What Do YIMBYs and Donald Trump Have in Common?
- YIMBYs and Trump are consistently complicit in the offloading of vast amounts of public property to friends in the speculative real estate market, prioritizing luxury housing for affluent singles while ignoring the affordability needs of working families. https://savedcpublicland.org/the1617project/2023/06/09/dcs-sordid-track-record-of-public-land-giveaways/
- Both Trump and YIMBYs ignore or dismiss genuine solutions that could provide DC and cities across the nation the truly affordable housing it deserves. Instead of deploying programs such as custom zoning and social housing, Trump and YIMBYs favor private developers doing the lifting and grifting instead of public initiatives, effectively spitting in the face of HUD and endorsing the privatization of public housing through “repositioning” programs. https://ggwash.org/view/97236/dcs-public-housing-agency-is-making-halting-progress-but-much-more-needs-to-be-done
- Both YIMBYs and Donald Trump share a deeply troubling agenda that displaces people of color from their rooted neighborhoods without much concern or acknowledgement. This is seen vividly in Washington, D.C., where our city consistently ranks among the top cities for gentrification, with devastating impacts on longstanding Black communities with barely a blush by YIMBYs. https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/EVDFHVYYVVSXWIYMPVQ9/full
YIMBYs don’t have to care about the impacts of their build-baby-build rhetoric because they are privileged enough not to bear the adverse brunt of their advocating to privatize public land and build more luxury units, this same policy that benefits the exact class of real estate players who fund campaigns of politicians like Donald Trump.
But wait there’s more . . .
Find out why the YIMBY “affordability” program in DC, called “Inclusionary Zoning” or “IZ”, is an absolute fraud perpetuated to guise the overblown and continuing construction of mostly unaffordable market-rate luxury housing units despite the growing racial disparity and displacement in DC.
- IZ Fraud Explained, Part 1 (AMI) :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3_Hf_84Mn0
- IZ Fraud Explained, Part 2 (Waiting Lists & Funding) :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbvxR-r4lyw
Other links of import::
- The DC Citizens Forum: Washington Was An Icon Of Black Political Power. Then Came Gentrification, by NCRC, January 29, 2024, https://ncrc.org/the-dc-citizens-forum-washington-was-an-icon-of-black-political-power-then-came-gentrification/
- “Studying Gentrification on One Block in DC: The Many Problems of Following People Around.” UMD, Dr. Johanna Bockman, March 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am28wMWnG-4
- Review of “Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap” by Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Review published by Oxford Academic, August 30, 2024, “Golash-Boza’s narrative connects the thread of how Black residents, once abandoned in declining neighborhoods, were taken off the streets by incarceration and displaced by gentrification”, https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/103/2/e15/7746085
- The Black Broadway: Washington D.C.’s U Street, by Ennis Davis, Nov 14, 2023, https://www.moderncities.com/article/2023-nov-the-black-broadway-washington-dcs-u-street