National press ridicules SJ Housing Department's partisan podcast

The April 19 print edition of National Review, a venerable conservative weekly, featured a lead article by Will Swaim that skewers the SJ Housing Dept's much-maligned "Dwellings" podcast series. The article makes fun of the disinformation and biased nature of the series and department, especially when it comes to the podcast's blatant advocacy for citywide upzoning. The article quotes a posting from this humble website as well.

One of my favorite epiphenomena of the accelerating purge of the suburbs is the new podcast "Dwellings." A production of San Jose's housing department, "Dwellings" reveals that, like most local governments in California, the one in San Jose has been taken over by activists. In this case, the government is "enabling multi-unit housing on properties with a Residential Neighborhood General Plan land-use designation," the city's website says. "In San Jose, these are typically properties in single-family neighborhoods." The city calls such "enabling," which is backed by the coercive power of the state, "Opportunity Housing."
In one episode of "Dwellings," a guest asserts that the goal of Opportunity Housing--to pack more people into less space, in the midst of people who bought suburban homes precisely to escape density--is actually "a return to the way humans have lived for millenia." Yes, yes we honor the memory of our Navajo forebears, who famously lived in towering condos with dogwalkers, doormen, and DoorDash.
The podcast goes on like this, a free-market website in Silicon Valley notes {Editors acknowledge: yes, that's us Opportunity Now}, miking up only lefty activists or housing department staffers. Who's not welcome on the podcast? "Builders, contractors, landlords, renters, architects, developers--anyone from the market side of the issue...And bizarrely, the stakeholder group most impacted by the Opportunity Housing--homeowners--get zero voice and representation. Zero."

Read the whole thing here.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity.

Photo taken by Dan Lacey.