‘There Goes The Neighborhood’ Doesn’t Mean What Barbara Bry Thinks It Does
San Diego’s next mayor will be one of two Democrats running on the November ballot; Assemblyman Todd Gloria or City Council member Barbara Bry. Republicans were shut out of the contest after Councilmember Scott Sherman placed third in the March primary.
Gloria has enemies, both liberal and conservative, stemming from his years on the City Council and his authorship of far-reaching legislation in Sacramento. (And I’ll come back to him in the next few weeks.)
Today’s story concerns his competitor. Barbara Bry’s name is blowing up Twitter this morning, thanks to a campaign email she sent out with the heading “There Goes the Neighborhood.”
Her campaign has taken a distinctly rightward turn, and her opposition to the “Sacramento YIMBY’s” is front and center.
My opponent’s “solution” to the affordable housing problem is to support Sacramento's “YIMBY” movement (Yes In My Backyard). He and his YIMBY allies want to transfer power and control over the future of your home and our neighborhoods to Sacramento politicians, high-rise developers and greedy Silicon Valley speculators.
When a (formerly, now calls himself ‘recovering’) Republican political consultant with no skin in the game calls out a campaign talking point as being racist, Bry might want to listen.
https://twitter.com/RyanClumpner/status/1281410787882397697?s=20
He goes on to say:
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of housing policy should instinctively understand what that phrase means and how it’s used. It’s almost inconceivable that a major candidate for mayor in a top 10 city wouldn’t understand.
In fact, it is inconceivable. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s running a campaign based on preserving the racially segregated neighborhoods that have existed in San Diego since they were built with racial covenants & deed restrictions from the 1920s-60s.
She won’t come right out and say that though. She’ll say this is the wrong place for affordable housing, or the wrong time for this project, or she’s concerned about neighborhood character.
Or, “There goes the the neighborhood.”
Democratic activist Molly Beane responded to the email with an open letter thread explaining to Bry just how bad an idea this was:
THREAD: An open letter to @barbarabryd1 @bry4sd (cc: @ToddGloria). Emailed to her in response to her recent campaign email “There goes the neighborhood?”
I have to say, I am extremely disappointed in this email & in your policy positions on housing.
I do hope you will read this and reflect on it, as it constitutes a perspective that you may not be regularly exposed to. Also, I once supported you & looked up to you when you ran for council.
Exclusionary housing is racist and classist. There is no other way around it.
Single-family zoning, arbitrary height limits, & property tax laws have contributed to exorbitant housing costs in this city. It also has a generational implication for those of us who did not grow up with wealthy parents.
Barbara, I am 35 years old and am nowhere close to being able to purchase a home & can barely afford the cost of rent even though my small business generates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in sales.
I graduated college in 2007, right before the economic collapse. This means that my wages were neutered.& I had to work harder and longer to make ends meet. I am a first gen college graduate. My family was poor by most measures but my parents were able to house us adequately with their modest incomes. That is no longer true today…
I have a decorated, award-winning career, but despite this hustle and “pulling myself up by my bootstraps,” I live in a shitty one-bedroom apartment that takes a large chunk of my income.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this but you should read it. 44% of millennials are considering leaving the area.
That is not only a huge brain drain that impacts the economic prosperity of our region but also means that your supporters’ kids and grandkids may be priced out of the city they grew up in.
Those who are more concerned with “preserving the character of the neighborhood” (coded language) are a small but vocal minority. And the reality is, this view is part of what is pricing folks like me out of homes...additionally, it is the reason why so many people in this city are forced to live in their cars. Ironically, this is also the same group that turns up their nose to the homeless...
Given this moment we’re in where equity is on all of our minds, you have to understand that your support of these issues is not popular or practical.
More housing (whether considered affordable or not) & density drive down costs for ppl like me. Infill housing streamlines commuting for many &has positive enviro impacts. Your policy positions uphold the status quo & negatively impact the poor and marginalized communities.
It is incredibly insulting to assert that a YIMBY like me is “radical” because I simply want a shot of owning a home one day after all my hard work. I *literally* just downsized to a more affordable apartment to save money.
While you and your supporters live comfortable lives in once-affordable single homes, the rest of us are struggling.
Needless to say, I will be fiercely advocating to elect your opponent @ToddGloria because the future of San Diego depends on his victory.
Candidate Bry’s website couches her position on housing issues by saying she is the candidate willing to stand up to “Sacramento politicians, and the investors behind them, [who] keep trying to end single-family zoning and take away local control of their neighborhoods.“
A New York Times article about moves to increase density in some cities, points out the class bias built-in to current zoning schemes:
Cities have typically prioritized single-family homeowners above other groups, with the old belief that dense housing hurts their property values, said Andrew Whittemore, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Evidence supporting that belief is mixed, but Mr. Whittemore suggests it’s the wrong thing to focus on.
“Why is it the job of a government to see that a housing unit accumulates as much value as possible?” he said. “I think the purpose of zoning is to prevent harm. Planners shouldn’t be wealth managers. But they effectively are in every municipality in the country.”
The “end single family zoning” canard gets interpreted as a threat to their way of life by lots of folks for both good and bad reasons.
A Charlotte Observer op-ed succinctly explains the baked in racism:
In The Color of Law, author Richard Rothstein tells how early zoning ordinances specifically banned blacks from certain zones. The Supreme Court outlawed that in 1917, but in many cities, Rothstein writes, “To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began … to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford.”
Meanwhile, federal rules and redlining kept black families from getting mortgages, and housing developers couldn’t get financing without whites-only covenants in the deeds.
Learning that, I’m now losing any earlier, warm-fuzzy feelings for any “neighborhood character” created by zoning rooted in racial segregation.
This issue has been exploited by dishonest politicians who have made it into a “third rail” in the politics of urban development. And if there was ever a good time to disrupt that illusion, it’s now.
What is really going on in city planning reform is eliminating or severely reducing single family zoning as the default land use. And that standard is the norm in cities nationwide.
“R1” as single family zoning is often called, prevents housing development where it would be most beneficial and instead pushes development—and conflict over it—into denser, lower income neighborhoods, onto polluted commercial corridors, and into the undeveloped land outside city boundaries.
R1 has its origins in a desire to set privileged in-groups apart and “others” at bay. Its history is explicitly classist and deeply interwoven with racism, and its present form only barely conceals these origins. Changing zoning by itself will not end racism or inequality, but it can be a step in the right direction.
Changing the zoning doesn’t mean single family homes will be banned or destined for demolition. And it doesn’t mean there will be skyscrapers in La Jolla (forgetting about the coastal height limit for a moment).
It does mean that it will be easier and cheaper to build more housing without going to wildfire country to erect McMansions. “Sacramento politicians” are involved only to the extent that they realize the housing crisis in this state is real; nobody’s talking about having to fly to the capitol to get a building permit.
Finally, most of San Diego’s “villages” don’t have the density to support a truly local economy; getting in an automobile becomes the automatic choice when residents need to seek provisions or services.
If one truly favors small business growth, increasing the number of customers nearby eliminates an environmentally unfriendly barrier.
Barbara Bry is wrong in advocating for the status quo, even as she gives lip service to the ideal of building a more diverse, equitable, and climate friendly city. Her willingness to attack a generational political cause by those priced out of the housing market makes that perfectly clear.
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