By Soumya Karlamangla, THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 24, 2025
In a hotel meeting room two blocks from the beach, the California Coastal Commission might as well have written “SOS” in the sand.
“We are under complete assault,” said Susan Lowenberg, a member of the coast preservation commission, which was born in the 1970s from the same movement that gave rise to Earth Day and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “We need help.”
By Jessica Flores, Reporter
Feb 12, 2025
As day laborers go into hiding, labor experts say the workforce withdrawal could exacerbate the labor shortage and worsen the housing crisis. Shirley Pablo and Annia Lopez walked down East 12th Street in Oakland on a cold Wednesday morning, each pulling a foldable wagon filled with oranges, water bottles, granola bars, disposable face masks and “red cards” listing a person’s constitutional rights. The outreach workers approached four men chatting on the sidewalk near the intersection.
Housing Is A Human Right
January 31, 2025
For the 2024 election, Big Real Estate raised a whopping total of $171.6 million to kill Proposition 33 and pass Proposition 34 in California. Several of the top contributors are the country’s largest corporate landlords. Through its multi-million-dollar misinformation campaigns, the real estate industry was able to keep statewide rent control restrictions intact and push through an initiative to damage AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s housing advocacy work in California.
By KATE TALERICO
UPDATED: January 2, 2025
Developers who have reaped millions of dollars from an affordable housing program for middle-income renters with sometimes little-to-no discounts from market rents have spent hundreds of thousands on lobbying and campaign donations in recent years in a bid to keep lawmakers from imposing regulations. The expenditures represent a fraction of the $32 million the California real estate industry as a whole spent on lobbying the state legislature and the executive branch in the past three years.
By DAVID NEWMAN
December 23, 2024
There is a startling contradiction at the heart of Bay Area politics. On the one hand, the Bay Area is an unabashed “blue” stronghold, defining itself by its support for diversity and tolerance. Yet its resistance to building new homes cuts against these values. Experts have proven that suppressing housing is fundamentally regressive, massively increasing segregation, per-capita carbon emissions and rents. The opposition to development is kneecapping the Democratic Party on a national level.
By Zelda Bronstein
December 19, 2024
Berkeley’s new mayor, education consultant Adena Ishii, is a Yimby with scant experience in the town’s governance and politics. To be sure, Berkeley has had a Yimby mayor for most of the past eight years. But Jesse Arreguín’s Yimbyism was an acquired taste. He was first elected mayor in 2016 on an anti-Yimby platform. Shortly after taking office, he jumped onto the antidemocratic, “pro-housing” bandwagon.
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