SFBARF put renters into housing hearings; SF's first westside upzoning passed 11-0

In 2011 Sonja Trauss, a failed economics PhD, taught math in Marin County for $20 an hour — $12.50 once commute costs were counted, so she quit for a bakery job at that wage. In 2014, walking to a San Francisco bar, she met a window sign asking neighbors to stop a new apartment building, and concluded the city was short of homes and organized against building them. An article quoting Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti — only citizens' groups demanding housing permits could fix this — read like a call to arms. She emailed him and founded SFBARF, the SF Bay Area Renters' Federation.

Her method mirrored the other side's playbook. NIMBYs made posters, wrote letters and packed hearings; she made a website, threw parties to make the anger social, and trained members to claim the two-minute speaker slot. Her line: 'Do new houses cause rents to rise? No. Rising rents cause capitalists to build houses.' Called a developer front, she answered that homeowners blocking homes were just as greedy — removing the moral asymmetry that kept pro-housing voices quiet. Opponents differed: displacement fears in working-class West Oakland, views and quiet streets in wealthy Berkeley.

Progress was slow and setbacks sharp. The 2016 upzoning bill met wall-to-wall opposition at community meetings; at a Mission condo fight, after Trauss compared opponents' stance to anti-immigrant politics, a supervisor who had planned to vote yes switched just to avoid her side, and the project stalled 9-0. Fernando Marti of the Council of Community Housing Organizations argued the real constraint was construction cost, not hearings, and bristled at young YIMBYs borrowing civil-rights language.

So the campaign widened from single buildings to the rule itself: 'legalize housing everywhere' — into single-family westside blocks zoned against apartments. By the second round of 2017 meetings, a half-dozen YIMBYs speaking in westside neighborhoods 'completely changed the possibilities', and the bill that died in 2016 passed the Board of Supervisors 11-0 — per Trauss, the first upzoning ever in SF's westside. In 2018 London Breed won the mayor's office promising to turn 'the politics of no' into 'the politics of yes'; Trauss filed to run for the Board herself.

It reused the process instead of attacking it: posters, letters and hearings — the tools that made homeowners dominant — cost a renters' club nothing to copy.

It made the invisible constituency audible: supervisors had only ever heard objections, so a handful of pro-housing speakers changed what a safe vote looked like.

It stripped the moral asymmetry: if blocking homes is greedy, supporting them needs no apology, freeing would-be allies of development to speak.

After 2016 it escalated to the binding constraint — single-family zoning and a lawsuit against a refusing suburb — instead of relitigating building by building.

Where a decision is made in open forum, attendance is the vote. The side hurt by the status quo forgets to attend; copying the incumbents' tools costs less than rewriting the rules first.

The upzoning passed 11-0 in 2017. In 2018 London Breed won the mayor's office on a more-housing platform, campaigning on 'the politics of yes'; Trauss ran for the Board of Supervisors that November. Moretti's research gave the movement its economic case — SF, San Jose and New York halving their growth rates over 50 years had cost the US economy about $1.5 trillion; Mayor Ed Lee's 5,000-units-a-year target showed the goal going mainstream. Opposition stayed live: construction-cost critiques, resentment of YIMBYs' civil-rights framing, and the Mission fight's 9-0 backlash vote.