Tag: tenants’ rights

Seattle Weekly Prints Error-Riddled Piece by Bay Area Activist Who Compared YIMBYs to “Alt-Right”

This week, Seattle Weekly ran an error-riddled piece by a San Francisco activist and writer named Toshio Meronek titled “The Growing Power of Seattle YIMBYs.”

As someone who has covered the YIMBY movement  in Seattle (and attended the first-ever national YIMBY conference two years ago), I was intrigued by the headline, which echoed my own reporting on the increasing influence of YIMBY activists in Seattle and other high-cost cities. Unfortunately, the headline was just about the only thing about the story that was accurate.

Generally speaking, YIMBYs can be described as people who support the development of housing affordable to people at every income level, from formerly homeless individuals and families to those who can afford market-rate housing in an expensive city like Seattle. Since YIMBYs span the political spectrum, making the term itself a somewhat slippery catch-all, they might better be described as pro-housing: They support zoning and other regulatory changes that make it easier for affordable and market-rate housing developers to add housing to cities, and oppose exclusionary zoning and other restrictions that keep single-family homeowners’ house values on an ever-rising trajectory while pushing people who lack the means to buy single-family homes out of cities. Many YIMBYs explicitly oppose exclusionary single-family zoning because of its roots in racist redlining policies; others do so because it artificially drives up land values by excluding whole classes of people from huge swaths of growing cities. Some YIMBYs support more government-subsidized housing and protections for incumbent tenants; others oppose regulations like rent control on the grounds that they can drive up housing costs. But on one thing, they agree: They say “Yes in My Backyard.”

I wasn’t familiar with the writer, Toshio Meronek. So I did what the editor who green-lighted the story probably should have done in the first place: I googled him. As it turns out, Meronek is a Bay Area activist with a long history of making inflammatory, unsubstantiated claims about YIMBY activists. In a piece for the lefty online publication Truthout titled “YIMBYs: The Alt-Right Darlings of the Real Estate Industry,” Meronek made the bizarre claim that YIMBYs’ goal is to turn cities into playgrounds for the tech nouveau riche while driving poor people into “debtors’ prisons” with the aid of “militarized policing ” and “social control.” In a followup piece for the San Francisco Examiner titled “The Problem with YIMBY,” he doubled down, claiming that  YIMBYs’ “alt-right” views are “rooted in racist and anti-poor conservative neoliberal ideologies first inaugurated by Ronald Reagan. Further, they collaborate with the real estate industry to rebrand these racist and conservative policies as hip and edgy — this is the ‘alt-right’s’ method of spreading right-wing politics beyond its old white men in suits image.”  Victoria Fierce, a YIMBY activist whose group, East Bay Forward, was featured (and mischaracterized) in Meronek’s Truthout piece, had a particularly scathing, and thoughtful, rebuttal.

Meronek imported the template he employed in San Francisco to Seattle, writing a poorly researched polemic for the Weekly that pits tenants’ rights activists such as the Seattle Tenants Union against YIMBYs writ large, to the diminishment of both.

The piece is a mashup of unrelated policy arguments and mischaracterizations of YIMBY views that reveals Meronek’s ignorance of Seattle’s policy debates and his disdain for accurately reporting basic facts that interfere with his agenda of portrayingYIMBY activists as wealthy, racist, Silicon Valley-funded proxies for the real estate industry.

Originally, I had planned to address every discursive non sequitur in the piece, but then I realized that that’s the entire point: Meronek is attempting to dazzle us with bullshit. By suggesting that YIMBYs are somehow on the wrong side of local, national, and international debates over everything from rent control to rent bidding web sites to Airbnbs to the relative number of public housing units in New York City and Singapore, Meronek manages to implicate them by mere proximity in issues that are barely related, if at all, to the availability of housing in Seattle—which, after all, is what YIMBYs are actually working to increase. The straw men Meronek sets up can then be knocked down with a whisper. The Tenants Union wants more affordable housing? Imply that YIMBYs are against that. The Seattle City Council wants restrictions on rent bidding websites? I bet YIMBYs are super into rent bidding, too. The waiting list for Section 8 vouchers in King County is absurd, and has been for decades? Sure, they weren’t even around when the problem first materialized, but let’s blame YIMBYs for that, too. Some venture capitalist in San Francisco who has nothing to do with the YIMBY movement compares housing to sandwiches? Attribute that same belief to an unrelated think tank researcher in Seattle, while presenting no reason whatsoever for making that connection. Think about it for two seconds and it’s too late, because we’ve crossed ten lanes of traffic to get to an anecdote about Airbnb regulations in New York City.

In the end, the YIMBY becomes a comical straw capitalist with blinking dollar signs in his eyes—the kind of imaginary person who isn’t himself “impacted by the housing crisis” but has figured out how to benefit from it, one greasy backroom deal at a time.

So I’ll just stick, for the most part, to the many mischaracterizations and factual errors  in the Weekly’s piece, starting with the claim that the Sightline Institute, a sustainability think tank for which I have written about equitable development and affordable housing solutions, “promote[s] a libertarian, free-market solution to the housing crisis based on trickle-down economics.” Sightline, formerly Northwest Environment Watch, is in reality a Seattle-based think tank that promotes policies that advance sustainability, environmental justice, and social equity. Even if you aren’t familiar with the group, their mission statement and a description of the work they do is right on their website. And even if you’re skeptical of things like mission statements—perhaps  you read “We strive to identify injustice and work to dismantle the systems that perpetuate it” and think, “That sounds like free-market libertarianism based on trickle-down Reaganomics to me!”—you can always look over Sightline’s exhaustively archived research, or interview local Seattle sources about their work, or actually talk to the group itself about their mission. There is no evidence that Meronek did this.

Instead—after an 11-word, out-of-context quote from Bertolet, the only YIMBY voice in this story ostensibly about YIMBYs—Meronek accuses Sightline of funneling money… to itself.

Specifically, Meronek makes the bizarre and nonsensical claim that Alan Durning, the director of Sightline, has “funneled at least 1.3 million dollars to YIMBY organizations through the charity Good Ventures, founded by Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz.” This claim is so ridiculous on its face that I’m going to take a second to unravel it, because it speaks to the poor level of reporting in this piece overall, and is the kind of thing that should have made an editor or fact-checker question the veracity of the entire story.

Open Philanthropy, the foundation created by Good Ventures, is a nonprofit that provides grants to a long list of mostly left-leaning organizations, including Sightline and other sustainability groups. Sightline is not itself a granting organization and does not control the giving of any organization that provides its funding.

What Meronek appears to have done is look at Open Philanthropy’s grants database, picked a few groups more or less at random, including Sightline, and added those up to get to (approximately) $1.3 million. (I say “more or less at random ” because there are several groups that received funding from Open Philanthropy, including California YIMBY, that have “YIMBY” right in their name but did not make Meronek’s list of YIMBY groups). What’s bizarre about Meronek’s statement is not only that he’s claiming that Sightline made funding decisions for Open Philanthropy, a group that gave Sightline money and not the other way around, but that Sightline gave Open Philanthropy’s money to itself.

This is confirmed by an email from Weekly editor Seth Sommerfield to Sightline, in which Sommerfield explained that the $1.3 million number was “the approximate sum of these grants specifically: Sightline $350,000 10/17; East Bay Forward $40,000 4/17;  Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. $300,000 7/16; California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund $300,000 6/16; Sightline $450,000 10/15.” (Those numbers actually add up to $1.44 million, not $1.3 million, which seems like a weird rounding error if those were in fact the numbers Meronek used to get to $1.3 million.) Sommerfeld then said that any issues with the way the Weekly characterized Sightline were just ” a matter of your perception, not based on false reporting.”

“We have not found any inaccuracies in the reporting,” Sommerfeld wrote.

What the Weekly is saying, and standing by, then, is that of the funding it is claiming Sightline “funneled” to nonprofits through Open Philanthropy, a funder that is not controlled by Sightline, approximately $800,000 went to Sightline itself. Put another way, they’re claiming that Sightline granted itself $800,000 from an organization it does not control. There’s no way to make these numbers make sense. They just don’t. It’s like saying that a group that gets money from the United Way—say, the Downtown Emergency Services Coalition—is in control of all of United Way’s charitable giving because they received a grant from United Way.  Claiming that a group controlled the funding decisions of one of its benefactors, and somehow gave money to itself, is not a matter of perception, or a different way of looking at the numbers. It is a falsehood, represented as fact.

But the YIMBYs at Sightline aren’t the only thing Meronek mischaracterizes. He also blames YIMBYs—an acronym that barely existed before 2016—for gentrification in the Central District, implying that it is a new phenomenon that can be laid at their feet.

The city’s Central District is a stark example of what can happen when market-rate development is unleashed on a neighborhood. Once a majority-black area, the District is now cost-prohibitive to many black Seattleites, who make, on average, less than Asians or whites. The city now faces what its own Race & Social Justice Initiative calls an “extreme racial disproportionality in homelessness,” with—no surprise—black people ending up on the street in droves.

I couldn’t find an online source for that RSJI quote, which gives me pause in the context of a story that is so littered with misrepresentations and sentence-fragment quotes throughout, but that isn’t the part that’s wrong—Seattle’s homelessness crisis is also a racial equity crisis, with Native Americans and African Americans ending up homeless far out of proportion to their representation in the population. The problem is that the Central District (or, as Meronek adorably calls it, “The District”) lost the bulk of its African American population long before the current boom. See, for example, this 2005 Seattle Times article bemoaning gentrification from a wave of white newcomers to the area. Or this 2007 Seattle PI article describing the  same trend.

In fact, you can go all the way back to the year 2000, when the Central District’s African American population had been reduced to more than 70 percent in the 1960s to just over a third.  (Today, it’s closer to 20 percent).  People were trying to figure out what to do about the problem then, too. At the time, though, the issue wasn’t a wave of market-rate development—that didn’t happen until recently—it was a lack of housing affordable to people who were being priced out of the area by taxes and losing their homes to predatory housing lenders. (Policies that would have allowed and incentivized more housing in the area, including affordable units, could have helped with that.) The current wave of market-rate development that is being “unleashed on” the Central District is not responsible for gentrification that emptied the neighborhood of African American residents 20 years ago, or 10 years ago. These are complicated problems that shouldn’t be placed, ahistorically and unfairly, at the feet of present-day activists who are, in real time and on the ground, trying to solve them. There are certainly groups, particularly in the Bay Area, that promote market-rate housing at the expense of other solutions. But that’s not what’s happening in Seattle—nor, for the most part, anywhere. Pro-housing YIMBY groups here in Seattle have actually supported equitable development projects that are attempting to slow the trend of gentrification in the CD, like the recent partnership between Forterra (a sustainability nonprofit that has recently gotten into urban development) and Africatown, to develop affordable housing and support black-owned businesses in the heart of the neighborhood.

After blaming historical gentrification in the Central District on a movement that just started in the last few years, Meronek pivots back to Sightline, which is when he makes his most bizarre

The next misrepresentation, which has little to do with the YIMBYs, is minor in comparison: Meronek claims that an electricity survey showed that Vancouver was overrun with foreign investors buying up apartments and leaving them vacant. (The evidence was that 12,000 units had very low electricity usage, a stat that advocates for foreign investor taxes have used to argue that those units are sitting vacant.) Bertolet himself actually did a great job debunking this survey, using historical electricity usage data and occupancy data over time to show that the rate of low-usage units has remained flat over time, as has the occupancy rate of apartments in Vancouver. His research, headlined “Stop Blaming Foreign Home Buyers,” is well worth reading in full.

After a quote from “Capitol Hill staple” Dennis Saxman (an old-school lefty with little influence but who’s always game for a quote about how development is bad) describing YIMBYs as advocates for “uber-development,” the aforementioned non sequitur about New York and Singapore, and some random  statistics about Airbnbs in Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, and New York, the piece winds down with a plea for rent control and inclusionary zoning. But Meronek gets that one wrong, too. After implying that Seattle doesn’t have inclusionary zoning, Meronek pivots and says we do, but that “an unmarried, childless buyer can make up to $84,000—or 120 percent of the area median income—and still be eligible for this affordable housing.” Seattle’s inclusionary zoning program, known as Mandatory Housing Affordability, provides rent-stabilized apartments to people making up to 60 percent of the Area Median Income, or $42,150 for a single person with no children, and homeownership assistance is available for people making up to 80 percent of AMI, or $56,200 for that same single, childless person. It’s unclear where Meronek got his 120 percent figure, which also remains uncorrected.

Would a local writer with some familiarity with local organizations and issues have done a better job writing about this issue? Probably. Would an established journalist have done a better job than an activist with an (easily Googleable) ax to grind? Almost certainly. But the biggest issue I see with this story isn’t even its writer’s mangling of the truth. It’s that the writer decided he wanted to tell a story—about a shadowy cabal of corrupt Silicon Valley capitalists and associated sham nonprofits lining their pockets with the spoils of late-stage capitalism—but he didn’t have the goods. That’s why the story, on its face and setting aside all the errors it contains, makes no sense. What do Singapore’s public housing policies, Facebook, Airbnb, Chinese investors in Vancouver, and Rentberry have to do with a bunch of activists in Seattle? Nothing, really, but when you glue them all together with a few quotes from tenant advocates and random Capitol Hill activists, it sure sounds sinister, doesn’t it?

Support

The C Is for Crank Interviews: Jon Grant

Former Tenants Union director Jon Grant first ran for City Council Position 8 back in 2015, when now-interim mayor Tim Burgess was running for reelection and the field consisted of four straight white guys, three of them named Jonathan. Back then, Grant beat out the other two Johns on the ballot by arguing that incumbent Burgess had failed to act boldly on police reform and was in the pocket of big developers. This time, Grant faced a diverse group of primary opponents, including two women of color, the city’s first transgender council candidate, a lesbian, and a gay Egyptian-American Muslim man. His general-election opponent is labor leader Teresa Mosqueda, a Latina and renter who works as a lobbyist for the Washington State Labor Council. Grant says he considered dropping out of the race when it appeared that his frontrunning opponent would be a woman of color, but decided to stay in after he sat down with Mosqueda and realized they had different “theories of change” and visions for the city. A longtime advocate for public financing of local campaigns, Grant has raised $300,000 in democracy vouchers—publicly funded contributions from individual supporters.

I sat down with Grant at Eastern Cafe in the International District last week.

The C Is for Crank [ECB]: What do you see as the biggest policy difference between you and your opponent?

Jon Grant [JG]: The obvious answer is housing. When the city developed the Grand Bargain, it was a committee comprised of 28 members, of which I was one. Half of the committee was comprised of representatives from private developers, and that was really reflected in the final proposal. [Ed: Only nine of the 28 HALA  committee members work for private, nonprofit, or mixed-income developers; Grant declined to clarify which of the other HALA members he considered developer representatives.] Folks forget about this, but the conversation before HALA was around a linkage fee [a proposed square-footage fee, to be paid by developers, that would fund affordable housing], and council member Mike O’Brien had a proposal to max out the linkage fee [at $22 a square foot]. At the time, [the city’s Department of Planning and Development] did an analysis and they found that over the next 10 years, it would have brought in about $1 billion for affordable housing. My point being this: When you compare that raw number to the raw value of the Grand Bargain, it’s around $640 million, and that’s a pretty big difference. That’s letting private developers off the hook for millions and millions and millions of dollars, and I felt that that was a problem.

My opponent has criticized me for walking away from the table on the HALA process. That’s a mischaracterization. I stuck with that process for 10 months, and at the end of it, I voted my conscience. [Ed.: Grant actually abstained from the final HALA vote.] I felt it was important that there be a community conversation about, are we actually acting in the public’s best interest by striking the deal, and I thought abstaining from the deal created a space to have that conversation. And back in 2015 [when Grant ran for council Position 8 the first time], I put forward my own proposal that would have brought back the linkage fee. That’s unfortunately not how things worked out. We now have the Grand Bargain, and there are now these citywide upzones without any real discussion of whether we are getting the best benefit or the most for the public good. I think that’s a real concern, and I think that’s what’s at stake in this election.

ECB: HALA and MHA are now largely the law of the land in Seattle, with full support from the council—would you propose revisiting the process and reconsidering zoning decisions that have already been approved?

JG: I think that question—’Well, would you walk back HALA?’—is actually a distraction. I think the question is, why aren’t we asking for more in terms of affordability? My opponent won’t say what she’s willing to do in that regard.

 

“If you just allow for a citywide elimination of single family zoning, what’s going to happen is that the first properties to go are going to be rental properties, because if you rezone that area, the landlord who owns those properties will be very quick to sell it off to a developer to build a million-dollar condo or whatever.”

 

ECB: In our conversation, your opponent said she would like to bump up the MHA requirement, but that she thinks your proposal to require developers to make 25 percent of their units affordable is too high.

JG: I have yet to hear what that amount is, and there are opportunities for her to weigh in on that debate today, and she has not.

To me, there are signals that a candidate can give to voters about where they stand on these things, and not being vocal about this when the community has had real concerns about how these upzones are moving forward, and that the affordability levels are at the minimum—when you’re a candidate who’s had opportunities to be vocal and stand in solidarity with the community and you don’t do that, I think that’s a signal to voters. I think it’s also important to note that my opponent accepted a maxed-out donation from Maria Barrientos, who was a developer who was an architect of the Grand Bargain itself.

ECB: You mentioned this at a forum recently, and I have to point out that it was $250—hardly enough money to buy influence. [Ed: Barrientos is also one of the only prominent women of color in Seattle’s development community, and she has long incorporated below-market housing into all her buildings.]

JG: I think it really matters where your money comes from. It matters for voters to know who you’re listening to, who you’re accountable to, and for my part, I think taking a stance of not taking money from developers—it sends a clear signal to voters that you’re going to stand with them. When developers are having so much influence at city hall, what we really need is not another lobbyist at city hall that’s going to be cozy to developers but a community advocate that’s going to fight against the forces of displacement. I understand that when you’re talking about very complex policy issues, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. What I would really like to see is for the city to do an economic analysis of every upzone to determine what was the amount that the developer could afford before that tipping point where the developer walks away from the project.

ECB: Would you be open to allowing more density in Seattle’s single-family-only areas?

JG: If you just allow for a citywide elimination of single family zoning, what’s going to happen is that the first properties to go are going to be rental properties. It’s not really widely known, but one of the largest portions of our affordable housing stock is single-family homes. Now those are also the homes that are most at risk, because if you rezone that area the landlord who owns those properties will be very quick to sell it off to a developer to build a million-dollar condo or whatever. When we talk about changing the zoning, we have to acknowledge the fact that there’s 100,000 people moving to our city and they have to go somewhere, so we have to accommodate that growth, but I am very nervous and very cautious about the idea of eliminating rental housing that is currently affordable. If we don’t manage that we’re going to see widespread displacement of low-income people and people of color.

ECB: Do you have actual data to indicate that there are a huge number of people renting affordable single-family houses in places like the Central District who would be at risk of losing their housing if the city got rid of single-family zoning?

JG: Anecdotally, from my time at the Tenants Union, yes—the calls we would get from people in the Rainier Valley in particular and also in the Central District. I went to a forum recently and I asked people, ‘How many of you know someone who lives in a single-family home that rents?’ Like half the room raised their hand. So I think that it’s an issue that’s not really talked about.

[Ed: I searched Craigslist for houses to rent in both the Rainier Valley and the Central District and found none that would meet most definitions of “affordable.” A few representative listings included a four-bedroom house for $3,600 in Rainier Beach; a $2,500 two-bedroom in Hillman City; and a $2,000 two-bedroom in the Central District. In contrast, there were plenty of relatively cheap single-family homes near the University of Washington, including a $2,000 five-bedroom, a $5,000 seven-bedroom, and a $3,800 six-bedroom. Those rental listings, however, are obviously aimed at students, not families, and the University District is not a gentrifying, historically African-American area.]

“Police, as employees, stand apart from any other employees, in that they’re the only employees that have a license to kill. And for that reason, they need to be held to a different standard.”

 

ECB: You’ve criticized your opponent, including in this interview, for being a lobbyist. Teresa has pointed out that her clients are unionized workers, not big corporations. How do you respond to that, and are there any specific examples where she’s taken a position that’s out of step with working people?

JG: For my part, I stand in solidarity with rank-and-file workers. When we talk about labor leadership, I think it’s a different conversation. We’re in a moment right now where there is tremendous opportunity in Seattle politics to really push the envelope and get really progressive people elected, and [yet], the [Martin Luther King Central] Labor Council endorsed the same person for mayor [Jenny Durkan] that the Chamber of Commerce endorsed. We’re seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars being thrown into the race against me, even though I have a track record of being very pro-labor. I used to be a union member [at the Office of Professional Employees International Local 8]. I worked alongside Teresa on initiative 1433 to raise the statewide minimum wage. [UPDATE: Mosqueda says Grant did not “work alongside” her; rather, she ran the campaign and “I hired him for a few months.”] I’m very pro-worker, I’m very pro-union, but I just call into question these decisions that are happening at the higher levels. I think we have more than enough insider people at city hall who are more accustomed to making deals in back rooms than being out in the community and pushing the envelope.

ECB: One reason labor might not like you is that you’ve called for opening up police union contract negotiations to the public, which labor advocates worry will open the door to eliminating confidential negotiations for other public workers.

JG: Yeah, I don’t see that.

ECB: Why not?

JG: I think that what’s important to remember is that the police, as employees, stand apart from any other employees, in that they’re the only employees that have a license to kill. And for that reason, they need to be held to a different standard. And what I have seen through the negotiating processes with the union is that a lack of transparency in that process has led the public not to understand what is being bargained away, in terms of the right to have constitutional policing. I am 100 percent pro-union. I don’t think that the police labor contract should be completely open to the public. I think the provisions around discipline, especially, should be, because we’ve seen too many times where officers have been let of the hook. I think that if the city doesn’t take bold stances to actually address this culture of impunity that exists in our police department, we are going to continue to see more racial profiling, we’re going to continue to see more excessive force, and I’ve just got to call into question my opponent, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the same groups [unions] that are supportive of [the Seattle Police Officers Guild], and would call into question whether she’s going to hold them accountable.

ECB: How would you avoid opening that Pandora’s box and having all city union negotiations open to the public?

JG: If the city were to pursue this, we would craft legislation so that it’s specific to the police union. We have a reality where there is, every year now, a person of color getting shot by the police, and the idea that it’s not worth going out on a legal limb to try to save a life is not compelling argument to me.

 

ECB: As a white guy, how do you sit here and say, ‘Vote for me—I will represent the interests of women and women of color better than a woman of color’?

JG: I think this comes down to values and theory of change. Very early on in this race, I sat down with my opponent, and it was really clear to me that we represented different visions for the city.

 

ECB: Can you talk a little bit about what you’d do on as a city council member to promote gender equity, in terms of pay and opportunities?

JG: We’ve made some tremendous gains with the paid family leave legislation that got passed at the state level. The next thing I would work on is ensuring pay transparency. It’s kind of remarkable that we don’t already have this on the books. As I’m sure you know, women are paid 73 cents for every dollar a man makes. [Ed: 80 cents, and 78.6 cents in Seattle], and even less for  women of color. One of the big perpetuators of that is the fact that when you get a job, you have no idea if you’re getting paid as much as your male counterparts. And part of that is because when you get offered a job, they  ask for your salary history, but because of the existing gender pay gap, it just perpetuates that cycle into the next job that you get. So I would support putting penalties on employers [who penalize] employees who ask what their colleagues’ salary is so that they can see if they’re getting paid at same level, and prohibiting the disclosure of your salary when you apply for a job.

And then, secondly, I think that we really need to take into account child care. Right now, you have to pay as much as a college tuition for just getting basic child care services for your family, and that disproportionally impacts women. I agree [with Mosqueda] that we shouldn’t have families paying more than 10 percent of their income toward child care. We need to do some investigation into how it gets paid for, whether it’s borne by employees or a more progressive tax. I haven’t heard from my opponent about how she plans on financing it.

ECB: She’s talked about paying for it out of the next Families and Education Levy.

JG: Again, it’s a regressive tax. So I think to the extent that we can actually get more progressive revenue sources to pay for these programs—seeing whether or not the [city] income tax pulls through in court, imposing a progressive corporate tax, or implementing impact fees—I think that’s another thing we haven’t talked about enough.

ECB: You’re describing to me what it’s like to be a working woman, and I’m sitting here going, ‘Yeah, I know what it’s like to be a working woman.’ Isn’t it important to have more women, more people with that lived experience, on the council?  As a white guy, how do you sit here and say, ‘Vote for me—I will represent the interests of women and women of color better than a woman of color’?

JG: I think this comes down to values and theory of change. Very early on in this race, I sat down with my opponent. I talked about the concerns that I was hearing from the community, from women, from women of color, around police accountability, around housing affordability. And we had a conversation about our policy differences and how far we were willing to go to achieve the most robust outcomes for many different communities of our city, and it was really clear to me that we represented different visions for the city. I decided to stay in the race because I think that for those communities that are impacted, we have a platform that’s going to do more to advance social equity and to advance social justice.