Official: Housing fans are ‘Nazis’
The president of the San Mateo County Harbor District compared pro-housing activists to Nazis in an explosive tweet Sunday, the latest salvo in a battle over whether to build denser housing in a wealthy San Francisco enclave.
“Class war news of the day: Today some Nazis, I mean YIMBYs, are casing St. Francis Woods in SF because 100 years ago there were restrictive covenants,” Nancy Reyering, a commissioner on the county maritime board, wrote in a tweet that has since evaporated, along with her now-deleted Twitter account.
“What's next —” the tweet continued, “Molotov cocktails?”
Her words drew ire from State Sen. Josh Becker, a Silicon Valley Democrat, who said his family members died in the Holocaust.
“As a Jew with relatives killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, I beseech all to remember the 6 million Jews lost,” Becker tweeted late Sunday night, posting a screenshot of Reyering's tweet.
“I renounce San Mateo County Harbor Commissioner Nancy Reyering's using that term to describe housing advocates & hope she will only use it when referring to actual Nazis.”
Reyering later apologized in an email to The Chronicle, in which she elaborated on the sentiments articulated in the tweet, which she called “thoughtless and inappropriate.”
She said she wanted to vent frustration about what she perceived as overzealous construction of housing, at a moment when she also felt afraid of housing advocates who “attack me on social media where my personal address and photos of my property have been shared, and I've been the victim of verbal abuse.”
Matthew Lewis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY, condemned all personal attacks, regardless of the motivation or target.
“That said, a public official should expect to always be held accountable for their public statements,” Lewis said. “Nancy Reyering has a history of doing and saying things that end up being embarrassing for her.”
The online spat stems from an intensifying regional fight over SB9, a new state law that allows property owners to divide their lots in half and build two units on each portion, facilitating lower-cost, multi-unit housing in neighborhoods traditionally zoned for single-family homes.
Bay Area suburbs have tried a variety of creative strategies to circumvent the law, including a novel tactic that officials in the affluent Peninsula town of Woodside deployed in February, claiming all land parcels had to be preserved as mountain lion habitat. Reyering, a 35-year resident of Woodside, defended that line of reasoning in a March opinion piece for The Chronicle, in which she said the state's politically charged debate over housing density “has generated gravely misinformed public statements about wildlife habitat.”
St. Francis Wood pursued a different route, petitioning for a historic designation that would allow it to keep residential lots intact.
Housing activists who oppose this gambit have pointed to the racist history of St. Francis Wood, encapsulated in a clause from the community's founding in 1912, which barred people of “African, Japanese, Chinese or of any Mongolian descent” from owning property in the neighborhood.
Proponents of dense middle-income housing draw a direct line from that provision to the current effort to block construction of multiplexes, given that compact, reasonably priced
homes might help diversify the neighborhood.