Sanctuary.
Via WXXV:
Claire Neal is one of four roommates who split the $3,000 monthly rent for a one-bedroom near the Berkeley campus. She acknowledges that building apartments may eventually reduce rents. “I know taller buildings might be more efficient, but they are really not very pretty,” says Neal, a senior studying environmental sciences. “And if you are building up, you are going to tear down some things and change the neighborhood.”
Waiting at the same Starbucks near the downtown Berkeley BART station, Rahsaan Coleman, 45, also was wary of pledges to build in lower-income communities. A lifelong resident of Oakland, he said he had already seen many friends in the African-American community forced out by gentrification.
“If we build up, at what price? Who is going to live there? And is some of it Section 8?” said Coleman, who works at a nonprofit group, referring to a federal rent subsidy program. “The promises made to some sectors of the community in the past have not been kept.”
He said he had seen people forced to live on the streets, noting how many tent encampments are now packed beneath Bay Area freeway overpasses. The picture is not much different in Los Angeles, where a survey last year by the Homeless Services Authority found half of the homeless people said they were there because of eviction, foreclosure, unemployment or for “financial reasons.”
Mike Jones, 23, who works for a music company, shares a $2,200-a-month one-bedroom with his girlfriend near the Oakland-Berkeley border. He has heard the objections to new construction and adds lost views and increased shadows to the list, but said something needs to be done about high rents and long commutes. “The view might be diminished,” he said, “but that shouldn’t matter more than people matter.”[…]
Hanlon, of Yimby, called his group a growing force, saying it’s adding members even in outlying communities like Eureka, on California’s North Coast. The Yimbies say they are tired of being demonized for wanting something that approached what their parents generation had. Hanlon’s father, a postal worker, could afford to buy a home. But even with two master’s degrees, Hanlon said he is not even close to that dream.
“I would argue our generation’s inability to afford housing is not some moral failure or some lack of effort,” Hanlon said. “It’s the result of a dysfunctional system, and it’s dysfunctional because the older generation made it that way.”
He said older white homeowners are the one group in the state that doesn’t support new housing. When he goes to hearings about new development, he said, the opponents are typically “septuagenarians who just don’t want the kids living there.”
Hanlon worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Forest Service before taking on the housing cause. He acknowledges that the Yimby group he now heads receives most of its funding from Silicon Valley tech investors, who want to see more housing for their workers. He scoffs at the notion that his opinions have been bought by developers, pointing out that he is living in a cheap studio apartment in Sacramento.