Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

This is the fundamental challenge, IMO: to deal with a housing crisis, you need to understand how markets work. Lefties have been trained to not only reject those models but to be politically allergic to them. So focus on the right? Probably not: urban centers lean left HARD.

"Affordable housing" is too left a term, "YIMBY" too bogus for the majority of non-wonk voters. I agree w/ Saku it's a branding issue & agree w/ @kevinriggle & Mason—have to focus 'on the other side of the aisle;' as market-based policy it's easy to convince center-right+ folks.

IMO the right branding move is "pro-equality." Avoid getting into the weeds. Avoid building out models in your literature. Point out that SF is a white city becoming whiter, bc the people who can afford to come are largely white & nearly everyone must leave if they want a family.

What about just “pro-housing”? Like pro-choice, it seems hard to be against “housing.” And I think the term probably implies affordable to progressives and implies housing supply to liberals, both of which YIMBY supports.

"Housing" is a lot more sterile-sounding than "choice." It's also kind of an awkward term — people don't talk about their housing or being housed, they talk about their place/home/building/apartment. I suspect that a lot of people free-associated "housing" to "public housing."

That's true wrt word association. OTOH I think the best angle perhaps would be approaching it with the core idea that housing brings down """income inequality""", increases jobs access esp. from non-urban folk, etc.