It’s all set. I’m going to San Francisco to be part of a panel on housing. I’m not sure I will wear any flowers in my hair, but I will for sure be ready to tell stories about how things are going here is Seattle. And I am looking forward to learning from members of the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation, which has the best acronym ever, SFBARF. SFBARF is led by Sonja Trauss who you can watch in the featured video above courageously standing up for common sense and increasing housing supply. As she is taunted from the gallery behind (including about what she’s wearing) her, she makes the clarion statement we’ve made many times here. Build more housing. The meeting is about a plan for more development in West Oakland. She starts with a brilliant analogy; does the rain cause umbrellas, or do umbrellas cause the rain? (Traids starts at about 1:48:00. I’m working on an edit of the video)

Do new houses cause rents to rise? [CROWD: Yes!] No!  . . . We can look at an experiment. In San Francisco we effectively did not build. We have not been building to keep up with population. Have rents been steady in San Francisco. No! No, they have not, they have risen. So when you don’t build enough, it’s reasonable to expect rents to rise. People are going to move to West Oakland, because the Bay Area is a great place to live [Crowd: It was before you got here!]  I don’t want to repeat San Francisco’s experiment here. I want to build as fast as people move here . . . then we’ll have enough housing for all of the people that move here . . . [CROWD: Affordable housing is what we need!] And we will have affordable housing if there is enough housing!

San Francisco now has the dubious distinction of being America’s most expensive city thanks to a spiral of outcry about rents, followed by supply killing regulation leading to higher prices, and more outcry. I called it the San Francisco Death Spiral, a ride our City Council seems determined to take.

Trauss is courageous, standing up against a wave of vitriol and bad economics. She does so with confidence, a sense of humor, and because it what she believes is right. The only thing I can compare Trauss’ political and principled performance is Margaret Thatcher pushing back on socialists in the House of Commons when she said, “You’d rather the poor be poorer, provided the rich were less rich!” a stunning rebuke of what often masquerades as progressive politics, that somehow what makes social justice is making sure nobody gets too far ahead of anyone else, regardless of how much better everyone is doing. But we know that if we build more as Trauss suggests we can avoid the “San Francisco experiment” that has lead to higher housing costs.

You can read more about Trauss and what she calls her “club of weirdos” in an article in the San Francisco Examiner. I am looking forward to meeting other weirdos from San Francisco and the Bay Area who are weird enough to believe that supply and demand applies to the housing economy.