Editorial: Silicon Valley's Minor Trumpists

The Bay Area’s status quo of exclusion is not a joke, and it’s time to get serious about ending it. 

Cupertino Mayor Steven Scharf ignited a media firestorm over his sardonic call to “build a wall” in his January 30th State of the City speech. “We have a big problem with all these...other people from other cities, so we came up with this proposal,” Scharf quipped. “San Jose will be mainly paying for it. It’s not going to come out of our own taxes. Saratoga will give a little bit too, since they are a big contributor to our traffic issue.”

While he has since defended his thinly-veiled reference to the symbol of President Trump’s human rights abuses at the US-Mexico border and disastrous government shutdown as an attempt at humor, Scharf’s record provides ample evidence of his serious intent to keep Cupertino an exclusive enclave for the wealthy. No joke.

Cupertino Now, Cupertino Tomorrow...

The small suburban city is home to a median home price of $2.2 million, and the world’s largest corporation, whose Apple 2.0 campus would add tens of thousands of jobs. Scharf rose to power in the City Council on a wave of Not In My Back Yard sentiment by Cupertino voters who sought to oppose any provision of new housing for those workers, not to mention the teachers, service workers, and younger generations that are already squeezed out.

Scharf organized with the group Better Cupertino to oppose a mixed-use development at the largely-vacant Vallco mall in Cupertino that would provide 2,900 homes, 600 of them Below Market-Rate, including 40 units for Extremely Low-Income household and Adults with Disabilities. During his campaign for city council, Scharf and fellow opponents even organized a ballot measure in 2016, which a judge found to be “knowingly misleading” in its ballot argument. The state’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) has since opened an investigation on two Political Action Committees supporting the measure, the Committee Supporting Cupertino Citizens’ Sensible Growth Initiative and the Cupertino Residents for Sensible Zoning Action Committee, for illegally coordinating campaign efforts and hiding donation sources through “anonymous” matching funds. 

Further evincing his penchant for dishonesty, public records show that Scharf was banned from the neighborhood social network NextDoor for creating multiple pseudonymous accounts to rally opposition to the Vallco project, which will someday include homes for up to 1200 low income families—all while he was running for city council in 2016.

Scharf’s commitment to lying and gaslighting persisted after his election. During a 2018 hearing on the Vallco project, Kelsey Banes, a psychologist who works with homeless veterans at the VA hospital, testified that Scharf sat behind her at a San Mateo City Council meeting, muttering at every speaker who supported new housing, “Leave. Why do you need to live where you grew up? Leave.”

Scharf denied saying this, and his supporters in the audience subsequently booed and heckled Banes. Nevertheless, it is clear that Scharf genuinely holds this attitude, as he had previously stated in public: “no one owed me a house in Cupertino.” Scharf added that his daughter lived in Oakland because she could not afford Cupertino. “That’s the way it is.” 

Not unlike the current President, Scharf has also used his signature issue as an opportunity to joke about assaulting women, notably during his same infamous State of the City speech:

“I was in the hospital a few months ago being wheeled into operating room for a minor procedure—nothing serious­–and the person rolling the gurney into the elevator took a look at my chart and she said, ‘Hey, what’s happening at Vallco?’ She ended up in the emergency room after that question.”

While Scharf’s particular speech has focused the media’s ire on his own brand of misanthropy, it’s important to clarify that this attitude is widespread throughout the Bay Area’s fragmented municipal governments, with each exclusionary suburb pitted in a doomed prisoner’s dilemma to agree on nothing other than their default position against new housing. Those who can’t afford to live here are the losers. 

Previously, outgoing Cupertino Mayor Darcy Paul dismissed the idea that the region’s housing crisis was“dire” in his own State of the City speech. But evidently, the state legislature’s increasing oversight over housing approval—which brought the Vallco project to its current construction phase over local opposition—is dire enough for local NIMBYs to dredge up any imaginable reason to oppose it.

Recently appointed planning commissioner Kitty Moore, for example, argued that new residents would incur a demand for prostitution similar to that of oil industry workers in North Dakota.

As Sunnyvale resident Richard Mehlinger noted, 12 of 16 new commission appointments went to members of Better Cupertino, an openly NIMBY organization that works to preserve Cupertino’s segregation. More glaringly, this came after the City Council repealed new guidelines in its Code of Ethics specifying that “[a] Commission appointment should not be used as a political ‘reward’”—a repeal that most of the council approved.

It’s important to note that Scharf and his partisans are flouting laws while gaslighting the public for the same reason that Trump is: the truth is not on their side.

Wherefore the Wall? 

There is a general academic and political consensus on the need to remedy the harms of exclusionary zoning. These policies work as designed, to segregate racial minorities and hoard economic opportunity in wealthy neighborhoods. Limiting the capacity of living space on increasingly in-demand urban land inflates home prices and excludes the vast majority of the workforce enabling the area’s productivity. The neighborhoods become sorted by income, and consequently by race, professional class, and family structure. The best schools, job centers, services and infrastructure are hoarded by the wealthiest, while workers with the longest commutes are the least likely to escape poverty.

And much like the ironically international cadre of nationalist anti-globalists that have been emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric, Scharf has organized with the statewide group Livable California to lobby against regional cooperation to solve the urban housing shortage. In particular, like Better Cupertino, Livable California has rallied against statewide efforts to roll back single-family residential zoning and permit apartments where they are currently banned.

The more we interrogate the history and impacts of exclusionary zoning, the more the “build the wall” metaphor seems quite apt and literal. Scharf and groups like Livable California embody these motivations of exclusion, hoarding, and rent-seeking par excellence, and the Bay Area’s unique flexibility of permeable ideological brands allows for a broad coalition of right and left alike to unite around these values.

What values exactly? Jessica Trounstine’s groundbreaking book Segregation by Design (2018) has gathered compelling data on the political impetus for exclusionary land-use policies. For example, Trounstine surveyed 2,700 municipalities and found that the stringency of their land use regulations correlated strongly with racial segregation across cities, and predicted the availability of elementary schools in metropolitan suburbs. Further, Trounstine found that less diverse cities with a lower percentage of renters had greater inequity in public service expenditures per capita.

“The result of these policies in the postwar period,” Trounstine wrote, “has been to increase the disparity in service provision across cities.” Unsurprisingly, Cupertino ranks quite low among Bay Area cities in terms its share of renter population, and its Latino population hovers at 3%. In contrast, San Jose—one of the cities Scharf said would pay for his wall—is 33% Latino. On the other hand, as Asian immigrants and their children began to outperform white students in Cupertino schools, the city has experienced its own bizarre form of white flight in recent decades, and Stanford sociologists studying Cupertino found an academic culture that encoded “whiteness as having lesser-than status” compared to Asians in a 2013 ethnography.

The evidence is clear: cities that prohibited more affordable housing types became more expensive places to live in order to deny marginalized groups access to robust public services, tax revenue, and economic opportunity, and retain an otherwise precarious high status. These wealthy enclaves have already built the political and economic equivalent of Trump’s wall.

Deplorable Degrowth

It’s no surprise that conservatives like Scharf align with fellow Cupertino City Councilmember Liang Chao, who has admitted (albeit regretfully) to voting for Trump in multiple public forums. It’s also not a huge shock to see other outright liars and grifters among their ranks, like Livable California’s video blogger Ken Bukowski, a disgraced former mayor of Emeryville who faced outstanding fines from the FPPC after embezzling campaign funds to make mortgage payments.

It may be a bit more startling at first glance to see them align with self-described leftists like Zelda Bronstein, the Berkeley-based writer who regularly opposes regional tax initiatives and density around public transit. Bronstein, like others in Livable California, largely objected to regional tax-sharing initiatives to fund affordable housing proposed by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s CASA Compact. Previously, she opposed similar measures to fund regional wetlands preservation and transportation upgrades. Contradicting her professed concerns over affordability and displacement, Bronstein enjoys a multi-million dollar rental property portfolio in San Mateo County, where, unlike in Berkeley, there is no rent control. Bronstein Associates LLC has numerous evictions to its name, including no-cause evictions of Section 8 tenants, according to the county’s court records. Another eviction of a Section 8 tenant in South San Francisco was filed in 2012 over a balance of just $583 past due. Although Bronstein has somewhat hypocritically criticized policies to provide affordable housing for middle-income households, it is clear that she could provide housing for lower-income residents in her capacity as a rental property owner, and pointedly does not exercise this power.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that fellow Livable California ally Eva Chao, a San Francisco property owner and failed candidate for the BART Board, decried rent control and eviction protection proposals in the CASA Compact as elements of a “socialist coup” that would “enslave” property owners and turn landlords into a “plantation class.” When the privileged are threatened with equality, losing their elite privilege can feel like oppression.

Some Livable California members hardly hide their racist attitudes. Stephen Nestel, a vocal member in Marin County and author of the Save Marinwood blog, infamously used photos of MS-13 gang members to criticize a proposed affordable housing project in Marin. (It’s worth noting that the “Mara Salvatrucha” gang was formed by Salvadoran prison gangs whose members were deported from California back to El Salvador.) Beverly Hills Vice Mayor John Mirisch, another outspoken member, has regularly published right-wing invectives against immigrants arriving in Sweden and the U.S.

But it shouldn’t be surprising that this racism and classism is ideologically flexible. There are two broad premises underlying Trump-lite NIMBYism: (1) that immigrants are guilty until proven innocent; and (2) that incumbent property owners enjoy incidental, immaculate prosperity within a sort of municipal tabula rasa, absent the historical context and political economy that brought them here or the resource constraints and rent-seeking that currently bolster it. Hence, “local control”—the idea is that only a city’s current residents (in practice, only its property owners) should determine who lives there, not its increasingly mobile workforce. 

The broad NIMBYist appeal to “local control” is both disingenuous and morally inconsistent, not unlike segregationist dog-whistles about “states rights.” While cities like Cupertino recoil against state-mandated housing quotas, there is little resistance to the state’s restriction on property tax rates enacted by Proposition 13 in 1978. And embracing thousands of new jobs from Apple without commensurate housing for its workers infringes on neighboring San Jose’s ability to provide services, as it is already strained by a limited commercial tax base while still housing more of Silicon Valley’s growing workforce.

California’s fiscal incentives are perverse, and the U.S. Constitution is of no help to cities. The Supreme Court upheld the power of wealthy school districts to spend disproportionately more per capita on education than poorer ones in Rodriguez v. San Antonio, and in Milliken v. Bradley, it protected white suburban school districts near Detroit from federal desegregation orders that would have consolidated them with the largely black inner-city school district. While the Court has upheld residency requirements for services, it nevertheless undermined residency requirements for employment, notably in United Building & Construction Trades Council of Camden County v. Camden.

When NIMBYs argue that policies should focus on curbing demand rather than increasing the supply of housing, they rely on the dangerously false premise that a de facto limitation of personal mobility through government policy is an effective bulwark against the volatility of capital flight. Yet as far as we can tell, no homeowner in Cupertino is asking for their property values to crash. Nevertheless, our status quo enables the relatively free movement of capital, while empowering municipal governments to close their borders to workers.

Scharf and his allies clearly enjoy that municipal governments frequently close their borders to individual people. If you can't afford to live somewhere, and more housing is not being built in that somewhere (due to existing regulations, pushback from an interest group, etc.), there is a de facto wall. But the ability to move across municipal or national borders—and to have shelter on the other side—is a human right, whether or not Cupertino’s Mayor believes future generations deserve it.

Human rights are not a zero-sum game; pitting mobility against housing stability is a false choice. Building more homes both enables the human right that is personal mobility, and does not conflict with the financial or personal security of current residents.

Despite empty rhetoric about “balance” and progressive values, there is ultimately no altruism behind these Trumpist motives. The landed interests represented by Mayor Scharf and fellow members of Livable California benefit disproportionately from our state’s prosperity, and fight to preserve a system in which it is more difficult to distribute this wealth equitably. As soon as those political barriers are challenged, status quo stakeholders unite in defense of their unearned wealth and double down on the exclusionary policies that continue to enrich them. For the time being, we will set aside the chicken-and-egg question of which came first—the values, or the economic incentives and privilege sustaining them—since the political effort needed to overcome the politics of exclusion remains the same. 

It’s time to open our neighborhoods and open our hearts. It’s time to tear down the walls and build bridges. It’s time to overthrow the Bay Area’s Trumpists, empower workers and migrants from all walks of life, and to end the housing crisis once and for all.

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