Council Gives Real Estate Developers Vote of Confidence

 Council Majority Votes to Support YIMBY's Plan Over City's General Plan

Red Carpet to be Rolled Out For Developers

In a remarkable show of fraternity with corporate real estate interests, the Emeryville City Council majority voted to support the hand over of California cities’s autonomous public housing policies to private developers Tuesday night.  The voting (4-1 Priforce dissenting) puts the City’s imprimatur squarely in the ‘hands off’ developers camp with its nod to near total deregulation of municipality's housing policy for the benefit of market forces.  The vote shows a Council hostile to Emeryville's General Plan and a predilection to disallow Emeryville's residents a say so as the guiding principle for its housing policy in the future.

The new housing polity was forwarded in a series of affirmative votes, officially conjoining Emeryville with developer’s wishes, each in the same 4-1 fashion; a roll back of State planning protections for residents (AB 1307), a lowering citizen’s threshold vote from 2/3rds to 55% for development projects that would cost taxpayers money on infrastructure  (ACA 1) and a bill that broadly deregulates the approval process for local municipalities, including a roll back of affordable housing construction regulation (SB 423). 

Mayor John Bauters
Emeryville's laws protecting 
housing must be "streamlined" to
protect developers.    

 

The Council explained that community safeguards protected by Emeryville’s construction approval process need to be “streamlined” because “we are not building enough housing” and lowering the voter threshold for requiring taxpayers to foot the bill for public infrastructure improvements (coming as a result of private development) from the traditional 2/3rds to 55%, is OK because “it’s still democracy”.  

The protections the Council showed animosity towards come at the expense of decades of community activism at the local and state level through changes to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the Constitution of the State of California. 

The developer and tech funded housing lobbying group YIMBY backed the votes taken by the City Council, applauding Emeryville for what they characterized as being sufficiently “pro housing”. YIMBY has been criticized by many housing equity organizations state-wide for equating its hands off developers campaigning with a lowering of the price of housing as a false narrative.  

Affordable housing advocates refer to the YIMBY model as ‘trickle down housing’, recalling the Reagan era mantra of the discredited trickle down economics that was advertised as a way to buoy up the middle class.  The idea is government provides tax cuts to wealthy people and corporations and their extra wealth will trickle down to poor people as corporations re-invest in their businesses, hiring more and wealthy people hire more servants and they stimulate the economy with their increased purchasing power.  It is an idea Emeryville is doubling down on with Tuesday’s deregulation scheme.

Councilman Kalimah Priforce
The four other Emeryville City
Council members + Dianne 
Martinez are the "YIMBY 5".

Very revealing in the bills the Council voted on is a provision that developers will not have to provide as much affordable housing as they are now.  It is an irrational part of the trickle down idea: that being the notion that more affordable housing will end up being built if we remove requirements for building affordable housing.  Notably, the four supporting Council members didn't speak to that provision.  That plus the fact that developers, freed from government regulation requiring them to build ownership housing, will not build ownership housing.  Even before the Tuesday vote, Emeryville has morphed into a mostly rental city as Council member Priforce showed us on his website. 

Council members Courtney Welch, David Mourra and Sukhdeep Kaur all followed Mayor John Bauters’ lead with the votes but Councilman Kalimah Priforce was adamant this was not a way forward towards equitable growth.  Calling the four Council members plus newly appointed Planning Commissioner, the former City Councilwoman Dianne Martinez the “YIMBY Five”, Mr Priforce told the Tattler, “I want homeowners, renters, Community Based Organizations and City officials working together for an Emeryville free from developer control.  The YIMBY Five think they know better than what the people want.  I believe in placing the power back into the people’s hands so they can determine what true affordable housing is - not this trickle down housing.”

The Most YIMBY Mayor & Vice Mayor in the Most YIMBY City in California

Emeryville's Mayor, Vice Mayor Called Out As "Developer Shills" by Local Media

Mayor John Bauters
A "developer shill".

Emeryville’s mayor and vice mayor both made the list of the biggest lovers of corporate housing
development in the greater Bay Area in the “developer shill’ bracket produced by a local rental housing lobbying group known as YIMBYLAND in an open election of its followers.   The mutual love fest between YIMBY and corporate developers and Mayor John Bauters was particularly pronounced in the fantasy football-like bracket, netting Mr Bauters a position in the quarter finals, the group announced earlier this week.

Being selected for the YIMBYLAND developer shill bracket is no small thing, and Mr Bauters as well as the vice mayor, Courtney Welch, had to throw Emeryville’s local housing control over to developers in order to compete.  

The celebration of Mr Bauters and Ms Welch by YIMBYLAND is just the latest in the tender and devotional relationship grown between these two Council members and the nation-wide developer lobbying organization known as YIMBY, a developer funded group that wants to clear the field for developers to deliver the rental housing that is the most profitable kind of housing to build.

The result of having City Hall committed to allowing large corporate developers build what they want is the transformation of Emeryville from a city of mostly home owners into a city of mostly renters.  But Emeryville citizens don’t want what YIMBY wants.  Our General Plan is unequivocal: the City Council is to deliver more ownership housing, not more rental units.  To the extent residents know what these two City Council members are doing with our housing policy is problematic for the Mayor and Vice Mayor.  In this way, Mr Bauters and Ms Welch have had to operate under the citizen radar in Emeryville.    

More Rental Apartments Than Rain

Vice Mayor Courtney Welch
A "developer shill".

The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), of which Emeryville is a dues paying member, produces its jobs/housing balance every few years and releases the number of new housing units we need.  Emeryville is famous in the Bay Area for always beating its Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) housing numbers.  Emeryville achieves it by allowing developers build so many rental only apartment towers, the kind of housing that YIMBY is lobbying for.

 This implementation period, with all the new rental apartment towers approved by the City Council, has allowed Emeryville to crush its ABAG RHNA numbers by 203%, even more than the percentage over normal rainfall in Emeryville for this year, the most in recorded history (177%).

Mayor Distances Himself From YIMBY

Emeryville has earned the accolades from YIMBY, especially since Mr Bauters was elected.  The San Francisco Chronicle in 2021 called Emeryville's City Council one of California's "most YIMBY city councils".  However, the YIMBY agenda is not what Emeryville citizens are: pro-gentrification, pro-capitalist, free market fundamentalism associated with neoliberal economic modalities.  It’s funded by real estate corporate developers, Big Tech and right wing think tanks like the Koch brothers and is popular in the Bay Area only insofar as the organization can keep the right wing attachment hidden from view.  Accordingly, neither Mayor Bauters nor Vice Mayor Welch have told Emeryville citizens the two of them had made the YIMBYLAND list of shills for developers.  Mr Bauters has not said anything about it publicly while Ms Welch made a brief mention of it on her Twitter account.  

It’s almost as if they don’t want Emeryville citizens to know about all the hard work they’ve done to help developers build so many market rate rental apartments.  The Mayor told the Tattler the list is “humorous” but he said he didn’t know why so many YIMBYLAND supporters voted for him.

Why indeed.  Perhaps Mr Mayor, it’s because corporate developers appreciate what you’ve done for them over the years and they want to show their gratitude. 

The Developer Shill Bracket
Emeryville's Mayor and Vice Mayor beat out almost every Bay Area pol when they made the 'Developer Shill Bracket'.  The Vice Mayor came out from the 'mixed-use zone' while the Mayor took up position in the 'industrial zone'.  Mayor Bauters made it to the quarter finals only to be beaten by state senator Scott Wiener who wrote SB35 which forces cities that have fallen behind their government mandated housing allotments (not Emeryville) to deregulate their housing development policies.