New York City has 3 major pro-housing initiatives on the ballot that NYC New Liberals Political Director Tibita Kaneene thinks might be bigger than City of Yes. As we speak, however, NIMBY elected officials are mobilizing with dirty tricks to protect their own “member deference” vetocracy-of-one, a practice that Congressman Ritchie Torres called “municipal feudalism” on his own episode of Radio Abundance.

We’re in the midst of a few high-intensity weeks, so we’re shipping episodes right away and backfilling transcripts later. We wanted to give you the auto-generated transcript, but there’s too much “Chiyose” and “Zellnir Meiri” to be legible. If you’d like to help us clean up and ship transcripts faster, reach out to us at [email protected]!

Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

This episode was filmed on Tuesday, September 2nd. With Radio Abundance Host Steve M. Boyle on a flight to DC, Radio Abundance Los Angeles Host and newly-christened Executive Director of People First California Zennon Ulyate-Crow pinch hits to lead a special conversation with Jon Lovett, the co-host of Pod Save America, host of Lovett or Leave It, Cofounder of Crooked Media, and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama.Pod Save America were gracious enough to welcome us into their studio for this special episode of Radio Abundance, where Zennon got to ask the question that’s been on everyone’s mind: Jon, how did your brain not break listening to that? And how much longer can we have a Democratic party if our “Progressive champions” are intent on minimizing affordable housing and flipping the House and the Electoral College to MAGA for a generation?

Get the answers to these questions and more on this episode of Radio Abundance!

Thank you, Pod Save America, for letting us film this special episode of Radio Abundance at your studios!We’re shipping this timely video right before we leap into the Abundance 2025 Conference in Washington DC. We will backfill the transcript in the coming weeks! Enjoy the discussion, and make sure to catch the original!

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Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Radio Abundance. My name is Steve Boyle. I'm the Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America, and we are live on location in London today with Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North. Chris, thanks for joining us on Radio Abundance!

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

Thank you very much for having me! It's great to be here. Well, it's great for you to be here, I suppose, is probably the better way of putting it? Thank you for coming to this great city and chatting to us!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I mean, it is a tremendous honor. As I mentioned the other day at the Labour YIMBY Summer Party, it genuinely is the honor of a lifetime, no matter what happens from here on out, because I'm not in London to hang out with you — that's very fortunate for me — I'm here because, 20 years ago, I survived the July 7th terrorist attacks, and it felt very important for reasons I could hardly begin to explain to be back here for the anniversary.

And it turns out to have been because, a couple days before coming, the Labour YIMBY folks reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to do a podcast with them. I said, "You're never gonna believe it: I'm coming to London!" They said, "You're never gonna believe it. We have, like, 10 things booked that week. Do you want to do all of them?" And so we have gotten to meet each other, and here we are sitting down together.

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

Yeah, it's very good to have met you, and very good to form these Trans-Atlantic partnerships to beat the scourge of NIMBYism and hopefully get both of our great countries building again, because it's the only way we can start to solve the problems that both our nations face.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I mean, it is incredibly exciting, right? Our nations are family members. And, you know, families bicker from time to time. But that's a family, right? You have a kid. You raise the kid. The kid gets older and says, "I want more agency." You say, "I don't think so." Kid says, "I think so."

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

Who's the kid in this?

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

We're the kid! You're the parents. And, eventually, we've got to leave the nest. And then, after a little time of tension, we become quite close again. And have been ever since.

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

Yeah, I mean, if you follow the analogy to its end, eventually you are going to be caring for us. I'm not sure how I feel about that!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I think we've done a lot together as nations, from supporting each other in democracy to defeating fascism, and if we can help each other to build, that's fantastic.

And what I mean by help each other really is to learn from each other. Because I think the best way to go about this — the best way to help each other — is to share information and also case studies. So, I'm excited that we get to do that today, because even for our very wonkish and worldly audience, there's things you know about the UK and there's things you don't.

I think most people will be able to name your Prime Minister and the last few as well. They will have knowledge of certain UK scandals and historical developments. I'd be surprised, though, if a lot of people know what Milton Keynes North is.

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

A massive shame that is.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, tell us about it!

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

So, Milton Keynes is probably one of the places in the UK that would feel most familiar and at home to an American visiting.

We have these things that are incredibly rare in the UK, actually, which is roads that run straight. We have a grid system like you have in DC and lots of other places. And that is basically because it is a New Town. A New City.

I'm the first Member of Parliament -- it's the same age as my mum -- I'm the first Member of Parliament that was born and grew up in the New Town, now City, of Milton Keynes. It's got a population of about 300,000. It was built and designed by the 1960s Labour government, who saw the massive housing shortage that the country faced and realized, particularly here in London, that we needed to start building new places and new settlements to live in.

AMilton Keynes was the biggest and most successful of those places and has consistently grown ever since. Over the past decade, we've been building between 2,000 and 3,000 homes every single year. We are on a trajectory to become a city of about 500,000 over the next 15 or 20 years.

I think what's most exciting is: we built this new settlement, now this new city, where so many people have made their home, but we've also built a massive economic success story.

It's halfway between London and Birmingham, two of our biggest cities here. It's also halfway between Oxford and Cambridge, which are big university cities which I'm sure many of your audience have heard of. It's slap bang in the middle of all four of those. So, it's got really good connections to all of those places. And, partly because of that, it's got a real thriving economy.

We've got a massive growing tech sector. Robotics. Loads of other exciting stuff going on. More startups than almost anywhere else in the country. So, anyone that's coming over or looking to invest in the UK, please do consider it, because it is a really exciting, vibrant place and somewhere that I'm determined to continue building and ensuring that kids growing up there today can have the same fantastic start in life that I had growing up there a few decades ago.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Let's just double stamp something you said. Before we even get to your role in Parliament, how UK housing law works, and how you're trying to change that: you mentioned that Milton Keynes is a New Town. Which is to say, in the thousand year history of your nation — you can correct that; I know there's several pieces to the United Kingdom and maybe you have different ideas of where they begin. I'm going Battle of Hastings; we can refine that —

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

We're getting the Bayeux Tapestry coming over! That was announced this week.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Ooh.

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

We've already gone off on a tangent! The French are sending us over the Bayeux Tapestry for a little bit next year. Come back and see it!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

It's a dangerous precedent for you if we're starting to return artifacts to different places…

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

I refuse to comment!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

But in this long history, not so long ago, your people in government said, "Hey, you know this place where there is nothing? There should be a town here. We will build it." And you're not the only one!

So, I'm very curious: you started to allude to this, but, man, I think an American audience would be interested in why that decision was made in and how it was executed, right? Was it just the government building things? Was it a public private partnership? How did this work?

Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:

It was a big government decision, and it was far more government-led and executed. It was a Development Corporation, as we call them, that was set up, which is a publicly-owned organization. It had compulsory purchase powers.

My great, great grandparents were farmers on the land. They had their farm compulsorily purchased off them by the government in order to build it. So, it was a level of forcefulness and government control. A lot of it was private money still. There was a lot of private capital that was invested in it, but it was a lot more government-centered and government-focused than you would necessarily do today.

It was just because there was such a determination at the time to break through the housing crisis that the country faced. I think what was also interesting about it — obviously, kind of having a quite well planned city was quite interesting, and you talk about the grid system and everything else — but it was also being able to start from scratch. Picking what was effectively a lot of farms and going, "Let's build something here" really allowed for innovation.

So, they built entire housing estates to look at how, if you build in slightly different ways, it can lead to homes that use less energy, because there was a fuel crisis at the time. Thinking about how to build far more efficiently, so that you can get more bang for your buck with building.

We learned so much through the process of building as well. Actually, we — the government in the UK — is now thinking about repeating this process with a series of more modern New Towns. And what's interesting as part of that process that we're going through is looking back to the New Towns of the past, particularly Milton Keynes, and thinking, "What did we get right? What did we get wrong? What can we learn from them to ensure that the places that we build in the future can be even better?"

And that's quite exciting.!Like, actually, we talk about building and development and the things that it achieves in new homes, whatever. But actually, this idea of building somewhere new — and the innovation and what you can learn from it — I think is also really exciting.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of our Radio Abundance interview with Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North in the United Kingdom, filmed in London.

Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

Hello! My name is Zennon Ulyate-Crow. I'm here with Radio Abundance, live in Los Angeles. Sitting right next to me is Jon Rawlings, running for Council District 3 in Los Angeles.

Jon, want to tell me a little bit more about why you're here today?

Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:

Yeah, so we're here at the Sepulveda Stop of the Orange Line. We're reacting to City Council yesterday voting to oppose SB 79 to build more housing near transit. We thought this would be the perfect place to do it because behind us we've got what I think is a Chevron gas refinery and an empty parking lot on the other side. And this seems like the perfect place that we should be building housing.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

Can you tell me your first reactions to the Council opposing SB 79 and what you would want to do as a Council Member to support building more housing near transit?

Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:

Yeah, I mean, my first reaction is obviously disappointment. We certainly need bills like SB 79 to build more housing around transit.

But my second reaction was: I expected it. This is a City Council that has traditionally always said "no" to more housing, no matter what that looked like, whether it's a state bill or something on the local level.

So, as a City Council Member, I want to get to a City Council that says "yes" to more housing, especially around transit. That feels like probably the most obvious place we should start with building housing.

This station right here is actually the site of where they're planning to build the new Sepulveda Pass transit corridor, which is a train line that's going to connect the Valley to the West Side. You're going to be able to get from here to UCLA in 9 minutes.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

Why is the LA City Council opposing building more housing in places like this?

Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:

Well, we've seen City Council tends to listen to the loudest voices, even though that might not be indicative of the population of their districts. And those tend to be the NIMBY, wealthy, single family homeowners. And you'll hear standard terms like, "oh, we want to maintain control of our city and the way that we do things, and we also don't want to change the character of our neighborhood."

But, for those of us in this space, we know that that's just BS and that just means they don't want to do anything. They want to maintain their control, and that means not building anything.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

As a Council Member in CD 3, what would you do differently for your district and for the City of Los Angeles as a whole when it comes to housing and transportation policy?

Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:

Yeah, for me and my district in CD 3, we definitely could use some more building around transit and commercial corridors as well. There's definitely some opportunities along the Orange line and even along Ventura Boulevard to build more housing, bring in more density, and create more walkable cities.

In terms of transit, I would very much be an advocate for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor and building heavy rail down there, as well as other, you know, bus lanes and bike lanes and other transit-oriented development and just transit means of getting around the city.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

If there's any way that people can help out with your campaign, what could they do the most to help?

Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:

Right now, it's getting the word out. So, follow the socials for sure. Just look up Jon Rawlings (J-O-N & Rawlings like the baseball company) to follow me on social media.

If you're interested in volunteering, you can go to the website JonRawlings.com to reach out. Or even DM me on Instagram!

I'm available, and we're looking for volunteers and people that want to get the word out about good candidates that support transit and housing!

Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXIV: The Cut Red Tape for Housing Act. Laura Friedman is a United States Congresswoman from California and a member of both the Build America Caucus and the YIMBY Caucus.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Congresswoman Friedman, welcome to Radio Abundance! You’ve been on Radio Abundance before, but this is our first-ever live episode!

We got an early scoop that this bill might be coming and chatted about doing an emergency podcast today to be timely, and we thought, "hey, as long as we're going to talk to you anyways, let's do it live and try a new format and see who shows up!”

I mean, we're going to have the same conversation either way!

So, this is a lot of fun. We're extremely excited to talk to you again, and we’re also extremely excited about the new bill. And always extremely excited to try a new, fun, live format.

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Yeah, it's exciting! It's kind of edgy. I like it.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Super edgy…

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Dangerous!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

As is this bill, maybe? A little bit? Dangerously helpful?

I'm going to ask you about it in a second, but I want to set this up both for the audience and for you. First of all, you have been on Radio Abundance before, so for anybody that wants to know your origin story, how you got here, or how you think about this: go there!

Today, we're going to talk about the bipartisan Cut Red Tape for Housing Act.

And what I want to say to you is: you know, we have folks in our listener community who are maybe the foremost experts in their field in this sort of thing, and also folks who are coming to this movement for the first time and trying it out and seeing if they like it.

So, I bring that up (and talk so much off the bat) only to set up that, in a moment, I'm going to ask you, "What is the Cut Red Tape for Housing Act?" But, I actually want you to tell me twice. First, I want you to tell me for somebody who is joining this movement and curious and inclined to it. The layman's big picture. High level.

And then, I want to both liberate and encourage you to get real deep in the wonky details here. Because, I promise you, this is the space where you're going to be rewarded for that level of nuance and statistical precision.

So, with that intro done…

Congresswoman Friedman, what is the Cut Red tape for Housing Act?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

What this bill does is: it makes all infill housing categorically exempt from having to do a NEPA review (a review from the National Environmental Quality Act).

That would mean that, if you're building housing that has federal money in it—

(Because housing that doesn't have federal money generally does not go through a NEPA review unless there's certain things happening in terms of its location or its impact on an environmental resource. Generally, your infill housing in an existing city like Los Angeles or Boston or Memphis wouldn't have to go through NEPA unless it was receiving some federal funding.)

Generally, those projects are Affordable Housing that have pass-throughs from the federal government, often through the state, which trigger the NEPA review. That's a review that can take 12 months. It can take 15 months. Generally, they're approved. However, they take time, and they cost money: usually a couple hundred thousand dollars for Affordable Housing projects that already exist on a financial knife’s edge in terms of making projects pencil.

So, we want to get rid of that amount of time that these projects are being stalled. We've heard stories from developers about losing financing or potentially losing financing because of delays with NEPA reviews. Certainly, $200,000 could go back into creating more units, a better building, and lots of other things rather than doing a duplicative environmental review that's generally going to be approved anyway.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

This does remind me a little bit of some of the action in California. We just had Michael Tubbs on the podcast. He's running for Lieutenant Governor. As he spoke a little bit about CEQA reform, he mentioned, "if you've done a report before and the squirrels were fine, they're probably going to be fine even though you've changed the project a little bit."

That principle of “we've actually already checked, and we don't necessarily need to rerun the whole process” -- I think it's interesting.

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

And, let's be clear: this bill only impacts infill housing. It has to be a site that's already been developed. We're not talking about going into a city and taking a park or a community garden and then, without doing any looking at environmental impact, building a building.

We're talking about taking a parking lot or an old donut shop or a strip mall and redeveloping it as housing. That should be, generally, an environmental positive, not an environmental negative! Because, of course, if you don't build the housing near jobs and schools and businesses, you end up building housing oftentimes in actual green spaces out in areas that haven't been developed before.

So, there should be a net positive to the environment from these projects. There's no reason for them to have to go through NEPA, especially since they're going through other environmental reviews. We also exempted projects that would require the demolition of a historic structure. And, as I said, these are previously developed lots that are in urban areas.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I do think this is such an important point for the movement as a whole to keep coming back to, right? Which is: if you love your suburbs — and even more so if you love your rural area — the best way to protect both is to let dense areas be dense! Right? The densification of the suburbs and rural areas, perhaps some of that is population growth (for however much longer that lasts), but quite a lot of that is people being exiled from cities that are not pulling their weight.

So, this kind of infill housing, where you've already got places that are developed and that are fairly dense and that are a very natural place to build more housing — it seems ridiculous to stop that, and thank you for taking away some of those ridiculous barriers!

Let's define infill for a second. I am looking at the fact sheet, and it says, “either 75% of the site's perimeter adjoins parcels developed with an urban use, or 75% of land within a quarter mile radius of the site is developed within urban use.” So, that's how we're defining the proximity to a relatively dense urban environment. Then, I'm seeing “no larger than 20 acres, located on vacant or underutilized land that was previously developed for an urban use.” So, that is how we are defining infill. And you mentioned the demolition carve outs?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Yeah. We wanted to make sure that we addressed any concerns that people might have going in as we introduce this bill. We want to not miss something that might lead to objections. We want to make sure it's a net positive for communities.

And so, we use a lot of the definitions that are in the new California law for CEQA exemptions for infill housing as a viewpoint and as a guide because they went through a year-long process of being in discussion with environmental groups and with cities. I'm never one to miss taking material from people that have done their homework! And it seemed like a perfect time to introduce NEPA reform.

I've worked on these issues for my time in the California legislature where I served for eight years. I have worked on and done my own bills to reform CEQA (which is the California equivalent of NEPA), particularly with an eye towards housing.

So, I've worked in this space, and when I ran for Congress, a lot of what I talked about was bringing that same work to the federal space and looking for the opportunities to do streamlining and make our processes make sense and not be barriers to the things that we need.

We know what we need to do, and we need to do it quickly. That's what this bill is about.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

It seems like — and it's shining through this conversation — you've both written a bill that is designed to have an extremely positive impact, but also a bill that you think can pass. That's ringing through how you've learned from California and learned from what I might call handling objections ahead of time.

I am curious how you see the politics and future and timeline of this? IThis is a bipartisan bill, so I'm curious about Representative Edwards: his interests and your relationship. I'm curious, especially for folks who maybe aren't deep Congress watchers, what are the chances of passage? What is the process? How long might that take?

I'm curious how you would game out the road from here.

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Well, I only got elected in November and got sworn in in January, so I'm still learning a lot about this process! But I'm very encouraged by having bipartisan support. I'm part of a new caucus called the Build America Caucus, and so is Representative Edwards, so he seemed like he was a natural person for me to approach. He had questions about the legislation, and I'm really very honored that he chose to join us and co-lead this. It's great to be able to have support from across the aisle already because, if you don't have that in this particular Congress, it's very hard to get legislation passed!

That gives me a lot of hope that we can get this through. Now, I know that, in Congress, they are looking at doing permit reform across the board. But, I also wanted to make sure that we did something that was specific to housing and that did address legitimate concerns that people have around the environment. I'm not sure what shape that permit reform bill is going to take, and I think it's important from the environmental perspective to introduce legislation that, yes, wants to move housing forward quickly, but also respects legitimate environmental concerns, which is why we did a bill that had guardrails around it and includes exemptions to the bill. It includes NEPA review for things like historic resources, travel resources, and greenfields.

I don't know if we're going to get that in the permit reform bill, but I'm hoping that, if they see this bill, that maybe they will adopt this bill into whatever they're doing. Or, this bill can stand alone as its own piece of legislation. As long as it gets passed into law and we remove these barriers and get rid of this red tape that is so needless and really slowing down and costing more money to Affordable Housing developers, I'd be happy with any way that we get that done.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, I want to ask you about the environment in a second because that looms heavily here. I want to know how you would frame for everybody what NEPA is and the background of the National Environmental Policy Act.

And, of course, and this came through in the last podcast we did together, a huge amount of your motivation here — and, I think, this movement's motivation — is to do right by the environment. And to stand up and raise our hands when there is an environmental law that is hurting the environment.

So, we will talk about that in a second. But I want to quickly ask you about caucuses. It was very interesting to me when you mentioned that being a part of the Build America Caucus with Representative Edwards helped you identify him as a potential bipartisan partner — and, frankly, the importance of being bipartisan now, and that, for passage, if Republicans are going to be in the majority, you kind of need one of them...

I bring that up because we have talked to both Congressman Harder, who founded the Build America Caucus, and Congressman Robert Garcia, who founded the YIMBY caucus. It is so cool that these caucuses exist, and it's also, like, okay, now what? What does that mean? What does a caucus do?

Here, it sounds like you've already named one very specific function, which is just to identify and connect you with allies to get stuff done. So, I am curious for a second what those caucuses existing has meant for the work? As somebody who's joined one, what does it mean for you? What does it do for you to be a part of that?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

For me, it's a couple of things. It's certainly a signal of my priorities and my values to be a member of both of those caucuses. But, more importantly, it does show me right away who my allies are when it comes to this work.

And so, we were able to very quickly secure a co-lead who is a Republican co-lead because we went to members of the caucus. Hopefully that also gives him the trust that I have similar goals. And then, I'm hopeful that the caucus will get behind the legislation and come on as co-sponsors and that we will have a whole group of legislators pushing together.

You know, it's a new caucus. And I'm new to Congress! But, it's my hope, too, that the caucus itself has a package of bills (this being one of them) that we put forward as caucus bills. We haven't had that conversation yet because we're so new and people are still introducing their legislation for the year, but I would love to see the Build America Caucus and the YIMBY Caucus start to have a package of bills that are known to be caucus-supported bills.

I was a member of a couple of caucuses in the California legislature, and we did that every year, where we had our core bills and then we had bills that we supported. It was very helpful for people to know what the values were of that particular set of legislation. It helped for people on the outside who were stakeholders (for instance, people in the Abundance movement) to know what the key pieces of legislation are and what to focus their attention on. Because it takes a village. It takes people on all sides pushing for legislation to get through.

And when you have that, those people coming to legislators all around the country and saying, "I heard about this bill. This would help get Affordable housing built in your district. I'm a stakeholder in your district. I'm a resident. I want to see this pass,” it just gives them one more reason to vote yes.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I find it very cool when you reflect on the idea that you are new in Congress, telling that story of: you're there and you know what bills are good, but now you actually do have to figure out how this works — both interpersonally and logistically — and how to get stuff done.

Maybe I don't watch the right TV shows, but that to me is cool to openly acknowledge that!

As somebody who has lot of policy chops who now has got to figure out how you're going to get results in this new space: who's helping you? Who do you go to? How do you find out how to get stuff done and be effective? Who feels like your ally and mentor in Congress?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Well, certainly my amazing team! You know, when I was interviewing people to be on staff, having these goals and an understanding of housing policy and a desire to see more housing built — and not just housing, but more clean energy, more energy transmission, all the things that we need to live a better life and to make things more affordable for people — was key in my mind.

I purposefully brought people on that were YIMBYs, to be honest about it, both in my district office and in my capital office. So, that's a big part. That's the start, because I have people I can sit around with and talk about ideas and who are looking actively for ideas to help with this movement, as you put it, and this goal.

And also, I have certainly folks in my district that I know from my work doing very similar legislation at the state level in California. I have a housing advisory group, and several of those people are folks that advise me on a lot of the legislation I did around parking reform and ADUs and everything else that I've worked on and want to keep working on.

And then, in the legislature, of course we have the representatives you mentioned. Robert Garcia, Josh Harder. There's a whole bunch of people who also really lean into this issue. And it's growing. As the housing affordability crisis is growing around the country, we see more and more members of Congress wanting to find solutions.

Housing is becoming unaffordable in places where even recently it was affordable. Young families today don't feel that they will ever be able to buy a home. That's a fundamental change from the way things were 20, 30 years ago. Maybe even 15 years ago. This isn't just California policy. It's not just Los Angeles policy. It's really national policy.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Looking at this bill: I have fact sheets and everything I've been able to consume today in the last couple hours, but I do not have the text of the bill. So I'm very curious about the scope of both the bill and about NEPA in the sense that, in a lot of the chatter today, a phrase that keeps coming up is Affordable Housing. That phrase is not, though, in the fact sheet, so I am curious if you can flesh out for me? Both in terms of NEPA generally and also in terms of this reform. We've talked a little bit about what it applies to and doesn't in terms of infill and urban areas and previous uses and things like that, but in the spectrum of Affordable Housing and who's building the housing, what is in scope and not in scope?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Unlike CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, which affects — even though single family housing's categorically exempt and housing kind of is and kind of is not through a whole patchwork of exemptions — it's a much broader review process, whereas NEPA is limited to projects that have federal funding.

So, you're generally not going to be talking about your market rate housing unless they're in the context of a larger project that has some federal funding. You can imagine — I'm just going to throw it out — like, a baseball stadium or some project that has some federal nexus or federal funding. Or, more likely, a train station or a piece of transit infrastructure that might have housing attached that might trigger a NEPA review because of the federal funding.

A regular market rate apartment building does not go through NEPA. The projects that go through NEPA are ones that have some federal funding — any federal funding — and that's generally affordable housing, meaning housing that's built with federal subsidies and then rented through covenants to low-income individuals for reduced rent and for rent that would be cheaper than they could get from market rate housing. So, that's why we refer to Affordable Housing, because this is generally going to help with the creation of subsidized affordable units.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Can you handicap for me what to expect in terms of the creation of subsidized affordable units in the coming years? Not even in terms of what this bill makes possible so much as the appetite of the federal government right now to build subsidized affordable units. And, if we win (in what is a very long time from now), can you gauge for me, numerically, the past, present, and what you might expect from the next few years in terms of the actual appetite to build subsidized, federally-funded affordable units?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Well, it's hard for me to say because I don't communicate directly with this Administration…

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You don't text them?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

You know, the Trump Administration, it seems to me that they are not very keen on funding housing in general, and they've made overtures at closing out Section 8.

Certainly for the things that keep tenants in place and a lot of the programs that come through our CDBG financing that are meant to assist tenants who are on the verge of homelessness, they've made a lot of overtures towards cutting these programs.

And I can tell you, from speaking to our local housing authorities, they're really, really afraid of the impact on homelessness from X-ing out a lot of these assistance programs.

You know, we're still working on the budget for this year, so it's hard to say what's actually coming down the pipe. I also have not been able to really take the temperature of the majority party's interest in funding subsidized affordable housing.

And look, you're not going to subsidize housing your way out of our housing crisis. And not everybody qualifies for subsidized housing. You have to be low-income under certain definitions to get into one of these units. But, on the other hand, there's definitely a subset of the population that needs extra help and that's not going to be able to afford a lot of market rate housing.

You know, folks coming out of the prison system. People who are in recovery. People who are severely disabled. A lot of our seniors end up on very, very fixed and low incomes and can't afford market rate housing in our more expensive urban areas where they grew up and where they have their connections and their ties.

So, there's a lot of people where subsidized housing is really a lifesaver. Recent immigrants. You could point to a lot of populations that need that kind of housing. We used to have a better system to create it in California through our redevelopment agencies that paid a lot of dividends back in terms of also redeveloping blighted areas and polluted areas. But we lost that when the state got rid of that particular tax increment method of financing housing. So now, developers are cobbling housing costs together through a series of tax credits and other federal programs. And so we really do need an expansion of those programs, even while we encourage market rate housing, which we also need because there's a lot of middle class people who also need housing and who are being priced out of the market!

So, there's going to be different strategies that we need to employ to get the housing that we need. And subsidized housing is definitely one of them.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, JD Vance and I text each other on Signal all the time, and he's told me very clearly that he thinks that once we deport all the illegal immigrants and then all the legal ones and then all of the citizens that made fun of him, housing prices will go down, so I think we'll be fine…

But, it does occur to me that, even if the Trump Administration builds nothing in the next few years, there's still two giant ramifications to this bill and passing it now, even if the Administration doesn’t take advantage of it.

Which is to say: a future Democratic Presidency, while picking up quite a lot of pieces, will be able to build. As somebody who says “Yes in my backyard!” to both market-rate housing built by the private sector and housing built by the public sector, that excites me. You are making that easier for a future Democratic President.

But also, I think of the message this sends to states. Whether that's California or New York or Illinois or any states that are thinking about reforming right now, this is another little dent in the universe and crack in the dam, showing that the momentum is on our side and that this is the right thing to do from a policy perspective.

So, even if Trump is not helpful here, it does seem like the signal this sends and the future it sets up is also valuable in addition to the immediate impacts and potential this bill unleashes.

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Yeah, I mean, you've got a law here that's a good law with NEPA. But, when it's spilling over and creating barriers for exactly the kind of housing that everybody says we need, which is affordable housing for low-income people, seniors, disabled, and others, for no reason — for absolutely no environmental gain that anybody can point to — we're reforming that law.

This bill will lower the cost of developing affordable housing. It will speed up the process at a time when we know we desperately need this housing to keep people from slipping into hopelessness.

This will make it more affordable. That money should be going into these buildings. It shouldn't be going into hiring consultants to write environmental reviews that have already been done through other processes. It's completely red tape. It's the kind of red tape and bureaucracy that everybody hates.

So, I think this bill's a no-brainer. It should be easy, and I'm hoping it will be.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Very nice. I did promise we would tee you up on the environment. So, let's get into this now:

We are talking about the reform of an environmental law, and we have pretty strong feelings about how this will help the environment.

Give us a sense of the stakes of this and the impact you think this will make? Why, in terms of outcomes and values and morals, is this the right thing to do for the world we live in?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Sure!

This makes it easier to build on previously developed infill sites, sites in our cities, and on land that was already developed and needs a new use. We've got a lot of those around our communities. Often they're blighted. Closed. Rivers of concrete. Closed strip malls. Obsolete office buildings. They're eyesores, and they can be magnets for crime and blight.

This would speed up the process of turning them into something that we need, which is places for people to live. It's a benefit to our cities. There's no downside! It's certainly not harmful to the environment. But if we don't do it, we know what happens. Not only do more people struggle with affordability for housing, but also people face homelessness. And, when we do build, if we don't allow building in our cities and in infill sites, people will build in places that haven't been developed before, and that's when you have real environmental impacts. That's when you're building on land that's habitat or on land that's covered in trees, out in the suburbs, where you have to now drive much further from your job, causing polluting air, car congestion, and all those things that suburban development outside of cities creates.

I'm an environmentalist. And I'm a huge supporter of environmental laws. And I am not a supporter of suburban sprawl. It's un-environmental! It's a terrible use of land! It causes traffic, congestion, and smog. And it eats up precious open space and habitat for animals who are already struggling.

So, this makes a lot of environmental sense. And it's my hope that environmental groups will support it on that basis.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Sounds like a lot of bad stuff is caused by not building housing! We should probably build housing!

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Look, at the same time that I've authored numerous bills to speed up housing production at every level, from new market rate down to affordable housing, I have authored key bills around wildlife connection, connectivity around habitat protection, around biodiversity, around reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and clean energy. To me, it all fits together. I don't see these goals at all as being at odds. I think that, if you care about the environment, you should care about building the housing we need in the right places, and you should also care about better ways of moving people around that are more sustainable than individual car trips.

I think that it's a triad. We should all be thinking about that. If you're thinking about the environment, you should also think about where you're going to grow your cities and how to do it in a sustainable way and how to move people around. So, I think we need to be thinking about these issues much more in a holistic way.

I've done policies to try to link that. Just to go into the Wayback Machine from a few years ago: when I worked on parking reform, to me, it was about the environment. It was about better ways of supporting public transportation, using land better, and building the housing we need, all in one piece of legislation.

So, I look at this in very much the same way. It's about taking away an environmental review that is actually stopping something from happening that's a huge net benefit for the environment.

NEPA is a great and groundbreaking piece of legislation that we should protect. But we should also, as environmentalists, be very clear about fixing the things that aren't working about it so that it can't be weaponized against the environment and repealed!

If you're thinking strategically, the last thing you want to do is have a nonsensical use of NEPA that its opponents can use to justify getting rid of it.

My attitude is: it's a great and important piece of legislation. Let's fix the things that we know need to be fixed so that we can protect the parts of NEPA that we absolutely need to protect our environment.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, don't think for one second taht I was going to let you get out of here without plugging your work on parking and cars!

Folks, if you're watching this or you're hearing about Congresswoman Friedman for the first time, I think you're going to like what she's done before on parking and cars…

You know, I was once talking with a member of Congressman Scott Peters’ team, and they called him an “OG YIMBY.” So that has entered my vocabulary, and I would say that Congresswoman Friedman is an “OG” and an innovator and pioneer of the Parking Wars.

I've got to get you out of here, so, look, give us a couple seconds of final thoughts? And also, where do you go from here? I mean that literally: this is announcement day, literally where do you go from here?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Well, I would say that, number one, my message for the movement is to create a big tent. I've had a lot of success at bringing environmentalists on board with this agenda. I come out of the historic preservation world, so I'm always careful to respect the goals of people who love old buildings and want to retain the character that really important old buildings give. I've worked on preserving buildings like the Cinerama Dome and the Capitol Records building and the Case Study houses in Los Angeles, and I don't see that at all being at odds with creating the landmarks of the future. So, rather than throw rocks at each other, let's bring these movements together — the I Love Buildings movement along with the environmental movement, who understand that we need to have these coalitions and find ways of building consensus and moving forward.

We've been able to do it in California with a lot of success. And, by the way, working also with our friends in the labor movement, who also are incredibly important to bring on board, so that this is a benefit for all of these major stakeholders. That would be my closing message!

I really appreciate your having me here today. It's exciting. When I got the invitation, I was really excited! And for those of you I don't know, it's nice to actually meet you!

We are going to be announcing more housing bills. We're working on a package of really cool housing bills, including one that's even bigger than this...

So, stay tuned! A lot more to come!

And that's a teaser… You're not getting another word out of me on that!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Look, I've got to build hype, too!

So, long as you let us cover that with you, we'll do the tease and the whole hype and buzz process, and we can let things trickle out when the time comes…

We are honored and flattered and blown away that you would carve out 30 minutes of a pretty important day to spend with us and dive into this and give us your perspective, both as an innovator and a pioneer in making Abundance happen and also as somebody who's truly accomplished on this and is fairly new in Congress and now is making it happen and learning the ropes and getting stuff done.

So, this has been super cool. Thanks for joining us on Radio Abundance! Onwards and upwards and on with your day!

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Thanks so much!

Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXIII: Abundance Energized! Alex Trembath is the Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hello, and welcome to Radio Abundance! We are here with Alex Trembath. He's the Deputy Director of the Breakthrough Institute, and this is his second appearance on Radio Abundance.

Hey Alex, welcome to the program!Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Thanks for having me back, Steve.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, we are thrilled that you are back. We had an amazing conversation about two months ago.

You know, the Breakthrough Institute was very early to the world of Abundance, long before Abundance had a name, with fingers in a lot of areas, but especially energy and the environment, sending out a call to the world that our approach to the environment was neither helping the environment nor ourselves and proposing a better route through what you call "eco-modernism" in terms of how we can build a greener world and a more energy-efficient world while also lowering the cost of energy and making it easier for people to live where they want to live and live near where they work — building a world with more energy, more food, and a better environment for all of us and every creature on earth.

Is that a reasonably accurate description?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

That was great.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Amazing. So in that last conversation, which I will link to because it was phenomenal, we talked about the origins of The Breakthrough Institute. We talked about your work in energy. And we talked quite a lot about nuclear energy and safety. We went through different nuclear accidents and talked about why it was safe and really analyzed them. So it's a really phenomenal conversation, and one of my favorites. We're not going to retread old ground, but I highly recommend that.

So, we are really excited to talk more because there's so much to this area. You also work on things like agriculture and food. We're really excited to talk about Abundance when it comes to food.

You are also doing events! In fact, our audience may have heard of or may also be about to attend the Abundance Conference in DC. You are one of the biggest if not the biggest and certainly one of the key organizers and producers of that. So, I figured we'd start there.

Let's start with just what it is, right? To anybody who is not already initiated or who does not already have their ticket, what's the Abundance Conference?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, we're really excited about it. It's two weeks from today, as we're recording. It's September 4th and 5th in Washington DC.

This is really the national gathering of the broad Abundance movement that we all and that all your listeners know and love. At this point, there's 15 think-tank and activist co-hosts and a number of sponsors as well. We're going to have over 500 people there, from every walk of life.

We're going to have thinktankers and journalists and philanthropists and advocates and activists and investors and technologists and elected officials at the state, national, and local level. Our hope is that this becomes the annual convening of the Abundance Movement.

This is the second time that we're doing this event. We launched a pilot Abundance Conference in DC last year that we all really loved, and we wanted to do it again and make it bigger and make it better.

You know, I've been doing events for over 10 years. I won't say it's not hard! It is hard work! Logistically. Substantively.

But it wasn't hard to build interest for this event. Let me say that we sold out six weeks in advance. We have a waiting list of over 200 people at this point!

My hope is that we can accommodate more people and ideas in the future.

We're really excited. We're going to cover housing (obviously), energy, infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence, healthcare, immigration, families, state capacity, governance, and on and on and on — the wide swath of the Abundance Agenda.

We’ve got some pretty incredible speakers lined up. I'm just really excited!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You’ve got incredible speakers! You've got some amazing speakers, some amazing partners. Give us some razzamatazz for a second? Let's name-drop a little bit! Who's coming?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, so obviously 2025 is the year of the publication of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

You know, Derek Thompson, who really coined the term "the Abundance Agenda" in 2021 — which was kind of a Rubicon for a bunch of us, right? We talked in our last conversation, Steve, about how a bunch of us within Abundance, including Breakthrough and the YIMBY movement and organizations like Niskanen had been doing Abundance-y stuff for years or more. The Federation of American Scientists is a co-host on this event, and they've been operating for over half a century at this point on a whole bunch of stuff related to nuclear and science and technology. But, it really was just over the last few years that we all found each other in this new context under this new tent called Abundance.

So, we're thrilled that David Brooks from The New York Times is going to be interviewing Ezra and Derek about their book and the reaction to it over the last six months or so. We're also thrilled to have dozens of elected officials from around the country, including a number of Members of Congress who will be on stage, as well as Representatives from State legislatures and Mayors and local Representatives from City Councils and local government.

We're also thrilled to have the Governor of Utah. Spencer Cox is going to come talk about what Abundance looks like in his home state of Utah.

Those are a few of the big keynotes that we're excited to have planned for this year's conference. And then, beyond that, like I said, we've got 15 co-hosts and a bunch of philanthropic and other sponsors focused on a range of issues that I could never hope to program in my many years of planning and executing climate-and-environment-focused conferences.

We've got The Institute for Progress helping us figure out a panel on Immigration and The Federation of American Scientists spearheading a panel on the next Golden Age of American Science and Science Investment. We've got The Niskanen Center helping us with a panel on families.

We've got the whole YIMBY movement — Welcoming Neighbors Network, Metropolitan Abundance Project, The Abundance Network, YIMBY action — collaborating on a session, sharing lessons from what worked for communications and organizing in the housing sector to what might work in other Abundance sectors, like energy or infrastructure.

I'm really just scratching the surface here! It's a lot of partners. A lot of sweat equity. A lot of ideas. A lot to be excited about.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You mentioned you've been throwing events before. This is something we share and love, and we'll talk about the importance of events in a second.

But you mentioned you've had a decade of experience throwing events in the world of energy and climate and the environment. So, going back to last year — so, pre-Rubicon, we're back in Gaul — how did this come together in the first place?

Because 15 partners and co-producers or however you want to call it, that's a big number to come out of the gate with that! So, going back to last year, what was the origin story of kicking this off?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

You know, it was a few years ago that I ended up in conversations with folks from some of these co-hosts, just talking about what it would look like and what the purpose and strategy of an Abundance gathering in our nation's capital would look like.

Like, “what should we and why would we convene to co-host an Abundance conference in DC?” And I was talking with folks again, from like The Institute for Progress and The Foundation for American Innovation and The Niskanen Center, about this realization that we are all marching to the same tune.

We are — with significant kind of substantive and even ideological differences between us — all part of this Abundance coalition, this Abundance movement. And last year, really, I and Derek Kaufman, who founded Inclusive Abundance in 2024, spearheaded the first Abundance Conference in DC along with four other co-hosts: The Federation of American Scientists, Institute for Progress, The Niskanen Center, and The Foundation for American Innovation.

And that went really well. It was six co-hosts and a bunch of sessions and panels. We had folks who were at the time working in the Biden Administration. We had Jerusalem Demsas, who this week launched a new magazine, interviewing Patrick Collison, one of the benefactors but also one of the visionaries behind the Progress and Abundance movements. And it just really felt in that event like momentum was building, and a bunch of us wanted to do it again, expand the tent, and democratize the effort.

So, going into this year, we went from 6 to 15 co-hosts. I think last year's headcount was something like 250 people. This year, we've got almost 600 people. And, like I said, there's honestly 100s more people who want to come.

So, I don't know exactly where this thing is going, but it really does feel like a significant groundswell of folks who want to show up in person — like you were saying, Steve — who want to gather and see each other and meet each other and celebrate Abundance victories.

And also, I think, hash out our differences and tensions across the ideological and political spectrum that spans Abundance. That's really my substantive interest in this event: putting like-minded and civically-minded people in a room together and hashing out our strengths and our weaknesses and our commonalities and our differences.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, it's a pretty huge leap, right? You had 6 partners last year. This year, it's 15. So that is 250%. You also mentioned that last year had about 250 people. This year, not only did you set out and go, “we're going to double that,” but then, you sold out well ahead of the conference and have about the size of last year's headcount on your waiting list!

So, you have about 300% of what you had last year, in terms of people that want to go, and will double it in terms of people who actually can go.

In terms of what people can expect and get out of the event — you've started this already — so, obviously, you go. You have fun. Obviously, you learn things. Obviously, you see people you've heard of and meet them.

But, you mentioned — and I thought this was a really interesting way to start — the idea of coming in from different perspectives. So, this is an event for people on the Left, the Right, the Center — every weird where in between —and I love that you mentioned this as a place to come together and be like, “all right, what do we agree on? What do we disagree on? And where are the differences and things that we can work out, merge, understand each other better?”

Those kinds of things. That can only happen when you do actually trust each other enough to be in the same room together and talk to each other.

So, I thought that was really exciting. In your world, in your life as an event producer, in this conference and everything you've done before: why do events? What does this do for people?

You've named a few things. I'm just curious about the power of events? It's a lot of work! Why do this work?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

You know, part of the reason you're talking to me about this is because, not wholly unique among the co-hosts, but particularly among the co-hosts, Breakthrough had the talent and infrastructure and the team in place to throw a conference.

Again, that's not sort of an exclusive strength of ours, but it's something that we have done — and, we think, done well — for well over a decade, is put on events. We've got an events team. We've got relationships with vendors and all the software that that goes into throwing a multi-hundred person event.

And we had the interest and passion for this invigorating-but-challenging work of putting on a conference. And that comes from myself and my colleague Thia Bonadies, the Abundance Conference's Producer, working together for many years at this point, working really hard to bring people together who don't see eye-to-eye on things, and to hash out disagreements, tensions, differences, both in (hopefully) well-planned, well-staged, moderated discussions, but also in all the really important off-stage, informal conversations that happen organically at events.

Events and convening were super important to us at Breakthrough over the last almost two decades that we have been operating because we saw ourselves as offering and building a new philosophy for thinking about the environment and for thinking about the relationship between nature, humans and technology. And we couldn't do that just ourselves.

The staff of The Breakthrough Institute, we relied on expertise. We relied on feedback. We relied on Socratic discussion of the constituent parts of what became eco-modernism.

So, it was just really part of Breakthrough's DNA: bringing people together across disciplines and across differences helps shape and build momentum, but also disciplines a framework, a philosophy, and a movement.

And now, working with all the co-hosts of Abundance, and, you know, the co-chairs of the conference, Jen Pahlka and Zach Graves, and the program committee and everyone who has volunteered time and energy and money and financial support for the conference to make it what it is, I think reinforces to me that the value of bringing people together in person and forcing yourselves to create a program — to create a session on immigration or to create a session on energy Abundance or to create a session on overcoming scarcity in the US healthcare system — when you actually have to not only put your brain to that task, but put multiple brains and multiple institutional imperatives behind that task, you really force yourself to hash out what you believe, why you believe it, what the evidence base is for your policy or political program, and I think that's true across issues and across subject matters.

Obviously, I and we as organizers of Abundance 2025 are not the first persons to realize that workshops or colloquia or conferences are powerful in that way. But I think they are.

The last thing I would say about it is: I find myself thinking that events like this are increasingly important, actually, in a world where we have a fractured media landscape, no hope of building a shared info-sphere, and broken attention spans at the personal and institutional level. I think that we should do a whole bunch to combat all of that, but one of the things I think we should do is spend more time together in person.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Oh, I had promised myself we were coming up against the limit of how much we could talk about events before we got to energy!

But then, you mentioned, a really important point:

Events have always been important in politics. They've never stopped being important. But I agree: I think they're suddenly more important than they have been. You named a few reasons why, and I'll give a few more.

You named the fact that our society is fractured. We get news from different places. We get our worldview from different places. And the only way to reconcile those things, instead of living in different realities and fighting with each other from different realities, is to merge them by being in the same place at the same time and talking to each other. That's one part of this and our fractured ecosystem.

I would also say that's related to what we call our Loneliness Crisis, which is very relevant to YIMBYism and Abundance because it's very hard not to be lonely when you don't live near each other. When you live in your little fortress and you have to drive 30 or 40 minutes to see people you know, you end up being in these little silos. Events are a panacea for that.

And then, I would say, obviously, the online space has gotten a little harried and corrupted, and we're only at the start because — whether you love AI, hate AI, or, like me, sort of both — the world in which, I mean, you're just not going to be able to tell who on the internet is a person or not, right? Are either of us a real person or not? Or even, is this Alex and Steve, or did Alex and Steve outsource this interview to their representative AIs? Not right now, but I know people working on that and pitching that, right? Like, that's coming.

So, it seems to me that the only way to know that you are talking with a person and dealing with people and living in the world of people — and politics is just people — is to be with people and to be present with them.

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

I agree with all of that, Steve. And it raises, I think, a really interesting — philosophical tension might be too strong a word to use — but a philosophical tension for those of us who believe in progress, growth, and Abundance in the first place. Which is that we are all — broadly, maybe not maximally, but broadly, on average — advocates of progress, of technology, and of change.

You know, the whole premise of YIMBYism is that the existing community is not and should not be sealed in amber. And that, actually, dynamism and change and growth are part of what makes a community vital.

Same with energy, right? We are talking about the clean energy revolution, but the reality is that we have always been revolutionizing and rebuilding and building over our energy system. It's part of what makes us human. It's what makes us growth and science and Abundance advocates in the first place.

And I think — and again, this isn't unique to Abundance, but it is maybe particularly relevant to those of us so enamored of progress in technology - there is a kind of shared humanity and a shared community that, I think, all of us in society are increasingly treasuring and frankly anxious about as we talk about new media landscapes and as we talk about the hopeful — I agree with you — productivity boom from Artificial Intelligence and all the new tools and instruments and capabilities that we're developing with digital technologies, and as we talk about ever more globalized culture and economies and society, I do think there is a humanist — and, frankly, at times, "small 'c' conservative" — need to cultivate in-person interaction. To cultivate family. Tribe. Village. Whatever you call it.

And I don't really know what the resolution or the solution to that tension is, but I can tell you again that there is a demonstrated, mass desire to all get together in person and feel it and talk about it, including among a bunch of us who are generally very optimistic about technological change and about dynamism. I find that tension really vital.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, when we think about “political parties,” there's a word in there that I don't think gets enough attention, which is “party.”

Whether you want to do anything in politics or with people, you've got to throw a better party.

And this is a good start.

Let's segue, though, from this to The Breakthrough Institute and your portfolio. If I go on your website and look under "Our Work," you list five topic areas where you're saying, "hey, how can we use better policy and better technology to create better results, better results for the environment, better for the trees and the fish, and better for people in America,” right? “We can do better.”

One is Climate and Energy. We’ve been all over that. Nuclear Energy Innovation: we went all over that. Environmental Regulatory Reform, all over that. And then, you have two that I think are really interesting and that I want to spend time on today.

One of them is Food and Agriculture, which I don't think gets enough attention in politics in general and even in the Abundance space. I want to know more about eco-modernist and Abundant food and agriculture!

What do you mean by that?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah. So, for our part as The Breakthrough Institute, we see ourselves as making the environmental case for industrial agriculture.

So, if you think about food and the environment or “foodie environmentalism” or the “slow food movement” over the last half century or so, Rachel Carson, one of the founding figures of modern environmentalism, was writing largely about the use of organic chloride, pesticides, and pollution from farm systems.

The concern and anxiety about the ecological effects of food production are really hard-coded into environmentalism. That mostly has manifested as an environmental movement in opposition to industrial agriculture and factory farms.

There's good reason for that! When you talk about industrial agriculture, you're talking about massive machines powered by fossil fuels. You're talking about synthetic fertilizers that are created by natural gas as opposed to created by waste products from livestock and from crop systems. You're talking about nitrogen pollution from over-application of fertilizers creating dead zones and rivers and waterways. You're talking about pumping up water from aquifers in the desert and growing crops in places like California — where, 400 years ago, if you had told the very few people who lived in California that the desert would one day be the nation's breadbox, it would've been shocking!

So, obviously, agriculture has enormous environmental impacts. By some measures, it has the largest environmental impact of anything that humans do. Something like half of the ice-free land on Earth is dedicated to growing food for humans.

Actually, the bulk of that is grazing land for cattle and other ruminants, and a huge amount of it is also for crops that feed cattle, as well as biofuels and food that humans actually eat. So, it's by far the leading driver of land use change around the world, much bigger than cities or even mining and minerals production. It’s a much, much bigger order of magnitude. Bigger than anything else we do.

So, the environmental concern about the agricultural system is well-founded!

Our point of view is that: all of the things that environmentalists have been telling us that we need to do to minimize our ecological impact from our food system would actually make it worse, when you do the math.

Organic food and organic agriculture use only organic fertilizers and pesticides, which lead, on averag — and this is a really robust finding in the empirical literature — to lower yields. So, you might have less pollution on a given acre of land, but you need more land to grow food, which leads to more deforestation.

If you compare synthetic versus organic fertilizers, to be a little reductive, you're talking about chemical fertilizers made in a factory using the Haber Bosch process versus, very often, cattle manure.

First of all, the synthetic fertilizers tend to produce less nitrogen pollution per area of application because you can be more precise. But, another thing to remember is that, for that cattle manure that that does go into fertilizing organic farms, those cattle were mostly industrially-fed cows!

So, the organic food system is really floating on top of the bulk industrial food production system, without which it couldn't exist. And, if you do all the math behind the assumption that you do produce all your food with just organic inputs, then you end up using over an India's worth of land extra in order to feed the population we have today, let alone the 1, 2, or 3 billion more people that we're expecting to live on the planet by later this century.

What we observe is that, yes, the environmental impact of the food system has been growing over the centuries and millenniums, but mostly because the population has been growing and we need to feed everybody.

In that time, the environmental footprint of an individual's agricultural demand has gone down dramatically. So, even I, with a 'high-up-the-food-chain omnivorous diet, the land that is needed to cultivate and grow my diet is 10 times lower than what it would've been for someone living a thousand years ago. It's 50% lower than it was for my great-grandmother.

So, even in the last one hundred years or so where we've seen the scale deployment of irrigation and synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides and multimillion dollar, GPS-guided combine tractors and massive irrigation systems using pumped water from aquifers, we're using less land. We're actually using less water. We're using fewer inputs per capita to grow more food.

That’s the long and the short of our view on what sustainable agriculture should look like: it should look like we're economizing on land and inputs to grow more food, using less land, and sparing more of the land area and nature for wild nature.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

The history of food is addictively fascinating, and also, I think, at times terrifying. Check me on any of these facts and rein me in if we're going too deep on this, but I think of a number of things, right?

First of all, the fact that: the stuff we're growing — all of those fruits and veggies — the “natural stuff from the ground for humans to eat” is not natural! That's not “God-given!” The Garden of Eden wouldn't have had apples!

Fruits and veggies, as we know them today, are an invention. Humans made them. People in the Americas created potatoes and yucca and corn and tomatoes. It took a long time, but it's a human invention.

All of this stuff that we think of natural — and then you go to the world of fertilizer, right? For a long time in history, the best fertilizer was bones. Human bones. If there’s a battle near where you live and a bunch of people die, that’s terrific news! Go gather bones, grind them up, and that's going to help grow your food.

And then, post-1492, you get Europeans colonizing the Americas. And, in South America, they went, "Whoa, this is weird! Why are all these South Americans going to this island to harvest bird poop and taking it up to the Andes to grow potatoes?"

And then, they realized that: actually, bird poop is an incredible fertilizer. And then, you get things like the Guano Act in American law, which was, like, if we find an island with bird poop on it, we can claim it to harvest the bird poop to grow food.

And then, I mean, pesticides. You talk about pesticides as an invention and synthetic. It's also an arms race. If you don't use pesticides, your whole crop can be wiped out. That’s happened many times in the last few hundred years. But, if you do use pesticides, you haven't suddenly invented your solution for the future. The bugs learn, too. And, by next year or in the next couple of years, they've adjusted. So, you're constantly having to come out with new, escalating ways of keeping your food safe from the bugs as the bugs learn, too. That scares me.

I am very curious how you think about this. When you talk about using less land, is that stacking things? Is that artificial light? Meat? Do you like the idea of designer-invented meat? What do you see as the future and the right solutions for this kind of thing?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, I think that, given the scale of agricultural production and the range of productivity around the world and the stubbornness of peoples’ diets, we're going to have to do all of it and at least attempt to max out every solution set that you just mentioned there.

Just to go through a few of them: American cereal production — corn, soy, wheat — is two or three times more productive than the global average. If you got the rest of the world up to existing American standards — not sci-fi stuff, not vertical farms, not brand new sort of varieties, but just up to American standards — you would spare enormous amounts of land for other purposes, whether it's rainforests or grasslands or parklands. The other half of eco modernism is that we kind of want to intensify human production of nature to spare more and more of the planet for wild nature and for managed nature. So that, you know, that's one.

You mentioned vertical farms. You know, there's a lot of pessimism around vertical farms right now, partly because vertical farms need water and pesticides and fertilizers, just like any sort of crop system. But, they need way less of that because you can be much more precise with most of your inputs in, a vertical greenhouse.

What you need a lot of is energy. You need a lot of electricity for the halogen lights in your greenhouse. And that is just added costs compared to getting your light from the sun and the sky.

Now, there's a benefit there, which is that you can have the lights on all day. But, most plants don't actually want the light all day. Yes, food that we eat is mostly an invention, created by humans over eons. But still, most plants expect the sun to go down. Leaving the artificial sun on requires you to tinker with the plant itself in order to make it absorb all of that energy.

So, there's a well-founded pessimism for vertical agriculture for those practical reasons, but I do think that it has a future, particularly for leafy greens and some vegetables, like strawberries and tomatoes and cucumbers and things like that. Those are not a significant share of agriculture and humans' environmental footprint, but they are a particularly inefficient one.

If you look at the amount of calories you produce with an acre of lettuce compared to an acre of corn, it's almost irrationally different, because there aren't any calories in lettuce. We want to produce lettuce and we want to produce fresh produce greens, but if you're talking about efficiency of calorie production and land area, it would be great if we could figure out how to move a bunch of that produce and greens production indoors, where it uses far less land and water and fertilizer and pesticides.

That requires a lot of energy, in addition to decarbonizing the energy supply and powering these AI data centers and new critical minerals production. If we had ‘mega high energy Abundance’ from solar and nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture and all of the technologies that we'll talk about and that we've talked about before, you could do things like desalinate water for agriculture and for municipal water supplies. You could do things like vertical agriculture. And you could actually make those things economical.

You also mentioned “alternative meats.” You know, we have been advised not to call it “fake meat,” because consumers really don't like that!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Designer meat! Customize the marbling on your ribeye!

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Definitely not “in vitro meat,” which is another term of art. People are still figuring that out!

Alternative proteins, like the ones people know best, like Beyond Foods and Impossible Burgers, really took off thanks to impressive design and impressive science five or six years ago.

I think that they — Beyond and Impossible in particular — got a bit of a windfall from the pandemic, when people were stuck at home and they needed to buy a bunch of frozen food, and “there's this new, exciting food option in the grocery store!”

So, yeah, you're going to buy a bunch of fake meat. That didn't really last. There was a sudden rise and then a sudden decline in consumer interest in fake meat.

I think that's because, as good as Impossible and Beyond Burgers are — and I really do like the Impossible Burger, in particular — they're not quite as good, I think, is the general consumer sentiment, compared to a regular beef burger.

And, once you get out of hamburgers and chicken tenders, we just are nowhere close to producing a really good salmon filet or grilled shrimp or ribeye or chicken thigh or the things that people find really tasty and really care about.

Those are the kinds of things that require quite a bit of science to actually produce. I don't know if it's some combination of fermentation and 3D printing that will do it, but those are two of the main processes that these startups and scientists are exploring to actually produce tasty, edible, competitive, desirable protein.

If you did that, you would really minimize the significant environmental impacts from our food system!

Again, the biggest environmental footprint — maybe of anything in the world — is cows, who belch methane and who require a vast amount of land area for grazing.

Here again, I would say that organically-fed cows actually require more land area for and more inputs for a given amount of meat produced, just because finishing the cattle-raising process with grain and feedlots makes them bigger faster, so that they're brought to ‘slaughter weight’ faster and they spend less time belching methane into the air for a given amount of meat produced!

So, there again, there's an opportunity to accelerate the industrialization of cattle production to — relatively — lower its environmental impact.

But, you're still talking about an enormous amount of carbon and land area for feeding and producing beef! And so, there again, I think we need to both make more efficient our livestock production systems with the animals that we have today — which, not unlike the sort of fruits and vegetables you mentioned earlier, are an invention of the human species at this point, if you look at...

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, they don't come like that! With all that fat. That's not how they came. We did that!

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, we did that! And, you know, I think it's a fair argument that it's our responsibility to have some stewardship and some dominion over that. We do have dominion over the lives of over a trillion animals, depending on how you count it, especially when you tally up all of the tilapia and shrimp and seafood that humans consume in a given year.

It's a really daunting challenge. Not just the ecology of it, but the animal welfare. I think we're going to need to, again, press on all levers to make these systems more efficient — and hopefully more humane along the way — while trying to crack that really tricky science and engineering challenge that would finally deliver scalable, sustainable, and desirable alternative proteins.

So, those are a few things across the sort of horizon of our food future!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, it sounds, Alex Trembath, like you were describing, a world where there's more food and less death and more land for people and less global warming, which sounds dangerously Positive-Sum. You can't think like that!

On vertical farming, as you mentioned, if you mention vertical farming, you might as well put a sign on your forehead that says, "dunk on me!”

You've talked about that having a lot to do with energy. And, obviously, you guys are in energy! So, if you get everything you want on energy — if we changed the laws and you could build nuclear and AI went through its booms and busts but at the end of the day they built nuclear and, maybe, one day, we take climate change as seriously as Richard Goddamn Nixon did more than a half century ago and build a bunch of nuclear plants across the US to make energy cheaper and the climate better — if you get what you want on energy, does that solve the problem with vertical farming? Does that become attainable then?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

I don't know what kind of thresholds there are. I’m holding out hope that with ‘hyper energy Abundance’ — like with solar farms and nuclear plants dotting the landscape (in my imagination of it, the solar farms will be a lot more visible than the nuclear plants, which take up far less space and you can kind of bury them under parking lot) and a lot more ‘hyper-Abundant’ electricity —I don't see why a certain amount of like greens and produce production indoors wouldn't become more economical.

It would surprise me, based on my surface level review of the scientific literature here, if we ever produce corn or soy or grow cattle equivalents indoors. But, I wouldn't bet against surprising amounts of innovation here, especially once you start talking not in years but in a decades and centuries timescale!

150 years ago, we might have known that the atmosphere was 70% nitrogen, but we still fought wars over bird poop in the Southern Hemisphere because there's this weird collection of dry islands where it just collected.

And then, as soon as Europeans industrially discovered guano, they started to run out of it, and scientists were scrambling to figure out, “well, there's all this nitrogen in the atmosphere, but we can't get to it.”

So, these scientists in Germany — Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch — got together and came up with the aptly-named Haber-Bosch process, which fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia fertilizer.

Again, that would've sounded like gobbledygook and magic 150 or 200 years ago!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Still does!

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Still does! Yeah. When you actually start to talk about fusing two atoms together to release gobsmacking amounts of thermal energy and then turning that into electricity, these technologies are really magical.

I like to remind myself of that when I think not 5 or 10 or even 25 years down the road but 50 or 100 or 200 years down the road — not that I expect to be around to experience it. I do start to shed some of my pragmatism — and certainly some of my pessimism — around the agricultural and industrial and energy and urban processes that we take for granted today.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, maybe one day, maybe soon, the world will look like the cover of the Abundance book.

Which I thought should have had more skyscrapers, but they didn't ask me!

On your website again, we talked about a couple things: ‘Climate,’ ‘Energy,’ ‘Environmental Regulatory Reform,’ ‘Nuclear Energy Innovation.’ We've talked about ‘Food and Agriculture.’

You also have ‘Energy for Development.’ And your headline on that page is, "Confronting Green Colonialism and Western Hypocrisy."

Very spicy! What does that mean?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Energy for Development is our way of talking about energy and agricultural development in low and middle-income countries.

Our policy proposition there is that, due to, again, a misguided environmentalist impulse in international aid and global development, there have been legal and non-legal restrictions made on investments in energy infrastructure and food systems in poor countries for decades and generations.

There have been bans on hydroelectric fossil fuel and nuclear energy investments by places like the World Bank and the European Development Bank and the Overseas Private investment Corporation and other multilateral finance organizations that were created to help accelerate industrialization, labor force expansion, and technology transfer in the poorest parts of the world.

We have placed these restrictions on the types of technology, energy, and infrastructure that would really allow our poor neighbors in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia and Latin America to have access to, while still enjoying those technologies ourselves!

If you look at the US energy system, we use everything. We've got 20% of our electricity coming from nuclear. We've got another 20 odd percent coming from wind and solar. We've got 40% coming from natural gas, 7% or 8% from hydrogen, and the rest of it coming from a little bit of coal and geothermal.

Most of those technologies — at least until recently, when there's been reform movement to fix what we considered a pretty great injustice here —most aid and development finance have been restricted for most of those technologies.

So, our Energy for Development program has been focused on fixing that by engaging lawmakers in Congress and engaging the rule-makers at places like the World Bank and the European Development Bank and other multilateral finance institutions, and also by emphasizing the really central importance of energy infrastructure to economic development.

You know, there's this other model of energy access and international aid, which says, "if you just install solar panels and micro-grids in these poor villages in poor countries, then you're providing energy access and you can leapfrog over the fossil fuel industrialization that we benefited from in Europe and East Asia and the United States and beyond.

Our view there is that: that will not work. It is better than not to have a solar panel on your home, and it's better than not to have a clean cook stove in your home, but what drove economic growth and improvements in human welfare in every country around the world is urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural modernization. And those require lots and lots of energy.

And — to put a fine point on it — lots and lots of oil and natural gas.

Maybe a lot less coal than Germany, the UK, and the United States used, fortunately. But we're still using quite a bit of oil and natural gas in the United States, and we've been arguing for a very long time at this point that it is one of the more screwed-up injustices in the world that we're telling the poorest people on the planet that we're going to restrict access to the same technologies that we still benefit from.

So, that’s, in a big nutshell, what our Energy for Development program is focused on.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, in terms of oil and natural gas, it seems like there is almost a carbon investment — like, a dirty energy investment — that's needed in order to have clean energy.

Which is to say, if you want wind turbines and solar power and all this stuff, some amount of the manufacturing for that does take the dirty, shitty, crappy oil and natural gas.

And so, if you want to reap the benefits of clean technology, there is a very short term sacrifice in order to have the "return on investment" of a better, safer world and climate later.

Is that right? How do you think about where the most polluting energy sources factor in today and in the coming decades? What's the right way to think about how that fits into a wider and greener system?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

There's a couple of angles on it. It's a really well-formulated question, Steve. You actually stumbled upon the right terminology there, which is a term called “EROI,” or "Energy Return on Investment."

EROI is an attempt to calculate all of the input energy that goes into producing an energy-producing technology and doing a cost-and-benefit calculation.

So, if you have a solar panel that produces however many megawatt hours of electricity over its lifespan, how many megawatt hours of electricity went into producing that panel? And that (which is a large surplus) is your EROI.

But, the size of that surplus is different from technology to technology.

So, on the one hand, you're very right that we do actually need significant amounts of industrial energy. Electricity in particular, but also the steel and concrete and glass and copper that go into producing nuclear reactors and solar panels and wind turbines and batteries.

We need energy to produce those raw and engineered inputs in the first place. And, we need fossil fuels still for most of the stuff that we do, as far as we can tell.

There's a push in energy and climate spaces to electrify everything.” Which, directionally, I think is a great goal. If you can electrify vehicles and furnaces and boilers and stoves and ovens and things that currently run on gasoline or kerosene or natural gas, then you can plug everything into the grid and build lots of solar and lots of nuclear and run our homes and our personal vehicles with electricity.

The problem is that: that's a minority of what we use our energy for. Most of the energy we use goes to the industrial and agricultural and bulk transportation systems. Those are still heavily-reliant on especially oil and natural gas, not just for fuel, but for process input.

You need coal to produce steel, at least at scale right now. There's startup arc furnaces to try and use electricity to create steel and similar innovative designs to produce low carbon concrete and low carbon glass and things like that. But, at the moment, the best way that we know to produce steel and copper or to produce steel and glass and plastics and other petroleum inputs and other petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is using fossil fuels as an input. And, meanwhile, using natural gas, especially for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing on our electricity grids.

Now, we're attempting to solve that whole terrain of problems. We are getting better at building and deploying batteries that can store excess renewable energy for when the sun goes down and when the wind isn't blowing for a few hours of the day.

We're trying hard to make longer duration energy storage economical. We are working on electrifying technologies that currently use kerosene or gasoline. We're making progress in some places, like with thermal heat pumps and with electric vehicles — Tesla and Rivian and all these things.

But, it's really hard, you know? That's really the upshot for me at the end of all these conversations, is that this is hard, not easy. There's a hard industrial and engineering and policy challenge that will mostly happen pretty slowly.

We see really exciting and increasingly visible signs of progress. You can see Teslas out in the world all over the place, at least here in the Bay Area right now. You can see solar panels. I hope, in the not-too-distant future, we start to see, if you drive to the right place, really cool geothermal drilling sites.

I hope that we start to see micro-reactors sort of dotting the landscape, and that more of this decarbonizing infrastructure becomes visible and exciting to us.

Really, you're talking about — to your point, Steve — the next rung up the energy ladder. And it just would not have been possible and would not have been feasible to, for example, do the Manhattan project without industrializing first! It wouldn't be conceivable to create fake meat if we hadn't figured out how to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.

So, to the original impetus behind your question: telling poor countries that they can't rely on, not just those fossil fuels, but those processes —and telling them that they can just leapfrog directly to solar panels on their rooftop to power a cell phone and a light and maybe a cook stove — I think is just profoundly unjust, and also really misunderstands the nature of economic growth of energy systems and energy transitions and the nature of climate action and what decarbonization is actually going to look like.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, this has been an amazingly fun conversation.

I'm once again honored to spend time with you and to get to hear about the Abundance Conference and the meaning of events in politics and food and agriculture and justice in climate and energy technology for the world.

As we come to a close here, I'm curious: The Abundance Conference is about to happen, and it's also sold out! For anyone that's either finding out about it in this episode or was, like, "oh, I was going to go to that! What do you mean it's sold out?" — (that's scarcity, Alex!) — for anybody who is interested now: how can they make sure they go next year? How can they follow along? How can they get involved? How do they plug in?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Get on the waitlist! Follow the website. We'll be sure to keep anyone who signs up for the wait list appraised of future gatherings and future events.

And then, beyond that, I would literally just go and sign up for the newsletter of all 15 co-hosts, who will talk about the future of the Abundance movement and the future of any Abundance events, including the Conference, but not just the Conference.

I would also say that, if you're in New England a couple weeks after Abundance, YIMBYTown is just a few weeks later (for our housing listeners)!

And that, if you're in the Bay Area, there's a Progress Summit in Berkeley (which I believe also has a waiting list)!

I hope that all of these events continue and take place in much taller, more capacious buildings in the future. There are a bunch of really cool institutions where you can follow along now.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Amazing. Alex, thanks for spending time with me today! I'll see you in a couple weeks! Thanks for joining us on Radio Abundance!

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

I'll see you in DC, Steve! Thank you so much for having me on again! This was great!

Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

Hello, my name is Zennon Ulyate-Crow. I'm here with Radio Abundance, live from Los Angeles, California!

I'm here with Jonathan Hale. Jonathan, want to introduce yourself and what you did for our community?

Jonathan Hale, Street Safety Advocate:

Yeah! Hey, how's it going? My name's Jonathan, and what I did was I organized a group of neighbors. We painted a set of crosswalks here at Stoner Park, and we got the city to remove them. Then, the city repainted them. We took advantage of the backlash from them getting removed to force the city to repaint the crosswalks and make other improvements around the park, which we're really excited about.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

Can you tell me more about how these crosswalks came to be?

Jonathan Hale, Street Safety Advocate:

Yeah! So, when we started out, I got together a group of my friends and neighbors, and we painted crosswalks at the corner of Stoner Park. We figured that crosswalks near a park and near schools and near daycare should be the default, especially with Summer Camp right around the corner. This was at the start of the summer when we painted these.

So, we decided we were going to paint crosswalks. We knew that there was no, quote unquote, 'right' way to do it. So, we did our best, and I don't think a lot of people noticed at first. But then The West Side Current, a local paper, published a story about the crosswalks, and then that led to the city removing them.

We took advantage of the fact that the city removed them and the backlash that they've generated to call for the city to repaint the crosswalks and make improvements to the park, which they did.

So, you can see the new city-painted official crosswalks are behind me.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

Tell me more about why this crosswalk was so important for the community?

Jonathan Hale, Street Safety Advocate:

Yeah, I think it's important, well, because it's a park, and I go here a lot. I know there's always a lot of kids here, but, more importantly than that, I think this represents the city saying, "okay, it's time to stop 'letting the perfect be the enemy of the good' and actually get stuff done," which they did! The city replaced this crosswalk within a week of it getting removed And that was because of the backlash and because our neighbors reached out and pressed the city to get this done.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

Why do you think it took the city so long to install a crosswalk right next to a park where kids play every single day?

Jonathan Hale, Street Safety Advocate:

I think the city's worried about the liability risk, and, frankly, I don't think there's a lot of willpower to get basic quality of life improvements done. Too often, I think we say, "it is what it is," or "that's just the way things are," and we say that as if it were the solution and not the problem itself. And, I think, hopefully this sheds some light on the fact that this is the problem and we need to change the status quo.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

You mentioned that there's one other thing nearby that is another example of the failure of LA city governance to get things done. You want to talk about that a little bit more?

Jonathan Hale, Street Safety Advocate:

Yeah, for sure. Well, we're actually a couple houses down from 1747 Stoner, which is the site of an ED-1 project that's 100% Affordable Housing and that gets around parking requirements because it's affordable. It's non-subsidized Affordable Housing. And there's so much community resistance to this Affordable Housing and round after round of community input and meetings that we don't need because people's lives are at stake.

Just like here with the crosswalks, people's lives are at stake if we don't make these improvements. Somebody will get hurt. With housing, people's lives are at stake because, if we don't build housing, people will become homeless and people will struggle to pay their rent.

And so, I think this is just an example of how we need to get things done across the board because the stakes are high and we need to stop waffling about this stuff.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: 

What's next for the crosswalk movement?

Jonathan Hale, Street Safety Advocate:

Yeah, for sure. Well, I guess, for starters, I'm not really affiliated with an organization. I get help from The Crosswalk Collective. They're an amazing group that does work mostly in Hollywood and Mid-City. But, I think the point of this is that we need to cultivate this culture of civic engagement and community-building, and we need to stop pretending like this is somebody else's problem. It's our problem. It's all of our problem.

So, the thing that's next is, this Sunday, we're going to be painting crosswalks in Venice and then going to CicLAvia, and, the city has agreed to a meeting where we're going to talk about infrastructure improvements and practical things that we can do to speed up our bureaucratic processes and get stuff done. Which I'm excited about.

But, in the meantime, we'll keep painting crosswalks. We'll keep doing guerilla urbanism until the city actually demonstrates it's serious about getting stuff done.

Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXII: In the Arena. Michael Tubbs is the former Mayor of Stockton and the Founder of End Poverty in California. He is now running for Lieutenant Governor of California. Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hello, and welcome to Radio Abundance! I'm your host, Steve Boyle, the Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America. We are on location in-studio in Los Angeles today with two Radio Abundance Los Angeles co-hosts. I am here with Alex Melendez, a longtime activist with YIMBY Action. He founded YIMBY Latino and was a DNC delegate for the 2024 election.

Hey, Alex!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Happy to be here!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I am also with Zennon Ulyate-Crow. Zennon is likewise a young activist with YIMBY Los Angeles, the West Side Young Democrats, and now Abundance Network's Abundant Santa Monica. Zennon was the youngest commissioner in Santa Cruz's history.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Welcome! Welcome to Radio Abundance.

And, speaking of young folks, we've got a young folk here!

Well, I'm still young. I feel old with these guys. I felt old learning about your age the other day. I knew you were, when you were first elected, one of the youngest elected officials ever in the US at age 22. You've been the Mayor of Stockton. You are now running for the Lieutenant Governor of California.

You know, I have, even young politicians, a certain vision in my head that they're a little older. And then we were hanging out the other day, championing SB 79 in Sacramento. You had more to say to champion it than I did. I basically walked in and said, "I'm Steve Boyle with YIMBY Democrats, and I approve." But a friend of mine was there who said you went to college together. And he and I went to High School together. So that bummed me out because of imposter syndrome!

Michael Tubbs, thank you for joining us on Radio Abundance!

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Thank you so much for having me. It's fantastic to be here.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Why are you running for Lieutenant Governor?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Lieutenant Governor in California, in this moment, is a position that requires leadership, right? The job has very particular things you're responsible for.

You're on the UC and CSU board, one of the only people in the state on both. And what people don't know, particularly for this conversation, is that both the UC and CSU can build by-right. In the same way they build buildings and departments, they could build housing. They could build more student housing, as you probably know, going to UC Santa Cruz. They could also build more workforce housing.

The Lieutenant Governor also sits on the State Lands Commission and is responsible for being a good steward of our environment, but also making sure we're being thoughtful about when it is appropriate to actually build more housing.

And then, beyond that, it's just an incredible bully pulpit. It's the second-highest elected official in the fourth-largest economy in the world: an economy that we know isn't working for everyone, an economy that we know isn't building enough housing for everyone.

So, it just felt like the right opportunity to make an impact on the issues I care about and to make sure that California remains a beacon of what a multiracial democracy could look like: a society that's moving forward, not looking towards the past for inspiration, but looking at the future, embracing innovation and figuring out, how do you make sure we all do well?

It's just an amazing opportunity. So I'm excited to be in the race.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

So you begin with an interesting thread, right? Because we'll of course talk about policies around housing and YIMBYism and Abundance in California and how to make it possible for people to build -- the private market, citizens, community developers, anybody -- to build. And government's included!

And speaking of government, you've mentioned that, as Lieutenant Governor, you would have land and permission, which are two of the hardest things to get in order to build. So, if you did become Lieutenant Governor, what would you want to do with that land?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I'm going to be the most annoying regent of all time, insofar as I think, (A) we have to leverage the thousands of acres of the UC and CSU system. We know that students need housing, that janitors need housing, that adjunct faculty needs housing, that the people who work at universities need housing, and really making it a priority for that system to build, build, build.

It's not a 10-year project, it's not a 20-year project. It's a necessity. Not just because I love housing, but because there's a real need. Throughout our system, from the UC level to the CSU level, even the community college level, the biggest need is housing. It's student housing.

You have people taking longer to graduate because they can't find housing. You have people not graduating because they can't find housing. You have people graduating while living in cars or couch surfing because they can't find housing. So that's a manageable problem, a worthy problem, and one that I will use the bully pulpit in the position of trustee to really push and advocate for, because my experience in government has taught me: nothing just happens, and nothing happens easily. Yeah. You always have to push. You always have to get on people's nerves. You always have to be annoying.

That's the only way anything, particularly important things, get done.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

I'll put some numbers to that as well. In the UCs, 7% of students are currently experiencing homelessness. In the CSUs, it's about 15%. In the community colleges, it's about 22%.

I actually founded the Student Homes Coalition in California, which worked on passing student housing legislation at the state level. We've passed five out of seven bills for the past three years.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, thank you for your work. Amazing.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, something we're very familiar with in the Bay Area is students being seen as pollution. There's just been some good reforms and clarifications to CEQA, but it was quite vague about what was pollution, so people could say that students were pollution, young people were pollution, noise is pollution, parties are pollution – genuinely – to block student housing and to block low-income housing and affordable housing.

I talked with Jon Lovett, the former speechwriter for Barack Obama and Host of Pod Save America. We talked in the fall. He said a big radicalizing moment for him was to see, in the East Bay, student housing be thwarted because "students were pollution."

This story has even made it across the pond! I was in London two weeks ago, meeting at Parliament and having lunch with a member of Parliament and a sort of a world-crossing academic, and the academic, a guy named Alain Bertaud, as we were telling stories of NIMBYism around the world, he started talking about us not being able to build student housing in California.

So, it is legendary, this failure and betrayal, and I'm excited that you might take a stab at fixing it.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Yes, sir!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

I hate to say this, but students do breed CO2. Just saying!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, you've got to watch out for that!

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I think, also, what's lost in the conversation is, in addition to students, it's also the people who work at the universities who need housing. Our universities are some of the biggest employers in the state. Just like we require or want other big employers to build housing near the job site, the CSU and UC system has to do the same thing, even at the community college level.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

I actually had a brief stint where I almost became a community college trustee in my home district back in San Mateo County, and I ended up earning the endorsement of the faculty union because of this specific, particular thing.

A lot of their part-time professors were facing a lack of housing opportunities and the fact that a lot of them had to drive into this very wealthy district that had an excess of money and land.

I will say, that district was the first educational district in the county to build housing. So, they were starting to work on that, but that was also one of their primary issues. And the reason why I earned their endorsement was because I was a strong advocate for wanting to build more housing so that these people can live here and do the work that they were happy to do for students.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And when we talk about teacher housing and janitor housing-- this is all levels, right? – it's something I've seen even in the suburbs I grew up in. They’ve tried to build affordable teacher housing, and the community can go, "I don't like it. It's too many stories. The homes are too close together. I don't want it." And, suddenly, you're saying students can't live and teachers can't live.

And, by the way, this isn't just charity for students and teachers. Universities are the engines of culture and economic development and innovation. The companies of the future, the jobs of the future, the game changing research of the future -- it all happens at universities.

And, I'll just say, I think universities already are a little bit of a model for the cities we want and the neighborhoods we want, right? They’re walkable neighborhoods where you live by people you know and where there is intellectual stimulation and social events.

I think for a lot of the loneliness crisis and a lot of the separation of our society and a lot of what people want when they move to cities, a lot of what young people want, but also elderly people, too, all want a place you can walk and be with anything you need to get and all the people you love and stuff to do. And I think, we're just asking to let students live, let teachers live, and let's all live in our little universe of universities.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Americans pay a lot of money to see this stuff and go overseas to Europe.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, and not just Europe, but Disneyland! We're sitting here in Los Angeles. I'm going to hit this so many times and in every interview because: Look, you can – in California – build dense neighborhoods, walkable neighborhoods, abundant public transportation, and mixed-use buildings. You don't have to do setbacks. You can have cafes on the street corner and tree lined streets. You can do all of this as long as nobody can stay the night and there are roller coasters!

But, if you do, people are willing to fly across the country and the world and pay hundreds of dollars a day for: not a room to sleep in. Right? And some of it is so that the kids can see Mickey Mouse, and some of it is to ride the rollercoasters. But I think there's quite a lot of people there that are young-ish, middle-aged, that don't have kids – I don't think they're there for Mickey Mouse!

I think we just like that stuff. And I think we should all be able to have it.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

I mean, literally, aside from Disneyland itself, you have Downtown Disney, which is a walkable shopping mall attached to Disney that people go to just walk around.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

This is so funny because Disneyland actually has a City Hall. My favorite joke every time I go is, "I'm here to make a public comment to Mr. Mouse. Can you build some more, please?"

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

All right, enough Mickey Mouse. Back to Michael Tubbs!

Michael, what else does the Lieutenant Governor do?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

The Lieutenant Governor is also the Acting Governor when the Governor's gone and out of state. The Lieutenant Governor also is the emissary for foreign trade, which before was more of a symbolic role, but, given this current administration’s tariffs and the ways in which the United States' trade position with partners is always subject to change, that's going to be a real role to make sure that California uses its market capture to continue to do things that benefit the economy and that allow people to build and allow people to prosper right here in California.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, sometimes, I've thought of the Lieutenant Governor as kind of the Vice Presidential role for a state Governor. But, in this case, it's your own election. You don't run on a ticket with the gubernatorial candidate.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

It's a separate election. And it creates, again, a huge platform.

I think what I've learned, particularly in the last six months, is that folks need leaders that are going to level with them and explain to them what's happening and what's going on. How is this working? What are the blocks? Why isn't this done? Why hasn't that been passed?

A big part of how I've envisioned the role will be doing that – being an explainer-in-chief – and also doing stuff that most Lieutenant Governors don't do – like testifying on every single bill – I think is important. And I've done that already as a candidate. I've testified on the two most, quote unquote, "controversial" housing bills this cycle, one by Buffy Wicks around CEQA reform and one from Scott Wiener around transit-oriented development. Not because it's in my job description, and not because Lieutenant Governor is the authority, but because leadership demands action. It's the right thing to do to make it really clear to people, “no, this is not about some abstract notions of right and wrong or an adherence to a rigidity that doesn't really work for people anymore. This is about: we have a problem. We don't have enough housing. We need every tool in the toolbox to build more housing. “

And, when those things come up, I will – I'm doing it as a candidate, but even more so as Lieutenant Governor – I will be very bullish about saying "this is where I stand. This is why it needs to happen," and exerting some force and pressure because I think that's the only way California and Sacramento actually move. You have to push it. Einstein said – or was it Newton? – that "an object at rest tends to stay at rest." You have to – we have to – push, and it's going to take leadership to do that.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, we ran into each other while you were testifying for SB 79 for transit-oriented development in Sacramento. I wonder if you can testify a little here?

Can you tell us about those two bills and what you said about them and why you believe in them?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, the Buffy Wicks bill on CEQA reform, the argument was, “there's nothing Progressive about process in and of itself. There's nothing forward-thinking or Democratic about delay. There's nothing enlightened about not getting the thing done” And we know that nothing is sacrosanct, at least in my view. Nothing is untouchable. And CEQA has its uses! CEQA is not altogether terrible. But, we do know that CEQA has been used and weaponized in a terrible way as it comes to delaying and denying the ability to build housing.

Buffy's bill was a simple one. It was like, “let's, for things that, like infill projects, have already gone through the CEQA process or the general plan, that land doesn't have to go through the CEQA process again for another project.” Basically, “if the squirrels are going to be okay in the general plan, they'll be okay again.” It’s the same land that's already been looked at. It’s like, “Why? Why be redundant?” Particularly with the fact that we have a crisis! Particularly that we don't have enough housing.

And then Scott Wiener's bill is around transit-oriented development. We know that our transit systems need ridership. We know that in LA and the Bay Area, we need more people to ride these public utilities, (A).

(B) We know that transit-oriented development provides an opportunity for a lot of infill, dense, and multi-level housing, right?

And, (C) We know there's a demand for it, that young people, and all people, have no problem living next to the BART, have no problem living next to the Metro, and have no problem living near the transportation hubs.

We also know there's a climate impact when folks aren't able to live next to transit and folks have to commute for hours. When I was mayor of Stockton, we led the state and the nation in the number of “super commuters.” 10% of our population commutes three hours a day or more for work. And it's because the housing that people could afford is in Stockton, but the jobs were in the Bay Area, and the housing wasn't there near the BART station.

So, Senator Wiener's Bill will allow for that to happen. That one's working its way through the process. I'm hopeful that our friends and the legislators see that now is the time to think a little bit differently. Now is the time to have constructive dialogue with some of our friends. And now is the time to really show the folks in California that we are not just saying that it's a problem, but we understand that we have tools that can make that problem more solvable.

And, on the Scott Wiener bill, it's a triple win. It's good for the environment. It's good for transit ridership. And it's good to increase the number of units of housing to get us towards the goal of the amount of housing we actually have to build for the people who live in California to be able to stay living here in California.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Thank you for bringing up climate change and environment and the climate change implications of building homes and the climate change implications of CEQA reform.

CEQA stands for, what, California Environmental Quality Act, right? I like to say, when Trump says "I'm making America Great Again," we know that's b******t. He's destroying American greatness. When Republicans say, "this is the One Big Beautiful Bill," we know that's b******t. There's nothing beautiful about it. So, why, when you hear about the “California Environmental Quality Act,” do you assume it's about “the environment” or “quality?” Because it's in the name?

Really! I feel like a lot of why we come to this movement, why we come to Abundance, is because we grew up as Progressives wanting to fight climate change, seeing this existential threat, this planetary emergency, and all the intransigence and denial on the Right that is poisoning our world and holding us back from thriving in the atmosphere we deserve.

And so I say, “How dare you, Democrats, say that climate change is a planetary emergency and then let climate change deniers in Texas lap us on building green energy? How dare you say that climate change is perhaps the most important issue in the world, but also make sure that people can't live where they can walk to work and to each other, and instead they have to live three hours away and commute by gasoline-emitting and plastic-shedding vehicles three hours back and forth both ways?”

That doesn't take care of people! It doesn't take care of the environment!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Can I mention high-speed rail, or is that a third rail we don't want to touch right now?

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

I think you can keep us on track!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Train puns!

I mean, that's the ultimate example. Unfortunately, I hate to say it, we've become – California has become – a little bit of a punching bag for its inability to get it off the ground.

But I can't think of something that would've been better for the environment than having high-speed rail where people would be able to commute across California at a rapid speed. And that basically had a death by a thousand cuts. And a lot of that was due to delays and environmental regulations. You can't even describe better irony than that.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

CEQA as a law – people forget this – the entire point of the law is to analyze what the difference from the status quo is. That's it!

It just says, “how is this different from what's there right now?” Take an oil refinery – if you want to build a solar power plant, that's going to require a CEQA report, because that's changing from the status quo.

And climate change, the way we respond to it – the only way you can respond to it is by changing literally the entire way that we live and operate in our society today.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Michael, I want to get to you and your background in Stockton and Universal Basic Income in a second. But I'm curious how this all stacks up in terms of the rest of your field?

This is in California. And it's early. The election's in a year. We're well away from the primaries. But in California, you're running against Democrats. How are they on these issues? How do you fit in there?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I know, in my race, it's been clear to me – and it’s part of the reason why I decided to run – that being a Democrat is necessary but not sufficient. In California, that phrase almost has no meaning. Like, "I'm a Democrat." What does that mean? Like, what do you fight for? What have you done, and what are you prepared to do?

So, I think the big differentiator is that I'm a person of action. And when you have action, you make some people upset. But I'm not afraid of making people upset for the right things. I'm not afraid of disagreeing with my friends on things that are important, like ending poverty or building more housing.

I think that really, over the course of a year, people see that's the big difference. We can all say the right things. We all have ChatGPT. Everyone knows what to say to the right audience. But it's really about, "What are you going to do?" And then, "What have you done? And what are you doing while running?"

I just think, on those three dimensions, there's no contest between me and my opponents.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, let's use your own words to segue to your background then. I'm thinking about your time in Stockton and your work on ending poverty in California.

Michael Tubbs. What do you fight for? What have you done? And what are you going to do?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

One of my favorite quotes is from the movie The Color Purple, when the character of Celie says, "All my life, I had to fight."

That really encapsulates the energy I bring to politics. I'm really fighting for a government that works for everyone. Truly: a government that simply works for everyone.

I think what gives me hope is that we have so many examples of the government working for some people. Like, very well. This terrible bill that the Trump administration passed is a beautiful example of the government working for some people, for the billionaires and all the folks that got their tax cut. The people not on Medicaid, that bill works great – "bigly," as he would say – for them.

And it's illustrative that, no, we can make this thing work for some people. And my job is to try to make it work for all people. When I was in Stockton, I fought for a city government that was functional, a city government that could deliver services, and a city government that provided a baseline level of security and opportunity for people.

We reduced homicides by 40%. We reduced shootings by 30%. We went from bankruptcy to the second-most fiscally healthy city in the state. We created a universal scholarship program. So, even to this day, every single kid who graduates with a 2.0 is guaranteed a scholarship to a trade school. If they want to be a beautician or a welder or a barber, at a two year school or a four year school, with the idea being that Stockton is #99 in the top 100 cities in terms of college attainment, so to grow our economy, we have to let our young people know there's an expectation for you to do something after high school. And we're also going to give you the resources to do it.

We did the first guaranteed income program in the country while I was Mayor in Stockton, primarily because I'm just obsessed with this idea that, in a country and a state that has so much wealth, a state that has so much creativity, a state that's the fourth-largest economy in the world, why are so many people poor? Why is poverty so pervasive? Why are so many people unsheltered? And why are we okay with that?

And the idea is: let's test something. Let's test and see if a small amount of cash provides enough of a shock absorber to allow people to deal with financial volatility and also allow people to actually build a foundation: to buy a floor, buy boots, and then buy straps they could pull themselves up with.

Since being Mayor and Councilperson, I've continued that fight with End Poverty in California, where I've gone up and down the state in communities listening to folks and trying to figure out why it is that in a state so Liberal, in a state that creates everything from the technology we use to the food we eat to the culture we consume, why are so many people who are powering the state poor? Why are there so many people who are working themselves literally to death who can't afford housing? And what's the mismatch between our rhetoric and what we do?

We also have scaled Guaranteed Income across the country. So now there's 80 pilots happening across the country, and over half a billion government dollars have gone out to over 20,000 Americans from cities and counties I've helped all across the country to pilot this idea of a Guaranteed Income.

Those are some of the things I've done. Those are some of the things I'm fighting for. And then all the unsexy legislation stuff, like attaching myself to bills that may seem controversial.

And maybe that's why sometimes I get in trouble. It doesn't seem controversial to me. It's like, “this is like common sense. It's very simple, actually! This is not complicated!” Like, “build more housing!”

But even in my time as mayor, I remember one of the biggest fights I had was when I went to end the golf course subsidy because we had an issue with affordable housing. I didn't even say "build housing on the golf course" (which I probably should have if I was going to get all that heat!). I didn't think I could do all that. But I said we could take that money and create an affordable housing trust so that we could help projects pencil out.

We streamlined the permit center. We built more units in the four years I was mayor than in any time pre-2008 Great Recession. And a lot of it was just having an orientation towards "Yes" and not letting -- and projects would sometimes almost die at the council, and I would call the developers and the unions into my office, and we would negotiate there and be, like, “no, this is too important. We need this downtown project, and we need it to be mixed use, and we do need some affordable units. Let's figure out a number we can get to, everyone.” And no one walked away hella happy all the time, but everyone walked away feeling like, “okay, the project's not dead. There's something happening.”

So, that's some of the things I fight for and some things I plan to fight for.

And sorry for the very long answer.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I loved it. I'm going to go back to the very beginning because you mentioned some huge achievements and gains in public safety. I think public safety is on the minds of a lot of California voters right now. And, in the coming years, it's going to be on the minds of a lot of American voters looking at California on public safety to evaluate Democratic leadership.

We saw in the last election – and California's going to vote blue at the end of the day – but we saw a ton of voters across California – across San Francisco, across Los Angeles – vote red, especially people of color, a lot of times talking about issues around public safety and public disorder. It does seem like people of color, most of all, are caught between under-policing and over-policing. And, as a result, Democratic policy makers are, too:

How do we rightly say that we cannot have a world where police can abuse their authority without accountability and kill and maim black men and families with overly aggressive uses of authority and violence?

And then, in order to curb that and resolve that, it seems like we then went in the direction of what you might call a toleration of extreme and degrading disorder.

And, it turns out, both hurt people. And both hurt the most vulnerable people most of all, whether you are suffering from state violence, or whether you are suffering from the anarchy of neglect and the threats from individual citizen violence around you.

So, man, Michael Tubbs: as a Mayor, as a black man, and as somebody who – I mean, those were huge, what you talking about, 30% reductions in some of those crimes and violence. I mean, this is incredible – how did you achieve that, and what should California learn from you?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, first, let me say, I think part of it was proximity. It was personal to me. I ran for office for City Council because my cousin was murdered in Stockton. So this idea of safety and public safety was not theoretical. It was like, “how do you make this not happen again?”

I'm 34. My father's been incarcerated for the past 33 years. So, in terms of understanding the carceral system and the impacts of that, I just knew, particularly, as you mentioned, as a black man, that part of my role would be making sure that we're responsible and smart and data-driven with how we actually solve a really real problem.

I think the biggest insight I had was from doing ride-alongs with my police officers and realizing that they were called upon to do so many things that they're not trained to do. I spent 10 hours in my first ride-along, and, in the course of 10 hours, we were therapists, we were relationship counselors, we were parents trying to help kids get to school. We were a jobs program. Someone called us because someone stole $5 worth of earrings from the thrift store. We were mediators. And then, we were detectives because someone was shot, but we got there after the shooting. So, we were detectives. And I was like, “oh my gosh, you are called upon for” -- We were mental health clinicians.

I was like – very rarely you get to do police work. You're doing all these other things. And that's frustrating, because (A) you don't have the training for it, so you're frustrated, and (B) the public's frustrated because we're not getting the results we want to see on these other issues. And you can't really focus on what I define as actual police work.

So, with that insight, I was like, “okay, how do we make sure that (A) we don't use police for everything, but we actually have other tools in our toolbox to deal with other problems, so you don't use a hammer for what the wrench does?” You don't use a screwdriver for what the hammer does. We use police officers for everything, and that's just not what they're supposed to do or what they're good at.

So, we invested in and we were one of the first cities in the state to do the alternatives to policing police response for mental health. Because what we found was we had a huge problem with officer-involved shootings. My brilliant police chief, Eric Jones – we looked at the data and we felt like, “oh my gosh, 70% of the folks who have been shot, often fairly, by a police department, had a mental illness. They were in psychosis. They were schizophrenic. They were bipolar.” Which doesn't mean they weren't a threat or there wasn't real fear, but it does mean that our officers weren't trained to be mental health professionals. And what they saw was what they were trained to see: a threat that needed to be neutralized.

So, we overhauled our training of that, but then we also partnered with our hospital systems to provide first responders who are social workers and mental health clinicians who go out before police and try to diffuse situations. And then, if they can't, and it's a real violent threat, then officers come in. And we led the state in the decline of officer involved shootings in 2019, in part because of that work.

We looked at the data around shootings, and we treated gun violence as a public health issue and said that, you know what, shootings don't happen everywhere in the city; they happen in very particular parts of the city. Parts of the city that oftentimes have no access to transit, no jobs, opportunity, legacies of redlining, the list goes on.

We're a city of 320,000 people. It was 84 guys who are most likely to be the victims and perpetrators of violent crime at any time. Meaning that, it's hard to devise a solution for 300,000 people, but I said, “we can put our heads together and think about these 84 guys. Like, we all have more than 84 friends on Facebook. Like, that's manageable and bite-sized.”

And then what we found, upon further research, was that these 84 guys weren't mysteries to us. They weren't surprises. These were folks who had been arrested eight times on average. So we had been in communication with them, and the tools we had weren't sufficient because they were still shooting, but we knew who they were. They were mostly on probation and parole, meaning they had mandated conversations with someone from the government once a month, but were still shooting. 50% were homeless and couch surfing, 60% food insecure and hungry, and almost 100% percent were shooters that had also been shot at. This conflated the narrative: they were perpetrators, but they were also victims too.

And just really thinking very clearly around, “okay, what are the services and opportunities folks need?” And then, giving folks that chance and saying, “well, hey, look, we know life sucks. We know things aren't fair. We understand that, and here's an opportunity, and I want you to take advantage of that. If you take advantage of it – we're resource scarce, but because you're such a priority – you don't have to wait in line. You can be the first one to get your tattoo removed. You're the first one on the list.” Which pissed some people off! I'm like, “it's a priority! Like, we have to do that!” If we don't have enough resources, let's be smart.

But then, secondly, saying, “the Police Chief and the DA, they're not going anywhere. Jails aren't going anywhere. In fact, they have a mandate to be more aggressive because the violence is unacceptable. So, if you don't take advantage of these resources, I can longer can help you.”

So, it was that messaging and consistency, I think, that helped in being very data-driven.

But also, and I think this goes with all the work overall, it was just being very comfortable with saying that the status quo isn't working. And because it doesn't work, as a leader, you have a responsibility to make it better. Which might mean challenging convention. Which might mean taking some risk. Which might mean pushing back on the thinking because that got us to this point.

Because the thinking that created the problem is not going to be the thinking that solves the problem. And, in that case, the thinking was "lock everyone up". And: “but yeah, we tried that! So maybe that's not the solution. Maybe there's other things we can do.”

And what we saw is that not everyone changed, and not everyone took advantage, but a 40% reduction in back to back years? To date, that’s the only two years this century that Stockton has had less than 40 homicides was 2018 and 2019.

It worked. But it was a lot of work.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

One of the reasons I actually became a big fan of yours in this particular arena is because you always seem to focus on outcome-based solutions: how do we get the most efficient policy to impact the most amount of people, and how can we be as effective as possible?

I feel like this actually ties into YIMBY Democrats for America pretty well: the focus on anti-poverty and the efforts to provide a future and a vision for America that focuses on an affordable living space where everybody can have their own economic development to leave poverty can be found in the most outcome-driven solutions.

That's why I was really happy to see that you were advocating for some of these housing supply bills. Because one of the other things involving poverty, crime, and mental health is a lack of stable housing.

I've heard so many stories. I have this one in particular of this old, black, veteran woman at the opening of an affordable housing complex. It was back in 2019, and it was this affair where a bunch of politicians and government people were patting themselves on the back like it was something to celebrate. And this lady, totally unscripted, took the mic and was describing how having a stable place to call home made her feel human again.

She also described how she's had first, second, third, fourth chances, and what she needed all along was a stable place to call home. That's one of the visions I feel like we can provide with more housing abundance in America, and I feel like that ties in with a lot of the anti-poverty work you've done.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, I remember when my mom bought her first home. She was 26 years old. Back then, housing was affordable, so she bought it for like $150,000. It wasn't huge. It was a three-bedroom, two-bathroom in Stockton.

We watched it be built from the ground up. We would drive by it every day, and she would talk to the contractor. Just seeing sort of the pride and the sense of not– just “somebody-ness” – but the sense of, "I'm part of community. I have a stake in this. I have some ownership."

Home ownership may not be for everyone, but everyone should have the chance to make that decision for themselves. And that decision shouldn't be made by supply. The baseline we provide is supply, but then also, I was reading some research the other day about how, for folks our age, between 35 and 44, home ownership has decreased by 10% compared to the previous generation at our age, and the average age of a first-time homeowner is so much older today than it was 20 years ago.

We know that, in this country, so much of wealth – not just for you, but for your children and your children's children, or for a business you may have – is tied up in home equity. And once you get on, it's an onramp. Usually that goes up.

But, if you can never get on the ramp, you have no-- it's like a game being played, and you can't even get in. You can't even try. And I think that's just fundamentally unfair, and that, as Democrats, as Progressives – however we want to label ourselves – the job has to be not just giving people hope in the abstract, but hope in reality.

Like, “look, we can't guarantee an individual outcome. We can work towards some policy outcomes and hopefully you will have an opportunity to own a house. Or, hell, before that, an opportunity to afford rent! And an opportunity to stay in California.”

And – I'll be quiet after this – but I think my biggest fear is that, if we don't get as serious – and you all are serious – if elected leaders don't get as serious as you all in the next decade with all of the changes and disruptions that are going to happen in this economy, California won't lead. Because the leaders will have to go and move to Texas. And move to Florida. And move to Nevada. And move to all these places we say we're better than.

But, to your point earlier, it's places where a recent college grad can afford housing. Where a recently-married person with a kid can buy a house with a little bit of space. And I think, oftentimes, our policy-makers are so divorced from that experience because they own their homes!

They've owned their homes for a long time. They remember when a down payment was $20,000. Their point of reference is a world that no longer exists. I think it's our job to speak truth to power and push us to create those realities now, for us and for our generation.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, we will talk in a moment about some of those big economic shifts that are coming. I am very interested to learn more about how you evaluate your experiments with Guaranteed Income, what you've learned since, what you've learned from scholarships since, how you think about it as a policy matter.

And, of course, that's going to have a lot of relationship to what might come from Artificial Intelligence, which is unpredictable. There are scenarios in which Guaranteed Income becomes much more relevant, much more quickly…

But I do want to, while we're on this topic of housing and your background – some of the stories you've told about your childhood, and the stirring eloquence with which you've talked about how scarcity impoverishes and immiserates people – And prevents people, families, and entire cultures from building wealth and changing the trajectory of their families. And takes people who have jobs but are precarious and sends them to the street. And, once you're on the streets, it's very tough to pull yourself back up, right? –

We know that, in scarcity, people who are vulnerable and marginalized are the first to lose out in that auction-like bidding war that takes place for those scarce few available resources.

But, how, when you talk to other black men, black families, and a community that has suffered from "urban renewal" and displacement and erasure and obliteration and is afraid that that cycle is continuing and repeating with corporate development and that new supply will not be for them but to the eradication of them, how do you have conversations about gentrification, housing, supply, and construction?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I think it starts with just being real. Gentrification is real. Like, it has happened. It is happening. It does happen, and it does disproportionately impact black people.

I think it also takes this understanding of history, of how it hasn't been 300 years – it's been, what, 50 years? – since the Fair Housing Act. It hasn't been a long time in which black people and other minorities have actually even been able to participate in a housing market. And, even in that participation, they still had to deal with redlining and still had to deal with being denied loans at 2-3 times the rates of other homeowners with the same credit scores, and still having their properties appraised lower when they're ready to sell.

So, I think it is a conversation that has to be multilayered and multidimensional to really get to the totality of the issue.

I think that's one thing. I think, on the gentrification front, part of why gentrification happens, though, is because there is a lack of supply. Like, part of the issue we have is that, even if your home or your grandmother's home accrues so much value and you sell your South LA home for $1.3 million and you make $700k – you make some money off it – that's still not enough for you to buy another house in the community! Because there's not enough supply. You'll make some money, but then you'll have to leave and move.

So, I think part of it is thinking through a multi-layer solution that supply has to be a part of, so that there's a place for that capital to go in the community if folks choose to make money off their house, as they have a right to, but want to stay nearby to where they are.

When I was Mayor, I would always talk about how – and I could be wrong on this, but – it seemed like the assumption of gentrification is that this land is more valuable if you are no longer there. That the land has value detached from you, and, as soon as you go, we can bring the value up.

And I was always interested in saying, "No! Like, let's get nice things. Let's bring in coffee shops. Let's bring in all those things, and let's bring more people in without the displacing people who are already there.”

Which, again, goes back to my answer, which is: Build more. Build denser. Build, build, build.

But there has to be more supply. I think that's the first bulwark against gentrification. And then, we have to be creative about solutions about first-time home-buyer down payment assistance, rent – programs that will help.

We have all these conversations about the integrity and the character of neighborhoods, but that seems to only be applied when rich white people don't want folks of color in their community, or don't want lower-income people in their community.

But, we could take some of those same principles and think about, “how do we – in the midst of change, in the midst of new residents coming in – what are the backstops? What are the policies and what are the things we could create to allow for some of the culture and character of those neighborhoods to stay similar and to allow those residents to be allowed to stay?”

So, it's a supply issue, but it's also a conversation about some level of rent balance, right? So that you folks aren't just all of a sudden dealing with hundreds of dollars of increases in rent out of nowhere because Stanford grads like me want to move into South LA.

So, long answer! I think it has to be measured and balanced by taking into account what I heard in the earlier conversation: that we're talking about people, not buildings. We're talking about community, not rooms. And that the best communities are those that are diverse. The best communities are those that have a mix of old and new. The best communities aren't those that go through rapid change and rapid change-like facelifts.

I think what draws people to certain communities is the history. It’s the culture. It’s the people. It's the food. And the prices!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah,at the risk of being reductive and corporate: diversity is an amenity! It is nice to be around culture and history and new things and interesting people!

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Totally.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And I think your framing here around "we can have nice things," but also "you can have nice things," is really important. The idea that it isn't a choice between preserving these cultural neighborhoods in amber while they slightly decay and freezing them versus sweeping them up for the white people. The perks and parks and dogs of gentrification should be for the black people that live there, too! They should have nice things and new amenities! And that culture shouldn't be displaced, but it also shouldn't be frozen. It should be growing and thriving, and there should be bigger, taller, more vibrant, wealthier, black neighborhoods.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I think South LA, – when I first moved here, I moved to Hyde Park – I think South LA, although not perfectly, has done a pretty good job with all the development coming in with the Olympics and the Metro rail and the airport expansion.

I think it's because the leaders were intentional. Adecade ago, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Holly Mitchell, Karen Bass, and all the leaders of South LA had a conversation about: “these investments are coming down the pipeline. We can't stop, quote unquote, ‘the market,’ but what can we do to make sure our folks are okay.”

So then, there was mass public education, and they let people know what was coming and about that amount of impact, value, and why it may be a good idea not to sell, at least immediately. They created Destination Crenshaw and made it so that you don't just go through Crenshaw: they made Crenshaw a destination with art installations and history and storytelling so that, as folks are going from the new Metro line through Crenshaw, they're not just going through, but they're stopping and being part of the community. They help the small businesses around. So, “get ready for this influx!”

There was a strategy around: “we want this investment, but how do you make sure that we mitigate harm from the investment?” And I think that's what's required. Being strategic, being thoughtful, and thinking about all the good that can come with new investment but also how to mitigate harm.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

So, how do you educate people and bring them along for the ride?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I tell people all the time: “just look at South LA.” It’s different today than it was 20 years ago, but I would say south LA still has the feel of traditional South LA. You still see Latino people. You still see black people. And you see more white people, but it has had an intention about keeping its character while welcoming investment.

And then also – I'll be cool after this – but they also have a lot of homegrown entrepreneurs who are part of the decision making. You have Issa Rae bringing in fine dining and restaurants and coffee shops. You have Prophet Walker, a young developer who's developing multi-use and college housing on the Crenshaw Corridor. You have SoLa Impact and Martin Muoto, another developer who's developing in South LA around the Crenshaw Corridor, but doing so with the community. And you have the Council Member and his staff being the squeaky wheel, trying to get as much as they can, being as annoying as possible.

They've also tapped into other partners, like banks to give people loans to expand their businesses or to buy some of the empty parcels of land. So, it's been fascinating to watch how folks have harnessed investment, have harnessed nice things coming and have said, “no, we don't have to fear it. We don't have to be passive. We can control it. We can help shape this destiny. We might not get everything right, and everything might not stay the same, but we can keep character, bring in investment, and make sure that everyone gets to enjoy the new nice thing.”

So, definitely I would say the South LA Destination Crenshaw area is a good example of investment without gentrification.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Michael, I hear you. What immediately comes to mind is fighting the scarcity mindset. You just encapsulated it very well with that messaging.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Speaking of fighting the scarcity mindset: we have a few minutes left. And, for those few minutes, Michael, I wonder if you can put on your professor cap for a second, because I want us to know: in the year of our Lord 2025, what should we know and what do we as a species know, about Guaranteed Income? What do you expect in terms of coming economic shifts? And what should policy makers be thinking about and learn from you in the years to come?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, Number One, we know that it works. We've overseen 20 RCT trials across the country, not done by me but by independent researchers at the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

We know Guaranteed Income doesn't make people stop working. In fact, in many cases, it allows people to pursue work more. To go from part-time to full-time work. To pay for childcare so they can go to work. To deal with the transmission so they can go to work. To take time off their part-time jobs so they can apply for the full-time job.

We know that has positive health impacts and that so much of the stress and anxiety we see in our society are real mental health impacts. Oftentimes, the causal link is because of economic scarcity. It's because of stress. It's because of not sleeping. It's because of not being able to take care of yourself because you worry about paying for necessities.

We know, as it relates to housing, that the average amount of money that people are evicted for isn't the full amount of rent. It's $381. Like, folks are able to pay some of it. They're not like, "I'm not going to pay rent." They're like, "this is what I have to pay."

We know Guarantee Income is a stabilizer that allows people not to be evicted. Because we also know, when someone is evicted, it's hard to get them back in housing. We know it has all types of cascading impacts on generations: not on just folks, but also their kids.

And we also know that a Guaranteed Income is not a panacea for everything. It can't solve for every issue. But, it can solve for the issue of a lack of cash and for focusing a floor and a foundation.

And we did a large-scale experiment in this country during COVID with the Child Tax Credit, where, in one year, 90% of the kids in this country qualified, and we cut child poverty in half in one year. So it's also doable.

And the country didn't change. This is in a time when people were protesting the capitol – protesting elections, doing insurrections – but not a single person burned a stimulus check or their child tax credit. Not a single person protested that. No Republican was upset. In fact, then President Trump, remember he stopped the printing press and said, "do not print these checks unless my name is on them. I want people to know I did this!" Right?

So, we know it's also a winning issue. And, with automation and with AI, we don't know the exact impacts, but we know there will be some disruption. We know that new jobs will be created, but we also know some people will lose their jobs.

And what's interesting about it is that: the research tells us that the types of folks who are going to lose their jobs aren't the people that people think. In addition to call centers, it's going to be white collar workers. It's going to be entry-level accountants. Entry-level lawyers. Entry-level folks who have professional jobs. Who went to good schools. Who went to college and got the degree. And we're going to have to have some sort of floor to allow folks to transition to the new jobs that are created. To allow folks to stabilize. And to allow folks to get those early job experiences, Number One.

And then, Number Two, I think in addition to Universal Basic Income, part of the conversation I want to have, particularly as Lieutenant Governor, is: what does Universal Basic Capital look like?

Given that these language models are valuable because of our data, and given that social media is valuable because of our data, how do we own a piece of that, so that it compounds and grows and then we all have a stake in the success and we all have a stake when things go well?

Whether it's a fund similar to – in Alaska, they have their permanent fund based off of oil, because that's their oil, right? In California, our oil is tech. It's innovation. It's data. It's AI. It's the future. And we have to have a conversation about, how do we make sure everyone gets a piece? So that folks are able to transition, thrive, and benefit from what they're giving value to and what they are making valuable with their decisions, with their questions, with their pictures, and with their uses.

They're all data companies at the end of the day. And that data is ours.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I love that. Right? I mean, that idea that our oil is us. It's our words and our emotions and our attention and, when the stock market goes up, when companies boom, when they hire people, create jobs, the oil that is running them – the thing that they are selling – is your attention. And we should make a little bit from our attention. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Just a little bit.

Michael, it has been such an honor to hang out with you today and get to know you a little bit and hear about how you’re working to lift people up, from lifting people up with guaranteed income and brazen innovative early experiments in that which you saw through and continue to see through. You talk about keeping people safe and making sure communities are places where everyone can thrive with a new deal for both citizens and police in terms of their roles and how they can engage and participate in the culture. And, of course, lifting people up now in your work as you pursue the Lieutenant Governorship, fighting for homes.

Maybe we'll lift some people up – quite literally up – into the sky.

I'm going to come to you for final remarks and thoughts in a second, but I do want to give Alex and Zennon a chance to just throw out any final parting thoughts!

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

I had one question that I was really curious about. There's been this unholy alliance for a long time between a lot of people that are on the Progressive side but have been opposed to change and your massive McMansion homeowners who are like, “yeah, we don't want any change.”

That's what's been stopping a lot of development and a lot of progress in trying to create new things because we don't want to see that change.

But, I think we've been starting to see that coalition start to fracture. I think the win by Zohran Mamdani in New York City is a fantastic example of that. He had 'Halal Economics,' where he talked about reducing the permit prices for getting halal truck permits and talked about building more supply as a means of making sure that we can deliver and that government can deliver.

Can you touch on that a little bit and where you see yourself in that dynamic and where that's heading?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Yeah. Orthodoxy isn't my thing, right? I have a clear sense of values. And then, those values operate issue by issue. So, I think I am obsessed with government working. I'm obsessed with delivering. I'm obsessed with outcomes. And I think, because in Stockton I had three Republicans and three Democrats on my council to do all the work I did, I've become very astute at just getting things done.

Some people say I am Progressive and some Progressives say I'm a Progressive Moderate, so I don't know. At the end of the day, I live as someone who (A) believes that everyone has inherent dignity and value, equal value, and that (B) government has to work for everyone, and that (C) government has a responsibility to correct the harms that government caused. That's my Political Philosophy 101.

And I'm also someone who's not afraid to fight. I'm someone who believes that government doesn't just belong to the people who pay attention. Doesn't just belong to the people who benefit from government contracts. Doesn't just belong for the industry around government. But actually belongs to the people who are too busy to even know what the hell is going on in Sacramento. And that you have a responsibility to always show up and advocate for them.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

The Left-Right spectrum breakdown and questions of "where on the Left are you?” are always so funny because we have this attachment to ‘map’ that can explain where a human falls, but asking how Left or Right you are is actually just asking – I guess we don't have Buzzfeed quizzes anymore, but it's basically like a stupid online quiz asking – "where would you have sat in the first year of the French Revolution?"

That's what it is! There was one building, and the more Liberal people sat on the Left side, and the more Conservative people sat on the Right side. And it didn't even last that long! It's literally a question of “what table would you have sat at in 1790 or something?" It is a stupid way to describe politics.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I'll probably get in trouble for this – whatever! – but I also don't think there's a “Right!”

I think anyone who aligns with the Republican Party today is “Far Right.” There's nothing "conservative" about massive government spending. There's nothing "good governance" about kidnapping people off the street. There's nothing conservative about corruption. Like, that is not "Right." That's wrong! It's wrong. Like, it's wrong, it's wrong. It's “Left” and “Wrong.”

So, I think that there is – and I tell people all the time – I think we have to be wedded to solving the problem rather than to having the solution. If we have that beginner's mindset, like “this is a problem” and we’re open to solutions, we could get to more solutions because no one has all the answers and no one way of thinking has all the answers as well.

We're centering everyone and thinking through basic norms of human decency. I think that gives us the opportunity to come up with solutions that may be "Right," but, again, those words mean nothing! What matters is the impact. Are people helped? Are people housed? Are people clothed? Are our people fed? That should be how we measure one's political orientation.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Thank you for making that point. Journalists, please remove the word "conservative" from your vocabulary when talking about the Right and the Republican Party! It is gone. If you are trying to repeal the last hundred years of American global leadership and the American welfare state and American economy, and if you are trying to disrupt the world order, then without even asking whether that’s good or bad (it's bad), we can conclude that it’s not conservative; it's radical.

While we're at it, let's not call people "Progressives" who are scared of the future. If we care about Progress, we have to build Progress.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Those were going to be my ending comments, actually.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Do it, Alex!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

I mean, I think the whole crux of why we're here with YIMBY Democrats for America is we have to sell a better vision to our party on what we could do with economic development. Give people an opportunity to live. The working class. And it's clear that we fell off of that a little bit in the last election.

I think that's the work you've been focusing on, especially in outcomes. I think this is where we really need to go. And I think this is how it ties into Abundance and building a better America where people can thrive means focusing on anti-poverty and fighting the scarcity with solutions, which I think Michael really encapsulates.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And, oh, by the way, that outcome oriented vision? That’s the origin of Progressivism. That is what it means. The original Progressives were the YIMBYs, the wonks, the data dorks who thought that if you applied a scientific lens of inquiry and experimentation and reason to the world around us, and if you cared about numbers and data, then you could use that to create better solutions.

And then, like FDR, you could evaluate those solutions. It's what you talked about, too, earlier! I was going to bring it up earlier because The New Deal was not handed down like tablets to Moses! Nor was it some long-standing master plan of FDR's.

He took office in a crisis. He said, we just have to try as much s**t as possible, as committed as possible, and we're going to constantly evaluate and experiment, and we're going to run with what works, and we're going to change what doesn't. That was our New Deal! That was FDR!

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I'll be quiet after this, but I tell people that the most Progressive thing you can do is hold power accountable. The most Progressive thing you can do is demand that government works.

That's literally what it means to be Progressive. To hold power to account. To say that this government we're all giving money to has a responsibility to us. And making sure it ensures its responsibility. Building housing, all types of housing, including affordable housing, is Progressive.

I was talking to a friend the other day, and I also think this is not about being anti-union. Unions are good things! Just like building housing is a good thing. Sometimes interests converge, and sometimes interests collide. And then there has to be dialogue. Sometimes there may be some conflict. But that doesn't mean the project's lost. That doesn't mean there's no alignment anywhere. It means that we have to come to grips with the fact that in California we have unions, and union wages are good things. We also have to come to grips with the fact that, in California, we need more housing and a lot more housing. In fact, it's better for unions when there's more housing because there's more jobs that are created!

So, I think to your point, it's just pausing a little bit and really disentangling. Let everyone see the whole picture. Like, “this is what we're trying to get to. This is our goals. This is what we stand for, and this is how we get there.”

I think our job is to paint a vision that's big enough. Where everyone sees themself in it, even if the role isn't exactly the same as it's always been. Because change is also part of life, part of government. It's a constant, particularly in the times we live in.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, as Democrats, as Progressives, we believe in and are committed to the cause of being champions for the working class and for working people in America and in California. And it doesn't help working people in America or working people in California if one group of workers makes it so that all the other workers can't afford a place to live or stay in their neighborhood or spend so much time commuting that they can't be with their families. But, when we build…

And, of course, the alliance between the YIMBY movement and the Labor movement in California has been so instrumental in so many changes in the state because it is workers that build those homes. It is workers who live in those homes. When we build those homes, it is workers that can stay in their homes–

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

And workers who can afford the homes they build!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Afford the homes they build! Live by where they work, so that you are spending those six hours with your family and not the highway!

Michael, you have a verbal tic, which I'm sure you're aware of. But you've said it at least three times here. You've said, "I'll be quiet after this.”

I'm sure you learned that somewhere. I'm sure you had to learn that. And I don't know if that was just growing up as a young black man in America. I don't know if that was a family member who told you that. I don't know if it was your campaign team who said, “man, keep it short for the clip!” But, you've said it a few times: "I'll be quiet after this."

And my wish for you is: that you don't.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I appreciate that.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

I agree.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Stay loud, man.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Appreciate you.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And, speaking of: one final opportunity. Michael Tubbs: loudly, without being quiet after this – although the whole podcast might be quiet after this. It's all got to end at some point. No finale, no story!

So, Michael Tubbs, thanks for being with us today, man. What thoughts do you want to leave us with? How do we follow you and your campaign for Lieutenant Governor. And how do we support you?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

You can follow me at @MichaelDTubbs on Instagram, on X, and I think I just created TikTok recently. It's at @MichaelDTubbs. Really excited about that.

Or MichaelTubbsForCA.com. You can sign up for updates. You can donate. You can volunteer. You can send your policy ideas.

The last comment I'll make is this: given everything that's happening nationally, California is even more important. The alternative to MAGA can't be unaffordability. It can't be an inability to build anything. It can't be homelessness. As folks are looking for alternatives to Trumpism, California has the opportunity. But we have to lead, and not just in words, but in action.

So, in this moment, our state has to be very clear-eyed, very resolute, and very determined to begin to solve the issues we face: Number One being housing. Housing and security. That's going to require all of us to think differently. It's going to require leadership.

And that's why I'm running for Lieutenant Governor. I am prepared, excited, and willing to help exert the leadership necessary to move California from the state of inertia to a state of Progress. Meaning that Progress is happening all around California.

Tech and everything else around it seems to be moving: moving quickly and pivoting and responding to the times. Californians deserve a government that's also as nimble, as creative, as innovative, as forward-thinking, and as future-embracing as the sectors that power its economy are.

That's the only way we defeat MAGA once and for all. It's not just providing good vision, but a reality: where folks are like, "wow, I want to live in California. They have all this Liberal stuff. It works. It's clean. It's safe. I can afford to live there. It's fun. There's things to do. It's diverse."

We have to make that vision a reality. And we can do it. That's why I'm excited to be running.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

The eyes of the world are on us, and I do believe you are 100% right. What we do here and what we do now – and soon – is going to decide the fate of America and therefore the fate of world history, I think, for quite a while to come.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Yeah. Not hyperbolic at all. Seriously.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

So, let's go do it! Let's go! Let's do it!

Michael Tubbs, let's build California.

Build America. Defeat Fascism.

Michael Tubbs, thank you so much for joining us today on Radio Abundance!

For Zennon Ulyate-Crow and Alex Melendrez. I am Steve Boyle. Thank you for joining us on Radio Abundance live in Los Angeles. We'll see you next time. Thanks everybody!

Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXII: In the Arena. Michael Tubbs is the former Mayor of Stockton and the Founder of End Poverty in California. He is now running for Lieutenant Governor of California.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hello, and welcome to Radio Abundance! I'm your host, Steve Boyle, the Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America. We are on location in-studio in Los Angeles today with two Radio Abundance Los Angeles co-hosts. I am here with Alex Melendez, a longtime activist with YIMBY Action. He founded YIMBY Latino and was a DNC delegate for the 2024 election.

Hey, Alex!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Happy to be here!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I am also with Zennon Ulyate-Crow. Zennon is likewise a young activist with YIMBY Los Angeles, the West Side Young Democrats, and now Abundance Network's Abundant Santa Monica. Zennon was the youngest commissioner in Santa Cruz's history.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Welcome! Welcome to Radio Abundance.

And, speaking of young folks, we've got a young folk here!

Well, I'm still young. I feel old with these guys. I felt old learning about your age the other day. I knew you were, when you were first elected, one of the youngest elected officials ever in the US at age 22. You've been the Mayor of Stockton. You are now running for the Lieutenant Governor of California.

You know, I have, even young politicians, a certain vision in my head that they're a little older. And then we were hanging out the other day, championing SB 79 in Sacramento. You had more to say to champion it than I did. I basically walked in and said, "I'm Steve Boyle with YIMBY Democrats, and I approve." But a friend of mine was there who said you went to college together. And he and I went to High School together. So that bummed me out because of imposter syndrome!

Michael Tubbs, thank you for joining us on Radio Abundance!

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Thank you so much for having me. It's fantastic to be here.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Why are you running for Lieutenant Governor?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Lieutenant Governor in California, in this moment, is a position that requires leadership, right? The job has very particular things you're responsible for.

You're on the UC and CSU board, one of the only people in the state on both. And what people don't know, particularly for this conversation, is that both the UC and CSU can build by-right. In the same way they build buildings and departments, they could build housing. They could build more student housing, as you probably know, going to UC Santa Cruz. They could also build more workforce housing.

The Lieutenant Governor also sits on the State Lands Commission and is responsible for being a good steward of our environment, but also making sure we're being thoughtful about when it is appropriate to actually build more housing.

And then, beyond that, it's just an incredible bully pulpit. It's the second-highest elected official in the fourth-largest economy in the world: an economy that we know isn't working for everyone, an economy that we know isn't building enough housing for everyone.

So, it just felt like the right opportunity to make an impact on the issues I care about and to make sure that California remains a beacon of what a multiracial democracy could look like: a society that's moving forward, not looking towards the past for inspiration, but looking at the future, embracing innovation and figuring out, how do you make sure we all do well?

It's just an amazing opportunity. So I'm excited to be in the race.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

So you begin with an interesting thread, right? Because we'll of course talk about policies around housing and YIMBYism and Abundance in California and how to make it possible for people to build -- the private market, citizens, community developers, anybody -- to build. And government's included!

And speaking of government, you've mentioned that, as Lieutenant Governor, you would have land and permission, which are two of the hardest things to get in order to build. So, if you did become Lieutenant Governor, what would you want to do with that land?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I'm going to be the most annoying regent of all time, insofar as I think, (A) we have to leverage the thousands of acres of the UC and CSU system. We know that students need housing, that janitors need housing, that adjunct faculty needs housing, that the people who work at universities need housing, and really making it a priority for that system to build, build, build.

It's not a 10-year project, it's not a 20-year project. It's a necessity. Not just because I love housing, but because there's a real need. Throughout our system, from the UC level to the CSU level, even the community college level, the biggest need is housing. It's student housing.

You have people taking longer to graduate because they can't find housing. You have people not graduating because they can't find housing. You have people graduating while living in cars or couch surfing because they can't find housing. So that's a manageable problem, a worthy problem, and one that I will use the bully pulpit in the position of trustee to really push and advocate for, because my experience in government has taught me: nothing just happens, and nothing happens easily. Yeah. You always have to push. You always have to get on people's nerves. You always have to be annoying.

That's the only way anything, particularly important things, get done.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

I'll put some numbers to that as well. In the UCs, 7% of students are currently experiencing homelessness. In the CSUs, it's about 15%. In the community colleges, it's about 22%.

I actually founded the Student Homes Coalition in California, which worked on passing student housing legislation at the state level. We've passed five out of seven bills for the past three years.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, thank you for your work. Amazing.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, something we're very familiar with in the Bay Area is students being seen as pollution. There's just been some good reforms and clarifications to CEQA, but it was quite vague about what was pollution, so people could say that students were pollution, young people were pollution, noise is pollution, parties are pollution – genuinely – to block student housing and to block low-income housing and affordable housing.

I talked with Jon Lovett, the former speechwriter for Barack Obama and Host of Pod Save America. We talked in the fall. He said a big radicalizing moment for him was to see, in the East Bay, student housing be thwarted because "students were pollution."

This story has even made it across the pond! I was in London two weeks ago, meeting at Parliament and having lunch with a member of Parliament and a sort of a world-crossing academic, and the academic, a guy named Alain Bertaud, as we were telling stories of NIMBYism around the world, he started talking about us not being able to build student housing in California.

So, it is legendary, this failure and betrayal, and I'm excited that you might take a stab at fixing it.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Yes, sir!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

I hate to say this, but students do breed CO2. Just saying!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, you've got to watch out for that!

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I think, also, what's lost in the conversation is, in addition to students, it's also the people who work at the universities who need housing. Our universities are some of the biggest employers in the state. Just like we require or want other big employers to build housing near the job site, the CSU and UC system has to do the same thing, even at the community college level.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

I actually had a brief stint where I almost became a community college trustee in my home district back in San Mateo County, and I ended up earning the endorsement of the faculty union because of this specific, particular thing.

A lot of their part-time professors were facing a lack of housing opportunities and the fact that a lot of them had to drive into this very wealthy district that had an excess of money and land.

I will say, that district was the first educational district in the county to build housing. So, they were starting to work on that, but that was also one of their primary issues. And the reason why I earned their endorsement was because I was a strong advocate for wanting to build more housing so that these people can live here and do the work that they were happy to do for students.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And when we talk about teacher housing and janitor housing-- this is all levels, right? – it's something I've seen even in the suburbs I grew up in. They’ve tried to build affordable teacher housing, and the community can go, "I don't like it. It's too many stories. The homes are too close together. I don't want it." And, suddenly, you're saying students can't live and teachers can't live.

And, by the way, this isn't just charity for students and teachers. Universities are the engines of culture and economic development and innovation. The companies of the future, the jobs of the future, the game changing research of the future -- it all happens at universities.

And, I'll just say, I think universities already are a little bit of a model for the cities we want and the neighborhoods we want, right? They’re walkable neighborhoods where you live by people you know and where there is intellectual stimulation and social events.

I think for a lot of the loneliness crisis and a lot of the separation of our society and a lot of what people want when they move to cities, a lot of what young people want, but also elderly people, too, all want a place you can walk and be with anything you need to get and all the people you love and stuff to do. And I think, we're just asking to let students live, let teachers live, and let's all live in our little universe of universities.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Americans pay a lot of money to see this stuff and go overseas to Europe.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, and not just Europe, but Disneyland! We're sitting here in Los Angeles. I'm going to hit this so many times and in every interview because: Look, you can – in California – build dense neighborhoods, walkable neighborhoods, abundant public transportation, and mixed-use buildings. You don't have to do setbacks. You can have cafes on the street corner and tree lined streets. You can do all of this as long as nobody can stay the night and there are roller coasters!

But, if you do, people are willing to fly across the country and the world and pay hundreds of dollars a day for: not a room to sleep in. Right? And some of it is so that the kids can see Mickey Mouse, and some of it is to ride the rollercoasters. But I think there's quite a lot of people there that are young-ish, middle-aged, that don't have kids – I don't think they're there for Mickey Mouse!

I think we just like that stuff. And I think we should all be able to have it.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

I mean, literally, aside from Disneyland itself, you have Downtown Disney, which is a walkable shopping mall attached to Disney that people go to just walk around.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

This is so funny because Disneyland actually has a City Hall. My favorite joke every time I go is, "I'm here to make a public comment to Mr. Mouse. Can you build some more, please?"

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

All right, enough Mickey Mouse. Back to Michael Tubbs!

Michael, what else does the Lieutenant Governor do?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

The Lieutenant Governor is also the Acting Governor when the Governor's gone and out of state. The Lieutenant Governor also is the emissary for foreign trade, which before was more of a symbolic role, but, given this current administration’s tariffs and the ways in which the United States' trade position with partners is always subject to change, that's going to be a real role to make sure that California uses its market capture to continue to do things that benefit the economy and that allow people to build and allow people to prosper right here in California.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, sometimes, I've thought of the Lieutenant Governor as kind of the Vice Presidential role for a state Governor. But, in this case, it's your own election. You don't run on a ticket with the gubernatorial candidate.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

It's a separate election. And it creates, again, a huge platform.

I think what I've learned, particularly in the last six months, is that folks need leaders that are going to level with them and explain to them what's happening and what's going on. How is this working? What are the blocks? Why isn't this done? Why hasn't that been passed?

A big part of how I've envisioned the role will be doing that – being an explainer-in-chief – and also doing stuff that most Lieutenant Governors don't do – like testifying on every single bill – I think is important. And I've done that already as a candidate. I've testified on the two most, quote unquote, "controversial" housing bills this cycle, one by Buffy Wicks around CEQA reform and one from Scott Wiener around transit-oriented development. Not because it's in my job description, and not because Lieutenant Governor is the authority, but because leadership demands action. It's the right thing to do to make it really clear to people, “no, this is not about some abstract notions of right and wrong or an adherence to a rigidity that doesn't really work for people anymore. This is about: we have a problem. We don't have enough housing. We need every tool in the toolbox to build more housing. “

And, when those things come up, I will – I'm doing it as a candidate, but even more so as Lieutenant Governor – I will be very bullish about saying "this is where I stand. This is why it needs to happen," and exerting some force and pressure because I think that's the only way California and Sacramento actually move. You have to push it. Einstein said – or was it Newton? – that "an object at rest tends to stay at rest." You have to – we have to – push, and it's going to take leadership to do that.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, we ran into each other while you were testifying for SB 79 for transit-oriented development in Sacramento. I wonder if you can testify a little here?

Can you tell us about those two bills and what you said about them and why you believe in them?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, the Buffy Wicks bill on CEQA reform, the argument was, “there's nothing Progressive about process in and of itself. There's nothing forward-thinking or Democratic about delay. There's nothing enlightened about not getting the thing done” And we know that nothing is sacrosanct, at least in my view. Nothing is untouchable. And CEQA has its uses! CEQA is not altogether terrible. But, we do know that CEQA has been used and weaponized in a terrible way as it comes to delaying and denying the ability to build housing.

Buffy's bill was a simple one. It was like, “let's, for things that, like infill projects, have already gone through the CEQA process or the general plan, that land doesn't have to go through the CEQA process again for another project.” Basically, “if the squirrels are going to be okay in the general plan, they'll be okay again.” It’s the same land that's already been looked at. It’s like, “Why? Why be redundant?” Particularly with the fact that we have a crisis! Particularly that we don't have enough housing.

And then Scott Wiener's bill is around transit-oriented development. We know that our transit systems need ridership. We know that in LA and the Bay Area, we need more people to ride these public utilities, (A).

(B) We know that transit-oriented development provides an opportunity for a lot of infill, dense, and multi-level housing, right?

And, (C) We know there's a demand for it, that young people, and all people, have no problem living next to the BART, have no problem living next to the Metro, and have no problem living near the transportation hubs.

We also know there's a climate impact when folks aren't able to live next to transit and folks have to commute for hours. When I was mayor of Stockton, we led the state and the nation in the number of “super commuters.” 10% of our population commutes three hours a day or more for work. And it's because the housing that people could afford is in Stockton, but the jobs were in the Bay Area, and the housing wasn't there near the BART station.

So, Senator Wiener's Bill will allow for that to happen. That one's working its way through the process. I'm hopeful that our friends and the legislators see that now is the time to think a little bit differently. Now is the time to have constructive dialogue with some of our friends. And now is the time to really show the folks in California that we are not just saying that it's a problem, but we understand that we have tools that can make that problem more solvable.

And, on the Scott Wiener bill, it's a triple win. It's good for the environment. It's good for transit ridership. And it's good to increase the number of units of housing to get us towards the goal of the amount of housing we actually have to build for the people who live in California to be able to stay living here in California.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Thank you for bringing up climate change and environment and the climate change implications of building homes and the climate change implications of CEQA reform.

CEQA stands for, what, California Environmental Quality Act, right? I like to say, when Trump says "I'm making America Great Again," we know that's b******t. He's destroying American greatness. When Republicans say, "this is the One Big Beautiful Bill," we know that's b******t. There's nothing beautiful about it. So, why, when you hear about the “California Environmental Quality Act,” do you assume it's about “the environment” or “quality?” Because it's in the name?

Really! I feel like a lot of why we come to this movement, why we come to Abundance, is because we grew up as Progressives wanting to fight climate change, seeing this existential threat, this planetary emergency, and all the intransigence and denial on the Right that is poisoning our world and holding us back from thriving in the atmosphere we deserve.

And so I say, “How dare you, Democrats, say that climate change is a planetary emergency and then let climate change deniers in Texas lap us on building green energy? How dare you say that climate change is perhaps the most important issue in the world, but also make sure that people can't live where they can walk to work and to each other, and instead they have to live three hours away and commute by gasoline-emitting and plastic-shedding vehicles three hours back and forth both ways?”

That doesn't take care of people! It doesn't take care of the environment!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Can I mention high-speed rail, or is that a third rail we don't want to touch right now?

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

I think you can keep us on track!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Train puns!

I mean, that's the ultimate example. Unfortunately, I hate to say it, we've become – California has become – a little bit of a punching bag for its inability to get it off the ground.

But I can't think of something that would've been better for the environment than having high-speed rail where people would be able to commute across California at a rapid speed. And that basically had a death by a thousand cuts. And a lot of that was due to delays and environmental regulations. You can't even describe better irony than that.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

CEQA as a law – people forget this – the entire point of the law is to analyze what the difference from the status quo is. That's it!

It just says, “how is this different from what's there right now?” Take an oil refinery – if you want to build a solar power plant, that's going to require a CEQA report, because that's changing from the status quo.

And climate change, the way we respond to it – the only way you can respond to it is by changing literally the entire way that we live and operate in our society today.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Michael, I want to get to you and your background in Stockton and Universal Basic Income in a second. But I'm curious how this all stacks up in terms of the rest of your field?

This is in California. And it's early. The election's in a year. We're well away from the primaries. But in California, you're running against Democrats. How are they on these issues? How do you fit in there?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I know, in my race, it's been clear to me – and it’s part of the reason why I decided to run – that being a Democrat is necessary but not sufficient. In California, that phrase almost has no meaning. Like, "I'm a Democrat." What does that mean? Like, what do you fight for? What have you done, and what are you prepared to do?

So, I think the big differentiator is that I'm a person of action. And when you have action, you make some people upset. But I'm not afraid of making people upset for the right things. I'm not afraid of disagreeing with my friends on things that are important, like ending poverty or building more housing.

I think that really, over the course of a year, people see that's the big difference. We can all say the right things. We all have ChatGPT. Everyone knows what to say to the right audience. But it's really about, "What are you going to do?" And then, "What have you done? And what are you doing while running?"

I just think, on those three dimensions, there's no contest between me and my opponents.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, let's use your own words to segue to your background then. I'm thinking about your time in Stockton and your work on ending poverty in California.

Michael Tubbs. What do you fight for? What have you done? And what are you going to do?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

One of my favorite quotes is from the movie The Color Purple, when the character of Celie says, "All my life, I had to fight."

That really encapsulates the energy I bring to politics. I'm really fighting for a government that works for everyone. Truly: a government that simply works for everyone.

I think what gives me hope is that we have so many examples of the government working for some people. Like, very well. This terrible bill that the Trump administration passed is a beautiful example of the government working for some people, for the billionaires and all the folks that got their tax cut. The people not on Medicaid, that bill works great – "bigly," as he would say – for them.

And it's illustrative that, no, we can make this thing work for some people. And my job is to try to make it work for all people. When I was in Stockton, I fought for a city government that was functional, a city government that could deliver services, and a city government that provided a baseline level of security and opportunity for people.

We reduced homicides by 40%. We reduced shootings by 30%. We went from bankruptcy to the second-most fiscally healthy city in the state. We created a universal scholarship program. So, even to this day, every single kid who graduates with a 2.0 is guaranteed a scholarship to a trade school. If they want to be a beautician or a welder or a barber, at a two year school or a four year school, with the idea being that Stockton is #99 in the top 100 cities in terms of college attainment, so to grow our economy, we have to let our young people know there's an expectation for you to do something after high school. And we're also going to give you the resources to do it.

We did the first guaranteed income program in the country while I was Mayor in Stockton, primarily because I'm just obsessed with this idea that, in a country and a state that has so much wealth, a state that has so much creativity, a state that's the fourth-largest economy in the world, why are so many people poor? Why is poverty so pervasive? Why are so many people unsheltered? And why are we okay with that?

And the idea is: let's test something. Let's test and see if a small amount of cash provides enough of a shock absorber to allow people to deal with financial volatility and also allow people to actually build a foundation: to buy a floor, buy boots, and then buy straps they could pull themselves up with.

Since being Mayor and Councilperson, I've continued that fight with End Poverty in California, where I've gone up and down the state in communities listening to folks and trying to figure out why it is that in a state so Liberal, in a state that creates everything from the technology we use to the food we eat to the culture we consume, why are so many people who are powering the state poor? Why are there so many people who are working themselves literally to death who can't afford housing? And what's the mismatch between our rhetoric and what we do?

We also have scaled Guaranteed Income across the country. So now there's 80 pilots happening across the country, and over half a billion government dollars have gone out to over 20,000 Americans from cities and counties I've helped all across the country to pilot this idea of a Guaranteed Income.

Those are some of the things I've done. Those are some of the things I'm fighting for. And then all the unsexy legislation stuff, like attaching myself to bills that may seem controversial.

And maybe that's why sometimes I get in trouble. It doesn't seem controversial to me. It's like, “this is like common sense. It's very simple, actually! This is not complicated!” Like, “build more housing!”

But even in my time as mayor, I remember one of the biggest fights I had was when I went to end the golf course subsidy because we had an issue with affordable housing. I didn't even say "build housing on the golf course" (which I probably should have if I was going to get all that heat!). I didn't think I could do all that. But I said we could take that money and create an affordable housing trust so that we could help projects pencil out.

We streamlined the permit center. We built more units in the four years I was mayor than in any time pre-2008 Great Recession. And a lot of it was just having an orientation towards "Yes" and not letting -- and projects would sometimes almost die at the council, and I would call the developers and the unions into my office, and we would negotiate there and be, like, “no, this is too important. We need this downtown project, and we need it to be mixed use, and we do need some affordable units. Let's figure out a number we can get to, everyone.” And no one walked away hella happy all the time, but everyone walked away feeling like, “okay, the project's not dead. There's something happening.”

So, that's some of the things I fight for and some things I plan to fight for.

And sorry for the very long answer.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I loved it. I'm going to go back to the very beginning because you mentioned some huge achievements and gains in public safety. I think public safety is on the minds of a lot of California voters right now. And, in the coming years, it's going to be on the minds of a lot of American voters looking at California on public safety to evaluate Democratic leadership.

We saw in the last election – and California's going to vote blue at the end of the day – but we saw a ton of voters across California – across San Francisco, across Los Angeles – vote red, especially people of color, a lot of times talking about issues around public safety and public disorder. It does seem like people of color, most of all, are caught between under-policing and over-policing. And, as a result, Democratic policy makers are, too:

How do we rightly say that we cannot have a world where police can abuse their authority without accountability and kill and maim black men and families with overly aggressive uses of authority and violence?

And then, in order to curb that and resolve that, it seems like we then went in the direction of what you might call a toleration of extreme and degrading disorder.

And, it turns out, both hurt people. And both hurt the most vulnerable people most of all, whether you are suffering from state violence, or whether you are suffering from the anarchy of neglect and the threats from individual citizen violence around you.

So, man, Michael Tubbs: as a Mayor, as a black man, and as somebody who – I mean, those were huge, what you talking about, 30% reductions in some of those crimes and violence. I mean, this is incredible – how did you achieve that, and what should California learn from you?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, first, let me say, I think part of it was proximity. It was personal to me. I ran for office for City Council because my cousin was murdered in Stockton. So this idea of safety and public safety was not theoretical. It was like, “how do you make this not happen again?”

I'm 34. My father's been incarcerated for the past 33 years. So, in terms of understanding the carceral system and the impacts of that, I just knew, particularly, as you mentioned, as a black man, that part of my role would be making sure that we're responsible and smart and data-driven with how we actually solve a really real problem.

I think the biggest insight I had was from doing ride-alongs with my police officers and realizing that they were called upon to do so many things that they're not trained to do. I spent 10 hours in my first ride-along, and, in the course of 10 hours, we were therapists, we were relationship counselors, we were parents trying to help kids get to school. We were a jobs program. Someone called us because someone stole $5 worth of earrings from the thrift store. We were mediators. And then, we were detectives because someone was shot, but we got there after the shooting. So, we were detectives. And I was like, “oh my gosh, you are called upon for” -- We were mental health clinicians.

I was like – very rarely you get to do police work. You're doing all these other things. And that's frustrating, because (A) you don't have the training for it, so you're frustrated, and (B) the public's frustrated because we're not getting the results we want to see on these other issues. And you can't really focus on what I define as actual police work.

So, with that insight, I was like, “okay, how do we make sure that (A) we don't use police for everything, but we actually have other tools in our toolbox to deal with other problems, so you don't use a hammer for what the wrench does?” You don't use a screwdriver for what the hammer does. We use police officers for everything, and that's just not what they're supposed to do or what they're good at.

So, we invested in and we were one of the first cities in the state to do the alternatives to policing police response for mental health. Because what we found was we had a huge problem with officer-involved shootings. My brilliant police chief, Eric Jones – we looked at the data and we felt like, “oh my gosh, 70% of the folks who have been shot, often fairly, by a police department, had a mental illness. They were in psychosis. They were schizophrenic. They were bipolar.” Which doesn't mean they weren't a threat or there wasn't real fear, but it does mean that our officers weren't trained to be mental health professionals. And what they saw was what they were trained to see: a threat that needed to be neutralized.

So, we overhauled our training of that, but then we also partnered with our hospital systems to provide first responders who are social workers and mental health clinicians who go out before police and try to diffuse situations. And then, if they can't, and it's a real violent threat, then officers come in. And we led the state in the decline of officer involved shootings in 2019, in part because of that work.

We looked at the data around shootings, and we treated gun violence as a public health issue and said that, you know what, shootings don't happen everywhere in the city; they happen in very particular parts of the city. Parts of the city that oftentimes have no access to transit, no jobs, opportunity, legacies of redlining, the list goes on.

We're a city of 320,000 people. It was 84 guys who are most likely to be the victims and perpetrators of violent crime at any time. Meaning that, it's hard to devise a solution for 300,000 people, but I said, “we can put our heads together and think about these 84 guys. Like, we all have more than 84 friends on Facebook. Like, that's manageable and bite-sized.”

And then what we found, upon further research, was that these 84 guys weren't mysteries to us. They weren't surprises. These were folks who had been arrested eight times on average. So we had been in communication with them, and the tools we had weren't sufficient because they were still shooting, but we knew who they were. They were mostly on probation and parole, meaning they had mandated conversations with someone from the government once a month, but were still shooting. 50% were homeless and couch surfing, 60% food insecure and hungry, and almost 100% percent were shooters that had also been shot at. This conflated the narrative: they were perpetrators, but they were also victims too.

And just really thinking very clearly around, “okay, what are the services and opportunities folks need?” And then, giving folks that chance and saying, “well, hey, look, we know life sucks. We know things aren't fair. We understand that, and here's an opportunity, and I want you to take advantage of that. If you take advantage of it – we're resource scarce, but because you're such a priority – you don't have to wait in line. You can be the first one to get your tattoo removed. You're the first one on the list.” Which pissed some people off! I'm like, “it's a priority! Like, we have to do that!” If we don't have enough resources, let's be smart.

But then, secondly, saying, “the Police Chief and the DA, they're not going anywhere. Jails aren't going anywhere. In fact, they have a mandate to be more aggressive because the violence is unacceptable. So, if you don't take advantage of these resources, I can longer can help you.”

So, it was that messaging and consistency, I think, that helped in being very data-driven.

But also, and I think this goes with all the work overall, it was just being very comfortable with saying that the status quo isn't working. And because it doesn't work, as a leader, you have a responsibility to make it better. Which might mean challenging convention. Which might mean taking some risk. Which might mean pushing back on the thinking because that got us to this point.

Because the thinking that created the problem is not going to be the thinking that solves the problem. And, in that case, the thinking was "lock everyone up". And: “but yeah, we tried that! So maybe that's not the solution. Maybe there's other things we can do.”

And what we saw is that not everyone changed, and not everyone took advantage, but a 40% reduction in back to back years? To date, that’s the only two years this century that Stockton has had less than 40 homicides was 2018 and 2019.

It worked. But it was a lot of work.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

One of the reasons I actually became a big fan of yours in this particular arena is because you always seem to focus on outcome-based solutions: how do we get the most efficient policy to impact the most amount of people, and how can we be as effective as possible?

I feel like this actually ties into YIMBY Democrats for America pretty well: the focus on anti-poverty and the efforts to provide a future and a vision for America that focuses on an affordable living space where everybody can have their own economic development to leave poverty can be found in the most outcome-driven solutions.

That's why I was really happy to see that you were advocating for some of these housing supply bills. Because one of the other things involving poverty, crime, and mental health is a lack of stable housing.

I've heard so many stories. I have this one in particular of this old, black, veteran woman at the opening of an affordable housing complex. It was back in 2019, and it was this affair where a bunch of politicians and government people were patting themselves on the back like it was something to celebrate. And this lady, totally unscripted, took the mic and was describing how having a stable place to call home made her feel human again.

She also described how she's had first, second, third, fourth chances, and what she needed all along was a stable place to call home. That's one of the visions I feel like we can provide with more housing abundance in America, and I feel like that ties in with a lot of the anti-poverty work you've done.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, I remember when my mom bought her first home. She was 26 years old. Back then, housing was affordable, so she bought it for like $150,000. It wasn't huge. It was a three-bedroom, two-bathroom in Stockton.

We watched it be built from the ground up. We would drive by it every day, and she would talk to the contractor. Just seeing sort of the pride and the sense of not– just “somebody-ness” – but the sense of, "I'm part of community. I have a stake in this. I have some ownership."

Home ownership may not be for everyone, but everyone should have the chance to make that decision for themselves. And that decision shouldn't be made by supply. The baseline we provide is supply, but then also, I was reading some research the other day about how, for folks our age, between 35 and 44, home ownership has decreased by 10% compared to the previous generation at our age, and the average age of a first-time homeowner is so much older today than it was 20 years ago.

We know that, in this country, so much of wealth – not just for you, but for your children and your children's children, or for a business you may have – is tied up in home equity. And once you get on, it's an onramp. Usually that goes up.

But, if you can never get on the ramp, you have no-- it's like a game being played, and you can't even get in. You can't even try. And I think that's just fundamentally unfair, and that, as Democrats, as Progressives – however we want to label ourselves – the job has to be not just giving people hope in the abstract, but hope in reality.

Like, “look, we can't guarantee an individual outcome. We can work towards some policy outcomes and hopefully you will have an opportunity to own a house. Or, hell, before that, an opportunity to afford rent! And an opportunity to stay in California.”

And – I'll be quiet after this – but I think my biggest fear is that, if we don't get as serious – and you all are serious – if elected leaders don't get as serious as you all in the next decade with all of the changes and disruptions that are going to happen in this economy, California won't lead. Because the leaders will have to go and move to Texas. And move to Florida. And move to Nevada. And move to all these places we say we're better than.

But, to your point earlier, it's places where a recent college grad can afford housing. Where a recently-married person with a kid can buy a house with a little bit of space. And I think, oftentimes, our policy-makers are so divorced from that experience because they own their homes!

They've owned their homes for a long time. They remember when a down payment was $20,000. Their point of reference is a world that no longer exists. I think it's our job to speak truth to power and push us to create those realities now, for us and for our generation.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, we will talk in a moment about some of those big economic shifts that are coming. I am very interested to learn more about how you evaluate your experiments with Guaranteed Income, what you've learned since, what you've learned from scholarships since, how you think about it as a policy matter.

And, of course, that's going to have a lot of relationship to what might come from Artificial Intelligence, which is unpredictable. There are scenarios in which Guaranteed Income becomes much more relevant, much more quickly…

But I do want to, while we're on this topic of housing and your background – some of the stories you've told about your childhood, and the stirring eloquence with which you've talked about how scarcity impoverishes and immiserates people – And prevents people, families, and entire cultures from building wealth and changing the trajectory of their families. And takes people who have jobs but are precarious and sends them to the street. And, once you're on the streets, it's very tough to pull yourself back up, right? –

We know that, in scarcity, people who are vulnerable and marginalized are the first to lose out in that auction-like bidding war that takes place for those scarce few available resources.

But, how, when you talk to other black men, black families, and a community that has suffered from "urban renewal" and displacement and erasure and obliteration and is afraid that that cycle is continuing and repeating with corporate development and that new supply will not be for them but to the eradication of them, how do you have conversations about gentrification, housing, supply, and construction?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I think it starts with just being real. Gentrification is real. Like, it has happened. It is happening. It does happen, and it does disproportionately impact black people.

I think it also takes this understanding of history, of how it hasn't been 300 years – it's been, what, 50 years? – since the Fair Housing Act. It hasn't been a long time in which black people and other minorities have actually even been able to participate in a housing market. And, even in that participation, they still had to deal with redlining and still had to deal with being denied loans at 2-3 times the rates of other homeowners with the same credit scores, and still having their properties appraised lower when they're ready to sell.

So, I think it is a conversation that has to be multilayered and multidimensional to really get to the totality of the issue.

I think that's one thing. I think, on the gentrification front, part of why gentrification happens, though, is because there is a lack of supply. Like, part of the issue we have is that, even if your home or your grandmother's home accrues so much value and you sell your South LA home for $1.3 million and you make $700k – you make some money off it – that's still not enough for you to buy another house in the community! Because there's not enough supply. You'll make some money, but then you'll have to leave and move.

So, I think part of it is thinking through a multi-layer solution that supply has to be a part of, so that there's a place for that capital to go in the community if folks choose to make money off their house, as they have a right to, but want to stay nearby to where they are.

When I was Mayor, I would always talk about how – and I could be wrong on this, but – it seemed like the assumption of gentrification is that this land is more valuable if you are no longer there. That the land has value detached from you, and, as soon as you go, we can bring the value up.

And I was always interested in saying, "No! Like, let's get nice things. Let's bring in coffee shops. Let's bring in all those things, and let's bring more people in without the displacing people who are already there.”

Which, again, goes back to my answer, which is: Build more. Build denser. Build, build, build.

But there has to be more supply. I think that's the first bulwark against gentrification. And then, we have to be creative about solutions about first-time home-buyer down payment assistance, rent – programs that will help.

We have all these conversations about the integrity and the character of neighborhoods, but that seems to only be applied when rich white people don't want folks of color in their community, or don't want lower-income people in their community.

But, we could take some of those same principles and think about, “how do we – in the midst of change, in the midst of new residents coming in – what are the backstops? What are the policies and what are the things we could create to allow for some of the culture and character of those neighborhoods to stay similar and to allow those residents to be allowed to stay?”

So, it's a supply issue, but it's also a conversation about some level of rent balance, right? So that you folks aren't just all of a sudden dealing with hundreds of dollars of increases in rent out of nowhere because Stanford grads like me want to move into South LA.

So, long answer! I think it has to be measured and balanced by taking into account what I heard in the earlier conversation: that we're talking about people, not buildings. We're talking about community, not rooms. And that the best communities are those that are diverse. The best communities are those that have a mix of old and new. The best communities aren't those that go through rapid change and rapid change-like facelifts.

I think what draws people to certain communities is the history. It’s the culture. It’s the people. It's the food. And the prices!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah,at the risk of being reductive and corporate: diversity is an amenity! It is nice to be around culture and history and new things and interesting people!

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Totally.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And I think your framing here around "we can have nice things," but also "you can have nice things," is really important. The idea that it isn't a choice between preserving these cultural neighborhoods in amber while they slightly decay and freezing them versus sweeping them up for the white people. The perks and parks and dogs of gentrification should be for the black people that live there, too! They should have nice things and new amenities! And that culture shouldn't be displaced, but it also shouldn't be frozen. It should be growing and thriving, and there should be bigger, taller, more vibrant, wealthier, black neighborhoods.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I think South LA, – when I first moved here, I moved to Hyde Park – I think South LA, although not perfectly, has done a pretty good job with all the development coming in with the Olympics and the Metro rail and the airport expansion.

I think it's because the leaders were intentional. Adecade ago, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Holly Mitchell, Karen Bass, and all the leaders of South LA had a conversation about: “these investments are coming down the pipeline. We can't stop, quote unquote, ‘the market,’ but what can we do to make sure our folks are okay.”

So then, there was mass public education, and they let people know what was coming and about that amount of impact, value, and why it may be a good idea not to sell, at least immediately. They created Destination Crenshaw and made it so that you don't just go through Crenshaw: they made Crenshaw a destination with art installations and history and storytelling so that, as folks are going from the new Metro line through Crenshaw, they're not just going through, but they're stopping and being part of the community. They help the small businesses around. So, “get ready for this influx!”

There was a strategy around: “we want this investment, but how do you make sure that we mitigate harm from the investment?” And I think that's what's required. Being strategic, being thoughtful, and thinking about all the good that can come with new investment but also how to mitigate harm.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

So, how do you educate people and bring them along for the ride?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I tell people all the time: “just look at South LA.” It’s different today than it was 20 years ago, but I would say south LA still has the feel of traditional South LA. You still see Latino people. You still see black people. And you see more white people, but it has had an intention about keeping its character while welcoming investment.

And then also – I'll be cool after this – but they also have a lot of homegrown entrepreneurs who are part of the decision making. You have Issa Rae bringing in fine dining and restaurants and coffee shops. You have Prophet Walker, a young developer who's developing multi-use and college housing on the Crenshaw Corridor. You have SoLa Impact and Martin Muoto, another developer who's developing in South LA around the Crenshaw Corridor, but doing so with the community. And you have the Council Member and his staff being the squeaky wheel, trying to get as much as they can, being as annoying as possible.

They've also tapped into other partners, like banks to give people loans to expand their businesses or to buy some of the empty parcels of land. So, it's been fascinating to watch how folks have harnessed investment, have harnessed nice things coming and have said, “no, we don't have to fear it. We don't have to be passive. We can control it. We can help shape this destiny. We might not get everything right, and everything might not stay the same, but we can keep character, bring in investment, and make sure that everyone gets to enjoy the new nice thing.”

So, definitely I would say the South LA Destination Crenshaw area is a good example of investment without gentrification.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Michael, I hear you. What immediately comes to mind is fighting the scarcity mindset. You just encapsulated it very well with that messaging.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Speaking of fighting the scarcity mindset: we have a few minutes left. And, for those few minutes, Michael, I wonder if you can put on your professor cap for a second, because I want us to know: in the year of our Lord 2025, what should we know and what do we as a species know, about Guaranteed Income? What do you expect in terms of coming economic shifts? And what should policy makers be thinking about and learn from you in the years to come?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Well, Number One, we know that it works. We've overseen 20 RCT trials across the country, not done by me but by independent researchers at the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

We know Guaranteed Income doesn't make people stop working. In fact, in many cases, it allows people to pursue work more. To go from part-time to full-time work. To pay for childcare so they can go to work. To deal with the transmission so they can go to work. To take time off their part-time jobs so they can apply for the full-time job.

We know that has positive health impacts and that so much of the stress and anxiety we see in our society are real mental health impacts. Oftentimes, the causal link is because of economic scarcity. It's because of stress. It's because of not sleeping. It's because of not being able to take care of yourself because you worry about paying for necessities.

We know, as it relates to housing, that the average amount of money that people are evicted for isn't the full amount of rent. It's $381. Like, folks are able to pay some of it. They're not like, "I'm not going to pay rent." They're like, "this is what I have to pay."

We know Guarantee Income is a stabilizer that allows people not to be evicted. Because we also know, when someone is evicted, it's hard to get them back in housing. We know it has all types of cascading impacts on generations: not on just folks, but also their kids.

And we also know that a Guaranteed Income is not a panacea for everything. It can't solve for every issue. But, it can solve for the issue of a lack of cash and for focusing a floor and a foundation.

And we did a large-scale experiment in this country during COVID with the Child Tax Credit, where, in one year, 90% of the kids in this country qualified, and we cut child poverty in half in one year. So it's also doable.

And the country didn't change. This is in a time when people were protesting the capitol – protesting elections, doing insurrections – but not a single person burned a stimulus check or their child tax credit. Not a single person protested that. No Republican was upset. In fact, then President Trump, remember he stopped the printing press and said, "do not print these checks unless my name is on them. I want people to know I did this!" Right?

So, we know it's also a winning issue. And, with automation and with AI, we don't know the exact impacts, but we know there will be some disruption. We know that new jobs will be created, but we also know some people will lose their jobs.

And what's interesting about it is that: the research tells us that the types of folks who are going to lose their jobs aren't the people that people think. In addition to call centers, it's going to be white collar workers. It's going to be entry-level accountants. Entry-level lawyers. Entry-level folks who have professional jobs. Who went to good schools. Who went to college and got the degree. And we're going to have to have some sort of floor to allow folks to transition to the new jobs that are created. To allow folks to stabilize. And to allow folks to get those early job experiences, Number One.

And then, Number Two, I think in addition to Universal Basic Income, part of the conversation I want to have, particularly as Lieutenant Governor, is: what does Universal Basic Capital look like?

Given that these language models are valuable because of our data, and given that social media is valuable because of our data, how do we own a piece of that, so that it compounds and grows and then we all have a stake in the success and we all have a stake when things go well?

Whether it's a fund similar to – in Alaska, they have their permanent fund based off of oil, because that's their oil, right? In California, our oil is tech. It's innovation. It's data. It's AI. It's the future. And we have to have a conversation about, how do we make sure everyone gets a piece? So that folks are able to transition, thrive, and benefit from what they're giving value to and what they are making valuable with their decisions, with their questions, with their pictures, and with their uses.

They're all data companies at the end of the day. And that data is ours.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I love that. Right? I mean, that idea that our oil is us. It's our words and our emotions and our attention and, when the stock market goes up, when companies boom, when they hire people, create jobs, the oil that is running them – the thing that they are selling – is your attention. And we should make a little bit from our attention. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Just a little bit.

Michael, it has been such an honor to hang out with you today and get to know you a little bit and hear about how you’re working to lift people up, from lifting people up with guaranteed income and brazen innovative early experiments in that which you saw through and continue to see through. You talk about keeping people safe and making sure communities are places where everyone can thrive with a new deal for both citizens and police in terms of their roles and how they can engage and participate in the culture. And, of course, lifting people up now in your work as you pursue the Lieutenant Governorship, fighting for homes.

Maybe we'll lift some people up – quite literally up – into the sky.

I'm going to come to you for final remarks and thoughts in a second, but I do want to give Alex and Zennon a chance to just throw out any final parting thoughts!

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Board Member for YIMBY LA:

I had one question that I was really curious about. There's been this unholy alliance for a long time between a lot of people that are on the Progressive side but have been opposed to change and your massive McMansion homeowners who are like, “yeah, we don't want any change.”

That's what's been stopping a lot of development and a lot of progress in trying to create new things because we don't want to see that change.

But, I think we've been starting to see that coalition start to fracture. I think the win by Zohran Mamdani in New York City is a fantastic example of that. He had 'Halal Economics,' where he talked about reducing the permit prices for getting halal truck permits and talked about building more supply as a means of making sure that we can deliver and that government can deliver.

Can you touch on that a little bit and where you see yourself in that dynamic and where that's heading?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Yeah. Orthodoxy isn't my thing, right? I have a clear sense of values. And then, those values operate issue by issue. So, I think I am obsessed with government working. I'm obsessed with delivering. I'm obsessed with outcomes. And I think, because in Stockton I had three Republicans and three Democrats on my council to do all the work I did, I've become very astute at just getting things done.

Some people say I am Progressive and some Progressives say I'm a Progressive Moderate, so I don't know. At the end of the day, I live as someone who (A) believes that everyone has inherent dignity and value, equal value, and that (B) government has to work for everyone, and that (C) government has a responsibility to correct the harms that government caused. That's my Political Philosophy 101.

And I'm also someone who's not afraid to fight. I'm someone who believes that government doesn't just belong to the people who pay attention. Doesn't just belong to the people who benefit from government contracts. Doesn't just belong for the industry around government. But actually belongs to the people who are too busy to even know what the hell is going on in Sacramento. And that you have a responsibility to always show up and advocate for them.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

The Left-Right spectrum breakdown and questions of "where on the Left are you?” are always so funny because we have this attachment to ‘map’ that can explain where a human falls, but asking how Left or Right you are is actually just asking – I guess we don't have Buzzfeed quizzes anymore, but it's basically like a stupid online quiz asking – "where would you have sat in the first year of the French Revolution?"

That's what it is! There was one building, and the more Liberal people sat on the Left side, and the more Conservative people sat on the Right side. And it didn't even last that long! It's literally a question of “what table would you have sat at in 1790 or something?" It is a stupid way to describe politics.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I'll probably get in trouble for this – whatever! – but I also don't think there's a “Right!”

I think anyone who aligns with the Republican Party today is “Far Right.” There's nothing "conservative" about massive government spending. There's nothing "good governance" about kidnapping people off the street. There's nothing conservative about corruption. Like, that is not "Right." That's wrong! It's wrong. Like, it's wrong, it's wrong. It's “Left” and “Wrong.”

So, I think that there is – and I tell people all the time – I think we have to be wedded to solving the problem rather than to having the solution. If we have that beginner's mindset, like “this is a problem” and we’re open to solutions, we could get to more solutions because no one has all the answers and no one way of thinking has all the answers as well.

We're centering everyone and thinking through basic norms of human decency. I think that gives us the opportunity to come up with solutions that may be "Right," but, again, those words mean nothing! What matters is the impact. Are people helped? Are people housed? Are people clothed? Are our people fed? That should be how we measure one's political orientation.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Thank you for making that point. Journalists, please remove the word "conservative" from your vocabulary when talking about the Right and the Republican Party! It is gone. If you are trying to repeal the last hundred years of American global leadership and the American welfare state and American economy, and if you are trying to disrupt the world order, then without even asking whether that’s good or bad (it's bad), we can conclude that it’s not conservative; it's radical.

While we're at it, let's not call people "Progressives" who are scared of the future. If we care about Progress, we have to build Progress.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

Those were going to be my ending comments, actually.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Do it, Alex!

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

I mean, I think the whole crux of why we're here with YIMBY Democrats for America is we have to sell a better vision to our party on what we could do with economic development. Give people an opportunity to live. The working class. And it's clear that we fell off of that a little bit in the last election.

I think that's the work you've been focusing on, especially in outcomes. I think this is where we really need to go. And I think this is how it ties into Abundance and building a better America where people can thrive means focusing on anti-poverty and fighting the scarcity with solutions, which I think Michael really encapsulates.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And, oh, by the way, that outcome oriented vision? That’s the origin of Progressivism. That is what it means. The original Progressives were the YIMBYs, the wonks, the data dorks who thought that if you applied a scientific lens of inquiry and experimentation and reason to the world around us, and if you cared about numbers and data, then you could use that to create better solutions.

And then, like FDR, you could evaluate those solutions. It's what you talked about, too, earlier! I was going to bring it up earlier because The New Deal was not handed down like tablets to Moses! Nor was it some long-standing master plan of FDR's.

He took office in a crisis. He said, we just have to try as much s**t as possible, as committed as possible, and we're going to constantly evaluate and experiment, and we're going to run with what works, and we're going to change what doesn't. That was our New Deal! That was FDR!

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I'll be quiet after this, but I tell people that the most Progressive thing you can do is hold power accountable. The most Progressive thing you can do is demand that government works.

That's literally what it means to be Progressive. To hold power to account. To say that this government we're all giving money to has a responsibility to us. And making sure it ensures its responsibility. Building housing, all types of housing, including affordable housing, is Progressive.

I was talking to a friend the other day, and I also think this is not about being anti-union. Unions are good things! Just like building housing is a good thing. Sometimes interests converge, and sometimes interests collide. And then there has to be dialogue. Sometimes there may be some conflict. But that doesn't mean the project's lost. That doesn't mean there's no alignment anywhere. It means that we have to come to grips with the fact that in California we have unions, and union wages are good things. We also have to come to grips with the fact that, in California, we need more housing and a lot more housing. In fact, it's better for unions when there's more housing because there's more jobs that are created!

So, I think to your point, it's just pausing a little bit and really disentangling. Let everyone see the whole picture. Like, “this is what we're trying to get to. This is our goals. This is what we stand for, and this is how we get there.”

I think our job is to paint a vision that's big enough. Where everyone sees themself in it, even if the role isn't exactly the same as it's always been. Because change is also part of life, part of government. It's a constant, particularly in the times we live in.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, as Democrats, as Progressives, we believe in and are committed to the cause of being champions for the working class and for working people in America and in California. And it doesn't help working people in America or working people in California if one group of workers makes it so that all the other workers can't afford a place to live or stay in their neighborhood or spend so much time commuting that they can't be with their families. But, when we build…

And, of course, the alliance between the YIMBY movement and the Labor movement in California has been so instrumental in so many changes in the state because it is workers that build those homes. It is workers who live in those homes. When we build those homes, it is workers that can stay in their homes–

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

And workers who can afford the homes they build!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Afford the homes they build! Live by where they work, so that you are spending those six hours with your family and not the highway!

Michael, you have a verbal tic, which I'm sure you're aware of. But you've said it at least three times here. You've said, "I'll be quiet after this.”

I'm sure you learned that somewhere. I'm sure you had to learn that. And I don't know if that was just growing up as a young black man in America. I don't know if that was a family member who told you that. I don't know if it was your campaign team who said, “man, keep it short for the clip!” But, you've said it a few times: "I'll be quiet after this."

And my wish for you is: that you don't.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

I appreciate that.

Alex Melendrez, LA-Based YIMBY Activist and Former National YIMBY Organizer:

I agree.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Stay loud, man.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Appreciate you.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And, speaking of: one final opportunity. Michael Tubbs: loudly, without being quiet after this – although the whole podcast might be quiet after this. It's all got to end at some point. No finale, no story!

So, Michael Tubbs, thanks for being with us today, man. What thoughts do you want to leave us with? How do we follow you and your campaign for Lieutenant Governor. And how do we support you?

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

You can follow me at @MichaelDTubbs on Instagram, on X, and I think I just created TikTok recently. It's at @MichaelDTubbs. Really excited about that.

Or MichaelTubbsForCA.com. You can sign up for updates. You can donate. You can volunteer. You can send your policy ideas.

The last comment I'll make is this: given everything that's happening nationally, California is even more important. The alternative to MAGA can't be unaffordability. It can't be an inability to build anything. It can't be homelessness. As folks are looking for alternatives to Trumpism, California has the opportunity. But we have to lead, and not just in words, but in action.

So, in this moment, our state has to be very clear-eyed, very resolute, and very determined to begin to solve the issues we face: Number One being housing. Housing and security. That's going to require all of us to think differently. It's going to require leadership.

And that's why I'm running for Lieutenant Governor. I am prepared, excited, and willing to help exert the leadership necessary to move California from the state of inertia to a state of Progress. Meaning that Progress is happening all around California.

Tech and everything else around it seems to be moving: moving quickly and pivoting and responding to the times. Californians deserve a government that's also as nimble, as creative, as innovative, as forward-thinking, and as future-embracing as the sectors that power its economy are.

That's the only way we defeat MAGA once and for all. It's not just providing good vision, but a reality: where folks are like, "wow, I want to live in California. They have all this Liberal stuff. It works. It's clean. It's safe. I can afford to live there. It's fun. There's things to do. It's diverse."

We have to make that vision a reality. And we can do it. That's why I'm excited to be running.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

The eyes of the world are on us, and I do believe you are 100% right. What we do here and what we do now – and soon – is going to decide the fate of America and therefore the fate of world history, I think, for quite a while to come.

Michael Tubbs, Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California:

Yeah. Not hyperbolic at all. Seriously.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

So, let's go do it! Let's go! Let's do it!

Michael Tubbs, let's build California.

Build America. Defeat Fascism.

Michael Tubbs, thank you so much for joining us today on Radio Abundance!

For Zennon Ulyate-Crow and Alex Melendrez. I am Steve Boyle. Thank you for joining us on Radio Abundance live in Los Angeles. We'll see you next time. Thanks everybody!

Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXI: LA All-Stars.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, everybody! Welcome to Radio Abundance!

I'm your host, Steve Boyle, here on location in downtown Los Angeles with three amazing Angelenos. YIMBYs. Abundance-minded Democrats.

I'm with Azeen Khanmalek, Alex Melendrez, and Dulce Vazquez.

Dulce, Alex, Azeen – thanks for hanging out with me today, and thanks for welcoming me to Los Angeles.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Thanks for having us!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Thanks for having us!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Happy to be here!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Why don't we go around? If everyone can maybe share, for a second, who you are and what's your background in the YIMBY movement? How'd you come to this? What are you most passionate about here? And what's on your mind today?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Sure, I'll start. I'm Azeen Khanmalek. Thanks so much for having me today. I am the Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA. For the past 10 years or so, we have been LA County's YIMBY organization. We're a nonprofit advocacy organization. We advocate for more housing at all levels of affordability throughout LA County.

I am an urban planner by education and training, and that's how I first came into this work. I worked at the City of Los Angeles for many years for the Planning Department and for several years at the Mayor's Office focusing on housing policy, housing finance, and land use, all in the service of building more housing.

In my journey in the public sector and as a policy expert in the housing space, I think what became clear to me over about a decade or so – and I really started my planning career right as the YIMBY movement was also dawning and in its infancy – I came to the realization that, although I loved being a planner and I love working for government, the solutions that we need to solve our housing crisis go beyond what any one city can do.

Local advocacy and local organizing is extremely important to this movement, and it is, in fact, what Abundant Housing LA mostly focuses on, but this is not just a policy effort that we're involved in, right? This is a social effort to change hearts and minds. And it's also a political effort, to get the kinds of leaders elected that will actually pass the policies we all know we need to get out of our housing crisis. So that's why I'm here today.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Speaking of a multi-pronged movement, Dulce, how about you?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Yeah, absolutely. Dulce Vasquez, longtime Los Angeles resident, former candidate for Los Angeles City Council and the California State Assembly. I've been in the YIMBY movement for a long time, and, I feel like, as a candidate, I was kind of in the first wave of those who were really honing in and centering pro-housing and Abundance in my platform.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And what year was that?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

2022. 2020 to 2022 was the campaign, and I got a lot of pushback for it, particularly in where I was running, where there were bountiful anti-gentrification efforts.

Azeen talks about sort of the social aspect of it and changing of hearts and minds. I was swimming in this very big ocean, but I've continued on in the movement. I'm a former Board Member of Abundant Housing. I continue to be involved with organizations like California YIMBY, YIMBY Action, launching YIMBY Latino with Alex, and I'm just happy to be here and continuing to spread the message.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

How about you, Alex?

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Well, Alex Melendres. I have been in some combination of Democratic Party advocacy and YIMBY advocacy for the last 10 years. I started as a volunteer and basically worked my way up in a variety of capacities.

I'm a former Organizing Manager with maybe four different former titles at YIMBY Action, from LA Organizing Manager to Regional Bay Area Manager to National Chapter Manager. And I, for a while, was the Equity Officer at YIMBY Action, where I really focused on building equity-based coalitions trying to work with affinity groups and diversify the movement. Which is something I had been doing for a while, but I was given more of an official role with that.

In the Democratic Party, I pretty much started as any basic Democratic volunteer and worked my way up to be a DNC attendee. I got elected to my local Democratic Central Committee, which are the local governing boards for the Democratic Party.

I should say most of this was in the Bay Area. I just moved here, roughly a year ago.

I've been neck deep in the state Democratic Party, and I like to joke that one of my biggest side missions in the California Democratic Party for a number of years has been to make it more pro-housing and more pro-Abundance. And that's taken a lot of work.

But, given the last election cycle in 2024, we saw a big shift with then-Vice President Kamala Harris actually adopting a lot of the housing shortage language and a lot of the messaging that was really important to what YIMBY Democrats for America is really pushing for. It speaks to the origins of YIMBY Democrats and the YIMBYs for Harris movement.

I've been doing that for a number of years, and my approach has always been to come from a grassroots building-power approach. There's enough policy people out there, but I've always been somebody to focus on building power in people because that's really what it takes. The old joke I used to say is: you can be right or you can learn how to win. We know we're right, and we have to work on winning.

So, that's where a lot of my work and background has been spent.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Nice! And Alex and Dulce, can you tell us a little bit about YIMBY Latino?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I think this is Alex's baby.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

One of the things that I started to notice around 2018 and 2019 is – I'm just gonna speak kind of candidly – very oftentimes, I was the only person of color in the room, as both my co-guests are probably familiar with!

But, over time, I did notice the movement start to grow more diverse. There was a variety of online discourse and in-person discourse, not just in the Bay Area, but in the state of California, about YIMBYs and Latinos at odds. But, there were a lot of people in the Abundance and YIMBY movement at the time who were Latino and who saw the connection of how their neighborhoods and displacement efforts were actually being affected by the housing shortage.

One of the reasons why I started that was because I saw a real untapped audience there. There was an untapped group of people who felt like they didn't have a space to be both their, affinity-based self and pro-housing at the same time. There were a couple activists in San Francisco that were actually really mad that I started this!

One of my very first events was a walking tour of a freeway removal in San Francisco at the time. It was to remove the Central Freeway and replace it with a park and housing, and some Latino activists in San Francisco were really upset by that.

But, when I started building this audience, I noticed that there were a lot of people that were happy that they had a space. There were other Latino YIMBYs out there who were really willing to hold their values and hold their representation forward.

Since then, we’ve held a couple of events. I held a panel at the last YIMBYTown on how to make the YIMBY movement more diverse. There was also a secondary panel by one of my good friends at California YIMBY, his name is Jordan, on Latinos in YIMBY. And, since then, it's become just a more common thing to see.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, thinking of all of your cultural backgrounds, I'm curious about your experience growing up of housing in your community? I don't think you speak for your entire demographic! But everyone has a community, right?

Think of your community's experience of housing: did you come to feel like you developed a heterodox take on that?

I mean, I think this is one of the most pivotal questions right now in the YIMBY movement and the Abundance movement is. One of the reasons I'm animated about this is because when you have scarcity – when you have a world where there aren't enough homes and it becomes an auction just for a roof over your head – the first people to lose and suffer are going to be marginalized people. They’re going to be vulnerable people, whether they're low income or whether they have historically not had access to certain communities or neighborhoods or levels of wealth.

And it feels like there is a tension, of course, when you have communities that are cultural communities, that are vital, that we want to keep and sustain and thrive and protect, that are at risk from gentrification, that are terrified of being displaced or eradicated by new luxury towers, and so, therefore, you end up fearing the idea of new housing. And then, when you don't create new housing, then you get the opposite effect and the scarcity and hollowing out, not just of those neighborhoods, but of entire cities becoming inaccessible to people. But it's very challenging to talk about!

It's very challenging to think, how do we protect people in a world where we're dealing with 50 years of a built up housing crisis? And so, even the solutions have, in their release valve, challenges and transitions and transformations.

So, big question, because it is a big question: I’m curious for your personal experience and how you think about these wider questions?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

You know, for me, I came into this as someone who has not struggled with housing. My dad was a farm worker. He lived in farm-provided family housing, and when they sold the farm to build gated communities in South Florida, he was able to buy the housing that we were living in for $45,000 in the mid 1990s. So, at $45,000, we never had to worry about our rent increasing. We never had to worry about interest rates.

As an adult coming into the Los Angeles market and seeing increasing rents, I was able to buy a very, very small condo when prices were down here in downtown Los Angeles. And coming to the understanding that I’d paid 10x what my parents paid for a tiny unit, and then realizing I'm going to have the same mortgage payment for 30 years, and then looking at communities that I now live in in South Los Angeles: there are no condominiums in South Los Angeles.

Actually, there's one condominium in South Los Angeles. It's on MLK and Figueroa, and that is the cheapest unit that you can buy in South Los Angeles. It was like $300,000 for basically a studio.

So, being able to purchase intergenerational wealth – that creation of equity, that creation of stability, of pricing, being able to borrow against your home, equity for college education, for a new car if your car breaks down, and being able to pass something on to the next generation – is really what drove me into the space and thinking about, well, why don't we build more condominiums?

And the laws are complicated around liabilities and everything. So, initially I'm like, we need to build more condos in order to get cheaper housing for families that can afford maybe a $200,000 or 250,000 unit right in Los Angeles. That is half the price of any decrepit house that is on the market right now.

So then going into this and launching a campaign focused on housing and walking the neighborhoods of people living 10 people to a unit – living in squalor, basically units that shouldn't be permitted and living in housing that gets more – I don't know what's the right word – deficient, or used, year over year – it falls into disrepair over time. And, every year, they're charging them more. And I'm just like, why can't people understand that creating more housing would provide more availability?

But also, to your point, you mentioned something about luxury housing. At this point, the housing availability is so decrepit in certain areas that any unit – not luxury, literally any new construction – is just seen as luxury.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, I mean, I think about this a lot, right? Luxury – of course, there's no meaning to it, right? There's no attribute. It is a branding term, right? It's branding.

And, rather than saying "no luxury housing," I think everyone should have "luxury housing." And I think the more "luxury housing" you build, the more people have "luxury housing," and, God willing, today's luxury becomes tomorrow's expectation. And two tomorrows from now, it becomes just an expected and extended benefit to everybody.

That's what we want, right? We want everyone to have a good home.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Also, everyone advertises! I feel like everyone advertises that their building is luxury.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Right! Everyone advertises as luxury, even when it's literally the most basic thing that you can buy.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Isn't the old adage like, the real luxury housing is a single family home?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

That's right!

So, I grew up on the West Side of LA in Palms. I think that my neighborhood that I grew up in is very exemplary of this debate around density and the need for more housing. I grew up in a single family home on the West Side of LA, but Palms is also one of the densest parts of West LA. So, I lived on a street with all single family homes, but all the streets around us were mostly apartments, and Palms to this day remains one of the most affordable parts of the West Side of Los Angeles.

It's not that affordable, right? But it is one of the most affordable parts of the West Side of Los Angeles because it's got more units as a neighborhood than almost anywhere else. So it's the perfect encapsulation of more supply offering more elasticity in the housing market and more affordability.

I think the thing that always really gets me when I go back to Palms – and my mom still lives in the house I grew up in – is, because of a lot of the new density incentive programs and things like that, development in Palms has been taking off, especially on some corridors around Overland and Westwood.

I walk around, and I'm, like, “Wow, this is so amazing. You know, Palms is becoming more walkable. It's becoming more interconnected. It’s got a transit stop, which was something I could only dream of when I was growing up as a kid.” You know, so I view it as really exciting, right?

I will say: a lot of folks in the neighborhood I grew up in don't necessarily see it as more exciting.

But I think that, also, Palms and the West Side and the continued exclusionary nature of land use on the West side also points the way forward to me. The complex thing about the housing movement is that we do have to hold these two fundamental things together: that we need more housing extremely urgently, and eviction is a terrible and traumatic thing to go through.

One of the campaigns Abundant Housing has been focusing a lot on over the past year and a half or so is: we need to upzone the hell out of our single family neighborhoods. Especially on the West Side of LA, in some of our most historically exclusionary neighborhoods.

To us, it's no wonder that we have these continuous and revolving cycles of gentrification and displacement because we're closing off more than 75% of our land to new multi-family housing development.

In the National Zoning Atlas that was recently just published – I was just looking at it – 79% of land that you can build housing on in the entire County of Los Angeles, it is illegal to build apartment buildings on.

So, if we really want to avoid gentrification and displacement, what that means is having the courage to confront the exclusionary nature of our land use regulations and reforming single family housing.

That's the only way we're going to do it, right? Making the pie bigger. Opening up the field to where we can build new housing.

Because, as it stands, you can build multifamily housing in, like, half a dozen neighborhoods in LA, and that's it. Right?

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Right! That actually reminds me of the two narratives that we use in that particular aspect. One of them in the housing movement is we have decades, maybe almost a century, of racial segregation that we have to basically undo. And single family housing and our exclusionary policies, unfortunately, have deep roots in that, even in some of our blue cities.

Segregation didn't just happen in the south. It happened here, you know?

One half of the coin is usually redressing a lot of the historical segregation and economic opportunity that has been denied to people. But also, what we're trying to do now is shifting the narrative more to what's possible: the vision of economic development and how can we unlock those particular areas.

I think being able to hold those two together is a powerful narrative for where we should be going.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Yeah! I will say: not necessarily zoning writ large, but density restrictions as a part of zoning are – and always have been – a tool of racist and classist exclusion. That's why they were invented. And even if that's not the intent behind them to this day, today, a hundred or so years later, that is what they still function as.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii recently teamed up with another favorite of ours, Congressman Scott Peters, on the new Build Housing Near Transit Act at the Federal level.

Senator Schatz just took the floor of the United States Senate for a barn-burner of a speech on housing, and he did say “zoning is a proxy for racism now being weaponized against the working class.”

And, I have to say, he's 100% right. Zoning was racist. It's not ambiguous. We're not reading between the lines. It’s the same level of clarity as when you ask why did the Confederacy secede from the United States? Like, they told us! They told us it was for slavery!

Zoning: they told us. They wrote it down! It was for racism!

That was the point. It was first to say “black people can't be in this neighborhood” and then to say “Chinese people can't be in this neighborhood.” And, when that was struck down, it was not to say, “oh, that's bad to say black people can't live in the neighborhood.” Or, “oh, that's bad to say Chinese people can't live in the neighborhood.” No! It was struck down because the Supreme Court decided it was bad that those white homeowners didn't have the freedom to sell their homes to whoever they wanted to.

So, living where you wanted, that wasn't the legal issue. The legal issue was people who owned homes and had money being able to sell them to all their customers. Zoning. Is. Racist.

Now, are there elements of zoning like, “the pig slaughter oil factory shouldn't be near my et cetera?” Sure! Sure. Sure. For uses, whatever. But shouldn't people be able to live everywhere? Should that be illegal?

Just because you crossed out where it said “black” and changed it to “apartments?” I don't think so! I don't think you can wink your way away from that!

And, when we talk about gentrification, I think we need to be thinking about the mirror image of that. “Here's a middle class cultural neighborhood, and what happens if wealthy white people move in?” Well, what about the neighborhoods of only wealthy white people (or only wealthy whoever can tap their way into that neighborhood)? I think the people from the cultural scenes and middle class should be able to move there! Right? Every neighborhood should be for everyone, right?

If you can build it – if it's your land, if you want to make a home, if you want to make a skyscraper, if you want to make a bunch of apartment buildings, if you can find a place to rent there for a night, a week, a month, a year, buy for the rest of your life – people should be able to live.

If you're an American in the United States, you have to be able to live where you want in America.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Your neighbors shouldn't get to choose who's deserving and who's not.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

No, it's bizarre!

It's a neighborhood; it's not a private membership club.

And this drives me crazy. I remember being in San Francisco. I met somebody who's part of a local San Francisco Democratic Club for the West Side, which is very suburban, and he was saying we shouldn't build housing and shouldn't build apartments there because the neighborhood had decided, as a neighborhood, they did not want three story buildings.

I just couldn't help but think, “Man, if the neighborhood decided they didn't want Chinese people there, then this guy, me, all of us would rightly say ‘that is b******t and unacceptable. Your local rule ends where human rights begin. It is not your property. It is not your call. Be racist in your own house. The neighborhood is for anyone.’”

And I think that's got to be – if we want opportunity to be for everyone, if we want to lift everybody up, if we want to live by our Progressive values, that means letting people live.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Yeah, they're those, like jokes you see of someone with one of those lawn signs in front of the house. Like, “in this house we love everyone, we accept, everyone's welcome, blah, blah, blah.” Except, you know, you can't build any new housing. You know, you can't build an apartment building, you can't build affordable housing, whatever it is – not here. It's not good enough. There's too much traffic, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, we have to be honest with ourselves. It's a huge problem in Liberal circles and Democratic circles, you know? Most people in West LA are Liberals, but they still don't see the irony. I feel like a lot of Democrats and Liberal Progressive folks in LA don't see the irony in trying to say, we're a sanctuary city, we welcome immigrants, but housing is so unaffordable that we can't functionally welcome anyone.

You know, my parents are immigrants. They came here from Iran. They came to LA because it was a place full of opportunity. It was affordable. But we are closing the door behind us to the next generation of folks who want to come to LA – whether it's from other places in the United States or from abroad – and make a life here and pursue happiness here. We're not going to provide that kind of place unless we make housing.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, Trump doesn't talk about The Wall so much anymore, now that he has concentration camps to play with, but in his first term, it was a very routine event for San Francisco NIMBY activists: maybe in the same day you would protest Trump's Wall and also say, verbatim, “we should build a wall around San Francisco.”

I just don't think we should have walls in America!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

This is the hypocrisy that basically got me into the YIMBY movement in the first place around 2017 or 2018, when I was coming off of being a young college advocate in Democratic Party circles.

I went to some of my local Democratic clubs where everybody was significantly older than me. There was probably one person closer to my age, and it was nice to be around people who had the same kinds of values as I did. And then, when I tried to mention housing nearby, all I got was, “oh, oh no, I mean, like, we don't want that near us.” I'm like, “wait a minute! That's holding our values in our own neighborhood, though!” It's like, why wouldn't we want to do that? And it's something I feel is coming to a head, particularly right now, as we're trying to offer a better vision for the Democratic Party of how we open up Blue cities.

I mean, to some of the earlier points, it's not just sanctuary city policies. We have a lot of these protective policies for people of marginalized identities. Open communities for the LGBTQ+ community. Sanctuary city policies. We just codified abortion rights in California. But the thing that we don't usually recognize enough – or we're starting to recognize now – is: that's only as good as the access that we allow. And we don't have that access! We can't provide our Blue cities and Blue areas, where we have these protections, with adequate, affordable, and abundant housing.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

It is a sick hypocrisy, I think, at the heart of our values and our identity of who we are as Progressives and Democrats that I think is tantamount to a betrayal of promises we've made.

Los Angeles is a sanctuary city, proudly. San Francisco is a proud sanctuary city. Are they sanctuary cities? Not if you can't live there!

If you can't afford the sanctuary, it's not a sanctuary. So these are not – these are sanctuary cities with walls against people who are coming to our doors seeking sanctuary. And I don't mean coming to our doors from outside the country. I mean they're in this country, and they have contributed to their communities, and they are good Americans – even if not in name yet – and people who need sanctuary and people that we claim to be protecting and offering sanctuary and safe haven to. But we are not. It's not a sanctuary if you can't afford it.

And this is, I think, also true for the queer community, and for any kind of marginalized communities. Again, San Francisco prides itself on being a haven for the downtrodden and a refuge and a place where you can find your community and your people and anyone can be accepted. But only if you can afford it, right?

The days of Harvey Milk are gone. If you are a trans kid growing up in Oklahoma, you cannot dream of finding your people in San Francisco. You can't afford it. It is off the map for you.

That, to me, is unacceptable.

That, to me, is a betrayal of who we are as Progressives.

And that, I think, is why Abundance is the road, not just to Progressive victories in elections, but to Progressive victories on policy. To Progressive victories in our culture and values and the identity of who we are as Americans. I think this stuff matters for becoming who we say we are.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

You could say the same for refugees. I’m half Mexican, and I've spent a lot of time organizing a lot of Latinos in the YIMBY space. But I'm also half Afghan, and one of the pivotal points for me in Democratic Party politics and activism and Progressive policies in general was refugee policies.

In 2021, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, and what you saw was a wave of Afghan refugees trying to come into this country. And the Bay Area and California in particular is the biggest hub of Afghans outside of the country of Afghanistan. And it was near impossible for a lot of these refugee organizations to be able to find affordable places where these refugees can actually integrate into communities.

It was something that I found really disappointing. I will say, one of the things that I did notice, if we're talking about larger coalition politics, is that refugee orgs have started to hop on the Abundance movement!

In my prior work at YIMBY Action as a National Chapter Manager and Equity Organizing Manager, I often met with refugee organizations where, outside of actual refugee policy, their second biggest goal was trying to build enough housing to make sure that they can have areas where their refugees could actually live in the communities and where they can properly integrate.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, I'm thrilled, and even a little emotional, to know that refugee groups are getting behind building homes. The fate of – and how we've treated – Afghan refugees is pretty near and dear to my heart.

I am a survivor of Al-Qaeda terrorism. I lived through an attack that they coordinated on the London Underground that was planned by Ayman al-Zawahiri.

When the US military was in Afghanistan, so many civilians and Afghans helped us out beyond measure and absolutely risked not just their lives but their entire family's lives. They took a risk that a partnership with the US could work. That America would stand true to our values. That we would keep our promises. That we would protect them. That they could bet on civil society, and they didn't have to collaborate with the Taliban, or they didn't have to participate in a perpetual cycles of violence.

So many people took that risk for us. To keep their countrymen safe. To keep us safe. To help us track down bin Laden and dismantle al Qaeda and the Taliban.

And then, when we got out of there, we said, “see ya.” And we broke those promises.

Now you've got people who worked for us as translators, as spies, as couriers, as local ambassadors, and as people who helped us move around Afghanistan, who were promised that we would keep them safe, whether they're in Afghanistan or here.

And they're not, now. They're not safe. In either place.

And so, it's just another betrayal to me.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I have a family member with some horror stories on that, particularly.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I do, on the positive side, though, want give a shout out to Sean VanDiver, my friend down in San Diego, who started Project Afghan Evac, who has been doing a ton of policy work, like hearings in DC, to help protect and evacuate at the time and now protect the Afghan refugees that are here.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, speaking of shoutouts, I'm curious what's going on in LA right now, and who's rocking it? Who – whether they're an activist, an organizer, an academic or scholar, a policy thinker, city planner, someone in local government – who's doing great right now? Who deserves a shout out? What's the state of play in LA right now? And who should we be excited about and be championing?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

There are some great bright spots, and there's some great folks.

First, right now, I'm going to shout out Council Member Nithya Raman on the LA City Council, who has been absolutely leading the charge on pro-housing policy in the City of Los Angeles. She just released a raft of motions, all focused on making the housing development and permitting system better, faster, and more efficient in the City of Los Angeles. Tackling ADUs. Condo-ization. Tackling power hookups for new multifamily buildings. She is whip-smart, on-the-ball, and really thinking about how we can build more housing faster in the City of LA.

I don't think it's limited to the city of LA either. We are a county of 88 different jurisdictions, and the County of Los Angeles, which administers the municipal affairs of 1.5 million people in the unincorporated LA County. I think West Hollywood is doing a great job.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Santa Monica.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

West Hollywood, Culver City, and Santa Monica are three Progressive West Side cities that, in the last election, all elected pro-housing city councils, and there are a lot of really great folks.

Jesse Zwick and Natalya Zernitskaya in Santa Monica are also really leading the charge out there. Bubba Fish and Yasmine-Imani McMorrin in Culver City. John Erickson in West Hollywood.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Chelsea Byers!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

And Chelsea Byers in West Hollywood.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

New Council Member Danny Hang!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

And Denny Hang!

Those are three of the five. So, there are some great folks really leading the charge. I would even say that our smaller cities right now in LA County are on the leading edge of housing reform. In LA County, I would say they are showing the City of LA – which is the big boy in our region – how it's done, what you should be doing, and how to lead with moral courage on the housing crisis.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Those are three great cities that have strong economic cores, strong restaurant scenes, and strong nightlife, and adding to their resident population just increases the foot traffic, not just from tourism, but literally on a 24/7 basis. So I really love those three.

I am hopeful for the future. We have some really fantastic candidates running in 2026 that have, from the jump, adopted this Abundance, pro-housing, we're-gonna-get-this-done mentality. So I'm really excited about '26.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Anyone in particular you think we should be watching?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Sarah Hernandez, who would oversee, I think, half of or most of Downtown.

Downtown needs a lot of help. I figured at some point we might address the sort of elephant in the background?

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Tell us!

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

This was the failed project that lost funding during the pandemic. And, at some point – what was that now, two years ago? – we had these gorilla graffiti artists tag literally all three buildings on every single floor.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

That's it? That’s the one?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

That's the one! That's the Graffiti Tower. Yeah, this is it.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Look at that!

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Yeah, this is it. I mean, look at how many units we could have on the market! Literally. I know that it's been sitting there for a while. It's been exposed to the elements. There's funding –

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

$800 million to finish!

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Yeah! But the fact that our city paid how many millions of dollars to protect this building from further damage? When it's privately owned?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

My contrarian viewpoint on this is that we should make it a historic cultural monument and never change it. And we should feature it in the Olympics. Like the Olympic torch lighting ceremony should happen right in front of it.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I mean, honestly? I disagree and don't disagree. I have thought about, like, in the way that when you tore down the Berlin wall, you had fragments of it as artwork. You should take down every single one of these glass mirror unit things and sell them off at auction. Literally spread it around the world and raise money.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I would also say: a skyscraper of rogue graffiti is exactly the kind of thing that becomes, 50 years later, a cultural monument. Right? And becomes beloved. And everybody wants to live by this graffiti skyscraper.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

But look at this! You're next to so much. There's a train station right there. There's the center of entertainment here in Los Angeles. The Staples Center. The Peacock Theater. The et cetera. Like, this is it. You're in the center of the city. This could be utilized to actually house people.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

How does this factor into YIMBYism? Because it seems like a housing failure, right? It’s a private developer. They get permission to build a big tower. And they didn't sell the units.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Three big towers. Three three big towers. And they didn't sell the units.

And now it's, well, they couldn't even finish. They couldn't finish. They couldn't finish. They lost their funding during the pandemic. Yeah. Couldn't finish it. Yeah. It's a failure. From all sorts of sides.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Well, we don't have to go that deep for it. We can just basically state that a lot of the policies that we have right now that prevent the development of housing – there's like a laundry list, you know – and increase the cost of development – it becomes hard. Like, this is why you can't find new funding for this sort of stuff. The old adage, this is why we can't have nice things, unfortunately. It's because of all of these restrictions. All of these – you know, CEQA's receiving some reform – there may not be one particular issue that caused this particular death here, but it's adding those up and why you can't secure enough funding to redevelop it or even finish the project.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, I mean, it's such a good point, right? In terms of how constrained our housing is by the cost just to build it and get it permitted, and by the fact that community developers are shut out in favor of bigger and more corporate developers because theirs are the only projects that can pencil out and they’re the only people who can spend the money to endure years and processes and grease the wheels of government –

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

There's an entire economy of lobbyists and consultants to just get permits and to get things passed. There's probably billions of dollars in just consultants.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

I think this is a point that I feel like gets missed, and we do really need to hit, is that the people who really benefit from regulations that either ban new housing or make it difficult to build are large corporate developers and large corporate landlords.

You know who really loves housing scarcity? Large national corporate landlords.

And it's also not a secret! They put it in their Quarterly Earnings Reports! Like, “oh, Seattle built more housing and so now we can't charge as much.” Those are the incumbents that really benefit from these kinds of regulations.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah. The sum of all NIMBY fears, the NIMBY nightmare scenario of rampant YIMBYism? That is the current system!

That world of extreme corporate consolidation, where only the big guys can thrive and we're all shut out? That is the current system!

Community developers, you can't do it. You don't have the money. You don't have the resources. You don't have the connections. You don't have the time. It's only a few big companies that can do it. And so the housing they build is always the big luxury towers, because that's the only thing that pencils out.

Or, my favorite little pet thing, as an aesthetic guy: those horrid 5-over-1s of gentrification architecture? The fact that that's not some brilliant architectural scheme or what we are condemned to build for housing because we've lost the arts. That's in the law!

You can't build a beautiful Parisian Haussmannian building! You must, in fact, vary the colors at certain increments, and the heights and the shapes and the textures. And those clunky-ass horrid gentrification buildings where you're like, “who wants to live there? Not me! Why is that here?” That is mandated and prescribed!

We live in the oligarchy and the corporate takeover that shuts the rest of us out. That is the current system of intense permitting regulations. And we can be the antidote.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

You know, I think about this all the time as I'm driving down the 110, because all of these horrific Italian-style 5-story apartment buildings built by Jeffrey Palmer, the big Republican –

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

In 2016, he was Donald Trump's single biggest individual donor.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Right! So, I get nauseous thinking about this. I get nauseous looking at them. But also, it's the cheapest housing you can find downtown Los Angeles.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

We were talking about the NIMBY fear? It's because most of our land is locked up under exclusionary policies and under single family zoning!

This could be a good time to tie in a recent policy that was going around in the YIMBY world in LA, which was ED 1. It was a directive by the Mayor of LA to speed up the permitting process for particularly 100% affordable housing. Azeen can correct me if I miss some of the policy details here, but in the City of LA, what people didn't know when it was started was that single family zoned areas were included in that policy for a while. And what you saw was tons of permits being sent in for development of multi-family affordable housing in these single family zoned areas.

Why? Because it was possible! Because there wasn't as much land value speculation, and the whole area was unlocked for that kind of potential.

And then that got pulled back as soon as people started to figure out that was the case.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, and the conversation about gentrification, I think, always misses the areas that are already gentrified, namely by what I think you might call “the Landed Gentry.” Which is to say: single family homes, single estates.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

There is a whole other conversation around gentrification, or what now we have coined as the Left NIMBYs (and I wish I had had that vernacular in 2022!). Something very real is, in these minority communities that are concerned about gentrification, where to buy a house is three quarters of a million dollars, you start getting white people moving in and they're like, “we don't want you here.” Well, it's like, “that couple would've bought a three quarters of a million town home in Santa Monica, but it doesn't exist, right? So, you need to get on the movement to create that town home in Santa Monica if you don't want them moving into these neighborhoods!”

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, I mean, this is what we've been dealing with in San Francisco, right? Wealthy people want to move somewhere that is disruptive, but, you know what? If you don't build them a shiny place to live, they're not going to not come to San Francisco. They're going to just take your home. Drive up the price of your home. And now, everybody moves down a rung and is worse off.

We, in the conversation around gentrification, when we think of urban renewal and Robert Moses and that horrid era of obliterating neighborhoods – when we don't build homes and we make it hard to build homes, we're just obliterating neighborhoods in advance.

You would never go into somebody's home and say, “you can't live here anymore. I'm knocking this down.” We talk about evictions. We talk about displacement. It's not somehow moral if you do it in advance.

If you wouldn't, once that building's built, go kick out everyone who lives there and tell them they're homeless now, don't do it before the building's built!

Those are all homes that people are going to live in. People with families. People who need them. People who are ready to be a part of your neighborhood community and your neighborhood character.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

You know, we talked about the Supreme Court decision around who you can sell to, right? So, we're having that conversation now in historically minority communities, where people have owned those homes for 60, 70, 80 years, they're passing away in their homes at ages 90 to 100. Their children are in their 60s and have their homes already elsewhere and just want to cash out, and there's this movement around, like, “well, don't only, like, sell your home to black, Latino, or whatever,” right? But it's like, “well, this is their retirement. This is their generational wealth that they're passing on. Wouldn't you want them to sell for the highest dollar if they've invested their whole life in this?”

And I just think that type of mentality is very toxic.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, I have two dreams here, right? One is for any American to live anywhere. So that you would never say, “oh, I'm a white homeowner and I will only sell to white people.” And you also don't have to say, “oh, I own this piece of property in my cultural community, I will only sell to members of my culture.” Everyone in every culture should be able to go everywhere and be the full expression of themselves everywhere.

And part of that full expression that I dream about is, when we talk about neighborhood character, when we talk about culture, the argument right now is still a scarcity argument, right? It's about displacement and change, right?

I want us to think about extension and growth and glory and taking neighborhood character and saying, “it's not the height, it's the people, it's the culture, it's the aesthetics, and how can neighborhood character actually grow skyward?”

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I was going to say, I have a couple narrative frames on this that I've thought about for a while. I want to tie this back to the organizing and the people and what we're trying to focus on with the Democratic Party. Everyday people. I'm going to take an old expression from one of my old YIMBY friends who was a Planning Commissioner back in my hometown of the Bay Area, specifically on the neighborhood character.

I distinctly remember he said this one time at a Council meeting, and it just stuck with me forever. He was like, “our city is great, so let's make more of it.”

That’s the core messaging we should really focus on.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah! I don't just want to see the historic Latino neighborhood. I want to see a new, historic, tall, Latino neighborhood! I want to see skyscrapers that look like the culture and the aesthetic and the imagery and the heritage and the architecture and the colors.

Skyscrapers, homes, apartment buildings, buildings in general – these are monuments. These are works of art. Or at least they could be.

These are expressions of who we are and our culture and what we value. And I think we should think of our neighborhoods not just as changing and evolving, but as canvases for us to paint on and leave our mark on. And if we have a culture and a community and a heritage and a history that we care about – and we all do, and hopefully many – we should be asking how to show that off to other people and to future generations by what we paint in brick and mortar and where we live and how we live and what we do together.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

And I think what's important about this narrative framework of focusing on people is that it's easy to get caught up in,the number of units and the density and the height –

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

And the parking spaces!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

The parking space! All these numbers, right?

At the end of the day, we really need to come back to the fact that these are not just units. These are homes for people.

The barista that you see every day at the coffee shop you go to. The person who takes care of your kids at daycare. Whoever. They're people in your community. And these can be homes for them.

And also that, through effective outcomes-focused policy and good housing policy, we can provide for people. Provide for people and enable them to flourish throughout their entire lives.

You know, we are an organization that is certainly very pro-tenant protections and pro-rent stabilization and very pro-housing and more housing supply, right? Because a critical component here is that people change. They grow. They have kids. They create families.

And so, as your circumstances change, we also want to make sure that you don't have to leave LA because, “oh, I have two kids now and I need more space and more space means unaffordable rent, so I'm going to move to Riverside or San Bernardino, you know, or Arizona or Las Vegas or wherever.”

Building more housing and ensuring that there's enough supply of all kinds of housing means that we can allow people to grow and change and age in place and not force people to move to wherever because they can't afford a home.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And, oh, by the way: if you do leave, you can come back.

I think that's important. Te idea that you can always come back.

And I hope to come back to LA soon! This has been a delight! We could do this for hours – and I want to – but we're not going to. But, no, it's been delightful. It's such an honor to be with all three of you, and I hope to return to LA and be welcomed back and do this again soon!

Alex, Dulce, Azeen: any final thoughts?

And, real fast Lightning Round: where can people find you? Where can they follow your work? How can they get involved?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

We are at AbundantHousingLA.org. We have 17 chapters all throughout LA County. We have fun ways to get involved, like Happy Hours, and boring ways to get involved, like sitting through a City Council meeting to give public comment. Check us out. Check out what we've got going on. We love new members and new people.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Dulce Vasquez. I'm @Vasquez on TikTok and Instagram. I'm going to start ramping up some political content for the 2026 election.

And, speaking of politics and elections, just on people's radar: SB 79 if you're in California!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Alex Melendres. My handle at pretty much every social media is @ACMelendrez, M-E-L-E-N-D-R-E-Z.

I also want to give a quick shout out to two LA candidates, Sarah Hernandez and John Erickson, both of which are running for the State Senate.

And, if I had something final, I'd say go register to vote!

Because that kind of matters at the end of the day.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Thank you, Alex, Dulce, Azeen! Such an honor. So much fun.

Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for joining us on Radio Abundance!

Thank you for the welcome to LA. Let's do it again soon.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Thank you!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Thanks for having us!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Thank you so much!

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