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. … [Read more...]
Jeff Fong
Jeff graduated from San Jose State University in 2011 where he studied Politics and Economics. He spent two years working in financial services before joining a startup focused on urban transportation. Since then he has become increasingly interested in urban economics as well as transportation policy and spends much of his free time reading, writing, and researching.
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
Planning As A Question Of Scale
This post was inspired by Nolan Gray’s “Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian Critique of Urban Planning” and the discussion it recently sparked over at Strong Towns. In Jane Jacob’s Hayekian Critique of Urban Planning, Nolan Gray argues for the futility of trying to master plan something as complex as an entire … [Read more...]
A response to Interfluidity
On Interfluidity, Steve Randy Waldman posted some criticisms of the market urbanist position. The post was interesting, though I took issue with a few specific points. The following are my responses. Regulatory Authority as a Property RightThe customary property rights surrounding homeownership … [Read more...]