Superior Court Judge Richard Ulmer, who is not known as a left-leaning jurist, just tossed out of court a lawsuit by a prominent Yimby group that sought to undercut Sup. Dean Preston’s statement that he had voted to approved some 30,000 new homes.
Corey Smith of the Housing Action Coalition argued in court that Preston should not be allowed to make that claim on his ballot statement, since the Yimbys say he hasn’t been supportive of new housing.
But the court ruling makes clear that moving unhoused people into empty hotels counts as housing, since people live there—and directly undercuts the Yimby narrative presented by a UC Berkeley professor.
That professor, who provided the expert testimony for the case, also compared people who disagree with the Yimby economic narrative to “cranks” and climate deniers.
It’s a pretty basic Superior Court case, rejecting Smith and HAC’s efforts to change the ballot statement. But it has much larger implications: It suggests that the idea only new construction, driven by the private market, counts toward housing is on its face false.
And it vindicates the argument of Preston supporters that
he’s among the most pro-housing supervisors—if you count passing legislation that raised hundreds of millions for new affordable housing, putting thousands of at-risk people indoors during COVID, and clearing the way to 10,000 new affordable units.
In other words, the court agreed: “Pro-housing” doesn’t just mean “pro deregulation and market-rate housing.”
From Preston:
Unlike the online discourse, in which false claims about my housing record are circulated nonstop with no fact checking, here we have a judge weighing in on the facts. The fact is that my housing record – available in public records – includes stopping thousands of evictions in our city, taxing billionaires to the tune of over $300 million since I took office, and approving 30,000 new homes, 86% affordable. I’m proud of that record, and gratified that the court upheld my right to present my record to voters.
Smith recently said that rents should go higher to encourage more housing construction.
Preston has, indeed, opposed some of the Yimby agenda, which included SB 35, and has suggested that market-rate housing is not going to solve the city’s crisis. Many progressives opposed Prop. 35.
Progressives have also argued that in some parts of the city, new market-rate housing could cause the displacement of existing low-income residents. That’s a position strongly supported by many community and affordable housing advocates.
Now it gets fascinating.
Smith got David Broockman, an associate professor of political science at UC Berkeley, to submit a declaration in favor of the suit. Broockmann has extensive experience in political polarization and theory, but his detailed resume shows little or no work in the economics of housing markets or urban planning.
He is, however, working with the Yimbys and Preston’s opponents. From his declaration:
As a resident and voter in San Francisco, I have been increasingly concerned about its dismal record in building new homes for its residents and I have been actively involved in volunteer efforts to publicize the role of elected officials in delaying or preventing new housing developments. In 2021, I worked with several other volunteers on a report analyzing positions Preston took on various housing approvals and legislation during his time in office. It confirmed that Preston opposed or blocked tens of thousands of new homes in San Francisco, while slightly over a thousand homes had been built in his supervisorial district during his time in office.
He states:
In the table, the total of nearly 30,000 homes includes 8,250 homes Preston allegedly voted to approve by voting for the 2020 Emergency Ordinance – Limiting COVID-19 Impacts through Safe Shelter Options. This ordinance temporarily leased hotel rooms.
[It also includes] 10,000 homes Preston allegedly voted to approve by voting to place Proposition K, Authorizing the Development of Up to 10,000 Affordable Rental Units in the City under Article 34 of the California Constitution, on the ballot at the 2020 General Election.
Since Prop. K didn’t actually approve any new units, Brookman says it shouldn’t count.
This, the court said, is nonsense:
First, Smith says homeless housing in 8,250 hotel rooms Preston voted to approve during the Covid-19 pandemic was “not real homes.” But even by a Smith definition of “home” – “one’s place of residence; domicile” – many thousand San Franciscans reside in hotel rooms for months. This linguistic fencing is not clear and convincing proof of falsity. Smith also quibbles that the City did not eventually “secure” most of the hotel rooms, but Preston’s statement that he “voted to approve” them is undisputed.
Second, Smith concedes Preston “voted in 2020 to place Proposition K on the November 2020 ballot to authorize…up to 10,000 residential units of low-rent housing projects,” but claims it is misleading to say Preston approved the new homes, as voters and planning regulators must also approve. Approval of Prop K by Preston and his board colleagues was step one to the other approvals. With a 200-word limit, a qualifications statement is truncated; it is not a civics tutorial. Preston’s statement is not misleading.
I have asked Brookman to comment, and he gave me this rather stunning statement:
Hi Tim, the evidence is overwhelming that new market-rate housing reduces rent, housing prices, displacement, and carbon emissions, both in its immediate vicinity and nationwide, and both in San Francisco and in other cities. That argument is fairly settled in academia. One can indeed find a few people who argue otherwise, similar to how oil companies can find cranks who argue climate change isn’t real, but both climate change denialism and opposition to market rate housing are quite rare among social scientists.
There are many in academia who disagree, and I’m a bit stunned that he is comparing the likes of Michael Storper and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose to “cranks” and climate deniers.
I asked him about the recent Storper paper, and instead of questioning its methodology, he said:
In summary, I can tell you that at all the academic housing policy conferences I have been to, every presentation begins with the speaker saying something to the effect of “as we all know, we need more supply to reduce prices.” I thus agree with the Storper paper: the idea that stricter zoning and less supply would reduce prices is simply not a mainstream idea in contemporary social science. There are a few papers that disagree with that consensus …. But the idea that new market-rate housing increases rent is not what the literature broadly indicates.
Storper doesn’t say that stricter zoning would reduce prices; he says that deregulation won’t reduce prices. And he, like others, argues that in some places, at some times, building more market-rate housing in a vulnerable community can cause nearby rents to rise.
That seems so obvious that it’s hard to call it anything but mainstream economics.
The larger point is that the “mainstream” of economic and political thought has been and still is often terribly wrong.
I emailed him:
First, the occasional paper that dissents from the mainstream is sometimes right. The early environmentalist who spoke of a connection between fossil fuels and a warming planet were far out of the “mainstream” and were dismissed as alarmists. So was Lois Gibbs. So was Dr. Robert Bullard. When Jane Jacobs wrote the Death and Life of Great American Cities, she was derided by a planning establishment that was all in for Robert Moses style redevelopment; now there is not a planning class in the US that doesn’t require Jacobs as a central text.For 50 years, the “mainstream’ of economic thought in this country was based on a modified Friedman-VonHayek concept of the supremacy of markets and low taxes; the result, we now know, has been utter disaster. Economic inequality is at levels that Pikkety argues are an existential threat to society (and he is NOT a climate denier).
So arguing that deregulation and free markets won’t bring housing prices down is by no means equivalent to climate denial. There are many respected social scientists who make that argument.
Broockman:
Tim. I am glad we are now on the same page that these questions are not “unsettled” in academia. From the perspective of most social scientists they are broadly settled, notwithstanding a small number of dissenting papers with methodologies that are not rigorous.
Right.
Okay, so here we have the Yimby political scientist who is the main force behind a lawsuit against Dean Preston saying that those of us who disagree with Yimby free-market ideology are such fringe thinkers that we are like “cranks” and climate deniers.
This is the expertise that the court soundly rejected.
