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Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 05/08/2026

Hate to see it.

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One of the superpowers of the climate-and-democracy group Third Act (on whose board I serve) is that all our members are over sixty and like many elders across the US are very good at showing up at meetings.
Nothing prevents younger people from going to this and other meetings (but like the image I saw of the meeting to decide on the Hopkins Street bike lane in Berkeley, most of the people pictured trended older). [update: I'm informed that the crowds were more diverse and people were attending on zoom.]
The ability to sit through meetings is an activist superpower (and yes they are often tedious and active participation requires mastering bureaucracies and reaching a crucial decision can unfold over many meetings or even many years). Older people also vote in higher numbers.
San Francisco has built 55,000 units, increasing its total housing stock about 12-- 13% since 2000. One statistic I read a few years ago said that we have 30,000 vacant units--second homes, properties bought and warehoused as investments, etc. Another version says that in 2023 we had 52,000 vacant units (link in comments).
I tend to think that the housing crisis here is more about distribution than supply (aka there is housing but it's unavailable or unaffordable). But also a lot of the pressure on this city over the past 15-30 years has come from Silicon Valley jobs, and while SF is a fully developed dense urban place, Silicon Valley is suburban sprawl that in many cases insists on remaining that way.

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p.s. There are of course people who are opposed to all forms of development, notably affordable housing, in their vicinity (see: redevelopment of Northgate Mall, San Rafael), but there are also legitimate objections to monster projects that change the character of the neighborhood, especially those designed primarily for the affluent. I should note that the Berkeley meeting was about putting in a bike lane on Hopkins that was very controversial (everything is in Berkeley). I'm not Berkeley enough to have an opinion, but I know my cyclist brother Steve strongly supported it and it aligned with the city's climate goals. Berkeley has a lot of NIMBYism.
p.p.s. A thing that does often distinguish a lot of the old from the young is: they've had decades to live in a place, come to love and understand it and maybe also understand that important decisions that affect the quality of life of the place will be made at tedious meeting. I mean, I met someone who was born in San Francisco today, and she might maybe be thirty, so that's thirty years in San Francisco--but she was working a job that definitely will not let her a homeowner off earnings, but maybe she has other forms of stability. (I know second-gen. San Franciscans who've inherited homes.)

A lot of younger people, though, came to San Francisco for jobs, and they don't necessarily have strong roots and ties to the place or see the process of its transformation. I lived in one apartment for 25 years in a neighborhood a lot of short-term residents saw as stable and my long residency let me see was being radically transformed. Too, the brutal housing costs here and in many other places mean that young people can't be confident they can commit to a place, because they can't afford to buy a home, and a renter's life too often feels vulnerable and contingent.
Of course a lot of elders are also renters, and they're even more vulnerable--an eviction can really devastate someone on a limited income without the resources to generate more.

Samuel @safestreets4lfk.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

It gets worse 😞