A Culture of Abundance: LIVE from San Francisco!

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great, but when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. This week marks our 10-week anniversary, so we're commemorating it with five very special episodes. One episode a day, all week. Happy 10-week anniversary, YIMBY Democrats for America. Today's very special episode is a first for Radio Abundance. This episode was recorded live in front of a huge audience at our Abundance Party in San Francisco. We brought together 10 leading organizations from the Abundance, YIMBY, and Democratic ecosystem in San Francisco, in California, and across America. Tonight, you'll hear from Derek Kaufman of Inclusive Abundance, Laura Foote from YIMBY Action, Jane Natoli from SF YIMBY, Mohamed Alameldin from California YIMBY, Joe Sangirardi from the San Francisco Democratic Party, Giselle Hale from Abundance. Giselle Hale from Abundance Network, Kevin Gray from Bay Area New Liberals and the Center for New Liberalism, Olga Zubashko from the United Democratic Club, and of course, your hosts, Armand Domoluski and YIMBY, Democrats for America, Executive Director Steve Boyle.

1:15 It's an abundant panel conversation, an abundance of special guests in front of an abundance of abundance-minded San Franciscans, ready to build America, defeat fascism, and unleash the era of Progressive Abundance. That's all happening here. And now, welcome to Radio Abundance Live. You're listening to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. Now let's get to the show. Please welcome your host for the evening, YIMBY Democrats for America Executive Director Steve Boyle. And to kick things off, here's Steve. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I hate these guys. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America. This is a very special episode because we are live in San Francisco at the Abundance San Francisco Happy Hour. Hey, everybody, if you are here, make yourself known. Give yourself a round of applause. Thank you so much for being here.

2:12 Thank you for fulfilling every middle-aged white man's dream of hosting a live podcast recording.

2:20 I can die happy tonight.

2:23 Yeah, I do. When people ask me why I started a podcast, I do tell them it's because I became a 36-year-old white man, and it's the law. And here we are. This is a pretty incredible event with a pretty incredible live audience. We planned this in about two weeks, and there are like 200 people here. This is pretty incredible. And the reason there are like 200 people here, well, there's a few reasons. One is because there are 10 organizations involved in this from all parts of the National California and San Francisco YIMBY Abundance and Democratic ecosystem, including the San Francisco Democratic Party, which is awesome. If you're excited that the San Francisco Democratic Party is embracing YIMBYism and Abundance, please give them a round of applause.

3:12 If you are not a fan of the Democratic Party, that's okay. Talk to me afterwards. I would like to recruit you.

3:22 I'm going to name a few other orgs with the San Francisco Democratic Party. We have YIMBY Action and their local counterpart, SF YIMBY.

3:33 We have the Center for New Liberalism's local chapter, the Bay Area New Liberals.

3:43 We have Abundance Network. We have the Housing Action Coalition. We have the United Democratic Club. We have the Breakthrough Institute.

3:57 We are YIMBY Democrats for America, and the final organization to call out, really the catalyst for this whole event, is Inclusive Abundance. And we are sitting here with founder and CEO Derek Kaufman, who came to us not long ago and said, hey, if you guys can get like 20 people for a happy hour, we'll throw a little money behind it. And now there are 10 orgs and 200 people. So, please, a ginormous round of applause. And a welcome to the stage and Radio Abundance for Inclusive Abundance's Derek Kaufman.

4:30 Thank you, Steve and Armand. It's a real pleasure to be here. And it's so incredible to see, sitting in front of me, hundreds of people who showed up for a happy hour in San Francisco. I think that Abundance has been slowly gathering momentum over the last couple of years. It started out with a lot of ideas coming from California. YIMBY groups in California, who are all represented here, are in many ways the OG of Abundance. But it's spread from there into climate-focused Abundance organizations, into innovation and progress studies organizations, into people who care about making government work better. And all of these different pieces of the community are finding each other at events like this, at events that we've done in D.C. and in New York City, at a huge conference that we had last October.

5:25 And the book that other Derek and Ezra came out with, I think, was very much the spark that has really ignited this into something that is much more powerful and profound. And it's just thrilling to see. I prepared several Derek Kaufman, Derek Thompson jokes, and they have already been taken. So, Derek, before we get to business, who are you? How did you get into this? What is Inclusive Abundance? And how did it get started? So, I came to Abundance after a 20-year career on Wall Street, where I worked at J.P. Morgan and Citadel, making bets on interest rates and currencies and mortgages. About a decade ago, I left that life and started to think about what I call policy philanthropy. So, how can you combine support for great think tanks generating ideas and connect those to public officials and their staff who are looking for ideas and organize a community of donors and supporters who are interested in both the political giving side of the equation and the public policy research support side of the equation.

6:28 So, I prototyped that model on two different projects. The first was the child tax credit and changing it so that it could reach families in poverty. This was a project that spanned 2016 to 2021 when the American Rescue Plan put this into place for a year, cutting child poverty almost in half. Here's to the child tax credit.

6:53 The other project I was excited about was thinking about the spatial inequity in our country and thinking about bringing opportunity to more places. And one of the tools that did that is this kind of wonky thing called the Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs, or Regional Tech Hubs for short, that wound up becoming law in the Chips and Science Act in 2022. And both... All right, Regional Tech Hubs. You're in San Francisco now, Derek. I love it. Both of these were abundance, but not of that name. And around the time when they became law was when Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Noah Smith and Matt Iglesias and Jerusalem Dempsis and many other thought leaders really began specking out what an abundance framework would be for solving America's problems.

7:43 And we can talk more, I think, about defining abundance later. But for me, it really resonated. And in 2023, I decided to start an organization to institutionalize and scale some of the projects that I had done in the other policy areas and created first a 501c3, which is the Inclusive Abundance Initiative. And then last year, about a year ago, a 501c4 to do lobbying and advocacy and really bringing those ideas to public officials. And we've been building the community, meeting people who are doing the work, connecting them. We've been supporting politicians in generating ideas. And we've been excited to see how much traction it's gotten. Now, we are here because Armand and I are with Yimby Democrats for America. And Yimby Democrats for America is here because Armand founded Yimby's for Harris and led a ginormous 70-plus speaker event fundraiser for Kamala Harris.

8:41 It didn't just raise about $150,000. It had more than 30,000 live viewers. We had governors, congresspeople, senators. It was very cool. And what we didn't know at the time, but as we started Radio Abundance, recently we interviewed Congressman Scott Peters, who told us that the new bipartisan congressional Yimby caucus was actually directly inspired by our work. That what we did was to identify, and by just promoting in the lead-up to the event, identify how many people in Congress were Yimbys, how many people really cared about this, that they cared about this, and that they should come together to do something about it, and that there was a mobilized and engaged constituency ready to support it. And what Congressman Scott Peters told us was that our virtual green room became a recruiting center as they started to build this.

9:32 And I bring this up because recently we launched as Yimby Democrats for America, and we launched with a fairly bold mission to defeat fascism and build America. So I was very excited about two days ago to open the news and see that there was a brand new bipartisan congressional Build America caucus. And then I was emailing back and forth with Derek, and Derek said, have you seen our news? And I said, I have seen the news. I thought they were pregnant, actually.

10:06 I didn't get that joke, but now I get it, and I'm into it.

10:12 I said, I've seen the news. What the heck do you mean, our news? And Derek, I wonder if you could tell us a little more. So as I mentioned, a lot of this project that Inclusive Abundance is interested in is organizing the people who can affect policy change and connecting them to the ideas. And after the conference in October, it became clear a logical next step would be to create a group in Congress where abundance and those kinds of ideas could be channeled to change how the country works. I had an old friend named J.D. Grome who had been the executive director of the House New Democratic Caucus, which is the largest ideological caucus in the House of Representatives. There's about 100 moderate Dems. He did that from 2012 to 2020.

10:59 And then he worked for Gina Raimondo at Commerce doing CHIPS implementation. And after that job ended, we retained him as a senior advisor to start coordinating among bipartisan members of Congress this new vehicle. And the abundance movement was clearly animating what was happening. But I think an interesting question is how we keep abundance at the federal level bipartisan. I think it's great that you guys are doing this work as you can be Democrats. And clearly, California is a very blue state where the fight within the Democratic Party for abundance or scarcity is a huge driver of what kinds of outcomes you get. But at the federal level, for anything to be durable, it's going to have to be bipartisan, especially if it's going to achieve the 60-vote threshold to get over filibuster in the Senate.

11:48 And so abundance, because of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book, is a slightly left-coded word. And at the same time, many of the principles that are sitting inside of abundance are pretty ideologically ambiguous. And there's a lot of the ideas around cutting red tape and making it easier to build that come from the classical tradition of the right. but they achieve progressive ends. And so we wanted to think about a way to make sure Republicans were eager participants in this project. And abundance caucus wasn't necessarily the way that that was going to happen.

12:25 I personally wanted to call it the Get Shit Done Caucus. And I made the case when we were sitting with the founding members of that caucus, who includes Scott Peters, who's amazing on a lot of these issues, and Jake Auchincloss, who I think you had, and obviously Representative Josh Harder, who's out in Stockton and is the chair of this caucus. And we bounced ideas around for the name. And in the end, abundance is also a word that's kind of an elite word right now. It's not a retail political word. What do we care about? We care about bringing costs down. We care about making it easier to build. And we care about U.S. national security. And Build America Caucus was a very simple, eloquent way to express those ideas. And so that's why we want that name. Although in the press release that happened in the Triangle outside of the Capitol on Thursday where 15 members spoke, Get Stuff Done was repeated by over half of them.

13:21 So I think in their minds it is the Get Stuff Done Caucus with Build America being the retail brand. You mentioned something really important, right? Which is like inclusive abundance is a non-partisan, bipartisan organization building to build those bridges and get shit done, right? And so how YIMBY Democrats for America fits in, what's exciting to us, you know, the YIMBY movement even before the abundance movement has long been proudly non-partisan and bipartisan as a way to find common ground, break out of the partisan divide and overcome NIMBYs in both parties and because there are such kick-ass organizations that are non-partisan and bipartisan like Inclusive Abundance like YIMBY Action like Abundance Network you've got it. Go, do it. And that creates a little home for us to say hey, how can we compliment you by rallying Democrats taking this message to progressives creating a home for people who are YIMBYs and Democrats and working together side-by-side with you to make this happen all over America.

14:20 Thank you. I think there are really two parallel projects that are happening here. One is how do you build an abundance faction within the Democratic Party? I think that the Democrats could use an optimistic vision about building an economic opportunity and a focus on getting shit done. When people are surveyed about which party is the get shit done party it is not the Democrats right now. And we need to change that because it's really what the country wants. So supporting organizations that are working on the left to create abundance and fight scarcity is valuable to me and valuable to everyone in this room and an important part of the project. Bridge building and when I put inclusive abundance together the goal was for the abundance actually to be inclusive I think that's like the obvious meaning but for abundance to be ideologically transcendental to be ideologically inclusive and to build bridges to the abundance Republicans who exist and they are fighting their own fight in the party right now against scarcity factions in MAGA.

15:23 And so while we see some of the scarcity on the left which can be what Ezra Klein calls the Marin County liberals what happens in some of the environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council who are the number one litigants using NEPA the National Environmental Policy Act blocking wind and solar projects so this is the left version of scarcity but on the right we see a lot of zero-sum mentality with respect to trade putting tariffs on our allies we see zero-sum thinking around science funding if you look the loan programs office in the Department of Energy which is a huge funder of all sorts of next generation electricity is potentially going to have its funding cut in the current bill so there's scarcity on the right and scarcity on the left and there's abundance on the right and there's abundance on the left and for the project to succeed federally we're going to need to get the abundance people together to do stuff so I wanted to I wanted to take a step back and talk about sort of the concept of abundance because one thing that's great about tonight is like I think there's lots of people who've read the book get it are excited by it but also at least personally but a lot of people are like I don't know what this stuff is and I was like come come please you know we're now in a moment where we talk about abundance Ezra and Derek wrote this book but what that means to like Republicans Democrats it's very different I'm curious about you especially as someone who came to like abundance stuff I think earlier than a lot of people what did it mean to you how do you define it and how do you think of the movement as a whole it's a really important question when I first met Derek Thompson he said that he was worried that abundance was a capacious word and this is why Derek Thompson has a number one New York Times bestseller and I don't it is a big word it can take on a lot of meanings and part of what's happening in the last couple of years is people are coming together to try to define it and it's really important to define the word because I actually think it's our north star to navigate out of our current polarized and dysfunctional political system fundamentally abundance is the antithesis of scarcity it is the opposite of scarcity it is fighting scarcity and in the world there's real scarcity there is a scarcity of seats in this room and there are only so many people who can get chairs if you look in Pack Heights there is a 40 foot building limit and the reason that there are not taller buildings there is not because of physics it's because of policy and so this is self-imposed scarcity this is scarcity that we have chosen to manufacture through our political system and abundance is an analytical framework rather than just a word to identify and dismantle that self-imposed scarcity and for it to be effective it needs to be more than just an analytical framework it needs to be a political movement where it unites people across the ecosystem to implement the abundance policies and remove the scarcity policies speaking of chairs you know Armand and I sat down and got to interview the economist Daryl Fairweather for Radio Abundance recently and she had a pretty incredible metaphor I thought for the housing market which was a game of musical chairs I assume everybody knows musical chairs but you have a certain amount of chairs I'm not going to explain it you have musical chairs yeah you go around the chairs there's like music and then everybody has to sit at a certain point and every round one chair goes and it gets smaller and smaller and more people lose and there's one final winner and Daryl Fairweather compared the housing market to a game of musical chairs where if you find your chair if you want you can keep it for the rest of the game and not only that but you can start removing chairs from the game so that other people can't have chairs find strategy if you want to play a game where you have one winner but we don't want to play a game where we have one winner we want to make all of us into winners and it seems like if we want to make all of us into winners we need to add more chairs so what we're going to do right now is add more chairs we have a bunch more panelists please cheer and act amused so it stalls an awkward moment while we add more chairs to the stage cheer like their houses we're going to add a bunch of chairs if you're a panelist come on up and we'll jump into our second section Derek stick around awesome all right hey just a very quick round of applause for we have done musical chairs and there are a lot of people on stage everyone's a winner all right with that please welcome my co-host of Radio Abundance Armand Domoluski you can tell that this is like a Yimby Abundance podcast because we just keep creating more space for co-hosts by the end of the evening everyone here will be on the podcast so I wanted to kick this off because this is actually very intentional for me the makeup of this and the abundance of this is that so my journey as Yimby I started on housing stuff my family were refugees who were very poor housing's very expensive it was a very easy natural fit and one thing I noticed over time in my activism is that when there were debates about climate change and clean energy a lot of the proposals that folks who were normally on my side on clean energy wanted more of it built were eerily reflective of the same problems that stopped housing in San Francisco people were like oh we should fund groups that sue clean energy projects and oppose them because that'll help get them built somehow and I saw this in transit where in transportation which has always been integral to housing from the very beginning but a lot of the same things of like well we can't build a bike lane and if like one person signs a petition and says we can't do it we've got to have a hundred people at a hearing and you don't solve problems like this with like one organization or one person or individuals you need a constellation of groups coming together fighting for different parts of this large complicated problem of abundance and so I would like to give everyone here on the panel like a chance to sort of introduce themselves say who they are and what they think like their role in abundance is and why it's so important Giselle okay hello hi thanks for having us I'm Giselle Hale I'm going to stand I want to see the people in the back of the room you matter so I I came to this I'm the former mayor of Redwood City I got into this work because my husband and I couldn't afford a place to live plain and simple and we really wanted to have a family which we now have I celebrated Mother's Day yesterday and so round of applause so housing for me was just a deeply personal need that had to be fulfilled that actually that chair's analogy was covered in my econ class in college so that's an that's an oldie but a goodie we came into this movement when my husband joined the Abundance Network so the Abundance Network is actually a three almost four year old C3 C4 it's one of the oldest actors in this space started here in San Francisco and was focused very much aligned with the book on starting where you have the root of the problem which is us which is this area Bay Area so we've been working with our chapter and organizing abundant leaders are there any abundant leaders who've gone through our program in the audience yeah lots of you that's great but we've recently expanded we really think of ourselves when you ask about the constellation we think of ourselves as the doers in the movement the activators in the movement we want to take this great agenda that these journalists have written and we want to do something with it we want to make it happen so recently we've expanded we've added an abundance professionals membership which is for people who are also doers their day jobs involve doing the work of abundance or building the abundance club at Stanford University and we're bringing them all together because so much of this work is about finding community with the other doers the other people who are doing this work and then I recently started a program called abundance electeds very near and dear to my heart because it's taking the layer of government that we often overlook the local layer of government and it is finding the people who are fighting the battles that go right with them to the grocery store aisle because that's where you get the feedback and we are supporting them we are supporting them in taking courageous votes in finding policies and in finding each other and to give you a sense of how popular this idea is and how needed it is we have soft launched so we've not even publicly announced this group we've just let our partners many of our partners invite people into it electeds they know in two months we've had over 68 members join from 23 states so we know there's a tremendous appetite and they're just so grateful to find each other and we're going to be continuing to work with them on helping them find policies that are going to drive outcomes in their community education and the support that they need to continue to do these jobs so that's a bit about the abundance network a bit about me and this is a great group of folks I just want to say these are people that we work with day in and day out both here in San Francisco but really across the country so delighted to be a part of this movement I'm also really happy the book came out because now my parents and my family understands what I do that really helped it's like now they're like God you've got the coolest job I'm like yeah mayor was cool but this is even better thanks so much thank you before Jane starts I just want to say you know it's quite a little bit of noise coming from upstairs which I'm quite pleased with because I think it's a pretty good party but rather than shush them I just want to see if we can maybe throw a better party so I want to challenge you guys and y'all out there for that and Jane you're up yeah I'm going to excite you so much by talking at you right now get ready are you excited to hear from Jane hi I am Jane Natoli I'm the San Francisco organizing director for UMB Action I came to this work through housing and like many people who've lived in San Francisco I've had the experience of trying to find a place here and this was peak awful times this was 2013 when you had to like show up with like a blood sample and offering your first born child and like all these things to get a home and I got very lucky right that's what enabled me to stay here I locked into a rent controlled one bedroom at a price that I won't tell you because you won't let me leave the room and that gave me the roots to put down and actually start to get involved so it took me a while I remember reading Burrowing Owls the day that it launched much to the chagrin of my employer I'm sure and I remember following Sonia on Twitter and being like what's going on with all of this but I didn't start to get involved really until late 2016 when a lot of people I think were in a very similar moment again a lot of people didn't know what to do after the national election and wanted to put their energy somewhere where they felt like they could actually influence things and that energy for me was local and housing was the number one issue you can try and solve all these other problems but what it comes back to is we're all just paying too much to live in San Francisco and maybe it will always be desirable I think it's a great city I think more people should be able to call it home and I think it's a moral failure that we refuse to build a five-story building because someone might get shade on their children on the playground for like ten minutes in December but that's unfortunately how we function here a lot and I've been to many hearings that have enraged me along those lines so as someone who's been in this a long time through that lens it's great to see more people coming together it's not just a housing problem we have this philosophy of saying no the constituency to say no is always there it's really easy to exist right because you're there and everything is suddenly worse after you move in like you can't change anything it was great when you moved in all change is bad right your favorite restaurant can't close you don't want your neighbors to move everything needs to stay the same right like we have a lot of this mindset that can come like we can't see the possibilities that change brings we're we're refusing to accept that our status quote is not neutral we can see that every day we can see that when we look out on the streets and we see a lot of people in need that don't have homes right just keeping things the same is having an impact right now we tried that for 50 years in California it has not worked in fact it has made all of our problems worse so that's how you know I started to realize that we needed to make this shift I would say on the housing front you know it's been slow going but we're getting there change takes longer than you wish but I do see the seeds of that as well in other areas that people are starting to realize if we want things to change maybe it's simple but not easy would be the best way to put it we know what to do but actually changing those legislators and those votes in the hearts and minds or just building a bigger constituency that says yes we want change to show up and out vote those people right these are all possible paths and I think we're finally starting to get there and that's what's really exciting me in this moment even if I don't want to pay attention to national politics sometimes I take a lot of hope from the local and the state project right now so I'm Laura Foote I am the executive director of YIMBY Action so Jane's our local organizing director for San Francisco YIMBY and we now have 67 chapters in 27 states I think is accurate oh yeah Giselle's a board member who else gets shout out you all are probably great too actually how many YIMBY Action official members are in the room okay the rest of you what's holding you back YIMBY Action dot org slash join so I I started getting involved in and there wasn't even a this right I mean I think so pre this I got a letter in the mail from a nearby homeowner who was very upset that in Noe Valley someone was going to tear down a one unit one story building and build a two unit two story building and the neighborhood needed to bind together and I was like I am working an entry level sales job and I hate you and I was trapped in a marriage that was coming to an end and my only path was to identify the next person I could move in with which was not the feminist dream I wanted to be living and I eventually did find a really great boyfriend he works in affordable housing so that's great but it is really true that the reason I'm here is because I was able to jump from one man to the next and that's sick you know and the stories my other friends every single person that I met in the first year in San Francisco is now gone every single one had to leave had to move back in with their parents and the stories that they tell themselves are ones of personal failure and I want to say to each one of them I know that pulled up that ladder of opportunity and it is now our job to rebuild that ladder of opportunity and we really can do it there's nothing stopping us it means identifying and building a constituency so elected officials can get to the heads of our parade we have to be a visible vocal parade for housing and that's what we're doing right here in this room that's what everybody in this room runs the 501c3 half of our organization the YIMBY law half I run the political activism half YIMBY action and you sort of have to be able to do all of these different parts of passing a law at the state level and then watching when a local government ignores it and being willing and excited to sue them about it to bring the courts into this being willing and able and excited to organize local constituencies to make sure that elected officials who believe that no one in their district would support these kinds of things you have to be organizing people to send in their letters of support to show up for individual housing projects to change the tone to make sure that reporters are covering the issue all of those pieces write your local op-eds we're heading in San Francisco largest up-zoning in the history of San Francisco but it hasn't passed yet and so we are going to need to make sure that our local San Francisco board of supervisors knows that these ideas are popular that they will be reelected and right now you know on the west side you may not know this but Joel and Gardio in the fight for his life he passed he helped pass legislation that was on the ballot to get the you know what I'm not going to nerd out on it go look up Joel and Gardio go vote for him and I'm going to pass it on to the next person you're all excited you're going to get emails from every single organization after this and read them if I could ask one thing if you do tonight after liking and subscribing to my podcast send an email to your supervisor it can be one sentence and just say I support Daniel Lurie's family zoning plan that's it if you do that CC us and you'll get volunteer membership at Yumbi Action just real quick before we pass it down the line you know I might just be so exhausted from event producing that when Laura talked about friends being gone I actually started to get pretty emotional I am from the South Bay and I got the opportunity to live in yeah okay woo far away and I got the opportunity to live in San Francisco because I was in a play with a guy who said I have a room in rent control department do you know anyone who would be interested and I got to move in and have a rent control department and because like your story I was blessed with this random fortune of a rent control department I got to build the artistic if and career of my dreams and the majority of the brilliant artists that I got to work with not only did not get those same opportunities to live out their dreams they are gone they are not here anymore and part of this scene and if I'm here for one thing it is to make sure that an artist with a dream or anybody with a dream has a shot and the opportunity to share their ideas and skills and artistry and heart with everybody else and it shouldn't be that hard to lower the rent and the cost of living and make that happen I think one of the things that I think we think about this is the tragedy of losing them but it's also true that we lose them as a city we lose the vibrancy we lose so much when people are pushed out and another part of I sort of joke I had to go from one man's apartment to the next not only that his ex-wife who was a hairdresser could not leave that apartment and so the three of us lived together in a one bedroom apartment Sam and I lived in the living room and she got to live in the I mean sorry Sam and I got the bedroom she got the living room and like you know ha ha ha ha no it was not fucking funny you know and we right yeah and I think this is like the kinds of sacrifices and and the amount of stunting that has happened to this generation the amount of art that we have lost the amount of interesting contributions to society the way in which teachers are ground down in this working second jobs all of these things all of these stories we tell ourselves about you know what's what's wrong with capitalism 90% of them come back to housing 90% of them come back to the fact that our paychecks are getting eaten by this issue I have to go home to my two toddlers and so I'm going to pass the mic so I want to add one more thing to that we're going that way so when I was mayor I did an intense focus on mental health when we looked at mental health after 20 interviews what we found if you peel back the onion layers it was a housing issue it was therapists who couldn't pay first month last month rent to actually move here and be a therapist and that affected people across the income spectrum because everybody couldn't get a therapist after COVID and the same is true of arts the same is true of education the same is true of just about any scarcity that we face if you peel the layers back underneath there you've got a housing issue so we got seven of you take this nimby's not reserved not reserved not reserved not reserved hi molly so we'll be call an up zoning though come on you're all friends I joked that we'd make it through the line and then finish the podcast that is what's going to happen but I think it is pretty good so far all right look I got a little ADU right here let's put one day one day actually yeah I have my sunglasses on because I had LASIK and I'm sensitive to light I'm not doing a whole Mitch Hedberg routine hello everyone my name is Muhammad Elam Maldin I am the senior policy advisor at California Yimby what is California Yimby third weekend I'm returning to California Yimby so I don't have the spiel down but a lot of the statewide legislation that you're seeing passed in California is through California Yimby check us out online I guess I'm looking at staff to see if I'm missing anything but a little bit about me yeah no I grew up in Stockton California ground zero the foreclosure crisis my first political thing was working with Mayor Tubbs with universal basic income and then we were like oh no one could afford the rent but you know Mayor Tubbs paid me I was like oh shit dude like interns could get paid so I went to DC and I organized a whole bunch of interns to get paid and we did it it was like two people and it was 14 million dollars and it was done in four months we snuck it into the military energy budget it was it got through the Republican Congress and signed by President Trump Doge found it so that's a fun little tale you know we do this federal thing I come back I hear of this the MB thing because after the interns get paid they couldn't afford rent and I was like okay so maybe it's a housing thing so I go on Reddit joined California MB as their first fellow in 2018 the middle of the SB50 fight so yeah it was legendary and I was there for like a year and a half helping organize helping with comms helping with digital and then I was like oh housing space is a little too white let me join the Greenlining Institute so I joined the Greenlining Institute managed their housing portfolio I think I did well because when I left I joined the board of directors for two years and it was really trying to combine racial justice with housing right housing abundance and then I was at UC Berkeley Turner Center for Housing Innovation which is how most of you know me I did a lot of stuff on the policy realm a lot of research on innovative local programs like San Diego's ADU bonus program was one of my first papers missing middle housing generally how to build ADUs equitably construction defect liability was my big send off and I also analyzed every housing bill passed in the state of California and kind of just told people what are the most important ones introduced and which are the ones that are passed and didn't pass and then after about four years there I was like SB 79 transit oriented development is coming back SB 79 one of the biggest housing bills AB 609 just streamlining the CEQA exemption and SB 677 which is SB 9 reform which was a lot of my papers back then because that's ending single family zoning all of that came to fruition at California and I was like maybe it's time to go back home so here I am I joined California MB my role is to look at everything past zoning so how do we actually get housing units built because once we figure out zoning there's a whole bunch of shit we need to uncover it comes from financing it comes from building codes it comes from subdivision map act reform it comes there's so much that we just need to start planning for legislatively and other states could organization it's a phenomenal team I'm very first of all Armand great job with everything for Harris and Steve you too and everyone here it's sort of beautiful to see how much everything has grown right and zoning reform and permitting reform is kind of the first step we got to keep this moving and I know this is a democratic thing but none of these state bills would have passed without republicans and so maybe we need to have a UMB for republicans right this is a very bipartisan issue Montana had some of best housing reforms passed last year and it was a very republican state yeah like I'm not saying sign up for fascism right but I'm saying like you know both sides of the aisle both think it's an important issue that's why all these federal caucuses have both parties but you know I'm happy the democrats are finally getting a little more organized and they're actually have an agenda and like a vision for the future that's great let's keep growing that something to look forward to and thank you for having me thank you for being here oh my god there's a whole other row back here did you guys know that say speaking of democrats i'll be happy to throw it to you but i was gonna throw it this way to do democrats you want to get anything in before there all i want to say is that it's the first time my entire life i've heard someone say i went on reddit and the story ended in a good way all right uh stand up and show off your shirt for a second can we get a round of applause for the abundance minded san francisco democratic party uh hey everyone my name is josie andriardi i'm an elected member of our local san francisco democratic party uh and last year we won 18 of 24 seats on the local democratic party and that's what we're here to talk about that is that is organizing at the grassroots level that is us putting our minds to the matter and actually knocking on the doors and convincing voters and talking to voters about what they care about you know when i moved to san francisco my husband and i moved to the castro we found just about the gayest place we could and we immediately realized how much the neighborhood had changed since we had just visited a few years prior the reason why gayborhoods in america are becoming less gay and less queer isn't because they're building so much housing it's because they're not and we see that in neighborhoods all across san francisco we see that here in the mission there was a moratorium on new housing in the mission for a long time with the idea that this is going to protect communities that had lived here for decades and it has not worked right people are still being pushed out people being forced further and further from the city into carbon intensive lifestyles that they're then having to spend longer amounts of time away from their families to get back to their jobs to support those very families they're spending less time with the democratic party has been at a step for a long time with these basic issues that are actually affecting people's lives and in our view as the local the san francisco democratic party the best thing we can do to garner confidence in the democratic party if we're running cities is to run them well so i do think yimbyism the abundance agenda is ultimately a a broad ideological spectrum of people who are who identify as yimby's there are socialists who are yimby's there are libertarians who are yimby's we all actually don't agree on how we're going to fix the issue but we do agree on the basic fact that everyone needs a place to live and we're actually committed to making that happen and i think the democratic party is the best party posed to do it in a way that actually benefits people's lives and doesn't just put money into the pockets of a few billionaires all right hi everybody my name is olga i'm going to stay seated because i'm taller this way so i'm here representing the united democratic club so that's uniteddems.org we are the largest democratic club in this city and while we do not focus on just one issue such as housing housing is the first thing on our values on our website again uniteddems.org and our club's purpose is our motto is do the work and the idea is that we recruit people for local politics and we say hey you know you see a problem in this city get out there and change it so as an example this past election we endorsed the slate that won and we door knocked for them for sfd triple c we endorsed a lot of other candidates and door knocked for them so that's something we do we also organize philanthropic events we recently hosted a blood drive we have a tree planting event etc so we do hear a lot about housing that's one of our things on our platform i'll add a personal story just very briefly a housing story that's worked so i'm originally from ukraine but i grew up in new york and after college i moved to new york i really wanted to live by myself but as you can imagine new york is also a very expensive city so i actually entered myself in a housing lottery and this was a lottery for low income middle income and market rate housing all in one building and i won the lottery i got a very spacious studio apartment 350 square feet um i could barely afford it i was working two jobs but it was rent stabilized and the idea was that uh i would get a better job in the future and make more money and the rent would become more affordable but the one thing that i really loved about that apartment complex is that you had people of all income levels living together and the most important part for me is that you had kids of different income levels living together playing the same playgrounds going to the same schools and that is a vision that i see for housing all over this country and maybe that's something that san francisco can also repurpose so i'll pass it along i know we're short on time but again uniteddems.org hey everyone so i'm kevin gray from the bay area new liberals i feel a little intimidated so many great speakers before me but i'll try to do my best i'll go back with who the new liberals are i think they're a little less known of the groups up here today so the new liberals in some form have been around since circa 2018 i like to think of them as sort of the abundance ideology before it had a really cool name um and so we have like a very holistic view on like liberalism and policy so we are definitely very much a housing first because it's just an emergency in this country but we also do like pro green energy or just energy construction in general we're very pro like trade pro smart evidence-based policy generally we're very very much focused on these kind of what does the data say like what is what are the experts saying about this what should we be doing and you know it's kind of crazy let's get a cheer for evidence and it's kind of crazy because like we have this housing issue and now people are starting to come around maybe supply matters and you know the experts haven't changed their opinion this has been the opinion for decades but we are just starting now where politicians starting to pay attention to what the experts have been telling us all along so we got the bay area new liberals and we try to have like a more bay area focused group because the bay is really interconnected and we want to bring communities together from all around and try to push policy together and we we like i like to create it as sort of like a home for people who have this sort of abundance ideology that you maybe you care about housing maybe you care about nuclear or green energy in general maybe you care about transit but you can come and hang out with people on our slack and our happy hours and those things kinds of things and you know have friends and home and not feel isolated i think for me forever i felt isolated in my politics i've kind of always felt this way but i never felt like other people did or i always felt like a little gas lit like maybe i'm the crazy one here that thinks you know maybe we can have a utopian and positive future a lot of doomerism all the time i want to have that kind of optimistic environment for everyone so we create this kind of uh environment and then we have great groups like i'm a i'm a member of udc and umb and i pay attention to what they're doing and then i when they're doing something really cool i try to throw people at them like okay i know you will like what they're doing here come on let's go doorknock with them um and try to you know amplify what all these great groups are doing um but we do do a couple cool little interesting things we've been doing a little bit of nuclear advocacy believe it or not san francisco does have a nuclear policy and it's very anti-nuclear um san francisco actually leaves like a million two million dollars on the table of free nuclear energy every year that could be used to lower your energy bills because it you know because it's just anti-nuclear um and then we have like a few like good governance uh policies that we're looking into to try to kind of improve the institutional infrastructure of san francisco to just run better in general like i said we love housing but there's so many good housing groups already so we mostly just try to support them uh yeah uh derek uh you've been very patient which is very inclusive of you uh as we start to bring this to the close um given that you really kind of catalyzed this event and and set it into motion and now there's all these people with their uh amazing stories and amazing work um i wonder if you have any reflections on on what you've heard and and the group on stage that can help us bring it home if i could also just add um we heard a lot about housing and nuclear and stuff like that and i think for a lot of people on this stage into this room we came up through the housing movement um you've come up through like science funding and energy how do you sort of like weave all that together first of all thanks to you steve and ron and everyone in this room for taking the time to come on a monday night and nerd out about abundance i am so excited at the optimistic vision that i've heard all of the people on stage articulate and i think we're at a time where there's a lot of pessimism and there's a lot of doomerism and finding a way to channel the abundance mentality to getting stuff done is going to resonate with more and more people so what i would say to all of you is you have friends and they have friends and the way movements grow exponentially is through socializing the idea bringing people in one of the challenges that i think existed until very recently is if you believe in this what do you do like what's next and so organizing whether you have ideas and you want to do some policy research and write a white paper or if you want to run for office or if you're friends with someone in office or if you want to host a political fundraiser or if you want to organize events like there's lots of levers that you can pull and one thing you can do is you can come visit inclusiveabundance.org where we published a landscape analysis of about 140 organizations that already exist doing this work these are people that i've met in my travels over the last couple of years many of them were at the conference which was abundanceconference.org if you want to see some of the speakers there are lots of things left to be done this is a very early moment and i believe when history is written and we're five years from now and ten years from now and our politics are dominated by abundance from the left and from the right we'll look back on this and people will be like yeah i was there i was at the laundry in may of 2025 i was listening to the radio abundance podcast and so it's really exciting to be early and it's going to be more exciting when we win so thank you all for what you do and here's to abundance can i real quick i just want to yes i do want to provide like a little bit of hope for everybody like we won the democratic party last year and the result is that last november we elected the most pro-housing majority on in the board of supervisors in san francisco history right that is that is an electoral like demonstrable impact and we have the potential to pass the most pro-housing plan in the history of san francisco the first meeting that we had as a party we passed the most pro-housing uh... platform as a democratic party in history and we have now started ruffling feathers at the state party because we have just passed a new resolution we're sending to the state party to force a conversation to make the state party pro-housing too because the state democratic party is not they have not passed a pro-housing resolution in six years it's been many more years since before that before the last one so this is we are we are here we are doing the work find udc find the united democratic club sf yimby the alice butoklis lgbt democratic club there are organizations whether or not you are in san francisco in the bay california across the country find your local uh... yimby chapter get involved because clearly the leadership of the democratic party is not going to make the democratic party pro-housing it's actually going to be the democrats who do it do the work do the work and for most importantly like and subscribe the radio abundance podcast uh... muhammad final thoughts and then i'm bringing it home oh oh please check in with people finale yeah please check in with people before you start a new thing just join an existing thing we have like ten abundance orgs i can't even keep track let's like can we can we just start joining each other's things like that's great okay and really pay attention to everything past zoning and permitting reform um that is zoning is what's possible permitting is how fast it happens subdivisions are how things are mapped out in a space building codes is the materials and the layout of things being built there is so much more we have to do here so please learn keep learning give us this information i learned what a laugh co was yesterday do you know what a laugh co is it's what yeah yeah for the recording if you could yeah define it please oh like it's let's say a water district local agency formation commission yeah commission yeah so like a good example of a laugh co yeah yeah yeah it's a water sewer district if you're gonna start any sort of new committee that has governing oversight of a public entity you would go and do a laugh co like a sewage or water district exactly for example well it is that sizzling gossip that you tune into our podcast yeah no no it gets it gets real so like there's a bunch of farm workers their well gets contaminated right and there's a water district a hundred feet away that could extend its pipe and give all these farm workers access to fresh water nope the laugh co process is too complicated in the middle of the bay area oh no all these farm workers don't have access to fresh water you have six builders remedy projects that are getting waiting to go online nope laugh co doesn't want to extend the water to these no water no housing it's these little things that pop up that you just have to constantly learn about and let people know about construction defect that was my thing for a little bit right oh there's this whole regime of lawsuits if you build a condo and that's why no one's building a condo right yeah no one's building a condo yeah and then it's like oh what else is there keep exploring keep learning share it within your networks and that's how we expand all right now that we have discussed sizzling sewage committees mohammed you recommended that you don't start a new organization you join other organizations just want to ask a counterpoint what if you start a new organization invite all the other organizations to turn out their people and share their people with each other so that everybody can join every other organization and we can build a culture of abundance and a coalition that wins and builds housing and abundance in san francisco california and america i also want to pick up on something derek mentioned which is the social aspect of this maybe people will join the abundance movement because of a book and maybe they will join the abundance movement because of twitter but i think they will join it because they hear somebody that has earned their trust and that they like speak from the heart with passion and with knowledge so make friends tell people how you feel speak your truth and throw parties and spread the message of abundance folks this has been your abundance ecosystem overview tapas small plates omakase appetizer platter flight of abundance and we we are so thankful for the organizations of abundance the culture of abundance they embody and the abundant amount of incredibly awesome abundance minded people in this room right now can you take a moment to just give our folks on stage but also yourselves a big round of applause for being here for fighting the fight for doing the work for showing up for spreading the message for meeting each other and for everything that we will do together in years to come Armand final thought and then I'll bring it home last thing one easy simple way I know I'm housekeeping and being annoying but to spread the message we have a big step and repeat upstairs if you go up there take a picture of yourself tweet it post it tag us at that's how your friends are going to hear about it that's how people hear about it and that's how we spread the message so please and just thank you I'm blown away by everybody here and our speakers this is like I'm going to cry in a couple minutes so thank you I'm truly grateful for being in this fight with you that that big photo backdrop upstairs it says on it in quite big letters a fairly bold message that I suspect a lot of you agree with which is to defeat fascism and build America and if that's a message that you believe in that you want to know is what people should be focused on go take a nice and nobody's on Facebook anymore Tinder photo I don't know whatever you want to do this is San Francisco so grinder please this is San Francisco so field please go upstairs take that photo tell the world and in the meantime thank you everybody for coming out tonight this has been a live episode of Radio Abundance by Yimby Democrats for America thank you to Inclusive Abundance the San Francisco Democratic Party Yimby Action Bay Area New Liberals the Center for New Liberals United Democratic Club SF Yimby Abundance Network Housing Action Coalition and the Breakthrough Institute and most of all all of you thanks for coming out tonight we'll see you soon you've been listening to Radio Abundance join the movement for Progressive Abundance at Yimby Democrats dot org yes we can build again yes we can trounce the fascists yes you can be the difference this is AI by the way you think these jokers actually got Obama check in with me in a few months it'll happen thank you for listening to Radio Abundance a new podcast by Yimby Democrats for America now it's time for you to join the movement we're building a big tent and it's going to take all of us join us and together we'll fight to build America defeat fascism and unleash the era of Progressive Abundance join the movement at Yimby Democrats dot org happy 10 week anniversary Yimby Democrats for America here's to everything still to come I'll see you soon you soon