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Jeff Fong

Jeff Fong

  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 36

Liberty Machines™

During an urbanist twitter free-for-all last week, the thoroughly awesome term “liberty machines” was used to describe the virtues of the car. The claim was made that cars let individuals go wherever they want, whenever they want and are therefore a ‘freedom enhancing’ form of transit.  This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this argument in libertarian(ish) circles. But it doesn’t tally with my experience and I’m not sure it makes any sense even within its own premise. A Personal Anecdote and a Couple Thoughts When I learned to drive way back when, it was in the great state of Texas where driving is basically a necessity. In that context, getting my license (and being economically fortunate enough to have access to a car) was certainly liberating for me after a fashion. Thinking back, though, I enjoyed far less mobility as a car bound teenager in suburban Houston than I do now living in Oakland, California. I walk to the grocery, take BART to work, bike to the gym, catch a Lyft to go out, and/or drive myself when the occasion demands. Most of my trips are multimodal and the integration of transit modes affords me far more freedom of movement than car use alone ever could. The biggest reason for this is that single occupancy vehicle use doesn’t scale as a stand alone system. Unpriced roadways are prone to hitting congestion points and, as readers of this blog are probably aware, adding lanes doesn’t help. When roads become clogged, and there are no viable alternatives, a reliance on cars becomes a constraint. And to respond to the idea that mass transit relies on government subsidies and car use does not…the technical term for that would be factually incorrect. Mass transit is more than capable of paying for itself and let’s just say highways don’t […]

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” should be required reading for YIMBYs and urbanists of any ideological stripe. Rothstein argues that housing segregation in the US has been the intentional outcome of policy decisions made at every level of government and that the idea of segregation as phenomenon driven by spontaneous self-sorting is largely a myth. Two major themes permeate the book: (1) the ways in which government has consistently intervened in the housing and land markets and (2) how these interventions were designed to pick winners and losers. The federal policy of underwriting loans for specific kinds of development (single family detached housing) and for specific people (whites) is an example that the author explores in depth. And after reading his account, I can safely say that I have a far better understanding of how nearly a century’s worth of policy interference has distorted markets and doled out privilege and oppression in equal measure. Throughout the book, Rothstein brings in the stories of specific people and places to add depth to his account. This both keeps things interesting and serves to humanize the story in a way that many tracts on policy fail to do. When he’s describing the lives of black Americans who were forced into soul crushing commutes because they were legally prohibited from living near their jobs, or families who had their houses firebombed for daring to move into a segregated neighborhood while police stood on their front lawns and watched…you remember that policy matters because it affects real people. And that real people suffered terrible wrongs for no other reason than the accident of their birth. Again, if you care about US housing policy, you must read this book. It’s impossible to understand where we are […]

People Over Process: Why Democracy Doesn’t Justify Exclusion

Some people accept the idea that restrictive land use policy is just as bad as all the research suggests, but persist in supporting the status quo. They argue that if a community chooses to regulate its built environment, that choice should be respected as having moral weight because it’s the outcome of a democratic process. This argument, though, is as logically confused as it is normatively problematic. And in the following few lines, I intend to demonstrate exactly why. No decision making process is value neutral. Whatever way we choose to go about collective decision making, we will always privilege certain voices over others. Institutions beget outcomes and the internal logic of our institutions will always favor some outcomes (and therefore voices) over others. The same individuals with the same preferences asked to make the same decisions through different procedures will produce wildly different outcomes. Imagine a U.S. Presidential election based on the popular vote or representation in the U.S. Senate proportional to state population and you should begin to see how the public will is as much a product of procedure as it is aggregated individual preference. Taking the Bay Area as a land use specific example, our system heavily favors the voices of incumbent homeowners to the detriment of everyone else. Land use decisions take place at the municipal level which–given the fact that we have 101 different municipalities–is a hyper local affair. When a new development is proposed, it only takes a handful of angry neighbors to impact decision making. Were land use set at a higher level of government, the typical number of people that get angry over an individual project would be far less effective at killing new housing. Fifty angry homeowners might matter to the Palo Alto City Council, but they’d be quite a […]

A Guide to Urban Development [Guia de Gestão Urbana]

Caos Planejado, in conjunction with Editora BEI/ArqFuturo, recently published A Guide to Urban Development (Guia de Gestão Urbana) by Anthony Ling. The book offers best practices for urban design and although it was written for a Brazilian audience, many of its recommendations have universal applicability. For the time being, the book is only available in Portuguese, but after giving it a read through, I decided it deserved an english language review all the same. The following are some of the key ideas and recommendations. I hope you enjoy. GGU sets the stage with a broad overview of the challenges facing Brazilian cities. Rapid urbanization has put pressure on housing prices in the highest productivity areas of the fastest growing cities and car centric transportation systems are unable to scale along with the pace of urban growth. After setting the stage, GGU splits into two sections. The first makes recommendations for the regulation of private spaces, the second for the development and administration of public areas. Reforming Regulation Section one will be familiar territory for any regular MU reader. GGU advocates for letting uses intermingle wherever individuals think is best. Criticism of minimum parking requirements gets its own chapter. And there’s a section a piece dedicated to streamlining permitting processes and abolishing height limits. One interesting idea is a proposal to let developers pay municipalities for the right to reduce FAR restrictions. This would allow a wider range of uses to be priced into property values and create the institutional incentives to gradually allow more intensive use of land over time. Meeting People Where They Are Particular to the Brazilian experience is a section dedicated to formalizing informal settlements, or favelas. These communities are found in every major urban center in the country and often face persistent, intergenerational poverty along with […]

Building A Better BART

In 2016, voters in San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa county approved a $3.5 Billion dollar bond to keep BART moving. Funds from the bond will be used to replace aging infrastructure throughout the system, but even three and half billion dollars will scarcely keep us running in place. Maintaining what we have long term—and eventually improving on what’s already in place—means finding a sustainable revenue stream for the system and reimagining how we fund transit in the Bay Area. Hong Kong vs the Bay Putting BART on permanently firm financial footing doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. Commuter rail systems in East Asia figured out how to run profitably decades ago. And there’s no better example of what BART could be than the Metro Transit Railway Corporation (MTRC) in Hong Kong. The MTRC operates 130 miles of track (roughly equivalent to BART). It transports over 5 million passengers a day (about 10x BART’s daily ridership). And it posts a 99.9% on time rate (let’s just say…way the hell better than BART). MTRC System Map   The MTRC is able to maintain its first-in-class service levels because it doesn’t skimp on the upkeep. It employs approximately 5,000 technicians who physically inspect every inch of track once every three days. The rolling stock is given a similar level of attention. And the entire system is overseen from a state-of-the-art control center where management can identify problems in real-time. The result of all this preventative care is a transit system that reliably performs at scale and sets the global standard for commuter rail. All told, the MTRC spends an impressive US $700 million a year on maintenance and improvements. But perhaps the most amazing thing is that this $700 million comes out to less than 40% of the MTRC’s yearly revenue. Value Capture Finance […]

Burrowing Owls, Comic Books, and Telling Stories That Change the World

[This article, originally published on the site Tech for Housing, has been updated. Mai-Cutler’s kickstarter has a few days left. You can donate here.] How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained) is Kim Mai-Cutler’s 2014 TechCrunch masterpiece exploring the history of Bay Area land use policy. It was the first investigatory piece to thoroughly survey the political, economic, and historical precursors of today’s housing crisis. And in explaining the problems that plague San Francisco, it provided the intellectual spark for nearly two years of grass roots organizing and advocacy. And now there’s a kickstarter to turn it into a comic book. As it stands, the kickstarter has raised over 16K in pledges (I personally pledged $100 last week). This total means a professional artist can work on the project full time and produce a finished product come March. Turning KMC’s tome on Bay Area land use into a graphic novel might seem a frivolous use of resources to some, but let me tell you why this is actually important. Burrowing Owls is the seminal work on Bay Are Housing. It’s also over 10,000 words long. That means that as good as it is, there was only going to be a small audience of wonkish individuals that would ever be able to wade through the entire thing. Translating the article’s information, ideas and arguments into a visually consumable format, however, makes it accessible to a much larger group of people. For every person that read the original article, there are probably fifty who would thumb through the comic book if left out on your coffee table. So if you’ve got a few bucks, please consider making a pledge. And after that, pass the message along. Ideas matter, but so do the ways in which we choose […]

Supply and Demand: A Response to 48hills

In a recent piece published by 48hills, former Berkeley planning commissioner Zelda Bronstein takes aim at…well…too many things for me to succinctly recount in detail. So instead of attempting to respond to every single argument littered throughout her 7,000 word article, I’ll focus on the big stuff. Supply and demand: it’s a thing…we promise Ms. Bronstein asserts that supply and demand is, in fact, not a thing. Or at least if it is, it doesn’t apply to the Bay Area housing market. She writes that in California generally and the San Francisco Bay Area specifically, …the textbook theory of supply-and-demand—prices fall as supply increases—doesn’t apply. I’m unsure why Ms. Bronstein thinks the laws of supply and demand (ceteris paribus) don’t work here, but they’ve certainly been in force in Tokyo. Japan’s capital has seen sustained population growth as well as productivity increases over the last couple decades. And after twenty years of allowing housing to be built when and where people demand it, prices have remained gloriously flat. Just as expected. And when we look at American cities with the most supply elastic housing markets, we see a strong relationship between the ease with which new market rate construction can be developed and lower price increases overall. Unsurprisingly, San Francisco has one of the least elastic housing markets in the country and has experienced some of the most extreme percentage increases in housing prices as a result. No matter what example we look at or how we cut up the data, there’s nothing out there to contradict the basic YIMBY story about supply, demand, and price. Unless, of course, you don’t actually understand the story, which may be the problem in Ms. Bronstein’s case. For her benefit, I’ll restate the general position. More supply equals lower prices (in the aggregate and over time) The pro-supply […]

Palo Alto: The Land of Too Many Jobs

Co-authored by Tony Albert and Jeff Fong SF Curbed recently sat down with Patrick Burt, Mayor of Palo Alto, to get his response to the high profile resignation of Kate Vershov Downing. Downing, of course, was the Palo Alto Planning Commissioner who publicly announced that she will move her family from the city because of high housing prices. Mayor Burt’s response illustrates a complete failure to accept either the nature or the cause of our housing crisis. And were we not so desensitized to this type of thinking here in the Bay Area, it would be hard to distinguish his comments from satire. Too Many…Jobs? Mayor Burt’s first, and perhaps most bizarre, assertion is that Palo Alto’s problem is job growth—both within the city as well as within its Peninsula neighbors. And that part of the solution must be to slow down or displace new job creation. Take a minute and let that sink in. An elected government official is calling out job growth as a problem, and advocating for policies to slow it down. Mayor Burt says that… we’re in a region that’s had extremely high job growth at a rate that is just not sustainable if we’re going to keep [Palo Alto] similar to what it’s been historically. Of course we know that the community is going to evolve. But we don’t want it to be a radical departure. We don’t want to turn into Manhattan. Job growth increases housing demand, and if housing supply increases more slowly than housing demand, housing prices rise to make up the difference. Mayor Burt is willing to admit that housing prices are too high, but actively rejects the idea that Palo Alto needs to significantly intensify land use with town homes or multi-family apartments. This leaves him backed into the absurd corner of addressing […]

Tech for Housing: An Experiment in YIMBY Activism

Tech for Housing was founded to organize Bay Area tech workers around supply friendly land use reform. Tony Albert, Joey Hiller and myself, all saw an unmet need for tech-centric political outreach and decided to try our luck. And as tech workers ourselves, we had certain ideas around the best ways to self-organize and why that organization hadn’t really happened to date. One problem with mobilizing Bay Area tech, we realized, is that many of us spend 50-60 hours a week at work. For those of us that weren’t already passionate about land use issues (yes, I’m aware I just used the terms ‘passionate’ and ‘land use’ in the same sentence), spending significant time and energy to understand, let alone act on, reform is asking a lot. We also noted that tech workers are, to varying degrees, transplants. Consequently, the existing political infrastructure that’s not too great at mobilizing tech workers generally is even less effective at activating recent arrivals who might not even be registered to vote in their new jurisdiction. After thinking through these and other reasons that we in tech remain politically apathetic, we realized the challenge was to dramatically increase the perceived benefit and decrease the perceived cost of political participation. To that end, we’ve started with tech focused content on housing policy, explaining at a high level 1) what’s broken, 2) why it’s broken and 3) what can be done about it. A lot of what’s happening at this stage is attracting the other workers in our industry who are already wonky enough to have read How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists two or three times. And after developing that core audience, providing them ways to activate our less engaged colleagues via various forms of social signaling. There’ll only ever be a certain number of people […]

Why The Tech Industry Should Care About Housing

[Editor’s note–this is the inaugural article for a new blog that Jeff launched called Tech For Housing, where tech workers advocate for more housing in the Bay Area.] San Francisco–For decades, every city in the Bay Area has restricted housing production. And for decades, the Bay Area has gone deeper into housing debt. People and money continue streaming into the region, cities rarely allow new housing, and prices continue to rise. This hurts every industry in the Bay Area, and tech is no exception. The housing market steals money straight out of our pockets and, if we stay the current course, will rob us of the better version of ourselves we need more time to become. How Housing Robs Us Blind Housing in San Francisco costs 73% more than in Austin, 53% more than in Seattle, and 36% more than in Los Angeles. And figures for many of the Peninsula Cities are even worse. After accounting for cost of living, our real incomes in Bay Area tech are often lower than those of our colleagues in less expensive locales simply by virtue of housing costs. Obviously, this is bad for us as employees, but it hurts founders and investors as well. The higher housing prices climb, the more founders have to pay employees to provide for the same standard of living. And the higher labor costs become, the more money founders have to raise from investors, meaning more capital gets tied up funding the same amount of work. All this adds up to tech, as an industry, paying more and more to stay in the Bay Area for zero added benefit. Median Rental Price per Bedroom Source: Trulia But there’s more at stake than just burn rates and take-home pay. As it stands, housing prices are a millstone around our […]

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