Why they fight

Jane Natoli

YIMBY Action, the pioneering pro-housing group, has about 2,100 members and chapters in San Francisco city neighborhoods. Here are some of the neighborhood YIMBYs who advocate for more residential development in their areas. Neighborhood: Inner Richmond

Occupation: Financial crimes investigator Story: Natoli, 37, considers herself lucky, paying $1,441 for a one-bedroom apartment in a rentcontrolled building. She had been living in the Richmond for a few years when she noticed friends began leaving the Bay Area for less-expensive places, so Natoli started following housing politics. She believes in allowing the kind of fourand six-story apartment buildings that were built all over the Sunset and Richmond before the neighborhoods were downzoned in the 1980s.

In her words: “It’s about offering up a vision. What does that vision look like? It looks like the city we already live in. I live in a 16-unit building on Sixth Avenue between Fulton and Cabrillo. It’s not too big for my neighborhood. It’s three stories. You can’t build anything like that anymore. Just opening up the chance to build something like that would make a huge boon for the west side. It’s simple density — the missing middle.”

Steven Buss

Neighborhood: The Mission

Occupation: Software engineer at Google

Story: Buss, 32, had lived in Los Angeles before moving back to San Francisco in 2016 with his fiancé. After the relationship faltered Buss had to find a new place. He stayed temporarily with his ex-fiance and then with his parents in Petaluma, before moving into a twobedroom apartment at 24th and Hampshire streets in the Mission. His room is $1,800 a month. “Everything below that price was either a living room or didn’t allow cats.”

In his words: “I don’t know a single person under 35 who owns in San Francisco. I don’t know a single person under 35 without a roommate in San Francisco. We don’t get to live by ourselves. We are all just trying to make it work. I find it extremely frustrating that the Planning Commission is almost entirely made up of members who are securely housed. San Francisco is 70 percent renters, and the people making our land use decisions are almost all owners. They don’t reflect the makeup of the city.”

Caroline Bas

Neighborhood: The Richmond

Occupation: Consultant at accounting and tax firm Deloitte

Story: Bas, 33, owns and lives in a 700-squarefoot condominium in a 15-unit building at California and Arguello with her partner and daughter. She got involved in housing advocacy after both her siblings moved away because they couldn’t afford the Bay Area. That made Bas the main caretaker for her disabled mother, who she says has been evicted three times in the past five years and has schizophrenia. It’s getting harder and harder to find a place to move her mother. “She is always the first one who gets kicked out when the landlord decides to remodel.”

In her words: “When I do talk to my — for lack of a better term — NIMBY neighbors, they say it’s so refreshing to speak to a Millennial. If we YIMBYs sometimes live in an echo chamber, they do too. There is not enough positive dialogue between the different groups.”