of houses that should’ve been built in the cities.

Right now, California Democrats are having a culture war about whether areas within a half-mile of commuter rail and metro stops should allow 5-story apartments near them. This is unheard of as a controversy in most developed nations, but this is the norm in California and much of the western United States, which is deeply indoctrinated with suburban planning. West Coast leadership on housing affordability is poor, and if you don’t offer any place for people to live, Democrats may continue to cede the housing affordability argument to Republicans. However, the Republican argument is stupid and immoral: that we just need to deport immigrants and develop Yosemite.

As for Lee’s proposal, I don’t think it’s serious. It’s yet another in an onslaught of right-wing culture wars designed to make people mad. It’s designed to make environmentalists mad for selling open space preserves and signal right-coded, anti-city land-use by mandating that only suburban single-family projects can be built.

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After the murder of George Floyd, city halls throughout the nation were flooded by youth activists demanding tremendous police budget cuts and mainstream liberal politicians flirted with ideas about society without law enforcement. I was quite taken by the idea of reductions in police duties, which spurned me and a few others to launch an idea that traffic enforcement should be civilianized.

This proposal went quite further than most abolitionist requests in the legislative process and almost came to fruition. It was predicated on factual data that the vast majority of public interactions with police are through traffic stops. Our initiative wasn’t embraced by the local police abolitionists in Berkeley who were mostly organized by left-wing groups to start a non-police wellness check organization. Incidentally, I had mobilized a similar pilot program for our transit system a year or two earlier which is still in operation today. Our civilian traffic enforcement initiative made much bigger headlines nationally and landed a profile of me in the Atlantic and a mention in the New York Times and Bloomberg.

But I must admit that it appears to have failed. We did not civilianize traffic enforcement because it’s prohibited by state law and legislators failed to legalize a pilot program. The energy behind the initiative died down as Berkeley, like most U.S. cities, were besieged by anti-social drivers and crime rings doing quick hit robberies and fleeing by car. It might still technically be in the City of Berkeley’s police reform backburner but the initiative seems quietly dead. Just as dead as most of “Defund the Police” is today which at best has shrunken back to use of force reform laws. Even popular socialist candidates like Zohran Mamdani of New York City or recently elected mayor of Oakland and progressive icon Barbara Lee support increased police staffing.

I’m willing to admit that I may have been wrong in this specific proposal for civilian traffic officers. The need for traffic reform was not wrong: cops do mostly interact with the public through traffic stops. Traffic stops are a major source of anxiety for both motorists and police and a common median for police violence. Traffic law does blend criminal and non-criminal investigations together in a way that waters down the legality of warrant-less searches. Research does suggest that the severity of police traffic enforcement does not correlate with improved traffic safety, mostly because traffic enforcement is often used as warrant-less investigations and rather than traffic safety. We were right to initiate a civilian traffic department and ban pre-textual stops, requiring cops to conduct criminal suspicion stops rather than traffic laws as a pretext.

But I noticed the civilian traffic enforcement idea lacked support among key constituents necessary to make it work. I didn’t say it publicly at the time but non-police labor union leaders told me in private conversations that no public workers would ever risk being a non-law enforcement traffic officer. That few civilian motorists would obey a civil servant that has no gun, badge and arresting powers pulling them over. Nor would many civil servants volunteer themselves as motorists are notorious for road rage and are prone to violence.

I had used civilian parking enforcement as a model for traffic enforcement but the parking officer union told me that they already dealt with physical blow-back from enraged drivers outside their vehicles. They thought it would be worse with motorists in their vehicles potentially concealing weapons and operating a potential weapon itself. The local abolitionists’ program to civilianize welfare checks (known as the Specialized Care Unit) which was successfully implemented still ran into an issue where civilian healthcare workers quickly deferred to the police at the first sign of escalation and conflict.

I think it was clear to me very early on that reducing unnecessary civilian and police interactions would require automated traffic enforcement technology. I didn’t embrace it initially because left-wing groups were opposed to automated traffic enforcement due to the fear of mass surveillance. But overtime I was convinced these fears can be addressed with privacy regulations and civilian control of traffic data, which are extremely important components of transitioning to a technological enforcement system.

Before I was a motorist, I didn’t fully understand left-wing opposition to traffic surveillance technology because non-motorists are already mass surveilled. Every transit station I’ve been in has a security camera in it, every transit vehicle has a GPS locator of my transit vehicle, and my transit card contains data that could identify my whereabouts. Many sidewalks are covered with often unsecured CCTV cameras. Cars in comparison are some of the least surveilled things in society which is ironic since they’re among the most deadly.

After I became a motorist I became supportive of traffic violation camera technology because it wasn’t life threatening and it didn’t discriminate. Like most Black men, I was taught by my parents how to preserve my life in the event of a traffic stop. But when I got a traffic ticket for not having a FasTrak, I didn’t need to do that: I just got a ticket in the mail. I watched red light cameras ticket drivers no matter their race, my friend got a ticket for driving in the bus lane, and it seemed much more effective at scaring drivers into behaving correctly. An outcome that has not occurred with manned police traffic enforcement, whose effectiveness is only when police are visible and rarely in the same spot twice.

More research on traffic enforcement technology also supports that it does not discriminate in issuing tickets. Traffic technology can be disproportionately placed in low-income areas and disproportionately hit minority drivers. That can be problematic if the road design encourages speeding and then cameras are placed to get tickets. But if you drive correctly, you don’t get a ticket. No officer necessary. I’ve driven for three years now and have only gotten standard toll payment tickets.

There should be civilian control over where traffic cameras are placed, presumably by traffic engineers and data overseen by civilian departments and community review boards. But this is a more promising approach to reducing police interactions than a civilian force. Automated enforcement has been widely deployed in many nations particularly in Europe and East Asia; in both urban areas and speed cameras in the countryside. This would save lives from both police violence and general traffic violence and improve the biases in policing that the majority of Americans experience.

I also think that police should transition to using plate readers and drones when following suspects. Since Governor Gavin Newsom ordered California Highway Patrol to engage in law enforcement in Oakland’s crime-heavy sectors, the city has been besieged with dangerous chases. An Oakland man who was a teacher was killed thanks to a suspect crashing during a police chase. While I don’t blame this death on California Highway Patrol that was pursuing the reckless driver who hit the man, if someone is already reckless enough to disobey traffic laws, endangering more lives to chase them is not worth it. Oakland is now debating between letting suspects simply get away and thus be immune to traffic laws as had been the status-quo, or chasing down suspects and risking the lives of bystanders per Newsom’s new initiative.

I think there’s a third option. There’s not too much research on plate reader and drone use so if this proves to be ineffective or abusive then I’ll oppose it. But it’s been promising seeing crime suspects get away from crime scenes without deadly police chases and law enforcement in other jurisdictions catch them thanks to plate readers. Like my transit vehicle having a GPS on it, I don’t see much of a difference with my car being tracked at random spots. I’d much prefer that technology over deadly police chases.

When automated plate readers were being rolled out in Berkeley, I did privately debate with progressive activists who were mobilizing to oppose them, whom I respect. Their and the ACLU’s disposition was that vehicles should not have their whereabouts known, even at the cost of it being exceedingly difficult to track down drivers who disobey traffic laws. I think the ACLU and like-minded people think that because everything you do might have a disproportionate impact on something, nothing can be done. I think that operating a vehicle that kills 40,000 annually carries a significant moral and legal responsibility. Their opposition to traffic violation technology like red light and speed cameras, I don’t agree with.

But surveillance concerns by the ACLU and others with non-traffic violation technology like Flock are valid concerns. Data collection should be in the purview of civilian departments and police should have to get a warrant to access information. If we can’t control the data that plate reader companies are using then we should not use them. Flock cameras are proving insecure and unreliable for public rollout and I currently oppose them and agree with the ACLU’s opposition. It’s not so much the concept of the technology as the data security and sharing concerns with the current deployment.

There should be regulations against departments sharing information without request. For camera technologies where police have direct control, we should have local civilian oversight boards and regulations on use and sharing data before deployment. I would not want my police sharing plate data with immigration officers and out of state departments chasing immigrants and women seeking abortions. But this is already happening even without traffic technology, through plate readers on police vehicles, social media, and other forms of surveillance like unsecured CCTV cameras.

Automated enforcement is still no substitute for traffic engineering. My experience in Japan has shown me a much better society where roads seldom exceed more than two or three lanes in dense urban areas, and how effective that is at curbing deadly driving.

But something that frustrated me about the Defund the Police period is seeing the police as a uniquely violent institution, and not a reflection of American culture. The American people and police are just more fatal compared to OECD nations, entirely because of gun proliferation. Gun control — primarily handguns — should be an essential component of any activist campaign to reduce police violence. (And many police intervention groups in high-violence neighborhoods do things like gun buybacks so this is not unheard of.)

British police killed two people last year; American police killed 1,365.

It’s the guns, stupid.

Any American who sees a police officer in Britain or Japan is astonished by how demilitarized and civil they are compared to the United States. Even New York City police seem far less trigger happy and frightened by conflict than almost anywhere else in the U.S. due to the city’s restrictive gun control. Even though Britain has a terrible knife-crime problem, they don’t have the guns and high homicide rates to justify mass militarization of their police.

The fact that liberals have completely lost on gun control since President Obama wept over the Sandy Hook massacre to the extent that gun control is not even a debate issue for presidential elections anymore concedes that America is a uniquely violent nation. Such foundational concessions make it impractical to disarm police, reduce police aggression and engage in ideological concepts of anarchism and non-authoritative power structures as we briefly did in 2020.

Replacing wellness checks and other lower-risk tasks with non-police officers to increase personnel and increase safety is good. There’s a fiscal case for civilian enforcement in the U.S. since public workers are paid significantly less than urban police officers. Doing basic things like being visible to discourage harassment, anti-social behavior and minor fights in places with high foot traffic are good. Having police collecting six figure salaries doing traffic enforcement when technology and road engineering can do it contributes to America’s abysmally high unsolved criminal cases.

The broader police abolitionist argument that many social issues should be invested in rather than reacted to with police is correct, however it didn’t make sense to focus on city general funds rather than the role of the federal government in subsidizing services like healthcare. Or the states’ abdication of funding law enforcement and education for prisons, resulting in greater local burdens which perhaps explains why people were so focused on local municipal general funds. (Great article on this funding problem BTW).

If we really want to not live in a country where people are frightened by police, we cannot live in a country where people are frightened by each other. I don’t know how you can have a high trust, peaceful society when there are more guns than people in this nation. Everything seems derivative of that issue and it’s very depressing that decentralized anarchism seemed more realistic than reducing gun proliferation in 2020.

My biggest takeaway is we need gun abolition: from the streets to the government. Abolish the gun. What a safer nation we would be if the death button wasn’t in the hands of millions and authority.

—

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article represent only myself. It does not represent the opinions of my employer or any organization, university and institution I’m affiliated with or my employer is affiliated with. It does not represent the opinions of any public commission I sit on. I’m not making any formal endorsements.

—

California has a major slate of housing law that’ll significantly push housing production this session and dramatically transform the state. There are three major proposed bills that have caught my eye. The first is Senate Bill 79, authored by state senator Scott Wiener (D - San Francisco), which is his fourth attempt at a transit-upzoning bill. SB 79 would re-zone areas around “high quality” transit stops, primarily rail stations, to allow for 6 - 7 story apartments within a quarter-mile of a major transit stations and 4 - 6 stories within a half-mile. The bill also removes a legal constraint on public transit agencies by allowing them to develop high-density housing and commercial properties on their public property with few restrictions. This is how East Asian countries approach mass transportation and it would provide alternative revenue for public transit by not leaving them dependent on fares and taxes for operations exclusively.

The other notable bill is Senate Bill 607, also authored by Wiener, which functionally exempts nearly all infill sites (meaning areas already developed) from CEQA lawsuits where the proposed project is housing, public transit and green energy related. By default, it declares these things in infill locations as inherently a climate and environmental good. Usage of CEQA to delay housing, green energy and transportation projects by NIMBYs in California was repeatedly cited in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” book. CEQA is also used by the Building Trades to negotiate with non-profit and for-profit developers to use their labor or risk litigation. The last bill is Assembly Bill 647, authored by Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks (D - Oakland) and Mark González ( D - Los Angeles), which would legalize 2-8 unit homes on every owner-occupied parcel in California with 1 low income unit required. This bill will not be at the Senate Housing committee hearing on Tuesday since it’s an Assembly bill, but its significance is worth putting on your radar.

Last week, an op-ed at the San Francisco Chronicle started a lot of discussion over state senator Aisha Wahab, representing the Hayward - Fremont - San Jose area, being appointed chair of the powerful Senate Housing committee. The opinion piece highlighted how Wahab made comments critical of the state’s growing support for housing streamlining and upzoning. Among these comments were that California should look at reducing demand and not just encouraging housing supply, and that laws which ended parking mandates at transit-oriented developments went too far. She made these comments at the first committee hearing and then published them on Instagram.

Aisha Wahab is pretty smart and I don’t think she’s a housing skeptic as pro-growth advocates are worried about. Her comments are rather mixed and it seems like she’s trying to channel multiple sides of the housing argument, although she’ll definitely need to see support especially from Alameda and Santa Clara county supporters of SB 79 and 607. Wahab was endorsed by urbanist groups for state senate but she’s allied with anti-poverty legal groups who do not like the state’s direction in reducing the cost of home construction and streamlining for ideological reasons. I don’t know how much of her statements are highlighting those group’s opinions versus her beliefs on housing. It’s worth noting that she did vote in favor of the major permit streamlining bill SB 423.

The Housing Committee this year is staffed by a decent amount of folks with quite mixed views on housing. These appointments were done by Mike McGuire (D - Marin and Sonoma County). In the battle for SB 79’s earliest predecessor, Mike McGuire had a provision inserted that functionally exempted his home of Marin County from being affected by the upzonings, which likely contributed to the bill’s failure.

The prospects of these ambitious housing laws making it through the Housing Committee have gotten a bit grim in light of the committee staff report on SB 79. The staff report essentially denigrates both the law and the broader concept of transit-oriented development. Here’s an example excerpt of their diagnosis on SB 79:

The committee may wish to consider the implications of granting significant benefits to developers which could result in few, if any, new affordable housing units.

Considering SB 79 just defaults to local inclusionary requirements for which most expensive cities already have high percentages of affordable units mandated, this is remarkably loaded language by staff. The consultants repeat many quotations from SB 79 opposing advocacy groups disapproving of no statewide affordability requirements on top of local ones, but cite no studies on how effective those requirements are at building subsidized housing. The only research they quote is an unstated organization’s misunderstanding of Karen Chapple’s study on migration patterns, implying affordability mandates in market-rate complexes alleviate displacement pressure when the study does not support that claim.

The consultants wrote zero positive insights about transit oriented development or S.B. 79 from the bill’s many supporters and ignored the bulk of housing research on these issues. Bill analysis reports are written by consultants who get some implied directional guidance on what to prioritize by who chairs the committee. The same consultants wrote a considerably more positive report on commercial corridor upzoning in 2022 because the Assembly Housing Committee chair wrote the bill. The staff report may indicate Wahab’s issues with SB 79 and this probably means that absent major outcry from the bills supporters (i.e. the Carpenters Union, YIMBY groups, student groups, transit groups, and people calling in), SB 79 is liable to get snuffed or challenged in committee.

Death by committee was the fate of SB 79’s predecessor, SB 50, when Assembly Appropriations chair Anthony Portantino unapologetically refused to hold a vote on it in 2019. Portantino had alternatively proposed to create car license plates with “housing crisis awareness” on them. Although California’s political zeitgeist was much more frightened by upzoning back then compared to today, license plates slogans over actual proposals was still so baffling to reporters and commentators that Portantino’s legacy is mostly remembered on how he killed SB 50.

The situation in Sacramento today is much different than in 2019. The state has begun passing streamlining laws and zoning reforms with no political blowback as was once feared. After Trump’s 2024 victory, Democrats both at the state and federal level are looking at the grim projections of California’s housing shortage ceding more population to red states, who are rapidly out-building California in homes, which will cause the Democrats to be locked out of the presidency after 2030. This and the devastating fires in Los Angeles explains why so many major housing bills have been introduced this session, and why the stakes are high in the Housing Committee hearing on Tuesday.

With national pressure on California, state legislators are beginning to take this situation seriously and that’s reflected by AB 647, the 8-unit statewide law. What’s unique about this law is that co-authoring it with zoning trailblazer Buffy Wicks (D - Oakland) is Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez (D - Los Angeles), who is the former chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party and a former presidential elector of the Electoral College. His co-authoring is a major deal since historically Los Angeles legislators are the most antagonistic to state housing laws due to L.A.’s cultural disposition for single-family suburbanism. Gonzalez’s authoring of such a major law means L.A. legislators are probably thawing in favor of more home construction after years of fighting against the more pro-growth Bay Area represenatives.

I suspect L.A.’s evolution is fueled not only by the overall cultural evolution on housing but the devastating L.A. fires that have wiped out thousands of single-family and apartment housing units, putting an unbelievable squeeze on greater L.A.’s housing market. Los Angeles County is reaching San Francisco and Manhattan prices despite having a median household income of about $87,000. The fact that only 4 (four) housing permits have been issued in Pacific Palisades since the fires has drawn global ridicule and Angeleno legislators are upset.

The opposition of Senate Bill 79 is are the same groups who usually oppose zoning reform, with the only surprise being the Nonprofit Housing Association of Northern California, the lobby group for low income housing developers. Low income housing developers are ordinarily supportive of upzoning laws. Their basis for opposition appears to be that SB 79 allows transit agencies to build commercial and market-rate apartments on public transit property without having to first prioritize low-income housing.

SB 79 does this because it’s based off East Asian transit systems, such as Japan Railway (JR) or Hong Kong MTR, which develop housing and commercial on station property and funnel that revenue into transit operations. These are the world’s most successful and frequent mass transit agencies but this is quite a foreign concept to Californians as indicated by the staff report’s bewilderment at why SB 79 doesn’t mandate transit property for subsidized housing. Subsidized housing pays no property tax and generates no significant revenue for public transit agencies. (I already talked about this though.) The nonprofit housers’ concerns that they would be priced out by market-rate developers doesn’t make much sense because public transit agencies aren’t selling their land and many of them like Muni, BART and LA Metro already require low income housing on their properties.

It’s possible SB 79 could be amended to mandate some statewide affordability requirement for public transit properties. That would make the nonprofit housers happy and put them in the support column. This could reduce the fiscal solvency of public transit agencies, but at this point most transit agencies already prioritize subsidized housing on their properties first and it doesn’t proclude revenue generating projects alongside subsidized housing. What should be avoided is a statewide inclusionary requirement for all projections within a half-mile radius that fails to consider different markets and their existing affordability mandates. Much like tariffs, blanket high taxes on housing usually results in nothing getting built except higher prices for the consumers.

There isn’t much or any upside in the Housing Committee killing or poison pilling these laws, especially if a lot of media and the public is paying attention on Tuesday. If they don’t advance the bill out of committee then not only will they get backlash in California but throughout the nation. The “Abundance Movement” which has gone viral among Democrats nationally has primarily focused on California’s housing shortage as the worst shortcomings of the American liberal project. Governor Gavin Newsom and his presidential ambitions has been confronted over his state’s inability to build homes and he’ll look pretty bad if these bills die on his watch. More focus should be on Governor Newsom whose happy to concede California’s greatest issue is housing, yet has stayed out of endorsing any legislation with his powerful bully pulpit.

If SB 79 or other major housing laws does get neutered on Tuesday it’s definitely because a majority of the Housing Committee personally wanted it and not because of political pressure by their constituents. I’m sure she’s getting pressure but there’s just no political upside to Senate Housing chair Aisha Wahab killing these bills. Political groups in Southern Alameda County and the South Bay which Wahab represents just don’t care about state zoning reform or are supportive. I say that as a former Hayward and Fremont resident. A candidate just ran against rolling back high-density housing in Fremont and barely won a single precinct. Hayward city council has been advancing transit-oriented housing without controversy and developed its two BART station areas decades before most Bay Area cities did. Santa Clara’s transit agency is redeveloping all the future BART stations for high density housing and would benefit from SB 79 upzoning around their struggling light-rail lines deep in San Jose suburbs.

Assemblymember Alex Lee the youngest socialist assemblymember representing Fremont/North San Jose has consistently wanted a major transit upzoning bill. Liz Ortega of Hayward was endorsed by California YIMBY and got equal support in donations from both the pro-streamlining Carpenters Union and the anti-streamlining State Building Trades. Congressman Ro Khanna of the South Bay Area got on Twitter last week asking Aisha Wahab to pass SB 79 this Tuesday. Ironically, the authors of these major zoning bills like Scott Wiener (D - San Francisco), Buffy Wicks (D - Oakland/Berkeley) and Mark Gonzalez (D - Central L.A. City / Boyle Heights/ Koreatown etc.) all live in districts where the housing politics is way more polarized than the committee chair’s.

So will California make 2025 the year for big housing reform and reverse their doomed presidential electoral map? We’ll find out on Tuesday and you can watch here. I think Wahab’s committee will advance most of these bills including SB 79, however the bills might be transformed dramatically in committee. The biggest obstacle to these bills is the Building Trade’s opposition to streamlining, as many Housing Committee members won their elections with strong endorsements by the Trades.

If you have an opinion on SB 79 or 607, you can call or message the Senate Housing Committee yourself. For AB 647, you can contact the Assembly Housing Committee although chair Matt Haney (D - San Francisco) is very much an pro-housing legislator. Considering how evenly stacked the Support and Opposition list is, many members will probably swing based on who contacts them the most on Monday (i.e. the day this is published) and Tuesday.