The Biggest Fight Emeryville Residents Are Ignorant of But Should Know About

 'YIMBY California' and 'Our Neighborhood Voices' Battle It Out For Control Over Emeryville

The Battle is Unheard For Most Emeryville Residents

It Should Be Loud

No Coincidence The Fight Is Quiet

News Analysis

The most fateful and far reaching story in Emeryville not currently being told is the quiet but tenacious battle for Emeryville’s housing policy fought between two outside organizations: YIMBY California and Our Neighborhood Voices.  The internecine battle between two disparate visions of the public’s role in public policy has been taken up by our City Council members serving as proxies.  Council member Kalimah Priforce serves as the dissenting voice representing the democratically focused grassroots push for a ballot initiative supportive of local housing policy advanced by the group Our Neighborhood Voices (ONV) versus the other Council members who are more or less represented by the corporate dark money funded lobbying Goliath, YIMBY California.  Notably, the YIMBY side (Yes In My Backyard) is trying to forward anti-democratic government housing deregulation and also to stop the ONV ballot initiative slated for November 2024.

YIMBY, flush with billionaire money and fronted by the authoritative lobbying giant YIMBY California, has been working to derail local democracy for housing policy using several strategically placed California legislators in its orbit, notably State Senator Scott Weiner.  Here in Emeryville, YIMBY California has two agents on our City Council, Mayor John Bauters and Vice Mayor Courtney Welch, both of whom receive support from the organization.  A public records search revealed Vice Mayor Welch received $2000 cash outright from YIMBY California, drawn from its ‘victory fund’.  

In a controversial action and illustrative of the clout YIMBY California now has in our City Council chambers, Mayor Bauters and Vice Mayor Welch led a drive to appoint Sacramento’s YIMBY California Policy Director and new Emeryville resident Ned Resnikoff to our Housing Committee.   Perhaps no single action surpasses that in terms of showing how our City Hall has been rolled by an outside business lobbying organization.  

Housing Committee Appointee
Ned Resnikoff
YIMBY California's Policy Director
With the Council majority's help
he leapfrogged onto our Housing
Committee after moving to Emeryville
only two months earlier.

The YIMBY organization seeks to take away our own democratically crafted housing policy and override our General Plan.  Specifically, we are supposed to be getting parks in trade for all the new housing developers are building.  But because that would cut into the profit margin of developers, Mayor Bauters, Vice Mayor Welch and YIMBY California want to make it so developers will be off the hook and the people left without a green respite from all the massive density coming Emeryville's way.  Oblivious to hubris, Mayor Bauters felt so strongly that we should override our General Plan and let developers off the hook for providing park space, he came right out and said it at a City Council meeting.

Our General Plan protects us against an onslaught of rental only housing, the most profitable kind of housing development to build.  The General Plan provides that Emeryville build ownership housing over rental housing.  And so YIMBY and their City Council sycophants want to override our General Plan to help the developers maximize their profits by building nothing but rental housing towers.  Families build wealth when they own their own homes, especially people of color and working class families.  This fact has been shown to be not impressive to the City Council majority despite our General Plan's recognition of this basic principle.

Also left unsaid by the YIMBY supporters on the City Council is the inconvenient truth that Emeryville doesn't need more housing (affordable housing excepted).  Whereas the greater Bay Area region does in fact need more housing, here in Emeryville, we have been using defacto YIMBY policy here for more than a decade, even before YIMBY was born.  The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), of which Emeryville is a dues paying member, conducts jobs/housing needs assessments every few years and every time, unlike our neighboring cities, Emeryville is shown to supply more than 100% of ABAG recommended housing.

Brentwood City Council member
Jovita Mendoza
She helped form Our Neighborhood Voices.
Ms Mendoza is concerned for Emeryville
and its YIMBY driven trajectory.

For its part, YIMBY supporters, fearing popular pushback over the lopsided billionaire corporate funded bully image, have begun to steal progressive language to try to confuse voters.  Some have expressed a ‘supply and demand’ argument to claim housing will become more affordable if we just give in to developer’s demands to take over municipal housing policy.  But Our Neighborhood Voices backer Jovita Mendoza cautions against buying all the YIMBY talk of trickle down hosing affordability, “Housing affordability has become a sound bite that Sacramento pretends to care about. Since 2016 there have been over 100 bills that have made housing more expensive and gentrified our POC and low income families she told the Tattler.  Ms Mendoza, a Brentwood City Council member, says she has been following what YIMBY California has been doing in Emeryville with interest.  She said Emeryville residents should be aware of what is happening [here] and they should “take back control over land use and let democracy come first” adding, “That is exactly what the Our Neighborhood Voices initiative will do”.

The local democracy movement, a popular grassroots presence in California, seeks to protect local housing policy by allowing cities to continue to decide for themselves what’s best.  The movement is using Our Neighborhood Voices to forward the ballot initiative process to stop the YIMBY California money juggernaut; people power versus corporate power.  A supporter of local democracy, City Councilman Priforce told the Tattler, "YIMBYism and their real estate lobby-backed gentrification strips away people-powered efforts to create real affordable housing rather than trickle-down luxury market-rate rentals. Restoring that power back into the hands of neighborhoods that can hold their local officials accountable is Local Democracy - taxation with authentic representation”.  Councilwoman Mendoza concurred, “There should be no more giveaways to campaign donors at the expense of the people, she said.  “Let’s stop the gentrification that is occurring as we speak in areas like where I grew up in Oakland and Emeryville and let people build the types of cities they want to live in, she added.

Mayor John Bauters and Emeryville Housing Committeeman Ned Resnikoff were contacted for this story but they both refused to comment.

Emeryville Housing Autonomy Confounded by the Advancement of a Paid Sacramento Lobbyist to Council Committee

The City Council Appoints a Paid YIMBY Lobbyist to the Housing Committee

Corporate Developers Now in Direct Control of the Levers of Power at City Hall

The Emeryville City Council Wednesday appointed a professional influence peddler for California YIMBY, a Sacramento based corporate real estate developer supported lobbying organization, to the Emeryville Housing Committee.  The Council appointee elevated to the Committee, Ned Resnikoff, is employed as the Policy Director for California YIMBY and has lived in Emeryville just two months.  The pick is a first for the Emeryville City Council who have so far resisted appointing a paid lobbyist to any Council committees.

New Emeryville Housing Committee member
Ned Resnikoff
He says 'best practices' for housing policy is to 
remove regulation for developers.  The implication
being that benefit for average people will
then trickle down, Ronald Reagan style.

Council member Kalimah Priforce strenuously pushed back against the appointment in what Councilwoman Sukhdeep Kaur pejoratively called an “outburst”.  As such, Mr Priforce was the lone dissenting voice among his colleagues against the controversial pick.

The vote elevating Mr Resnikoff, 4-1 (Priforce dissenting), raised the specter of a new paradigm in Emeryville of Council committee appointees being actual paid corporate lobbyists in the bailiwick of the business of the committee.  

Up until Wednesday, many if not most committee appointees have been local community members shown to be in the thrall of the business community but never in modern Emeryville history has there been such a blatant abdication of the City’s autonomy over to purely corporate interests.  

It was an action that drew rebuke from Mr Priforce, "How does a lobbyist even survive the vetting process through the Housing Committee he said.  “Should a  member of the NRA [gun lobbying organization] sit on the Public Safety Committee, he further inquired of his colleagues rhetorically.  The Councilman castigated the YIMBY employee for his housing policies as working against the interests of Black and Brown people, “You don’t care if [marginalized] people are gentrified out of their communities, he said.

Relying on a publicly offered argument of 'trickle down' democratic benefit, YIMBY's pro-developer policies have been shown to work in the real world as a gentrifying force against poor people in their communities, all the heated countering rhetoric from YIMBY aside.

Mayor Bauters dropped the gavel on Council member Priforce calling his speech “out of order” for disrespecting a "constituent" even though Mr Bauters himself is fond of doing precisely that from the dais, it should be noted.  

Council member Kalimah Priforce
"Emeryville's reputation of being a rotten city is
something we have tried to grow away from. 
But some of the rotten is still here in
how we chose to do things, in who
we select for our committees".

The YIMBY organization (Yes In My Back Yard) is a nation wide pro-housing developer lobbying organization and California YIMBY is the largest cell within the organization.  Their aim is to protect developer’s profit margins to get them to build more housing and they do so at the expense of local autonomy.  YIMBY pushes back against anything that would impinge on corporate profits including the building of more parks as the Emeryville General Plan calls for or even to deliver more ownership housing.  Developers can make more profit by building rental only housing and so that’s what YIMBY uses its power in the service of.  Emeryville has in recent years morphed from a mostly home ownership city into a mostly rental city regardless of Emeryville’s General Plan and its direction to increase the ratio of ownership housing.

The Mayor and Vice Mayor have forged ahead recently to deliver Emeryville to YIMBY, much to the delight of the Sacramento based lobbying organization.  California YIMBY, showing their appreciation, elevated Mr Bauters and Vice Mayor Courtney Welch to their ‘developer shill’ bracket  because of the pro-corporate housing deference the two have shown.  

The elevation of the Director of Policy for YIMBY to our Housing Committee sends a signal that the Council now pays total deference to the Sacramento organization, further bolstering the claim from the San Fransisco Chronicle that Emeryville is "the most YIMBY city in the state".

The Tattler reached out to Mayor John Bauters for this story but he refused to answer any questions.

The applicant's innocuous statement begins at 44:10 (below) but the fireworks start at 50:16.