By Peter Lawrence Kane
Affordability is crowding out nearly every other issue in San Francisco these days, and November’s mayoral race will likely be a referendum on Ed Lee’s housing policies. When state senator Mark Leno declined to challenge Lee’s bid for a second term, he left something of a vacuum on the progressive left. That’s where YIMBY for Mayor enters the picture.
“Yes In My Backyard” refers to Amy Farah Weiss and her push for “inclusive development.” The Bay Area native is trying to find a happy medium between mass displacement and relatively drastic measures like a moratorium on market-rate construction. With sites such as the Balboa Park Reservoir primed for large-scale development, the neighborhood’s current residents are edgy about the consequences. Balancing those concerns against the need for more housing is where YIMBY for Mayor sees political opportunity.
Curiously, Weiss never angled to be the left’s anointed candidate in a face-off against Lee. In fact, her initial vision relied on Senator Leno running, with a novel bit of gaming the system thrown in.
“I thought, ‘OK, we have ranked choice voting, so why don’t we do something unique?’” Weiss told me outside the Church Street Cafe. “I’m getting people engaged who might not usually be involved in civic participation.” If those voters ranked her as their first choice and an establishment candidate second, “Then I’m helping to steer votes but through a campaign of my own,” she said, pointing to her cap, emblazoned with the word “YIMBY.”
To speak with Weiss is to be dizzied by the array of nonprofits she’s worked with, as well as the general wonkishness she brings to the table. In our hourlong conversation, she mentioned her work on John Avalos’s campaign against Ed Lee in 2011, voter registration drives near USF, Neighbors Developing Divisadero’s successful effort to preserve the Harding Theater, the fight against Chase Bank in the Western Addition, happy hours with the strongly pro-development organization SFBARF, confronting developers to demand they explain the oft-quoted $600K figure as the cost of building a single housing unit, and quite a bit more.
Although armed with facts and figures about nitty-gritty public policy, Weiss has a hippie streak too. She works at the Apothecarium (although not for much longer), wrote a song about the mayor’s fundraiser called “Hey, Ron Conway,” and pledges that if she qualifies for public financing, she’ll pump half of it into the arts community. When I asked for her thoughts about the controversial development project at 16th and Mission, she declined to either endorse or condemn it, saying, “If you see that [site] and don’t think that there’s opportunity for it to heal and be revitalized, then I don’t think you have an open heart.”
Does she think another progressive heavy-hitter will seek the city’s top job? “At this point, the clock’s ticking,” Weiss said, noting that she would support assemblyman Tom Ammiano if he were to enter the race. This leaves her in the unusual position of trying to shepherd a movement that’s larger than any one person while also being the only public challenger against a potentially vulnerable incumbent. But make no mistake, her semi-accidental, outsider campaign is neither a vanity project nor an angry protest. “What I’m doing is focusing on YIMBY for Mayor rather than my name first, because my values lead me and I don’t want this to be a campaign about myself,” Weiss said. “We have to find our righteous and strategic yes.”
h/t CityLab; photo courtesy of Amy Weiss.
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