Posts related to YIMBY

2021 ADEM Election step-by-step guide

Voting in the ADEM election will let you amplify your vote power by 100x. ADEM sets the direction of the Democratic Party and controls who earns the Democratic Party endorsement for State Assembly, State Senate, US House, and US Senate.

Voters trust and vote with the Democratic Party endorsements. The endorsements can easily create a 12% vote margin (about 62,000 votes) in these high-stakes elections that determine state and national policy.

You must register for ADEMs by January 11, 2021, and some of the prerequisite steps can take several days, so DO THIS NOW!

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It’s time to legalize building

If you want to build the future, then we first have to rebuild our institutions.

Marc Andreessen is right: it’s time to build. The majority of us really want to live in a society with adequate housing, incredible medical technology, beautiful high rises and clean, fast, and reliable transit systems. So why don’t we have it? It’s not as simple as just not building, it’s that our institutions don’t allow us to build.

Ezra Klein sums it up well in Why We Can’t Build:

The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.

While we in the tech industry have been focused on building internet technology, launching new industries, and building a society capable of responding to the coronavirus lockdown with remote work, NIMBYs and other rent-seekers have made a bright future illegal. They’ve captured our cities and live off the rent. Their philosophy is to reject growth at every opportunity for the sake of their suburban aesthetic and their million-dollar Eichlers. To complain, when a scrappy neighbor starts a company in their garage, about the impact it could have on local street parking. To use the full power of the state to stop a new apartment complex or a new factory or to kill a startup.

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San Francisco Supervisors are eating the golden goose

Tired of innumerate elected officials mismanaging the city? Support my campaign for Democratic County Central Committee.

San Francisco just passed an increase to the fees on new office construction and it’s being sold as “$400 million for affordable housing.” In fact, of the $400 million, only $154 million is new revenue, and it’s spread out over20 years. That works out to only $8 million per year in new revenue (or about 30 units of subsidized housing1).

This comes at a cost of $300 million to GDP and over 1000 jobs lost over 20 years, and higher rents for nonprofits and businesses. We can build more low-income affordable housing by lowering barriers instead of killing the economy that employs San Franciscans and funds government services.

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November 2019 San Francisco Voting Guide

I will use my San Francisco Voting Framework to give you recommendations for the November 2019 election. The numbers in (parenthesis) are the voting principles I’m applying to my endorsement.

If you think we need this kind of rigorous analysis in the Democratic Party, then please support me: Steven Buss for Democratic County Central Committee.

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No on Kim

Why Jane Kim shouldn’t be our next mayor

I think that the only candidate that deserves your vote is London Breed. She is good on housing and is running a positive campaign based on uniting San Francisco. She is smart, capable, has good policy advisers, and is the only candidate who will work with YIMBYs to build more housing.

Tell your friends: Don’t vote for Jane Kim. I prefer London Breed, but Mark Leno would be a fine alternative. Here’s why Jane Kim will be a disaster for our city:

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