Read on Twitter
I read this article 3x because I was really annoyed, so I wanted to make sure I got each and every point without bias. There were some good points we all should consider but this GIF (b/c I love DBZ) below best sums up the article IMO. 
1/ https://twitter.com/GuekguezianLee/status/1346235561976029186
1/ https://twitter.com/GuekguezianLee/status/1346235561976029186
I have been involved with housing and homelessness work for 3 years now, thank you to @RebL19 for giving me my start! I left working in gov't to become an organizer for a #YIMBY group because I realized that we needed more than technocrats who worked within government to 2/
make the changes we needed to see around housing and homelessness. In my first year of being in LA, I have managed to talk to homeowners who got their homes through redlining policies, homeowners who fought to be able to buy homes due to the racist origins of homeownership, 3/
BIPOC and white folks who moved back to LA and had to move back in with parents, renters of color who have been renting for generations in Los Angeles, BIPOC and white renters who are newly transplanted (myself), and unhoused people. 4/
*brief pause* Before I continue, I want to publically thank each and every person who's doing the work in a low-income community for talking to me when they didn't have to, given the tension between them and YIMBYs. Y'all have added so much richness to my work. 5/
*hits play* And in these 8 groups that are all very broad with lived experience, there is so much nuance to understand how we arrive at our conclusions and feelings around housing and what we believe is best. And yet, this article didn't even make a scratch on that nuance. 6/
And if this wasn't a publication that would make its rounds in the world, I would probably not respond. But as a person who's doing the work (which I still don't feel comfortable saying), I can't sit by and let the discourse continue without adding my own thoughts. 7/
First, let's stop framing all disagreement as "leftist" when we know that any plight of BIPOC and low-income communities has always been framed as that to dismiss our plight in this country. Miss mamas, if you got beef with white leftists who spend 8/
all day on Twitter den just say dat. But leave me and my people out of the white on white political beef, we just tryna stay afloat at this point. 
#CancelRent & #CancelMortgages with targeted landlord relief! 9/ https://twitter.com/HealthyLA_Coa/status/1345893929414053889?s=20
#CancelRent & #CancelMortgages with targeted landlord relief! 9/ https://twitter.com/HealthyLA_Coa/status/1345893929414053889?s=20
Second, I don't think it's appropriate to write articles about housing in 2021 without mentioning redlining, that history is so crucial and (unfortunately) deeply informs our present issues with housing and the psyche of people's reactions. 10/
Third, it would have been so helpful to touch on why homeowners of color might have a very different reaction to more housing in the neighborhood, given our relationship to wealth. 11/
Fourth, it would have been even more helpful to dive deeper as to why folks who have been dealing with trauma regarding displacement for centuries (stealing people's land or people from their land to urban renewal to the current 2021 issues) have a separate reaction. 12/
In my building, there's a newly arrived white woman (not from Iowa but from Oklahoma) who described MacArthur Park/Westlake as a "war zone," thankfully my friends were able to correct her but what does that mean for how she interacts with the neighborhood? I can't say! 13/
But I can imagine how a person who views a neighborhood as a "war zone" is so new to a city might begin engaging and supporting policies that have no regard for the current residents in an attempt to "clean up" the neighborhood. Which means displacement! 14/
And I can also imagine how long-term members of the community would feel slighted and not want to work with a person like that because of how they feel her words describe the. And I can understand how folks want to decry gentrification because it is seen as 15/
areas getting whiter and wealthier and that can feel like a personal attack on the individual. But welcome to the club, try to imagine being told you're an issue based on your identity for over 500 years and then an article comes out basically adding fuel to that fire. 16/
Dr. Lugo said it best in her book Bicycle/Race when she wrote about the trauma of BIPOC folks in cities, "What is it like to be blight? To be the thing that blocks Progress, to be the thing that needs to removed so others can be healthy. Surely that takes an emotional toll." 17/
Every "leftists" I have talked to has said that they support getting more homes built in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods and that their only wish is that we can mitigate current displacement, and ensure homes built in their neighborhood are ALSO affordable to them. 18/
As a person working for a #YIMBY organization, I have talked to (more like been grilled by) #NIMBYs, #SHIMBYs, and #PHIMBYs and a lot of those conversations have ended with people wanting to continue to engage in conversation with me. 19/
And I'm so tired of seeing articles about housing that don't take into the totality of thought and lived experience within a community, how they arrived at that thought, and what their concerns are to move them towards the "right" goal. 20/
We can write all day about how "leftists" are forming alliances with #NIMBYs and portray developers as "a shadowy, parasitic force in metropolitan politics." But I have read more than enough articles (including this one) that discuss that. 21/
But when are we going to start writing articles about the inability of folks to organize because they are the children and grandchildren of those who participated in redlining, and as a result, grew up in segregated suburbs where they lived in a bubble, that everyone else was 22/
excluded from. As a result, have no idea how to effectively Politik with or build coalitions with "leftists" (i.e., BIPOC and low-income folks) because they grew up secluded from them, and only interacted with them when it was time for "good food" or a "cultural experience." 23/
It's nice that a new wave of people want to get into housing politics now that the issue has trickled up into a particular class, but there were and continue to be people doing this work when all of us were nothing but twinkles in our dad's eyes. 24/
What we write and how we write it has real-world implications and given that most of our cities are still segregated, we need to do better at ensuring our journalism can give the whole picture so folks can better digest an issue and getting out of our bubbles. /fin
To be clear, I don't have an issue with Jacob, personally. Could be a very fun guy to hang out with, but I do have an issue with the article. Having read Golden Gates and now reading The Affordable City, I know it's possible for white men to also dig deeper into the analysis.
I'm too staunch of an "intellectual" to allow for lazy, high-level writing, my mentors (some of whom are white men) didn't allow it from me and I'm not allowing it from anyone else. And I just had to give those caveats so folks couldn't dismiss this as me being the angry BIPOC.
