The big takeaway in Berkeley’s 2024 election(s), from Substacks to the S.F. Chronicle, has been that the “YIMBYs have won.” Berkeley, once the

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2024-12-24 23:30:05

The big takeaway in Berkeley’s 2024 election(s), from Substacks to the S.F. Chronicle, has been that the “YIMBYs have won.” Berkeley, once the holy grail of NIMBYism, has elected an unapologetic pro-upzoning newcomer mayor over two longtime critics of housing development, a 100% pro-density housing council, and the success of an anti-car urbanist ballot referendum. In general, this is true, but I want to delve into the complexity of the local situation so we can better appreciate this moment.

Ten years ago, the city council was mostly composed of members skeptical or outright hostile to new housing and the idea that supply was a remedy to the housing crisis. In 2014, when I first went to a public meeting on housing and recommended that we build more, I was jeered, booed, and largely alone. Today, every member of Berkeley City Council won their elections explicitly in support of the ideas very few people promoted a decade ago — that the city must embrace market and publicly-subsidized housing construction, build up and not outwards and to densify transit corridors.

Mayor Jesse Arreguin, now headed to State Senate, is a microcosm of the city’s changes. In the early 2010s, councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Arreguin were chief opponents against the downtown plan which yielded all these new apartment homes. Despite revisionist claims that Arreguin betrayed his voter base by supporting new housing after his victory, Arreguin was NIMBY but slowly moving away until about 2019 or 2020 when he officially flipped. After his 2016 victory the council promptly killed a senior housing complex, saddled a housing tower with requirements intended to make it unfeasible, was lukewarm on mixed-income housing at the BART stations and voted down a quadplex in South Berkeley over lack of parking. Kate Harrison won her election and promptly tried to downzone duplexes out of West Berkeley and joined with the rest of the council in trying to landmark a view from an apartment building. This was just the culture back then, as longtime Berkeley reporter Frances Dinkelspiel remarked to me earlier this year how astonished she was recalling the old days and how much Berkeley now uncontroversially supports dense housing.