Since late 2015, I’ve been using Medium for occasional posts/essays. See tmccormick.medium.com.

poster from GayShame.com, via Vice magazine.

[originally posted to discussion list of SFBARF, San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation].  Today’s Vice article on SF housing (“Nobody Can Figure Out How to Fix San Francisco’s Housing Crisis” by George McIntire) does a good job articulating some different points of view. Including, I was glad to see, prominent Berkeley regional/urban economist Enrico Moretti, who bluntly summarizes expert opinion & evidence on housing markets thus:

“a growing and homogenous body of academic research…points exactly to the opposite [of the pro-moratorium argument]. If you allow market-rate housing in a city you experience lower increases in rent.”

On the other hand, I am somewhat disappointed to see a familiar, tech-vs-the-city, xenophobic-tending frame, ie the primary causal factor described as: “The city has been overrun by young tech workers… transplants.” ..as if job and economic growth, new in investment and venture formation, and the attraction of talented, aspiring people aren’t generally signs of a flourishing, high-opportunity, open city — and key aspects of what most cities in the world are aspiring to.

As if the city is merely a victim of this tremendous prosperity, and powerless to use its great wealth to address attendant problems and shape itself. As if you can attribute this situation just to newcomers, without reference to, say, the immense tangle of property/tax/land-use restrictions and housing/transport underinvestment accumulated over decades.

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this is an idea I’ve been mulling and discussing with people for a while. A recent editorial by Greg Bauman, editor of Silicon Valley Business Journal, “Leaders need to step in on housing crisis,” prompted me to write the below comment describing the civic-ideas market/accelerator concept. Reposting here to add links and share.

> Policymakers should convene immediately to coordinate
> an emergency regional response

Dense new market-rate development near transit is an excellent idea. Instead of an emergency convening of all officials around just one idea, though, how about a convening and open/ongoing forum to propose, evaluate, and refine/develop a range of solutions?

A newspaper is in a good position to convene and develop broad solution ideas, as has been demonstrated beautifully by San Francisco Public Press’ “Housing Solutions” initiative and conference recently. This showcases a wide array of immediate, medium- and long-term proposals (including, full disclosure, my project for modular redeployable housing, Houslets). Some of these have the potential for impact much faster than new dense development would: for example, temporary rezoning of vacant land, or facilitation of accessory dwelling units and backyard cottages.

In the spirit of being business- and solution- and Silicon Valley-like — when in Rome!.. — how might we build an ideas/proposals market and accelerator, like a civic AngelList, to discover and build initiatives from idea to proposal to enactment? The project might be to develop an existing or new idea, and the product a professional-grade policy brief, a legislative bill or campaign, startup, social enterprise, city/county government initiative, grant application, funding drive, etc. Call it IdeaList, or CivicList, perhaps.

I imagine a platform which, like AngelList does for tech startups, allows founders/proposers and project ideas to be registered, linked, and combined; and perhaps good proposals incented by voting, micro-seed funding, ownership stakes, etc. You could think of it as bridging the gap between older media, still focused on one-off “articles” and exposition separated from action, vs the accelerator/venture-capital system which turns those ideas into real projects and makes the money. (also, hires some of the best / most innovative ideas people away from journalism, as at Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz lately).

There are many prior/existing deliberation and idea-market models/platforms to base on or learn from, such as UC Berkeley’s Opinion Space, California Report Card, Civinomics, Tumml, X-Prize-type bounty models, or ReframeIt (which just launched a deliberative policy project with Knight Foundation, TechCrunch and Silicon Valley Community Foundation). Perhaps SVBJ parent company American City Business Journals might consider prototyping such an idea market here, in view of potentially scaling/sharing it with its other 40 properties.

Reframe it. Scale it. CivicList? Hey, you never know, it worked for CraigsList.

—
Tim McCormick
Palo Alto
@tmccormick tjm.org / @houslets houslets.com

storify of and notes on discussion July 12-17 about new approaches to affordable and transit-served housing in Silicon Valley:

Facebooks's HQ now fully auto-dependent, but sits on disused rail line to #Caltrain, East Bay, & space for housing pic.twitter.com/yp69mE5G9K

— Tim McCormick (@tmccormick) July 12, 2014

@tmccormick FB could build mixed-use towers to include lux housing, reducing need for transit (all tech giants need to think skyward)

— Brian Davis (@svsfo) July 12, 2014

Brian Davis works for Google in Business Development.

@svsfo phaps.. I was thinking of something exploratory & nearer-term, relocatable modular live/work units deployed by RR lines, eg @houslets

— Tim McCormick (@tmccormick) July 12, 2014

@svsfo I & @houslets proj looking to connect w/FB/Google/etc employees & groups who might be intrstd to explore new housing/facility ideas.

— Tim McCormick (@tmccormick) July 12, 2014

@tmccormick @houslets great and will learn more; spoke to a couple startups tonight trying to move to SV and housing is their top obstacle

— Brian Davis (@svsfo) July 12, 2014

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