As housing bill stalls, Yelp CEO calls for new push
Two days after a controversial state bill to allow more housing near public transit was stopped dead in its tracks, one of its biggest supporters — Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman — called on other tech leaders to pressure their local governments to expand housing near their campuses.
Google and Facebook have started to engage locally, Stoppelman said, and he’s surprised that “more tech leaders weren’t paying attention to this problem as it was developing.”
Stoppelman spoke alongside the bill’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and other backers in an event at Yelp headquarters Wednesday.
Asked how his San Francisco local-reviews company is helping employees find housing, Stoppelman replied, “You end up paying (them) more. That’s the most straightforward solution.”
Stoppelman gave $100,000 to California YIMBY, a grassroots pro-housing group that sponsored Wiener’s bill, SB827. The measure would have stopped cities from using planning, zoning and other barriers to block certain highdensity housing projects up to five stories near public-transit stops.
Contrary to what critics contended, the bill would not have “wiped away all local control,” Wiener said. Cities could still impose their own approval process, design standards, affordable-housing requirements and demolition controls.
Many business, real estate and housing groups supported the bill. But it faced stiff opposition from cities that didn’t want to give up any local control, neighborhood groups afraid of overcrowding and some affordable-housing advocates who thought it would displace low-income residents.
Wiener modified his bill to address those concerns, but in its first hearing Tuesday, the Senate Housing and Transportation committee voted 5-4 to stop it from moving forward.
Wiener vowed to bring it back next year. He wouldn’t say in what form, except that “I don’t believe the bill should be further scaled back in terms of density and geography.”
The event was sponsored by Yelp and the Center for California Real Estate, an institute of the California Association of Realtors, to discuss potential solutions to the state’s housing shortage.
Sonja Trauss — founder of the SF Bay Area Renters’ Federation and a candidate for District Six Supervisor — said she has learned from campaigning that people “genuinely want housing. At the same time, they can become distressed if the proposal is for housing in their neighborhood.” Unlike other issues where people have absolute opinions, such as abortion and the death penalty, “every single individual is both for and against housing,” she said.
The last time California had a serious building boom was in the 1960s and 1970s, when the suburbs were being built. “It was cheap housing,” she said. On San Francisco’s west side, single-family homes were replaced with three-story apartment buildings known as Richmond specials.
Since then, the city has “downzoned” singlefamily neighborhoods and “upzoned” South of Market, where developers are building extremely expensive highrises. As Trauss put it, the city has outlawed Toyotas, “but you can build Lamborghinis.”
The “least disruptive” way to create more housing, she said, would be to let homes, when the owner has died or retired and moved out, be replaced with three- or four-unit condos or apartment buildings. Wiener’s bill would have allowed that. Minneapolis is considering allowing fourplexes citywide.
In an interview, Stoppelman said companies such as Google and Facebook “are massive, massive employers.” The communities where they are located “haven’t built much housing at all.” Google, he said, “should have taken action” sooner to encourage housing creation. “They weren’t interested in it.”
In December, Mountain View approved a Google-supported plan to allow nearly 10,000 units of housing to be built near its headquarters. Yelp and Google have feuded on business matters, including the way Google features Yelp reviews in its search results.
More than 100 Bay Area tech executives, including Stoppelman, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, and Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, signed a letter to Wiener supporting his bill.
Every major tech firm is considering hiring outside the Bay Area, and some already have, Stoppelman said. If nothing is done about housing, the trend will escalate: “It’s like ice caps melting. It starts out slow and very quickly gains momentum.”
For non-engineering jobs, he said Yelp is “load-balancing” employees between its San Francisco headquarters and its Scottsdale, Ariz., office, but engineers are hired at the home office because they “want to be around other great engineers.”
Asked if he’s considering relocating Yelp’s headquarters somewhere outside the Bay Area, Stoppelman said, “Not yet.”