SFBARF has taken a YIMBY, or “Yes in My Back Yard,” stance, predicated on the idea that more market-rate housing of all kinds, including luxury buildings, will take pressure off the market and today’s high-end apartments will eventually be affordable. This shortage of new housing not only incentivizes landlords to evict existing tenants but also forces lower-income renters to compete with the city’s highest earners.
According to SFBARF, the city’s vast tracts of low-density-zoned neighborhoods prohibit building new, taller apartment complexes with more units, which means developers focus on building high-profit units in the few high-density-zoned neighborhoods available. Golden Gates argues that the real root of San Francisco’s housing crisis is in the city’s and the state’s restrictive zoning laws. In his new book Golden Gates, New York Times journalist Conor Dougherty follows SFBARF’s path from an Oakland apartment to the state capitol as the group created a movement that “would upend California politics and help to spawn a national uprising of angry, millennial-aged renters.” Trauss, a thirty-two-year-old former teacher and “marginally employed rabble-rouser,” concluded that “the bus protestors were right to be angry about rent but were focusing on the wrong things.” Inspired nonetheless, she soon formed the San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation-an organization better known by its acronym, SFBARF-to attack the region’s housing crisis by advocating the construction of as many new units as possible. Shortly after the incident, Oakland resident Sonja Trauss read a TechCrunch essay explaining how the “vomiting anarchist” had been born out of decades of inequitable Bay Area housing policies. Demonstrating against the tech-fueled inequalities in the Bay Area, one member of the protest climbed on top and intentionally vomited down the bus’s front windshield. In April 2014, a group of protesters in Oakland blockaded a purple coach bus that was transporting Yahoo! employees to their Silicon Valley offices.
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