Origin Stories

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great, but when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. This week marks our 10-week anniversary, so we're commemorating it with five very special episodes. One episode a day, all week. Happy 10-week anniversary, YIMBY Democrats for America. Tonight, we'll be sharing YIMBY origin stories in their own words from five elected officials, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, U.S. Congressman and founder of the YIMBY Caucus, Robert Garcia, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, and California State Senator Scott Wiener. And then we'll be playing a never-before-seen interview from the fall with Pod Save America co-host and Barack Obama speechwriter John Lovett.

0:51 You may have heard clips, but you've never heard the whole thing. I think you'll find it eerily prescient. It's a clip show tonight. We'll be sharing our origin story as well. Join us as we reminisce and take a stroll down memory lane. Thank you for being with us as we celebrate the 10-week anniversary of YIMBY Democrats for America. Onward and upward. Excelsior, my friends. Ever upward. You're listening to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. Now let's get to the show. Please welcome your host for the evening, YIMBY Democrats for America Executive Director Steve Boyle. And to kick things off, here's Steve. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I hate these guys.

1:34 Hello, hello. Hello to all our friends in abundance. My name is Steve Boyle. I am the Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America and host of Radio Abundance. This is YIMBY Democrats for America's 10-week anniversary. It has been an amazing launch. We've interviewed leading elected officials and authors. We hosted a sold-out event in San Francisco with the leading orgs of the YIMBY and Abundance ecosystem and the San Francisco Democratic Party. We partnered with the Zellner-Myri campaign for the mayor of New York City to give our folks some direct access to him to ask him their questions about his plan to build and restore 1 million new homes in New York City in the next 10 years. And we were actually able to work with them and their campaign to create a very fun little trailer intro video, about five minutes really laying out the mythology and the scope and scale of the ambition behind his campaign to resurrect New York and really recapture the spirit of New York City by building and restoring those 1 million new homes in 10 years, channeling the passion and the drive that built the Empire State Building in less than 13 months at the height of the Great Depression.

2:51 As Zellner says, you know, this is New York City. Come on, man. We can do it. And, you know, we also woke up this past Sunday morning to find out that we were in the Wall Street Journal. They had flown out to cover that sold-out San Francisco event, which then became the cornerstone of a Wall Street Journal trend article on abundance in the Democratic Party, featuring voices like Ezra Klein and Congressman Josh Harder and Ro Khanna and Richie Torres, plus Noah Smith and also yours truly. The Wall Street Journal flew out to interview the team at Yimby Democrats for America. It is the first mention of our name, Yimby Democrats for America, in national print. The first mention of our mission to build America and defeat fascism.

3:40 The first mention of our vision, which we call Progressive Abundance. And it was also the first mention of my name because they ran with a quote of mine about my hopes for the future of the Democratic Party. So these are the first mentions of who we are. The first, but not the last. We are only 10 weeks in, and there are years to go on this epic journey of ours. But we are making speedy, swift progress, as I mentioned on Twitter the other day, while urging folks to take a few minutes out of their day to call their state senators. You know, in The Lord of the Rings, to get literary for a second, when Frodo Baggins sets out to walk to Mordor, it is a truly impossible, ridiculous goal. This hobbit, four feet tall and barefoot, embarking on a perilous and insane quest to defeat a world historical evil and trek a long and arduous journey.

4:39 It is silly. And if he told you he was going to do it, you would laugh in his face and do a spit take. But if that same Frodo Baggins told you he was going to walk 10 feet that day, you'd say, well, sure. Why? Why would you tell me that? And yet, what is it to walk to Mordor but to walk 10 feet and then another and then another and refuse to stop until you get there? So we are going to Mordor, folks, and I hope we can all go together because it is going to take all of us. But at the end of the day, at the end of each day, all we're really doing, all we're waking up to do is to walk 10 feet a day and maybe sprint a little more if we feel like it.

5:27 You know, all week this week, we are celebrating our 10-week anniversary. Officially, we hit that 10-week mark tomorrow on Wednesday, June 4th. So we are spending this week releasing an episode a day of all lengths at all hours because there's a lot of work to mark this special occasion. You know, Yimby Democrats for America and especially Radio Abundance have their roots in the second half of Yimby's for Harris this past fall. During the campaign season, I got the green light to start orchestrating events for the movement. The big ask at that point from the campaign wasn't money. It was activism, door knocking and phone banking. So we mobilized to produce a few phone banking events. And my scheme for luring people to come and inspiring them to hit the phones was to reach out to elected officials and ask them to sit down with us for like a half an hour and just talk, talk about the issues that matter to us, housing and democracy.

6:22 Zero in on what was most compelling to us in our world and speak to it with a level of depth that, frankly, most interviews and even political events just don't afford for just that one topic, housing. That is changing a little bit now, post Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and post Abundance, the book. But this was pretty special. So we got to sit down with folks like Governor Jared Polis of Colorado, who you heard from yesterday. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, who you'll hear from tonight, as well as U.S. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, U.S. Congressman Robert Garcia from California, the founder of the Congressional YIMBY Caucus, Robert Garcia. We spoke with Barbara Lee, who is then a United States Congresswoman. But now for the past two weeks exactly has been the new mayor of Oakland, California.

7:09 We spoke with California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is the OG YIMBY, as well as John Lovett, the host of Pod Save America, Lovett or Leave It, as well as a former speechwriter for a guy you may have heard of named Barack Obama. Tonight, we're going to have a fun little clip show. We asked each of our interviewees, the governors, senators and congressmembers, what got them into the YIMBY movement? How were their eyes opened? What radicalized them? So we're going to play for you each of their answers tonight. And then that John Lovett interview, that was a special one for me. It's the first one that I set up the first time I got to speak with an interview, a national figure. And, you know, of course, I grew up like probably so many of you really idolizing Barack Obama.

7:54 President Obama really appeared on the national scene with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention. And I certainly can't forget. And I wonder who can forget hearing those words. There's not a liberal America and a conservative America. There's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There's the United States of America. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. Although quick side note introduction, they do actually really seem to like federal agents poking around their libraries in the red states, which turns out to absolutely suck. Obama continued, we coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states.

8:42 There are patriots who oppose the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. You know, I remember watching it at the time on TV, having just turned 16 years old. I celebrated my birthday about a week or two before then. And I was looking forward to having the opportunity to vote in a few years. And I remember after that speech, before it was even over, turning to my parents and saying, I'm going to vote for that man for president in 2008, which was seriously crazy at the time. He was a state senator making his national debut that evening. But crazier things had happened. And I got to tell you, a lot of much crazier things have happened since.

9:32 So it was exciting to spend all those years, especially from 2004 to 2008, you know, coming of age and also following the coming of age of the Obama movement as well. I remember being at college at NYU and hopping on what we call the Chinatown bus. You may or may not remember the trend of cheap bus rides between cities really started because there were these companies that sprang up in the Chinatowns of various U.S. cities, places like New York and Boston and Philly and D.C. And these companies started affordable bus services to private bus services to bring their communities to see each other. College kids found out about this and it suited their budget very well. And from there, it just became a fad that spread. And of course, it's gone corporate now and you've got the bolt buses and mega buses of the world.

10:20 But I do remember being in college in 2008 and riding down to Philadelphia on the Chinatown bus to knock on doors for the first time ever, swelling with pride for the Barack Obama campaign. I returned to Philadelphia this past fall again to knock on doors. It was an incredible time. I cannot recommend it. Enough as an experience to get to talk to voters and meet them. You have a lot of conversations with people who are really enthusiastic and very thankful for you. And some of the conversations that start out challenging and rough turn into turn into new voters and really special and amazing moments. My favorite one this past fall, we did entirely in Spanish and it was great.

11:05 Got a voter out of it. So it was an incredible time, even if the days that followed were pretty rough and painful. But, you know, that wasn't the only thing that came a bit full circle this year. Barack Obama spoke again at the Democratic National Convention, as you'd expect this time. 20 years on, yes, the 20th anniversary of his original keynote address that launched his national career and made him a national and indeed a worldwide sensation. And this time, this year again, this past summer, once again, he took my breath away. We can't just rely on the ideas of the past. We need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today. If we want to make it easier for more young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country.

12:02 That is a priority. I remember listening to Barack Obama's speech this past summer at the Democratic National Convention in the car as I drove the hour between San Francisco and San Jose and being so gobsmacked my idol, Barack Obama, was suddenly talking about zoning on stage in the middle of the Democratic National Convention and receiving raucous applause and cheering. I was so shocked. I pulled off the road, pulled up the video on my phone to start watching and frantically started texting teammates and friends to say, can you believe what just happened? So as as maybe you can tell, I I also enjoy words and political rhetoric. So growing up, you know, among all the things I idolized Barack Obama for, I I probably idolized him for his speeches most of all, which means that as the years went by, I came to idolize John Lovett as well.

12:57 He was in his mid 20s when he began writing speeches for Barack Obama. After get this, he won an anonymous contest to do it. So, you know, John Lovett is also a bit of a hero of mine, which I probably should have mentioned to him. Maybe I'll get that chance sometime. And, you know, we got a chance to talk this past fall about that Barack Obama speech and President Obama's thoughts on zoning and permitting and yimbyism and yeah, abundance before we called it abundance. So that first interview with John, my very first, is very dear to me and we will play it in full for you today. But first, we want to share with you what our elected officials told us about what radicalized them and turned them into yimpies. So first, here is United States Senator from Hawaii, Brian Schatz, who digs right in on the racism and Jim Crow segregation that led directly to our zoning laws today.

13:52 Take a listen. It's two things. You know, my my solemn obligation as a United States Senator from Hawaii, the most isolated, heavily populated place on the planet is to try to make it work, try to make the math work for people in Hawaii. And it's just, you know, it's in my view, it continues to be the best place in the world, but it's really, really expensive to try to make the arithmetic work. And so, you know, as you kind of look at the pain points and the reason that ultimately people have to move away to the continent to make their life there is housing. And I started to realize the problem is that we have a shortage of it. And not that we're not building enough of a certain category of housing, not that there's too much of another category, but we just literally are 60,000 units short across the state of Hawaii.

14:41 And for the first time in a very, very long time, Hawaii's population got smaller. And that is not a healthy direction for an island state. The other part of this that I think, you know, I'm almost cheapest to admit is that, you know, I got under the Senate, a housing and banking committee, and I guess I didn't quite understand the deeply troubling history of zoning and restrictive covenants in real estate and minimum lot size. All those requirements that make suburban people happy came in the wake of Jim Crow segregation being outlawed.

15:28 And then the racist understanding that they couldn't be explicitly racist in preventing mostly black people from living in certain neighborhoods, but that they could use minimum lot size, restrictive covenants, planning and zoning, all of that stuff essentially as a proxy for race and continue decades and decades of segregation, which sort of jived with my instinct that, although the kind of way we come up in Hawaii politics is that it's somehow a progressive value to prevent housing, there is nothing progressive about preventing the building of housing. And that, in fact, there is a strong historical record that it was the bad guys that were preventing the development of housing. And they did it not just for economic elitism or just narrow like interests related to the, you know, character of their neighborhood, but like explicitly racist reason. And so that was how I got radicalized.

16:33 That interview with Senator Schatz was an absolute delight. It was fiery. It was authentic. It was in depth. He cursed up a storm. And we will be sharing more from that interview with you later this week. You know, a big goal of ours at Yimby Democrats for America and a big goal of ours from back in the fall is to connect the dots between Yimbyism and abundance and the progressive wing of the party. We are progressives ourselves. We see abundance as the way to achieve our longstanding. And we're talking more than a century here. Our long, long, longstanding progressive goals. That's why we call it Progressive Abundance. So we put out the ask to speak with someone from the left wing of the party who cared about these issues. And we were delighted to get the chance to sit down with then Congresswoman, now Mayor Barbara Lee. Her answer to what turned her onto these issues was moving, was heartfelt, was deeply personal. I think you're going to love it. Take a listen.

17:32 Let me just tell you, I start from the value point of view about housing is that it's a basic human right. Everyone deserves access to affordable, decent, safe housing. Secondly, when I was growing up, my grandfather, I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, and he was determined that as an African American, he was the first black letter carrier in El Paso, said, we're going to own our own home because that is the only way that we can ever send you guys to college, acquire wealth, the whole nine yards. So I've always been about housing and making sure people had access to affordable housing as well as home ownership opportunities. Fast forward in the California legislature, I chaired when I was in the California Senate, the Housing and Land Use Committee of the state Senate. And so I was able then to really look at California housing from a legislative perspective. And here, of course, in California, experts say we need three to four million new housing units to bring the prices down.

18:35 And in fact, I looked at housing, though, in its totality as a continuum. Then fast forward, I go to Congress, served for 11 years on the Banking, now Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Housing. And it was on that subcommittee that I was able to work with Bernie Sanders to establish the National Housing Trust Fund. And so we began to look at ways to bring down the costs of housing from rental property for young people, for home ownership. And looking at my view, again, in addition to being a human right, housing is infrastructure. And so how do we build more housing, bring the costs down, and see this as part of not only our human infrastructure, but as part of our infrastructure, like roads and bridges. So housing has been a big deal. And when I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley, now can you believe this? I got my master's in social work. I received a HUD fellowship to do that because I was so interested in the social determinants of housing and why so many people then in the day didn't have a decent safe place to live. So HUD, under a Republican administration, provided a two-year fellowship for me to look at and figure out how people's mental health and how their social status could be improved through housing initiatives. So I was able to get a HUD fellowship to go to graduate school. So this has been part of my DNA forever. You know, we're probably not supposed to play favorites here, but one of our favorites is certainly Congressman Robert Garcia. He is the founder of the new bipartisan congressional YIMBY caucus. He actually broke the news about the announcement date for the YIMBY caucus in our fall conversation with him. And of course, we found out from Congressman Scott Peters a little while later that we had a little something to do with both the inception of the idea and the recruiting for the congressional YIMBY caucus. We have already featured Congressman Garcia on Radio Abundance in a stellar double feature with California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Two young abundance-minded Democrats of color who were born outside of the United States came to this country as young children and became true patriots for America and for American abundance. And, you know, this is Pride Month after all. Happy Pride. So we must now call out another one of Congressman Garcia's laurels. He is the first openly LGBTQ immigrant to ever serve in the United States Congress. Before that, he was the mayor of Long Beach, California. And we asked him what got him into the YIMBY movement that would one day lead to his founding a YIMBY caucus in Congress.

21:17 I definitely think he replies during my time as mayor. I mean, I obviously come from the local governor world. And I saw, you know, really early on, I'm kind of like, you know, I just like love downtowns. I love creating public spaces. I early on, I consumed a lot of information as I was a kind of a teacher before I got into being mayor and I was a university instructor. So I just read an enormous amount of research and listened to a lot of really great information and documentaries and just read some incredibly, incredibly insightful, I think, authors and scholars with it all talking about early on, it was a lot about like creating third spaces and creating, you know, a walkable street.

22:13 It's an adding bike lanes. And so all of that really got me into this kind of role, especially pro-housing person during my time as mayor. I approved and supported every single housing project that ever came across my desk. I supported every single one, whether it was a market rate project, whether it was an affordable project, whether it was a project for people that were experiencing homelessness, unless we were unhoused. I really believe that housing should be our top priority in the city. And we pushed that. We either built or permitted close to 10,000 units during my time as mayor, which for a city like Long Beach that had been quite nimby before me, I think was, it was pretty powerful. And the one thing I'm probably the most proud of, and probably where I really got radicalized was, I was pushing through midway between my time as mayor and upzoning of the whole city. And as I'm pushing this upzoning, I realized who was opposing it and who was supporting it. And I saw myself being drawn to this kind of coalition of everyone, of young people, diversity, young professionals, working class communities that were all kind of trying to push for more housing. And the folks that were opposing, you know, any sort of housing construction adjacent to, you know, their homes or redoing the zoning were all essentially kind of entrenched kind of older folks, which I respect, but people that, um, that didn't want to see change. And, uh, and at that moment, I realized like we have to push and take these, take the arrows. And, and I, I had, you know, I remember one meeting that I have five or 600 residents, all very good voters and very good people yelling and screaming at me that I, they would, you know, ruin me because I was trying to upzone their residential neighborhood. And I think at that moment I realized, um, we really need to be fighters on this. And, um, and I, I got, that's really what I became, I started following kind of like the California NBA was going on. I'd already been in this huge kind of pro bike out of it and it all kind of came together for me. And then, um, my, my second term, I was just like, you know, fuck it. Like we just got to go big. And that's what we did.

24:46 Fuck it. Go big. We love it. I'd slap that on a poster and stick it on my wall. But that phrase is already tattooed on the inside of my head. It drives Yimby Democrats for America forward every day. Fuck it. Go big. You know, if you've never been to New Mexico, I cannot recommend it more highly. I go every couple of years to Santa Fe to visit my friends at Meow Wolf. They're a grungy art collective that has evolved into a quarter of a billion dollar juggernaut that many journalists think may become a new Disney. If you haven't heard of them before and you're thinking, what is a Meow Wolf? Well, Google it because they're building permanent exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles in the next few years. They have glorious exhibitions already in Las Vegas and Denver and Texas. Trippy, psychedelic, immersive fun houses for all ages. Truly immersive worlds. Sprawling, enormous, gigantic that you can really lose yourself in. Lose yourself and find yourself in art and feel authentically and as an adult, the same energizing buzz of creativity and inspiration and play that you once felt as a kid playing make-believe in trees and tree houses. But their home will always be Santa Fe. What really changed their trajectory was that one of their founders decided to check out a little startup accelerator run by a great group in New Mexico called Creative Startups. And that was where this brilliant burner, Burning Man artist realized, hey, I'm not only a scrappy shoplifter and artist, I am also a scrappy entrepreneur. Now, George R.R. Martin, who you may recognize as the renowned author of Game of Thrones, owns an independent movie theater in Santa Fe named the Jean Cocteau Cinema. And my buddy had previously worked for him briefly and been unceremoniously fired. But being a creative, artistic entrepreneur means you never burn a bridge and you push through the fear. So my friend went back to George and he said, I have an idea for my art collective to create a glorious installation experience at an abandoned bowling alley in Santa Fe. Would you consider buying the building and leasing it to us? And George agreed to a tour. My friend Vince painted the vision and George famously looked at the revolving bowling pin displayed outside that hailed cars off the street and asked, if I buy it, can we do something with that? Vince said yes. George said yes. And the art collective built the most incredible, interactive, story-driven fun house called the House of Eternal Return. It begins, yeah, in a house, which is, I mean, it's a house. It's a fully lived in house. It's in the middle of a now activated former bowling alley, but it's a house. And you begin there and you sift through the family's family's belongings, their papers, their rooms, and you begin to find yourself on a bit of a quest, unlocking something of an interdimensional mystery. And then you start to notice the secret passageways, refrigerators that open into new dimensions, washing machines that you can plunge through to arrive somewhere else. The experience is amazing. This was also at the height of Game of Thrones fame when they built it originally. It's still there. Please visit. So by mentioning that George R. R.

28:18 Martin had made it possible, they had an angle. They pitched it. Newspapers ran with it. And half a million people flocked to Santa Fe in its first year to check it out. It is a true New Mexico success story. So I love New Mexico. I visit often. I follow it closely. And we couldn't have been more honored to sit down with New Mexico's governor Michelle Lujan Grisham to hear her YIMBY origin story. Well, there's really three specific reasons. One, I want to go to younger folks. You know, we've invested in a really robust, even free cradle to career strategy to get folks to stay here, live here, work here, raise a family here, and to take away a lot of those burdens that prevent opportunity. So free universal child care. We're more than halfway there with a funding opportunity that lasts decades. Free pre-K, free therapeutic pre-K, moonshot investment, K-12, free college, two-year, four-year, part-time, full-time. Only state of the nation that's building that investment in New Mexicans. But if they don't have places to live, buy, rent, create equity, opportunity, stability, then all of the upstream investments really are minimized. So we want to make sure that we're supporting New Mexicans where they are. Two, every state, including this one, is concerned about workforce. So if we don't create housing so that we can get our workforce developed and stabilized in places around the state that have long been left out of housing and development initiatives because they're rural, we're going to be in a lot of trouble, particularly for an energy state that is moving robustly in renewables. You know, our large wind farms are not always going to be right in the center of the population areas in the state. And lastly, every state, including New Mexico, is behind. It's dire. We need 40,000 units. And for me, I'm happy about rent, but I'm happier about building equity and what I call the kind of stability in folks raising families and thinking about more permanency about where they live and building these economic opportunities. So we want to do as much as we can as fast as we care.

30:54 You know, when I think of the leaders of the Yimby movement, the founding pioneers, the tip of the spear, one of the names that comes to mind first is California State Senator Scott Wiener. He's been an outspoken advocate for Yimbyism from the days when it was extremely unpopular to the days when it was mildly unpopular and all the way to today's 50-50 tipping point. And he is still writing the laws that are pushing Yimbyism and abundance forward in California, pushing it through the most challenging environment for Yimbyism and abundance in this country. Here at Yimby Democrats for America, we are obsessed with the 2030 census. Red states have been dramatically outpacing blue states on population growth, which means that when the 2030 census hits, California is currently set to lose four or maybe five electoral votes. And as blue states across the country, like New York, bleed electoral power to. This would hand the country over to MAGA, Republicans and Trumpian fascism.

31:59 It would make the House of Representatives nearly impossible to win. It would make the presidential election and the Electoral College nearly impossible to win for a dozen years from 2032 to 2044. It would put a Republican in the White House. And let's be real. The Republican Party of your childhood is dead. It would put a MAGA fascist in the White House every year from 2033 to 2045. And even if Democrats win the election in 2028, following that up with at least 12 years, three terms of uninterrupted fascist rule means that by the time the next census hits in 2040, 15 years from now, and by the time the next presidential election with a refreshed electoral college count hits in 2044, nearly 20 years from now, well, let's just say, I'm not so sure we'll ever reach that election. If we do have a 2044 election after 12 years of MAGA rule, it's likely to more resemble one of Russia's elections, quote unquote, than one of ours or anything you'd recognize from your lifetime so far in America. We're putting everything behind changing it. Because what we do in 2025 will determine what happens in the 2030 census and will determine what happens to America throughout the 2030s and the 2040s. It will determine if we remain a democracy. The 2030 census and therefore what we do in 2025 is a referendum, a binary vote, a kind of American Brexit. Will America be a democratic nation or a fascist nation? It is the most important vote you'll ever cast, but you will cast it not at the ballot box, but with your own feet. If Democrats do somehow manage to avoid catastrophe, if the United States is saved by a surge in home building in blue states, a surge in population in blue states, a reversal of California's slow growth and upcoming bleed of electoral power, hemorrhage of what makes us able to resist Donald Trump, then more than anyone else in the world, we may have Scott Wiener to thank. Save democracy, Scott. Save the Democrats. Save California. Save America. I'm excited for you to hear Scott's answer to the question of what originally got him into Yimbyism so long ago. You know, you see on Twitter all the time, folks on what I would call the horseshoe left, calling Yimby's developer shills or corporate puppets. But when you hear from Scott Wiener, you'll hear that it's anything but the case. We recently held a happy hour in San Francisco with a live taping of Radio Abundance, where we heard from leaders of the Yimby and Abundance movements, as well as folks in the Democratic Party, including the official San Francisco Democratic Party, who officially partnered and co-sponsored the event. You'll hear the whole conversation in our next episode of Radio Abundance to celebrate our 10-week anniversary. But what really struck me then, and may strike you when you hear it, were the stories. Stories of being stuck. Stories of being trapped by high rents in devastating situations. Stories of seeing your friends and communities priced out of the cities you love, the cities they love, priced out of being with their communities. My origin story as Yimby was that I had the incredible fortune to luck out into a rent control department in San Francisco at a time when I wasn't even trying to move there. And because of that good fortune, I got to build the artistic career of my dreams while watching all of my artist friends, my artist community, buried by high rents, thwarted from realizing their potential, and eventually discarded from San Francisco. My community, by and large, is gone. And with it, so many artists and so much art, so much that could enhance our lives, our souls, our cities. It is gone. We cannot let that continue. I will not let that continue.

36:02 And building homes is the only way to make our cities safe for art, safe for culture, safe for life, safe for thriving, supportive of new ideas, places to incubate new eras and movements. San Francisco prides itself, speaking of Pride Month, on being a safe haven for the downtrodden, the marginalized, the persecuted. It is its mythology from the founding of the city, but it really reached its peak in the era of Harvey Milk and the Castro District and Gaberhoods, places where a kid growing up persecuted in a deep red state could find a home and a community in San Francisco. That is not possible today. A trans person fleeing the South cannot find a home in San Francisco today because no one can.

36:51 So they cannot find a community here, and there is no safe haven available here. It would be safe if only you could afford to live here. That is a fundamental betrayal of San Francisco's promise and purpose as a city. And Scott Wiener, first on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and now in the California State Senate, is leading the fight to make San Francisco and California a safe haven once again. That's the core part of why he became a Yimby. So let's listen to his answer now. It was a gradual process for me. So I moved to San Francisco in 1997 when I was 27 years old, and I thought I was a baby lawyer, and I thought, let's just go and find an apartment. Just find an apartment I like and sign a lease, and that will be the end of it, the way you normally think of getting an apartment. And I still remember the first morning I came in on a Friday evening and Saturday morning.

37:53 I went out and went out and went to my first open house. And there was a line down the block to get into the open house. And I finally got in and I finally got in and people were trying to bribe the landlord to choose them to sign the lease. And I remember thinking, this is super weird. But that was sort of normal. That was the beginning of the dot com boom. But I immediately knew there was something not normal about that. But I ended up finding a place. And then I was a junior lawyer. And I did a lot of pro bono work representing, defending low income renters. And I still remember talking to this guy who were facing eviction. And I still remember talking to this guy. It was an older gay man, probably in his 60s or maybe 70s, who was a long-term HIV survivor who was facing voter movement eviction.

38:49 And I remember him saying to me, if I lose this apartment, I'm going to have to choose between being homeless in San Francisco and getting good HIV care or moving back to the South where I'm from, having housing and getting bad HIV care. And that just shook me to my core that anyone would ever have to make that choice, that an eviction would be to either being homeless or having to leave our city. And then a number of years after that, I had gotten more and more involved in Unity. And I became the president of my neighborhood association in the Castro. And I remember that there was a project that was fully zoning compliant.

39:40 And it went through 50 5-0 community meetings for this zoning compliant apartment building. And so all of these experiences, eventually, like my own experience, the guy I was representing, and then seeing this weirdness of like a project that complies with all the rules has to go through an unending process. It just sort of laid the foundation for me to understand that our housing system was broken. And then I got elected and really saw the brokenness, that's a word of it, and learned what needed to happen to fix it. Powerful stuff and powerful answers from all of our guests so far. U.S. Senator Brian Schatz, Mayor Barbara Lee, U.S. Congressman Robert Garcia, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, California State Senator Scott Wiener, and yeah, I'll add President Barack Obama to the list.

40:30 His speech excerpts on abundance were every bit as powerful as you might expect. Which brings us nicely to our interview with John Lovett. I mentioned earlier why I found that conversation so powerful for me, but I think it's worth calling out. You know, it's very interesting to listen back to old election season conversations and think about how much has changed and also what hasn't. And I'll say that John Lovett's answers often seem eerily prescient to me. He tore into California's failings well before Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson did in their book, Abundance. He specifically laments California's failure to build more resilience against wildfires. Less than three months before the most devastating wildfires in California's history, which forced more than 200,000 people from their homes, destroyed more than 15,000 homes, caused more than $250 billion in damage.

41:28 One of a handful of the top wildfires by financial damage in all of human history, with some proposing it was the costliest ever and certainly the costliest ever in the history of the United States. And that's just in terms of financial damage before we even get to climate damage and the disastrous setback for the climate change movement. The wildfires in Los Angeles unleashed nearly as much carbon in the air in less than a month as one million cars over an entire year. More carbon unleashed in three weeks, as all of the forests in all of California can soak up in half a year. So housing, building. We know that's a climate issue as well. And damn, a disaster like what happened in Los Angeles really brings it home.

42:17 Speaking of disasters, John also told us that Donald Trump would eviscerate the economy if he was elected, absolutely blow up the cost of living while taking money out of your pockets with a national sales tax, by which he means Trump's devastating tariffs. Even as Trump explodes the deficit to pad the pockets of the extraordinarily rich, which is the very bill that sits in Congress right now. John wrapped it all up by saying all praise to Ezra Klein. So he was ahead of his time on that one as well. Let's get to our interview with Pod Save America co-host, star of Love It or Leave It, co-founder of Crooked Media, and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, John Lovett. Well, thanks, John, so much for sitting down with us for a few minutes today.

43:04 Fans, super grateful. Thanks for having me. John, let's start out this. Are you considered yourself a Yimby? Yes, I do. Sure. Absolutely. Have you always been a Yimby? Well, you know, I feel like I am like a negative partisan for Yimby. It's like, I don't know that I've, I'm definitely, I'm anti-Nimby, you know what I mean? And I think that's, that's where I begin. Like there was a story that really, there have been a lot of stories like this, but a group of Nimbys using California's environmental laws to basically retract a bunch of acceptances for kids to go to college in Northern California. It made me so angry. And there are tons of examples like that all over California about people basically using the good intentions of lawmakers trying to protect the environment and preserve the rights of people who live in neighborhoods to prevent places from changing and growing and becoming the welcoming economy that we claim to want to be.

44:01 And I find that really frustrating. Yeah, I mean, I remember that, right? They're calling college students pollution, right? And noise pollution, which brings up a really interesting aspect of all this, which is that in addition to the stakes of the national election, in addition to the stakes of the national battle and the partisan battle, there's also intra-party stakes to this, right? Where you've got laws, you know, again, there's this sort of pernicious laws on the books that were passed out of racism. There's laws that were passed with very conservative agendas. There's also a lot of laws that were passed with progressive agendas, right? Environmental laws. You've got folks kind of on the Democratic side of things, folks in marginalized communities paying high rents that are scared that new construction is going to bring, you know, gentrification or raise their rents or saying, how does sleek new construction benefit me?

44:54 You've got folks saying, hey, I worked my whole life to own this property. How is this going to affect my property values? So a ton of questions for you on this topic as a specialist and expert in communication. I mean, how do you how do you communicate the need to build more housing and the impact it's going to have in the face of these different concerns and concerns coming from people that are our allies and really meaningful voices even within our own party? Yeah, well, I mean, I think, first of all, I think a lot of what you're talking about are people managing and trying to be empathetic, trying to have compassionate, good policy, a broken system in which we should have already built millions upon millions of homes, right?

45:37 Efforts to keep rent down, efforts to say, hey, hold on a second. These new buildings that are going up, they're changing the kind of people that are in my neighborhood and I and the people that I that I grew up with feel like they can no longer afford to be here. Like, those are valid concerns. Those are very like reasonable things to feel about in your community. They're all, though, like downstream of we should have been building this whole time. We should have been addressing this as we went. We just didn't. And that's not just about housing. Housing is a huge part of it, but it's also about transit. It's about other forms of infrastructure. There's no sense harping on it. But we missed a window where we could have borrowed vast sums of money for free to create millions and millions of jobs building in energy, expanding train lines and fixing water systems.

46:31 And all kinds of ways, ways we could have built up California to be more resistant to both wildfires and droughts. There's tons of things that we could have been doing and should have been doing that we didn't. Can't go back in time. Now the question is, what do we do? Well, do we just sort of lick our wounds and accept that California has become prohibitively expensive, that we're just not going to be able to deal with these problems? Or do we finally do the work of the building and growing and changing that we had to do all along? The Inflation Reduction Act, I think, is a big step towards doing that. I interviewed Bill McGibbon, the environmentalist, talking about just how much solar is now coming on day after day after day. In a lot of ways, we are changing. We are addressing these issues. It's just going to take a really – it's going to take time.

47:16 It's just going to take time because we're making up of a generational failure. So when you think about that huge backlog, catching up on that generational failure, all the consequences it has in terms of high rents, in terms of climate change, in terms of energy production, even in terms of things like social cohesion, that sort of crisis of loneliness, in terms of sprawl and car dependency and people just being far from their friends and far from communities. As you mentioned, we've got a lot of work to do. You know, you've worked in presidential administrations. What can be done at the national level in terms of law and policy to address this crisis? And knowing – you know, you've discussed this from the California framework – knowing how much local work has to happen, what can be done to win that battle in terms of even just persuasion and sort of party motivation when so much has to be done at the local level?

48:04 There's an urgent need right now to help people, right? Like, if you bought a house in the 90s, right, your house went up in value. And so your wealth has grown with the rate of houses. But if you didn't, if you're a young person trying to buy a house or if you're an older person who finally feels like they're in a position to maybe buy a house or buy an apartment, you feel like you're priced out because of how much housing prices have gone up. So having a credit of $25,000 for first-time homebuyers helps people mitigate that – what is often the biggest challenge to becoming a homeowner, right, which is the down payment, while at the same time recognizing that this is a supply issue and building millions of houses. And both on policy and on politics, I think Democrats are in a better place when – look, Republicans want to make democratic policies of what you give up.

48:53 They want to make environmentalism about – they're coming for your hamburgers and your straws, right?

49:00 They want to make healthcare a zero-sum game. They want to make all this a zero-sum game. But we're, like, at our best when we're talking about how much we gain, right, how much we gain when we build more housing, that everybody can win if we start increasing the housing supply, that there's jobs in it, that there's access to the American dream in it. So I feel like we see that across the board. And, like, that's also, by the way, like, housing is just one example, but investing in clean energy, investing in infrastructure, right? Like, those are not just things that create jobs, but they create the opportunities for economic growth. They create the space for people to build businesses, buy homes, live the version of the life they want to leave without being constrained, as you said, by endless snarling traffic or being unable to afford a home near where their kids live or near where their parents live.

49:47 So it sounds to me, tell me if I'm getting this right, that in terms of the messaging, in terms of persuasion, in terms of empathizing and winning over folks who might be concerned, that it is about painting a picture of what there is to gain, of what can be unlocked for them, while also supporting all these, not necessarily, peripherals is the wrong word, but these additional investments and additional life upgrades that relieve some of that pressure and fit into that broader picture of giving people upgrades that sort of help folks embrace the changes brought by new construction. Do I have that right? How would you make this argument? We know what Donald Trump's plan is, right? He's made it very clear. He is going to cut taxes for the richest people in corporations, and he is going to pay for that by raising taxes on everybody else through a national sales tax.

50:33 And by the way, like even if you're going to articulate like the most generous version of that, which is a version he said, right, which is he is basically going to get rid of consumer protections, get rid of environmental regulations, break unions, right? His idea, I'm going to let the billionaires and the corporations, people that run those places, do whatever they want, right? And the benefits of that will flow to you. It's a version of trickle down, right? Like that's what he's saying. And then I'm going to raise the price of goods that we import. I'm going to make, I'm going to basically boost inflation. I'm going to cause all kinds of negative effects. But in the end, you'll benefit because we'll have unleashed these corporations without any restrictions whatsoever. By the way, something we've tried and that does not work, right? It doesn't lead to benefits for the middle class. Rich is a privilege for you and it leads to pollution and all kinds of harmful effects.

51:20 What Kamala Harris and Tim Walls are saying is we're going to cut taxes for you directly. We're going to invest in infrastructure. We're going to invest in clean energy. We're going to invest in these industries of the future, right? And we're going to bet that the reason we are not, that we don't need to, that billionaires and big corporations are doing great and they are not the people that need help. It's like it's ordinary people that need help and that that unleashes economic growth for this country. That actually standing up for unions raises standards of living. That giving people the tools to buy houses and create millions of small businesses, right? Rewarding entrepreneurs. That is how you create wealth in this country. And I feel like that's not just an argument we can win.

52:07 It's an argument we've won several times. Speaking of winning that argument several times, you won't be surprised to hear a lot of huge fans of Barack Obama who were just blown away by the convention speech. I remember listening to that on a driving and pulling to the side of the road to track it when he said that. I was so blown away. Do you know what his kind of path was to becoming a YIMBY and embracing that movement? Look, it's so funny, right? Because like we're talking about just common sense and just sort of learning the lessons of what's been happening in this country, right? Like, you know, we have real problems. We have those problems. What are things standing in the way of those problems? A lot of the time, certainly at the national level, it is right wing politicians and policies. That's often the problem. But that's not the problem in California, right?

52:54 So it's something else. What is it? Well, there are these obstacles in the way of addressing the problems that progressives in California want to address. And I don't think there's anything wrong with being honest about that and saying, you know what? Rivers were catching fire. There were massive environmental problems. Those are very real, right? But you go around the world, go to a place like Spain, right? They have environmental rules. They have union. But no, we really think that people in Spain are, they're like fighting to work harder than Americans. I don't think so. And yet they're able to build, right? They're able to build a rail line between Madrid and Barcelona, which has a tenth of the population of San Francisco and Los Angeles. And we can't do that here. Why? What are the obstacles? There's not one reason. There's not one reason. There's a lot of reasons. But we should be honest about what those reasons are.

53:40 Is some of it conservative influence? Absolutely. But not enough of it to it facing the fact that there are problems here that we can't just lay at the feet of Republicans and that there is obstacles to to growth, to building, to solving our problems that start with people taking advantage of, I think, rules that may have had a very legitimate purpose, but are often misused. Thank you, John, we got to let you go in a second. I just wonder if you have any parting thoughts. Thank you for getting on this call. You know, all praise to the leader, Ezra Klein. And let's win this thing. Thank you, John. Thank you for everything that you've done over the years to win hearts and minds and win battles. Thank you for what you're doing, both for the nation right now and for this movement right now.

54:25 And thank you so much for finding a little time to sit down with us. Of course. Let's go. Let's do this thing. Thank you, John Lovett. Thank you. Well, it has been an incredible time with you tonight, getting to celebrate the eve of Yimby Democrats for America's 10 week anniversary with you. And it's been fun for me to walk down memory lane. We've heard incredible origin stories from a governor, a senator, a member of Congress, a mayor, a state senator, and a speechwriter and political influencer. So I'll leave you with one last origin story. November 2024 was rough. I will always remember, remember that 5th November of 2024. I had spent the morning from the crack of dawn working for the Kamala Harris campaign.

55:11 I spent all morning turning out the vote in Pennsylvania. When I finished my shift, I hopped on a bus to D.C. to meet some friends for election night. My journey had actually begun there to see Kamala Harris's speech on the ellipse in the shadow of the Washington Monument and the White House at the very spot where Donald Trump began his January 6th insurrection against the constitutional order of the United States. As I was arriving back in D.C., I got a message, an invitation to attend Kamala Harris's election eve event at Howard University. When I arrived, I was wowed, overwhelmed, awed. I texted a friend to say, this doesn't look like a campaign wrap party. This feels like a victory party. And what a party it was.

55:56 I saw there a vision for America, much like mine, reach its full expression in the throngs of young, diverse college students who had arrived hours early and filled the square and the quad as they were dancing spontaneously, sometimes whipping out choreographed routines across this campus of historic and stately American buildings. This historically black university that had first emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and had played such an important role in our civil rights movement. It was alive. It was young. It was diverse. It was energized. It was patriotic. The air was electric. It was hopeful. There's a funny thing at these big campaign rallies.

56:43 There's so many people. And it's like the Internet and phone signal get jammed. So for the entire time I was there, I couldn't check Twitter. I couldn't check the news. My only source of election news was the television broadcast they sometimes played. And something funny was happening. They would cut away from the broadcasts often and abruptly. It was like they were hiding something. For the first few hours, it's impossible to know anything anyways. They'd flash the news broadcast at the top of the hour when the first results for each state came in. But these first results mean nothing, of course, at least unless you know which counties are actually reporting and you know their history and trends. But I didn't have signals, so I couldn't check that. And it did seem strange to me that the broadcast would cut off as soon as the analysis started.

57:29 At times, news anchors would report live for the event from the event. The broadcast would cut to them so we could cheer and seem enthusiastic in the background. But they'd be muted for the DJ as soon as they began to report. It was eerie. It was scary. At one point, I thought to myself, we might lose. I should probably come up with a backup plan. I'd been planning to spend the next year creating grand, immersive theatrical experiences all around the world, like the four-day experience I had created in the jungles and Mayan ruins and underground lakes and caverns of Mexico alongside more than 50 Mexican and indigenous artists that passed spring. Now I was looking all across Central America, South America, India, Europe, and the U.S., planning to launch these productions as new travel and tourism experiences that, just like that experience in Mexico, scores of audiences invested thousands of dollars in flying out to attend.

58:26 I knew that if Trump won, he would put in place truly crippling tariffs that would collapse the economy and surge the cost of living and mean that the community of early adopters most passionate about these experiences simply wouldn't have the money left over to afford such bucket list trips. I had taken the entire fall off to put everything I had into this campaign because I knew the world historical stakes of placing Donald Trump, a man who had once before tried to end our democracy back in the White House. But all along, I really did believe we'd succeed. In that moment, I realized I had no backup. I should create one, I thought, but the hours flew by and still I had nothing.

59:11 No sense of who I was in this new world. As I gazed upon the scene on election night at Howard University and as I began to comprehend what was happening, not from any news, not from Twitter, not from websites, and certainly not from the live broadcasts, but from the lack of news and the souring. I began to feel like the paradise, the vision of a thriving, resilient, rising American future that I had felt when I had first arrived had started slipping away. I pictured this vividly at the time. In every fiber of my being, I felt as though I had arrived to heaven and stood at the pearly gates waiting to be left in. As I then felt the ground beneath me start to sink and fall slowly like an elevator descending downwards, taking me down, down into a kind of hell, a new America, a different America, a different world than I had ever imagined I was living in, a vengeful America.

1:00:16 In America, an America where the Confederacy had been patient, bided its time, and finally won. And as I arrived in our new reality, I felt I had no place at this event any longer. And I faded off into the night and into our new life. The days that followed were morose. The only thing that I could think to do was to keep alive some of the relationships I had made during the campaign. So I sent a few emails to staffers I had interacted with. These were short interactions. Most of them weren't in any way meaningful, but hey, they were cool. And I wondered if anyone would grab a virtual coffee with me, an upstart, just to meet, just to talk. Most were depressed as well, at least I imagine, because I didn't hear back from most of them. One person did reply.

1:01:03 He worked for Maryland Governor Wes Moore. I met with him, and I threw out that maybe, just maybe, our movement would continue. No one had any bandwidth for the second half in the fall, and nobody would have any bandwidth in the future. But I had spent my life telling stories and putting together events, and I had figured out virtual events and recorded interviews during the campaign. So I knew that I could maybe slap together a podcast on my own. It wouldn't be much, but it would be a start. I threw this idea out there. It might happen. It was something we were considering. And my new friend eagerly said, yes, if you did a podcast, Governor Moore would love to do it. He would be happy to be your first guest. That settled it. We had to live on. We had to start a podcast. But the weeks started to run together, and the months slipped by.

1:01:51 It's hard to schedule with elected officials anyways. It's certainly hard to schedule something new. And it's definitely hard to rally when you are paralyzed by what you know is about to happen. And I feared the worst, and it has already been worse than I imagined. But I was lucky. Another staffer had said yes to a virtual coffee, but scheduled it for several months out and rescheduled a few times. But that meeting was on the calendar, and this person happened to also work for Governor Moore. And when we met, she said, this is an amazing idea. It should happen. I will make sure it happens. She relit the flame that had nearly gone out and put the launch of a podcast for YIMBYs and Democrats back on the radar. And then one day, out of the blue, we got the email.

1:02:39 Governor Moore is available for 45 minutes, one week from today. Can you do it? Of course we said yes. Now this was real. I fired away a flurry of emails to elected officials who had been friendly. I had first tried this in early 2025 after Governor Moore first said yes. But in order to do it, I bought a new domain for YIMBY Democrats for America. I created a website, a new email address so we could look professional, but I hadn't warmed up that email. So when I reached out to all those representatives initially, not a single one replied. This idea was dead in the water, I thought. The moment had passed. I'd missed it. The dream was over. Suddenly, in this moment, I realized the potential caused. Perhaps the emails had all gone to spam. And now that we had our first guest and needed our second, it was time to try again.

1:03:29 I launched the outreach, this time from a personal account, this time mentioning that Governor Moore had said yes. And this time, we received such an overwhelming response that our first five episodes had a combined 13 guests, which may explain why we launched with so many double feature podcasts that lasted two hours and sometimes three hours, which is ridiculous for a podcast. Very bad practice, but a good plan if you have a lot of interviews banked from eager elected officials and you need to get them out before Trump does something crazy that renders them all out of date. And that, my friends, is the origin story for Yimby Democrats for America and specifically the origin story for this podcast, Radio Abundance. Thank you for being a part of Radio Abundance. You are as important to us as anyone whose voice you hear, if not more important, because otherwise, who would hear them and who would act to build America, to defeat fascism and to bring Progressive Abundance to America.

1:04:28 So thank you for being with us tonight. I've been your host, Steve Boyle, executive director of Yimby Democrats for America and producer of Radio Abundance. On Wednesday, June 4th, that is tomorrow, we celebrate our 10-week anniversary and what a 10-week stretch it's been. Thank you for everything. If you haven't yet, remember to join the movement at yimbydemocrats.org slash join. Thank you, onwards, upwards, excelsior, my friends, ever upward. Good night. You've been listening to Radio Abundance. Join the movement for Progressive Abundance at yimbydemocrats.org. Yes, we can build again. Yes, we can trounce the fascists. Yes, you can be the difference. This is AI, by the way.

1:05:13 You think these jokers actually got Obama? Check in with me in a few months. It'll happen. Thank you for listening to Radio Abundance, a new podcast by Yimby Democrats for America. Now it's time for you to join the movement. We're building a big tent, and it's going to take all of us. Join us, and together we'll fight to build America, defeat fascism, and unleash the era of Progressive Abundance. Join the movement at yimbydemocrats.org. What's going on is Governor Westmore, Maryland. And housing is a top priority for Maryland because for too many people, our seniors and our educators and young families, they're being priced out. And so that's why, in the last year, we've introduced and passed the boldest housing package of any Maryland administration in recent history.

1:05:59 Expanding affordable housing construction, removing unnecessary zoning barriers, strengthening renters' rights, and finding new ways to fund more homes. And that's just a start. Mistakes are clear. This election will determine if housing will become affordable for working families or if we've been left with more broken promises of the past. You're making a difference, both in this election and in someone's life. You're reaching people who care about their communities, their families, and their futures. This is our time. And this is your moment. Thank you.