As of today, it has now been 3 full years since I’ve gotten my Switch. So, like the past 2 years, I wanted to post my top 10 games I played throughout the last year with some quick little reviews on why I enjoyed them. To avoid confusion this list is not a list of my top 10 games of 2020, it is a top 10 of the games I have played in the last year. Some of the games this year surprised the hell out of me, and others were extremely welcome due to old memories. Each game here I include my playtime (according to the Switch, anyways) and my completion percentage. Since it was asked a lot in the comments last year, I will be including a link to a Google Docs sheet that includes a link to a duplicate version of my sheet (with some things unimportant to anyone but me removed or edited) that I use to track completion percentages as well as information on how to use the sheet.
Currently playing: -
Backlog: Assassin’s Creed: The Rebel Collection, BioShock: The Collection, DOOM 64, Hollow Knight, Trials of Mana, Ys Origin
Games from this year that didn’t make the top 10:
· DOOM II (5+ hours, 100.00%)
· DOOM (1993) (5+ hours, 100.00%)
· Assassin’s Creed III Remastered (25+ hours, 39.78%)
· DOOM 3 (10+ hours, 75.00%)
· Darksiders Genesis (15+ hours, 63.60%)
· Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition (45+ hours, 85.75%)
· Super Mario 3D All-Stars (50+ hours, 84.59%)
· Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Definitive Edition (90+ hours, 92.38%)
10) Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout (40+ hours, 94.95%)
Yea, yea. Look at those thicc thighs! Now that that’s out of the way… I really enjoyed my time with Ryza. The alchemy system is what got me interested in the game, gathering materials to fuse together into more powerful items. As you learn more about the system and get access to better items everything begins to make more sense. You might find yourself just slotting things in at first, but eventually once you gain a better understanding you can figure out exactly what the system is getting you to do. Crafting endgame items with crazy stats and really showing off your skills as an alchemist is extremely fulfilling and from what I can tell the series has really improved on itself from past iterations. The story of Ryza is fairly grounded and tame for the most part, but it does still have some “save the world” aspect towards the end. You play as Ryza who wants to adventure with her friends and learn alchemy and… that’s pretty much the main focus for the first half or more. It was kind of a nice break and really helped it to stand out a bit more in my mind. The main point of the story really is just Ryza wanting to adventure after being stuck on a lonely, plain little island for her whole life. Once she is exposed to alchemy, she makes it her mission to improve her alchemy skills. The combat is an ATB system which was my biggest holdback of the game going in but in reality it was very quick and simple to get into and really didn’t require a lot of work to figure out. The one thing is that if you do not keep up on your alchemy skills you will struggle in battles. Constantly looking for ways to improve your gear is very important and you can easily find yourself running at a wall if you ignore it for long periods of time. It is definitely an interesting game to play and I really recommend looking into it for those of you interested in JRPGs. With the sequel coming out in just a month, and it being the first time in the series’ history (from what I know) that a protagonist has returned for a sequel, it is the perfect time to hop in.
9) Astral Chain (40+ hours, 84.20%)
I expected this game to be on par with or worse than Bayonetta 2. Then I actually played it and, well, I loved it significantly more. This game features a rating system very similar to the Bayonetta series, but the system is also significantly more lenient. Instead of judging you on how perfectly you can complete a level (not being hit, time, not using items, etc.) you are judged on how well you use your resources. You get bonuses for using different techniques, weapons, and legions. At first I still got low scores and did overall poorly, however because the rating system was so much more lenient and focused more on how well you are using the combat system it was a really good way to learn what was the best way to go about combat. This led to later files getting better scores and really making the whole game feel even more entertaining. The story is pretty straight forward; you’re a cop who ends up working for a branch of cops that use legions, basically enemies turned into allies, that are attached to a chain and fight against those same enemies. These legions are controlled alongside yourself, which seems a lot more daunting than it really is. While I am by no means a pro at the game, I do think it was fairly easy to get used to controlling multiple characters even with all the action going on. As far as weak points, there was only one major thing that bothered me and it was the same as Dragon Quest XI. I don’t like this game’s use of a silent protagonist. I felt that it robbed a lot of story moments of any impact because your character feels completely disconnected from a plot that they are supposed to be at the center of. Your character even has a voice actor, but they are only used when you are playing as the other gender. It wasn’t something that drastically impacts the game for me, but it still bothered me enough to mention. Overall, the rest of the game is a lot of fun and works really well. The whole thing is like its own anime and it even has an anime-style intro sequence, which by the way the music is top notch. Which is pretty important if you’re going to have an action game that you’ll want music to hype you up.. So if you’d like to play Anime Cops vs Cyber Demons ft. Litterbugs, then this is the game for you.
8) Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition (10+ hours, 98.58%)
It had been a long time since I played a Metroidvania, so this game was a welcome return for me. The movement available to you from the start is fairly limited, but you keep picking up skills over time until eventually it becomes incredibly smooth to dash around the world. The story is mostly told through a couple of momentary scenes, so there aren’t a lot of cutscenes besides the opening. I believe despite how brief the story is, the story of Kuro and the opening act are both amazing moments in not just this game but out of all games I have played. The soundtrack is beautiful and I found myself just hanging around to listen to it a few times. On top of all these elements, it also runs beautifully and never gave me a single problem. I may not have been a professional at the game, I believe I ended my playthrough with just under 500 deaths, but I never became frustrated with it. Besides completing the areas, you don’t have too much to focus on for collectibles. All you really have is life containers, energy containers, and spirit containers. Life and energy containers obviously improve your life and your energy, but spirit containers is used to build up your spirit gauge and act as skill points. These skill points can be used to unlock movement options like dashing and triple jumps as well as power boosts. It’s a fun system and I’m glad that there isn’t as much to really need to worry about while you’re exploring. The game is a constant rush to get better and improve your movement. It was a pure experience the entire way through. The entire game just radiates charm and despite it being a short game I feel like it will stick with me for a long time.
7) Ori and the Will of the Wisps (15+ hours, 96.46%)
This game was an absolute gem to play… mostly. There were some minor bugs involving moving between areas if I went through too fast or falling through the ground once or twice, and I did need to redo about an hour of work because of a glitch once, but besides that the game played beautifully. Movement in this game felt so much more rewarding much earlier than the original because most of the tools are unlocked early. This lets you get more practice in earlier instead of having things feel like they didn’t get a lot of time. I also like how things like Dash were actually built into the level design because it wasn’t attached to the skill tree this time. With more tools to use and design levels around, it made the game feel a lot more interesting to play around with. Speaking of levels, the world is amazing. The levels are all much more expansive and the world itself feels more natural. With extra movement options, the ability to move from one part of the map to another feels significantly quicker as well. The music in the game is just as incredible as the original, so no complaints there as well. It also includes more content through things like side quests, races, and projects to clean up a base camp of sorts. The story is more involved this time instead of being relegated mostly to a handful of cutscenes, although once you get past the first dungeon of the game it isn’t all that present. The basic premise is that Ori gets stuck in a new area and has to help remove the dark influence. I don’t think Shriek is as compelling of a character as Kuro, but that’s mostly because I really enjoyed Kuro’s role in the story. Combat is the big change from the original compared to everything else. Combat in the Blind Forest was basically relegated to telling Sein to fire at enemies and was more of an afterthought that an actual use. This is reflected in the fact that there are no boss fights in the original, only escape sequences. While Will of the Wisps does still have a handful of escape sequences, there are also boss fights. You have access to multiple weapons if you choose to unlock them, but your main weapon will be a sword. You can find Spirit Shards to equip to power up various aspects or grant different abilities like triple jump. Overall, it was a very nice improvement over the original and I think that if you enjoyed the Blind Forest at all then it is definitely worth buying this game.
6) Animal Crossing: New Horizons (370+ hours, 92.10%)
Here’s the game that I, like many others, always had one question in mind whenever I heard people talk about it. “What do you even do?”. I spent a majority of my time in the early days in a completionist mindset for the game which I think is why I was mostly burned out on it for a month or two once I had gotten the K.K. Slider concert for the first time. However, once I went into this game and started really working on the layout of my island I got legitimately interested. When things were no longer a checklist or a set of chores, it was just fun. While I look online at all the amazing islands that people have made and I can’t even dream of coming close to them, I’m proud of my little island. I decided to not do any terraforming (with a couple of small exceptions like cutting out a few squares for stairs or pushing a waterfall back by 1 so it was visible behind a bridge). By doing this it really feels like I’ve turned a barren island into a home. This game definitely isn’t for everyone though. The question of “What do you really do?” is a very real question, and something you need to figure out if you would enjoy essentially doing things with no reward except making a new home for yourself. You also need to accept that you can’t really play this in the same way as other games, as I learned when I was trying to just do everything. This game works best in short bursts or by having a preset goal in mind of what you want to accomplish in that play session. While Animal Crossing doesn’t really have a story, character development, or even that amazing of a soundtrack (which is still good and works extremely well for the game but is not extremely memorable) like most of my other favorite games as of late it is definitely a game I have found myself going back to continuously. The only thing I wish is that the villagers had more personality. I look at past games in the series and see the villagers I have on my island with distinct personalities that really make them into their own characters. With 8 personality types that give each villager the same set of lines, and 10 available houses for them, you’re going to end up with repeats and it really kills the immersion when you talk to 2 villagers in a row and hear the same thing. Besides that, I really enjoy the decoration aspect of things, especially some of the more natural areas of my island where I really got a forest-y feel out of it. I really enjoy watching things come together. When you wind up with a finished (or at least mostly finished) island and can walk through and look at all the progress you’ve made you really get a sense of accomplishment.
5) Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX (55+ hours, 85.58%)
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is my favorite spinoff franchise by a landslide. Taking the world of Pokemon and inserting it into a roguelike genre with a story and characters beyond anything across the mainline games combined. Unfortunately, based on critic scores and sales throughout the years, most Pokemon fans don’t share that sentiment. That being said, PMD is also much more difficult in comparison to the mainline games, especially in the postgame, which may be what pushes most people away. The main story of PMD involves you, a human, becoming a Pokemon and losing your memory. You form a rescue team with another Pokemon (you determine both your Pokemon and your partner in the beginning, with a personality test determining yours unless you want to choose it yourself) and aim to figure out what happened to make you transform while also helping Pokemon across the world. The story can get extremely dark for a Pokemon game and it is really good at keeping you wanting to see more. The postgame in PMD games is typically some of the best that I have come across. If you go through everything, the postgame can be just as long as the main story with much more challenging encounters. The gameplay revolves around taking missions and going into randomly-generated dungeons in order to rescue stranded Pokemon. Being a roguelike, you move tile by tile and your enemies only move when you do. It works well for the turn-based combat that Pokemon uses. I believe there is still a demo on the eshop that goes through the first couple of dungeons, so I definitely recommend trying the game out. I’m desperately hoping that we get to see more of the PMD franchise on Switch, with my personal hope being a new game and maybe even later on a remake of the Explorers games.
4) The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition (140+ hours, 86.76%)
Witcher 3 definitely gets the “Most Improved” award in terms of my initial thoughts of a game compared to the end. Due to the praise that Witcher 3 always got, I decided to give it a shot. Right from the beginning, it was overall pretty mixed. Combat especially took me a little bit to get used to, with the initial fight against the Griffin taking a lot to pull off. However, once I left White Orchard and got to Velen (and by extension began to understand the combat more thoroughly) the doubt slowly started disappearing. One of the things that I, and of course many others, found best about playing Witcher were the side quests. Side quests are typically very standard. “Save my cat”. “Kill 5 of that monster”. The side quests in Witcher 3 are much more fleshed out and multiple times I found myself having to stop and think about my decisions in them. Without going too much into spoilers, one of my favorite decisions I had to make for a quest came with handling the aftermath of a slaughtered village, leaving behind a lone child, and how you handle those responsible. While some decisions might seem simple to make based on your own moral compass, I always strived to make the decisions I believed Geralt would make. It’s the first time that I can say a game really made me stop and make myself into the character. Putting the “role play” into RPG. While Witcher has its fair few “Kill that monster” quests (a specific type of quest, Contracts), these are more acceptable since even these have story built around them and usually involve some level of investigation and build-up. You’re not going to have to go hunt down 10 Nekkers and then come back to some generic villager conversation. While the side quests are an amazing part of the game, they don’t completely overshadow the main story. You’re hunting down Ciri, your adopted daughter, and so you have to go to various locations throughout the world to follow leads on where she has been recently. Each of these areas have their own stories that explode out in a hundred different directions and lead to tons of time to spend in each area. Between side quests and exploration, I didn’t complete the story until 105+ hours into the game. I probably could have finished it sooner, but the side quests and the world around was way too interesting to just skip over. However there is still the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions to go through which add even more playtime. Both of these stories are really well done and deal with some amazing character moments and decisions. The characters are always an important part to get right in a story this large, and they are done excellently. Some of the standouts from my playthrough are Yennefer, the Baron, Gaunter O’Dimm, and Regis. They all play their roles in the story without feeling like just some key to get from point A to point B. While you’re in the mind of Geralt, you really start to get an understanding of them. Who they are, what they might do, what they like. Your conversations will always highlight which choice will continue you along the story, but skipping over the other dialogue options leaves you missing out on the world that has been crafted. Overall, the game definitely deserves the praise it gets. The beginning is slow, and the combat/movement can be a bit clunky and unintuitive, but the world on display is something I can’t ignore when it comes to being an amazing game.
3) AI: The Somnium Files (30+ hours, 100.00%)
Where to even begin with this game? This is by far the strangest game I’ve ever played… but I love it for that. In this game you are a detective, Kaname Date, who is investigating a series of murders where the victim has their left eye removed. Date has an AI companion in his eyeball named Aiba, who by the way has probably made her way into my top 10 game characters of all time. The game is a visual novel for most of the gameplay. You will visit various sites and look around the room and examine the background looking for things as well as asking questions of people around you. In the case of background items these will not always be related to the case and a lot of the time it is just humor, but I still recommend checking everything just because it is a lot of fun to hear the character interactions. The humor in the game is pretty sexual for the earlier parts but that tends to get toned down further into the different routes. The other part of the gameplay is very different in structure. Date is not a normal detective, he is instead part of a secret division called ABIS which goes into dreams, called Somnium, in order to find out more about a case. When you are in a Somnium you can move around freely, however there is a 6-minute time limit. When you are moving this time limit will continue as normal, but it will slow down drastically when you do not move. You examine various items in order to progress through the puzzle and get to the end to figure out where you’re going. Sometimes these Somnium will have a branching path that will send you down a different route in the game. There are 5 different routes to complete, and you will want to complete them all otherwise the game is ridiculously short and you basically don’t even get any answers to what is going on. It is really easy to go back and complete other routes however. You have access to a flowchart that you can select various sections and go to an individual section of a day or just play through the area as a whole. So you are able to just select a Somnium with a branching path and go from there. These routes all have the same basic concepts but small changes and focuses on different characters will lead you to a different end and give you new details about the case overall. Every time you think you have come up with a conclusion about what is going on the game throws another wrench until just at the end where it starts giving you the final pieces of the puzzle and you just start throwing them together in your head and watch it unfold. The final ending of the game is one of the few games I can say has actually gotten tears out of me and it was an amazing experience all around. I definitely recommend looking into the game as it was a lot of fun to play through and the constant twists and turns of the story are an amazing experience.
2) Fire Emblem: Three Houses (245+ hours, 97.39%)
Let me just say that when I finally got this game for Christmas last year, I didn’t put it down until I had finished it. I fell in love with the characters and teaching them to become ruthless killing machines. The different experiences and points of view that you could take on different paths was amazing, finding small details in one path that add connections to other paths. While my first and favorite path will always be the Black Eagle route, the other routes all add various details that you can’t get through just one story. To understand everything going on in the game, you need to play it all. No one path contains all the information in the game, and by playing through them all you gain a deeper understanding for character motivations and how the world is. The combat was simple enough for beginners to the strategy genre but also allows for more difficult experiences with things like Maddening (not my type of playstyle). The Divine Pulse mechanic, giving you the ability to rewind to a specific action in the battle in order to undo a mistake and/or death, is a crutch that I mostly relied on early in the game before eventually outgrowing it and learning how to handle the battlefield better with more strategy and better units in subsequent playthroughs. While I originally played on Casual Mode, I switched to Classic for my other playthroughs and found myself thrilled by the challenge that permadeath provided. By the end of my Classic playthroughs I had always managed to keep my characters safe, never losing a single one (Divine Pulse excluded). There’s something so much more thrilling about the battles when the game is less about who you can sacrifice and more about how to safely fight your way through. On top of the combat, I of course have to talk about the music. Another one of my favorite soundtracks (I feel like I’m saying that about just about every JRPG I play) and one I’m always happy to hear come on in my playlist. It's amazing to me that I was so worried about my interest in the game and that a franchise I had brushed off in the past would overtake Breath of the Wild in my favorite Switch games. While this game is fantastic and would have absolutely stolen the show if I had played it for last year… because I waited it unfortunately had to place after a game that I knew straight from the reveal would be in my top 2 Switch games, top 2 games period at that, of all time.
1) Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition (280+ hours, 99.40%)
This is going to be a long one, but it’s the #1 spot so I don’t really care. This first paragraph is going to be more rambly backstory than anything else, so if you don’t care about my life story feel free to skip ahead. Far and away my favorite game of the year, which is unfortunate because Three Houses would have also won in a landslide if I had played it last year when it released instead. I talked about it a little bit in my first yearly top 10 list with Xenoblade 2, but my history with Xenoblade is something I find interesting. I watched chuggaaconroy’s LP of Xenoblade as it was coming out back in 2014-2015. Despite enjoying the hell out of what I was seeing, eagerly waiting for 5pm to roll around for the next video directly from Episode 1 (something that despite enjoying chuggaaconroy before, during, and since his Xenoblade LP I was never and have never been as attached to one game), I never bought the game. At the time I was pretty much solely playing Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, Metroid, and Smash for games with the occasional random game in the mix. I had the game in my hands a couple times over the years but never followed through with it. Simple reasons like not wanting to pull out a Wii or just not wanting to pull the trigger on JRPGs. The release of Xenoblade 2 on Switch is one of the things that made me want my Switch (with the double punch of Metroid Prime 4 and Pokemon at E3 2017 being the nail in the coffin). I knew I wanted to broaden my horizons on game genres and franchises, so why not start with the sequel to a game I desperately wanted to play? Obviously, I fell in love with Xenoblade 2 and it kickstarted my love for JRPGs in general. Alongside the build-up to Xenoblade 2, I couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like to get an HD remake or remaster of the original. Fixing the only flaw that it had in the eyes of many people. Every single Direct throughout 2018 and 2019 I kept waiting for that magical announcement. I put “Xenoblade HD” on every single Direct Bingo card despite never actually expecting it. So of course when that September 2019 Direct rolled around, with plenty of evidence in the weeks before that something was happening from MonolithSoft, my hype was at an all-time high… and the reveal had me in tears.
Xenoblade Chronicles is an amazing game, an amazing franchise, built around story, characters, combat, and large, open(ish?) worlds to explore. The original game on the Wii is exceptional in every category except for graphics, which the Definitive Edition has drastically improved. The characters are able to emote in ways that they could only attempt before and it gives a lot more depth to various cutscenes throughout the game. As far as the various categories, the game is just as amazing as I remembered it. The characters all fall into your typical stereotypes, but they are not defined by their stereotypes. They are all people and you are able to connect to them because of it. Characters like Reyn may fall into the childhood friend/brawn-before-brains stereotypes, but he also has plenty of moments where it is clear he is more than that. While some of the characters may not carry the same level of significance throughout the story or into the final chapters, they are all great characters. This is where the idea of European accents for Xenoblade 2 came from, as the original is full of them. If anyone played Xenoblade 2 and was put off by the dub, please give this dub a shot. Characters like Shulk bring chills with their delivery in scenes and I honestly believe that even if you absolutely hated every other voice actor in the game that Adam Howden’s work as Shulk still makes the dub the best way to experience it. The story is amazing with constant twists and turns and is something that I wish everyone would experience once in their lives. At roughly 50-70 hours long it is also plenty long enough with enough content to stretch you easily over the 100 hour mark if you choose to. The game has an action combat system based around various things depending on the character. Characters like Shulk combine an offensive and supportive role by positioning himself around enemies to gain additional effects on his Arts while also healing and defending the rest of the party. Reyn is your typical aggro-drawing tank character to let Shulk get in some big hits without drawing attention to himself. Others are based on summoning elementals to buff the party’s stats and dealing heavy damage. The party all have their unique playstyles that can lead to you finding your favorite out of them no matter how you like to play. Make sure to switch your party around and experiment with the other members, don’t just stick with the first 3. Another thing that MonolithSoft is amazing at; the world is beautiful. There are plenty of different environments including lush fields, dark caves, murky-turned-breathtaking swamps, and icy mountains. Moving around on the surface of the Bionis makes you really feel small. Of course the world isn’t the same if you don’t have the music to back it up, and Xenoblade’s soundtrack is nearly unrivaled (in my opinion). With a huge amount of tracks for various emotions and types of scenes, it’s a soundtrack that I have been listening to for about 5 or 6 years now.
In the end, Xenoblade DE is still only my #2 favorite game on Switch. Still beaten out by Xenoblade 2. There are a couple of reasons for that. I believe the one reason that beats them all out is that Xenoblade 2 will always be the game that introduced me to an entire genre, to my favorite genre, and likely what convinced me that broadening my horizons for games was a good idea in general. However I do also prefer the characters of Xenoblade 2 and find them to boost the game up just enough. While I also prefer the story of XC1 to XC2, I do not believe XC2 to be a weak story like so many others believe. Xenoblade DE is a game that I can’t stop recommending to anyone who listens. My friends across Discord and real life know that I don’t shut up about it, to the point that I’ve been successful in luring multiple people in and getting them hooked. If you’re a fan of amazing stories, characters, soundtracks, and breathtaking views, do yourself a favor and buy this game. It’s an experience unlike any other.
15. Ori and the Will of the Wisps (15+ hours, 96.46%)
14. Octopath Traveler (200+ hours, 100.00%)
13. Animal Crossing: New Horizons (370+ hours, 92.10%)
12. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX (55+ hours, 85.58%)
11. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (125+ hours, 95.87%)
10. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition (140+ hours, 86.76%)
9. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana (45+ hours, 90.37%)
8. Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition (135+ hours, 88.34%)
7. Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna – The Golden Country (55+ hours, 100.00%)
6. AI: The Somnium Files (30+ hours, 100.00%)
5. Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition (240+ hours, 98.85%)
4. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (235+ hours, 93.43%)
3. Fire Emblem: Three Houses (245+ hours, 97.23%)
2. Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition (280+ hours, 99.40%)
1. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (935+ hours, 99.86%)
So there is my list for this year! I’d love to know what games you all played this year and what your favorites were. I think it’s a lot of fun to find out what games people enjoyed even if they didn’t release this year since maybe I find a new game to play out of it!

"Why is San Francisco the way that it is?"

- the_status
^{Discussion Thread, Queen Hillary Publishing, October 15th, 2020}

Boy, am I glad you asked!

^{(but really...am I? I know I said "ask me again on Monday" back in October. I spent a little longer on this than I thought I would...Sorry bud.})
A brief note about me and why you should or shouldn't care what I think:
I was born in San Francisco*, California in the late 1980s (👴 lmao), and grew up there through the '90s and '00s.
^\No, not Moraga. Not Mill Valley. Not Sunnyvale. SAN FRANCISCO. You moron. You absolute dolt.)
I've worked for small startups and watched them become major publicly-traded tech firms.
I've worked for local government and watched planning professionals drive themselves insane from knowing how to fix things but not having the political mandate to act on that knowledge.
I've mansplained to more than my fair share of people who didn't really care why San Francisco is the way that it is today. And you can be next!
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Introduction: "The City" as Everything but a City

"It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world."

- Oscar Wilde

"Hey, Georgia! San Francisco just wanted to say "thank you!" We already have Nancy Pelosi as our Congresswoman, now you're gonna give us John Ossoff as our Congressman!"

- Congressional Leadership Fund Super PAC
Few cities carry as much symbolism as San Francisco. When you consider that San Francisco is a city of not even a million people, its outsize presence in our cultural zeitgeist becomes all the more notable.
For progressives, the city is a besieged bohemian mecca - at once quaint and visionary, and under siege by a looming neoliberal order.
For conservatives, it's an anarchic disastrous mess where unchecked liberal policies have produced a petri dish of societal failure and hedonism, all funded by extreme taxation.
For liberals, it's a hub of technological innovation paradoxically situated precisely where innovation seems most squandered, where byzantine regulations on business and development stymie America's best opportunity to advance into the next century on the backs of immigrant innovators.
All three would likely agree with the assessment of Paul Kanter of Jefferson Airplane:

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

But how did it wind up that way?

Part One: Pre-Industrial San Francisco

Prior to European settlement, what is now San Francisco was Ohlone Indian territory. They were getting along pretty nicely until the Spaniards came up from Mexico with all their missionary bullshit, and that involved a lot of not leaving the Ohlone alone...Things kinda went downhill for the California native population from there in a big way. (Like in a genocide way.)
In the mean time these American people are super into this Manifest Destiny thing and so Alta California starts to have a big illegal immigrant problem from the United States. The San Francisco Bay is by far the best place to anchor a ship on the West Coast, what with the deep calm water and all, so all these illegal immigrants set up a little town called Yerba Buena*. Eventually they decide they're not content just genociding the native people, but also want voting rights and the ability to own the land they're genociding people on, so they go to Sonoma which is one of the only places the Mexicans have guns and they LARP a revolution.
^(\Funny story about the name change. I can explain in the comments if you're curious.)*
It's not the US military doing the LARPing at first but they're definitely super down with it so they decide get in on the fun too and, bingo bango, California's a state now.
Again, brief interlude, and I cannot stress this enough...this whole story REALLY sucks if you're an Ohlone Indian. Like, you're basically being shot and raped murdered by everyone else involved.
So anyway this statehood thing was perfect timing for the Americans because it was only a couple years later that this guy John Sutter sees something shiny in the water. Turns out people will basically crawl over a mountain range or get scurvy and shit themselves around Cape Horn just to get some of this cool shiny stuff, and that's exactly what they did.
So a metric shitload of people came to California starting in 1849. Most were from the Eastern parts of America, but many were from Mexico, Chile, the Philippines, France, and China. (The Chinese came to refer to San Francisco and the surrounding area as "Gold Mountain", and eventually, "Old Gold Mountain") These Forty-Niners were typically blue collar fortune-seekers. Ramshackle types from all over the world who thought they could change their fortunes with a dramatic change of scenery.
Basically right from the get-go, San Francisco was a mostly working class, pluralistic, multicultural and diverse place where people sought the next frontier of wealth, prosperity, and freedom. It was distant from the institutions and power structures that had established dominance in the East. A burgeoning independent metropolis and Capital of the Wild West.
This way of thinking about San Francisco is important because it basically still defines the San Franciscan identity, from the perspective of the people who actually live there, to this day.
TL;DR: San Francisco was:

• Ohlone land, until it was...
• Spanish land, but still mostly empty, until it was...
• American land, but still mostly empty, until it was...
• Still American land, but hella crowded all of the sudden, and now it was defined by...
• Pluralism
• Industriousness
• Innovation
• Freedom and independence from Eastern U.S. institutions
• Being a really shitty place to be an Ohlone Indian despite it being rightfully your land

Part Two: San Francisco as Western Industrial Powerhouse

What we're left with this point is a substantial, rapidly growing port city built around streetcars, horses and buggies, and shipping. It is the jumping-off point for any business endeavor pretty much anywhere in California's interior. And being so distant from the institutions of the East, it starts to develop its own institutions. Banks like Wells Fargo. The Southern Pacific Railroad. Levi Strauss Clothing Company. These dudes were ultimately the only ones to actually get rich from the Gold Rush.
Also still a really shitty place to be for an Ohlone Indian.
(By the way it was also a really shitty place to be Chinese pretty much from the Gold Rush onwards, too. Like, Supreme Court Case shitty....Not just once, either.)
The city caught fire and burned a lot, notably in 1851. This inspired the city to put a phoenix rising from the ashes on its flag. Then it all fell over in an earthquake and burned really good and properly this time in 1906. It rebuilt rapidly in time for the 1915 World's Fair.
This set the stage for what San Francisco would be for the next fifty years or so. An industrious, blue collar, capitalist metropolis. The gateway to the Pacific and the crown jewel of West Coast industry and innovation. A city dominated by organized labor, and, accordingly, progressive and sometimes even radical politics.
Then World War II happened and the U.S. was hella racist. They were hella racist against the Japanese people, to the point that they put them in concentration camps and made them abandon all their property. They were a little less racist to black people, and let them have jobs building planes and ships and stuff, but still too racist to let them fight in the war or live wherever they wanted. So a lot of black people moved to the Bay Area to help build planes and ships and stuff (plus it was still way better than staying in the South.)
With the limited places banks and neighborhood groups would let them live, a lot of them moved in to the existing working-class neighborhoods by the heavy industrial and shipbuilding facilities, and a lot of them moved into the place where the Japanese people had previously lived because, hey, I wonder why all these apartments are empty? Surely that's not a bad omen about how the government will treat minority communities, right?
So now the government has a black neighborhood on its hands and it's very inconveniently right next to some important stuff. Not to be racist (by the way just so you know one of my friends is black) but I think that means the neighborhood is "blighted" because of, you know...all that jazz. So they decided to do a Robert Moses all over the place and kick all the black people out and bulldoze their homes and stuff.
As you can imagine, a lot of minority community groups have wound up being pretty skeptical as a general rule of the vision laid out by mostly white politicians and urban planners for the future of San Francisco as it pertains to their communities.
So, in 1940, San Francisco was 95% white, but right after the war that number started falling steadily. It never stopped, and around the mid-1990s or so San Francisco became a majority-minority city, which it still is to this day.
Meanwhile the government was basically subsidizing suburban sprawl, building urban freeways and giving out super lucrative home loans to veterans ^{(minorities need not apply}). White people who were TOTALLY not racist but were just CONCERNED about the increasing diversity of inner cities started moving out in large numbers. In San Francisco they were largely replaced by immigrants. Overall the population began to decline around 1950 and wouldn't reach 1950 levels again until 2000. In contrast, the Bay Area was still rapidly growing by way of suburban sprawl. The population of the entire Bay Area almost doubles over this same timeframe, from 2.6 million to 6.7 million.
From an economic perspective, by the time the Vietnam War rolls around, the military figures out it can ship things a lot faster and cheaper if it miniaturizes the concept of a warehouse into a weatherized steel box, and then uses trucks and cranes in big lots by the water to load and unload these new "shipping containers" directly on and off ships.
Well, the problem is, the San Francisco isn't really set up for this. And it's not exactly a cheap, easy, or even smart idea to try to change that. So they do it in Oakland instead. And in only a few years, San Francisco loses its status as the primary shipping and industrial city of the Bay. American manufacturing declines generally, but even what little of it stays in the Bay Area doesn't stay in San Francisco.

The city of San Francisco lost twelve thousand manufacturing jobs between 1962 and 1972, the years when most of the Edgewater Homeless were adolescents. (Arthur D. Little Inc. 1975). The Edgewater Boulevard corridor, which had provided employment for most of the residents in the neighborhood up the hill, were particularly hard hit. Most of San Francisco's largest factories were located off Edgewater. It was also the hub for the region's transportation, communications, and utility sectors, including the Southern Pacific Railroad and, most important, the shipyards. Throughout the mid-1950s, the Hunters Point navy shipyard was the engine of heavy industry in San Francisco, with eighty-five hundred employees (Military Analysts Network 1998); but in 1974 it closed down.
...
Economists have shown statistically that high rents, high levels of income inequality, and low rental vacancy rates are the three variables most consistently associated with elevated levels of homelessness in any given city (Quigly et al. 2001; U.S. Bureau of the Census 2001). From the 1990s through the 2000s, San Francisco County ranked number one in the nation with respect to all these variables, and, predictably, its homeless population burgeoned.

^{- from Righteous Dopefiend\}, Phillipe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, University of California Press, 2009*)
So the city is pivoting away from being a blue-collar place where people live and work, and transitioning into a white-collar place where people commute to work, and otherwise pretty stagnant and kind of rife for the circumstances that bring the proliferation of homelessness. This defines the political order of the era. Planners and politicians are envisioning a new San Francisco, where it serves as the Manhattan to the Bay Area's New York, but with suburbs this time, if only they could stamp out all that blight.
TL;DR San Francisco is changing in the following ways in the middle of the 20th century:

• White people are leaving
• Immigrants and POC are moving in
• The city is shrinking in population overall
• The region as a whole is still growing because of suburban sprawl
• The city was rapidly losing its industrial jobs
• The people who depended on those jobs were suddenly unable to properly care for their families
• The city is not defined in any meaningful way as a haven for the rich, but is instead, from a residential perspective, in a state of slow decay and stagnation, populated by blue collar workers, people in public housing, and government bureaucrats
• Residential vacancy rates are low and rents are modestly rising but there is nothing at all like the housing crisis that we know of today occurring
• The planners and politicians are focused on remaking the city into a regional and global capitalist powerhouse, and using bulldozers and cranes to do it
• Conditions are shaping up to be pretty much ideal to drive an increase in homelessness (low vacancy, rising rents, rising income inequality)
• It was still a really shitty place to be an Ohlone Indian despite it being rightfully your land
• A bunch of weirdos were showing up and doing a lot of drugs. Oh yeah, about that, because it's kind of important...

Part Three: Flowers in your Hair

San Francisco's pluralism, its labor politics, and its independence from the hegemonic economic and cultural institutions of the regions to the East made it a mecca for free-thinking liberals and radicals well before the Vietnam War era. It was a working-class Catholic city, so in that sense it was fairly conservative, but it was also a cultural center of the Beat Movement. So when the counterculture movement gained steam across the Anglosphere in the 1960s, San Francisco was the place to be.
On January 14, 1967, a crowd of approximately 20-30,000 people gathered at the Polo Grounds in Golden Gate Park at what became known as the Human Be-In to suffer for fashion in the frigid San Francisco fog. In hindsight we understand this event to be the kickoff festivities of the Summer of Love.

The Human Be-In was the beginning of the story for thousands of people, many of whom would go on to take primary roles in San Francisco's revolution.
...
"When it started out, the city was antiblack, antigay, antiwoman. It was a very uptight Irish Catholic city," said Brian Rohan, [Michael] Stepanian's legal sidekick and another brawling protégé of Vincent Hallinan. "We took on the cops, city hall, the Catholic Church. Vince Hallinan taught us never to be afraid of bullies."
By taking on the bullies, the new forces of freedom began to liberate San Francisco, neighborhood by neighborhood.

^{- David Talbot, Season of the Witch (Free Press Publishing 2012})
As Acemoglu and Robinson repeatedly emphasize in this subreddit's bible, Why Nations Fail: Peace, Prosperity, Poverty, and Read Another Book (Crown Publishing Group, 2012), societies prosper when they produce inclusive institutions, and they collapse when they are subject to extractive institutions. But San Francisco progressivism, with its roots in the 1960s counterculture movement, sought a way out of this equation.
This movement believed the institutions of American culture at the time were extractive. But they blamed this on the very existence of the institutions themselves*.* They didn't try to replace extractive institutions with inclusive ones. Instead they imagined a society which was basically free of institutions entirely.

In this view one certainly couldn't trust the government or the church to dictate what experiences might be pleasurable or useful, so best to just allow or try everything. Some experiential and psychic explorers had wonderful insights and epiphanies, and they did break through to the other side, and some ended up with Jim Jones and the People's Temple.

^{- David Byrne, The Bicycle Diaries (Penguin Books, 2009})
This way of viewing the city was as a location for small, locally-grounded communities. Where interference from forces larger than the community brought only damage. This was fundamentally at odds with the global capitalist Manhattan-esque powerhouse that city planners envisioned for the place.
Where the planners were playing the role of Robert Moses, the new counterculture aligned with Jane Jacobs. They tended to believe, like her, that redevelopment, construction, change, etc...were threats. That in San Francisco's old 1800s construction there was community and culture, and that building over this old-ness would destroy that, as it had in the Fillmore when the city tried to get rid of all the black people...uh...blight. As Jacobs would put it:

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.
...
If a city area only has new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction.
...
If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts - studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions - these go into old buildings.

^{- from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, Random House, 1961}
From this perspective, there was only one threat to what made San Francisco special, and it came in the form of a planning department permit.

To recapitulate the state of affairs circa 1970, the progrowth coalition had complete command of San Francisco's physical and economic development. The dream of remaking San Francisco into a West Coast Manhattan was rapidly taking solid form as skyscrapers went up, BART tracks were laid, and lands were cleared for redevelopment.
...
The progrowth regime accomplished much, for better and for worse. It changed the face of San Francisco. In doing so, however, it fostered resistance among those the regime threatened or whose own dreams of the city were ignored. In dialectical fashion, the progrowth regime created the conditions that gave rise to its nemesis, the slow-growth movement.

^{- from Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975 - 1991, Richard Edward DeLeon University Press of Kansas 1992}
So now we've got a lot of different coalitions in San Francisco. There's the new-age hippies, the Chinese immigrants, the black community, the El Salvadorians and the Mexicans. There's a new gay and lesbian community in the Castro. And they're all pretty much okay letting each other have their corner of the city, because the balance of power is split and balkanized. None holds enough power to threaten the other. But they all, to varying degrees, feel threatened by development. So they start to organize their opposition to the pro-growth regime.

Baghdad by the Bay is now the Balkans by the Bay. Everything is pluribus, nothing is unum. Hyperpluralism reigns. The city has no natural majority; its majorities are made, not found. That is a key to understanding the city's political culture: Everyone is a minority. That means mutual tolerance is essential, social learning is inevitable, innovation is likely, and democracy is hard work. Economic change has produced social diversity, and social diversity is the root of the city's political culture. One of the controlling objectives of the progressive movement has been to slow the pace of economic change to protect against threats to social diversity. The economic forces that helped create San Francisco's political culture could also destroy it. The first line of defense is the antiregime.
...
The ultimate function of the antiregime is to protect the community from capital. It is a regime with the "power to" thwart the exercise of power by others in remaking the city. The primary instrument of this power is local government control over land use and development. In San Francisco, these growth controls have achieved unprecedented scope in these types of limits they impose on capital. They are used to suppress, filter, or deflect the potentially destructive forces of market processes on urban life as experienced by people in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities.

^{- from Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975 - 1991, Richard Edward DeLeon University Press of Kansas 1992}
Since demand for housing in SF proper isn't really rising all that much due to suburbanization and white flight, shutting down this growth doesn't yet manifest in a visceral way in the form of rising housing prices. The paradigm of supply and demand is theoretical to this coalition because it does not have any tangible consequences. So they reject the theory and get to work passing new legal restrictions on development. They build powerful local interest groups to throw their weight around whenever a new development proposal arises for development in their communities. This policy and organizing infrastructure persists to this day.
But when suburban sprawl in the Bay Area hits the boundaries of the greenbelt and there's no more room to absorb new housing demand in the suburbs, and as the tastes of the American hipster return to the same kinds of cultural amenities Jane Jacobs described above, the equation shifts in a big way. Starting with the first tech boom in the 1990s.
TL;DR: In the postwar era, San Francisco blossoms culturally as an epicenter for radical liberal thought.

• In the stagnating ashes of the local manufacturing and shipping economy, the blue collar residences are taken over by a new pluralistic group of people from a vast array of demographics.
• Meanwhile, planners and politicians remake the city as an office hub to house the workforce of the suburban Bay Area as a whole.
• The radical populist pluralism of the residents of San Francisco proper clashes with this vision for the city and they build an anti-growth coalition to combat it.
• Because of the stagnating population this does not yet have consequences on housing costs - suburbanization is continuing to absorb regional demand rather than the city proper.
• These consequences are hidden for decades - long enough for these groups to re-write local development law and cement their anti-growth coalition into local institutions, a sort of Maginot Line against growth.
• Oh, and for just a split second, on Alcatraz, it looks like it might not be such a shitty place to be an Ohlone Indian, but then pretty much right away it is again.

Part Four: The Tech Boom and the Rise of the YIMBYs

A major impediment to a more efficient spatial allocation of labor is housing supply constraints. These constraints limit the number of US workers who have access to the most productive of American cities. In general equilibrium, this lowers income and welfare of all US workers.

^{- Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, "Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth," NBER Working Paper 21154, National Bureau of Economic Standards, Cambridge, MA, May 2015 (revised June 2015})
Jane Jacobs did a really good job explaining why, strictly from a cultural perspective, suburbs suck and cities are awesome. Weirdly for a long time a lot of people thought it was the other way around, but by the 1990s it wasn't cool to be all suburban anymore and it was way more punk rock to be in a city.
So people who worked in Silicon Valley - largely younger people, fresh out of college - started wanting to live in San Francisco and Oakland instead, because the rest of the Bay Area was (and still is) sterile and suburban.
When the personal computer became a household fixture and the internet started reaching the mass market, suddenly there was a lot more money to be made in computers. All of the sudden San Francisco's population went from slowly rising to rising pretty quickly again. In 1990 San Francisco's population was lower than it was in 1950. By 2000 it was higher. By 2010 it was a lot higher. Now it's over 20% higher than it was in 1990.
San Francisco has always been a pretty expensive place to live, but that was mostly because it wasn't that depressed economically, plus it was beautiful from an aesthetic perspective and the weather was pretty much the tits.
All of the sudden, though, it was still beautiful and the weather was still amazing, but it wasn't just "not that depressed economically" anymore. Suddenly it was a straight-up boomtown.
And it still only has a fraction of the population - and, crucially, housing stock - that the Bay Area as a whole does.
So this entire planning and political infrastructure had spent decades building in one direction, where people moving to the Bay Area for work would live in the suburbs. And in response this anti-growth regime of pluralistic populist left-wing hyper-local community groups succeeded in pretty much freezing development by law in San Francisco proper under the assumption that everyone would just go work in Silicon Valley instead. And then the cultural and economic inertia does a 180 on them. Now everyone wants to live in San Francisco even if they have to work somewhere else.
These shifts - some local, some national, some global - have concentrated themselves in an unprecedented way in a city of less than a million people, focused on the tip of a peninsula only 7 miles across. With so little room for these effects to manifest, they manifest with a vengeance. There is nowhere to spread them out across. They hit like a tall glass of Bacardi 151.
What this does to the housing prices is totally predictable.

California’s home prices and rents have risen because housing developers in California’s coastal areas have not responded to economic signals to increase the supply of housing and build housing at higher densities. A collection of factors inhibit developers from doing so. The most significant factors are:
- Community Resistance to New Housing. Local communities make most decisions about housing development.Because of the importance of cities and counties in determining development patterns, how local residents feel about new housing is important. When residents are concerned about new housing, they can use the community’s land use authority to slow or stop housing from being built or require it to be built at lower densities.
- Environmental Reviews Can Be Used to Stop or Limit Housing Development. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires local governments to conduct a detailed review of the potential environmental effects of new housing construction (and most other types of development) prior to approving it. The information in these reports sometimes results in the city or county denying proposals to develop housing or approving fewer housing units than the developer proposed. In addition, CEQA’s complicated procedural requirements give development opponents significant opportunities to continue challenging housing projects after local governments have approved them.
- Local Finance Structure Favors Nonresidential Development. California’s local government finance structure typically gives cities and counties greater fiscal incentives to approve nonresidential development or lower density housing development. Consequently, many cities and counties have oriented their land use planning and approval processes disproportionately towards these types of developments.
- Limited Vacant Developable Land. Vacant land suitable for development in California coastal metros is extremely limited. This scarcity of land makes it more difficult for developers to find sites to build new housing.

^{Mac Taylor, High Housing Costs, Causes and Consequences, California Legislative Analyst's Office, 2015}
Remember, this is all happening so fast that not only are the institutions built out of the antigrowth regime movement still exerting their power on development, the people who built them are. They're still alive and showing up to community meetings. Remember, if you were 20 in 1975, you're just barely at retirement age now.
It's easy to understand why these people aren't responding to the price signals that are ringing alarm bells to everyone else. If they're renting, they're protected by rent control - their rent price is fixed to a modest cost of living increase as long as they don't move. This means they are totally insulated from a rising rental market, even if the direct consequence of rent control is suppressing supply and causing prices to rise for everyone else.
And if they own instead of rent, wouldn't they be priced out from rising property taxes? Not in California they won't, thanks to Prop 13!*
^(\Prop 13 does not apply to forcible land transfers of tracts rightfully claimed by Ohlone Indians or their descendants)*
These economic incentives ensure that their interests remain the same as they were in 1975 - all upside for them to oppose growth, and no downside. And in the face of this economic incentive, even the Fern Gully fairy tale that developers are inherently anti-environment is hardly necessary to get them to support restrictions which have a negative consequence on the environment and the economy:

Not all change is good, but much change is necessary if the world is to become more productive, affordable, exciting, innovative, and environmentally friendly....At a local level, activists oppose change by fighting growth in their own communities. Their actions are understandable, but their local focus equips them poorly to consider the global consequences of their actions. Stopping new development in attractive areas makes housing more expensive for people who don't currently live in those areas. Those higher housing costs in turn make it more expensive for companies to open businesses. In naturally low-carbon-emissions areas, like California, preventing development means pushing it to less environmentally friendly places, like noncoastal California and suburban Phoenix. Local environmentalism is often bad environmentalism.

^{- from Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser, Penguin Group, 2011}
It's been long enough since the first tech boom, though, that today there are a lot of people for whom these incentives do not align.
If you have to move apartments for whatever reason, you lose rent control.
If you're a newcomer to the city, you never really got it in the first place.
If you're an environmentalist who understands how carbon emissions work, you want to see more sustainable infill.
Or, like me, if you're a native who has all these advantages but still wants the city to be a place where people can come and live and seek prosperity, regardless of their origins, you simply understand that this status quo must be broken.
This is where the YIMBY movement gets its start. The YIMBY movement is nearly global at this point, but the most well-publicized first-movers in the fight got started in San Francisco about 5 years ago.

In San Francisco...things get weird. Here the tech boom is clashing with tough development laws and resentment from established residents who want to choke off growth to prevent further change.
[Sonja] Trauss is the result: a new generation of activist whose pro-market bent is the opposite of the San Francisco stereotypes — the lefties, the aging hippies and tolerance all around.
Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich.
...
But the anger she has tapped into is real, reflecting a generational break that pits cranky homeowners and the San Francisco political establishment against a cast of newcomers who are demanding the region make room for them, too.
...
Many longtime San Franciscans view groups like [the San Francisco Bay Area Renter's Federation (SF BARF)] as yet another example of how the technology industry is robbing San Francisco of its San Francisco-ness. Far from the hippies of the 1960s, many of today’s migrants lean libertarian — drawn by start-up dreams or to work for the likes of Google or Apple, two of the world’s most valuable companies. They tend to share a belief, either idealistically or naïvely, depending on who is judging, that corporations can be a force for social good and change.
But BARF members are so single-minded about housing that they can be hard to label politically. They view San Francisco progressives as, in fact, fundamentally conservative. That is because, to the group members at least, progressive positions on housing seem less about building the city and more about keeping people like them out.

^{- Conor Dougherty, 'In a Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to 'Build, Baby, Build', New York Times, April 16th, 2016}
All of the sudden a new coalition starts to form, drawing on the infrastructure of the old pro-growth urban regime and the influence of tech companies and young renters fed up with rising rental prices in the face of the demand.
SF BARF gives way to less eccentric and more mainstream organizations like YIMBY Action. These groups start releasing voter guides and organizing for pro-growth political candidates.
This shift is how San Francisco elected a YIMBY mayor, and how it elected, and then re-elected, the most YIMBY state representative in maybe the whole U.S.
Sen. Wiener's success at the state level has been a major turning point in the YIMBY fight. Escalating these reforms to the state level pulls small cities and towns out of their Prisoner Dilemma, whereby each individual city stands to benefit if everyone else builds housing, but stands to suffer a disproportionate amount of harm in the form of demand on their infrastructure and services if only they do.
He has built a pro-housing coalition with, among others, fellow Bay Area legislators Sen. Nancy Skinner (D - Oakland/Berkeley), Assemblymember David Chiu (D-San Francisco), and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D - Oakland/Berkeley). The YIMBY movement in Sacramento is now largely driven by urban Bay Area legislators, pushing against pro-suburb Republicans and substantial anti-gentrification coalitions from the Los Angeles area.
Housing development has accellerated in both San Francisco and Oakland on the back of new-found public support for housing supply growth. I have no reason to doubt this shift will continue as the grip of the old anti-growth regime loosens. It's inevitable once the incentives of the pluralistic components of the political coalitions shift.
Eventually the people with Prop 13 protections will stop owning their homes, one way or another. Eventually the people with pre-tech rents will move and the units will be rented again at market rate.
And when that happens to a large enough degree, the incentives driving the dominant political coalition will shift in earnest towards the evidence-based conclusions of economists and environmentalists. I'd go so far as to say we're past the beginnings of this, and maybe even past the turning point.
But in the mean time, San Francisco is a hotly contested development battlefield.
And to top it all off, if this sudden crunch wasn't already a recipe for capturing the national and global imagination, now it's happening right in front of the people who work at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit.
This makes the drama rife for all of us to watch unfold.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
^{Thank you for coming to my TED talk.}

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Add £10 play 10 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
PaddyPower Games - Cashback £20
Add £10 play 10 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
The Football Pools - Cashback £24.75
Sign up for the £10 a month subscription, cancel this after 30 days
Lottomart - Cashback £18
Add £10 - Play 10 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
Genting Slots - Cashback £25
Add £30 play 30 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
OhMyDosh - Cashback £40+
Referral gives an extra £1, sign up through the ref link at the top of the post to get the bonus!
Gala Bingo - Cashback £17.50
Deposit at least £5, you'll get a £10 slots bonus and 100 free spins, these carry hefty wagering requirements, Open any slot and play the minimum spin size, play until you lose all of the money in your account or complete the wagering requirements on the bonus funds. Withdraw any remaining balance.
BGO - £10 Cashback
Deposit at least £15. Play 15 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. DONT ACCEPT the welcome bonus from BGO.
Lottosocial - Cashback £4
Sign up to Lotto Social - Use your correct phone number when joining as it is the only way to login to your account. Purchase 10 lines for £1, after making a purchase go to your account page and find the list of syndicates your are in, leave the syndicates to avoid making any more payments.
Cheeky Bingo - £10 Cashback
Deposit £10 and get a £40 welcome bonus, just play bingo with all of your funds and hope to get some wins, bonus has 4x wagering requirements.

Quidco - Cashback £100+

Quidco don't offer a sign up bonus, find my ref link at the top of the post if you want to help me out!
All of the offers on quidco are much the same as topcashback, the only offer worth noting is the betfair casino offer which pays £100
Betfair - £100 cashback
Add £100 and play 100 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.

Cashbackearners - Cashback £180+

Sign up Bonus
Get a £6.5 sign up bonus, think this works with or without the ref link, links are at the top of the post!
To find these offers just search for casino on the site.
All of these offers state that you only need to make a deposit, its best to play through the deposit 1x to ensure that the cashback is paid.
LuckyMeSlots - Cashback £15
Add £15 and play 15 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
Spin Genie - Cashback £12.5
Add £12.5 and play 12.5 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
Cashmo - Cashback £10
Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses.
Ice36 -Cashback £15
Add £15 and play 15 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
Spinhill Casino - Cashback £15
Add £15 and play 15 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
Galacasino - Cashback £30
add £30 and play 30 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
Casino765 - Cashback £12.5
Add £12.5 and play 12.5 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
Casinosuperwins - Not recommended, bad site, awful support
Casino2020 - Cashback £15
Add £15 and play through £15 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses.
Pocketwin - Cashback £10
Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses.
The Sun Vegas - Cashback £15
Add £15 and play 15 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
DrSlot - Cashback £10
Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses.
MrSpin - Cashback £10
Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses.
PrimeCasino - Cashback £15
Add £15 and play 15 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
ConquestAdor - Cashback £10
Add £10 play 10 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
MFortune - Cashback £10
Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses.
Thanks for reading, hope this of use to some people, happy earning!

Up to £219.11 profit in cashback through gambling offers with TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh
TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh always have a number of gambling offers available, with the offered amounts often changing daily or weekly. There are currently quite a few offers available on each where the cashback amount is more than the required deposit or wager amount. I've done most of these and always keep an eye out for when the amounts increase, to make sure I can get the most for my money. The offers they have on at the moment are some of the best I've ever seen for them.
The first step is to sign up for the cashback sites if you haven't already. If you use a referral link to sign up then you can get an extra bonus once your cashback becomes payable:

• TopCashback referral link (£5 bonus / non-ref link (no bonus)
• Quidco referral link (£5 bonus) / non-ref link (no bonus)
• OhMyDosh referral link (£2 bonus) / non-ref link (no bonus)

Then the next step is to work through the offers. These are all only available for new customers, so if you already have an account with one of the sites then you won't be eligible for the offer from them unfortunately. It's also worth checking the terms as some have specific wagering requirements, for example Betfair Casino must be completed within 3 days of opening your account and low risk roulette bets (covering 25 or more of the 37 outcomes) are excluded from counting towards the wager.
Offers

#	Site	From	Cashback	Deposit/Wager	Profit
1	Coral Casino	TCB	£42	£10	£32
2	Ladbrokes Casino	TCB / Quidco	£42	£10	£32
3	Betfair Casino	Quidco	£40	£10	£30
4	William Hill Casino	TCB / Quidco	£54	£25	£29
5	Pokerstars	TCB / Quidco	£32	£20	£12
6	Paddy Power Games	TCB / Quidco	£20	£10	£10
7	Lottomart	TCB	£18	£10	£8
8	Foxy Bingo	OMD	£12.50	£5	£7.50
9	Gala Bingo	OMD	£12.50	£5	£7.50
9	Buzz Bingo	OMD	£17.50	£10	£7.50
10	Lottoland	TCB	£22	£15.01	£6.99
11	Tombola	TCB / Quidco	£15	£10	£5
12	Cheeky Bingo	OMD	£15	£10	£5
13	BingoPort	TCB	£4	-	£4
14	LottoGo	OMD	£4.50	£2	£2.50
15	Free Slots Genie	OMD	£1.25	-	£1.25
16	Profit Accumulator	TCB	£1.05	-	£1.05
17	The Best Free Spins	OMD	£1	-	£1
18	Free Spins Wizard	OMD	£1	-	£1
19	Pick My Postcode	TCB	£0.90	-	£0.90
20	Search Lotto	TCB	£0.82	-	£0.82
21	Free Spins Loopy	OMD	£0.80	-	£0.80
22	Super Free Slots	OMD	£0.70	-	£0.70
23	FreeBingoGenie	OMD	£0.60	-	£0.60
24	bgo	OMD	£10	£10	-
24	Slingo	OMD	£20	£20	-

Notes
If you complete all these offers then you should make £207.11 cashback in profit through the offers alone. If you are new to the cashback sites and sign up through referral links then this will be £219.11 instead. There's also a chance you can make a profit on any or all the offers and walk away with even more.
There's also a final few key points:

• Make sure you have all adblockers and tracking protection switched off as otherwise this may lead to issues with the cashback tracking correctly.
• I've listed the highest paying in terms of deposit/wager to cashback offers here, but if you have a preference for one cashback site over the other then they often offer very similar amounts if you'd rather go with the other instead.
• Similarly, some sites (OhMyDosh in particular) offer a lower cashback amount but also a lower deposit/wager amount, which may be more appealing to some.
• Some of the offers may require a premium subscription to receive the mentioned amount. I wrote a guide to maximising cashback that explains these.
• I don't like to say the cashback is guaranteed as all the cashback sites say it never is, but I've never had an issue with any of these sites, whether through gambling or other offers.
• Please be aware that these all these offers all are gambling, so I'd highly recommend depositing and wagering only the mimimum amount required to get the cashback, then withdrawing any profit you may have made.
• Please Be Gamble Aware when using these sites.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of these offers :)

I recently posted some other Neopets drama and people seemed to enjoy it, so here's something a great deal longer! It's a doozy.
This happened in November 2019, but I’ve been too lazy to write up the story until now. It’s known throughout the Neopets community by many names: UCgate, Savage Saturday, UC Santa, etc, and is undoubtedly one of the biggest bits of recent Neopets drama.

What is Neopets?

If you were a kid on the internet in the early 2000s, you probably know what Neopets is. It was the original virtual pet site: essentially, kids could adopt and name small images of fictional animals. You could play minigames, collect and sell items, explore the flash-based world, and chat with people using a bare-bones (and heavily censored) forum. Founded by two college students, it was originally backed by Scientologists (which the founders didn't know at first), before being bought by Viacom (Nickelodeon), and is now owned by Jumpstart, an edutainment company.
Since the early days of the site, one of the most important things was Paintbrushes: items that could change your pet’s color. Rarer ones add unique features, like costumes, wings, or new poses. Back in the site’s heyday they were impossibly expensive for most kids playing, an unattainable dream, but are easier to acquire today.
Neopets still has a surprisingly large fanbase (though nowhere near what it was), mostly made up of 20/30-somethings who grew up playing Neopets as kids. By now it’s a genuine surprise to see an actual child in the Neopets community. Almost everyone is there for nostalgia, myself included.
And people are willing to spend egregious amounts of money and/or time for a taste of their childhood.

Unconverted Neopets

On April 16, 2007, Neopets underwent a major change: adding the ability to customize your pets. This was controversial for a couple of reasons, but the relevant one is that nearly all of the Neopet art changed. The poses and designs players adopted were converted to new art without warning…unless you had a painted pet.
Certain painted pets were allowed to avoid conversion and stay as "unconverted" or "UC" pets, though you could still choose to convert them. This was a relief for a lot of people who had already painted their pets, but you couldn't make new UC Neopets (and still can't). If you wanted the old Royal Girl Aisha design (UC on left, Converted on right), tough luck. The only way to get one now was by someone else giving you one, or through trading.
See, you’re not supposed to trade Neopets for Neopoints, Neocash, items, or real-world money; that's against TOS. Only Neopets can be exchanged for other Neopets. UC Neopets started out uncommon, but over time as more accounts went inactive, more kids converted their pets without knowing, they increased exponentially in value. Black market Neopets trading had existed beforehand, but now UC Neopets go from anywhere from $10 to $300, with rumors of incredibly rare/well-named ones even going for thousands of dollars. It’s risky business since you can easily get your account frozen if you get caught, locking those UCs in a banned account permanently.
Worse yet, most UCs are from hacked accounts. Back in 2013, there was a database leak that many hackers have gone through to find valuables. Having a UC, especially a rare one, can make your account a target for hacking, though most hackers don’t hit active accounts.
Since they’re so rare, having a UC is seen as a status symbol. People will brag about how long they’ve had them, if they were gifted them, how long it took to trade for them, etc. Some people collect and hoard them. It makes the trading community a pretty hostile place, and people are very slow to trade the more valuable ones.

Stuck Pets

Now that we've talked about UCs, it's time to switch gears a bit. You can abandon your Neopets and toss them into the pound for other users to adopt. The catch is that Neopets runs on spaghetti code and the pound is broken. Certain 2-character strings get "stuck," essentially meaning that you can't see more of them by hitting the "view more pets" button, and can only be adopted by searching for their names manually. But since Neopets was popular in the early 2000s, they often have terrible names like "xXx_SunshineKween_xXx" or "SaSuKeLoVeR1992" making them difficult to search for. But people do it (myself included), and there's an entire website dedicated to finding pets stuck in the pound. If you don't click that link, well, there's a lot. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; it's impossible to guess how many pets are stuck in the pound, easily in the hundred thousands, most of whom are lost to time.
If you put these two things together, you'd think that there's MIGHT be a chance of finding UC pets stuck in the pound. But people have been doing it for years, meaning that all of the obvious names were long found.

The "Spreadsheet" Method

I'm not sure of the exact origin, but the Spreadsheet Method was popularized by the page /~tileset, which has since been taken down. Luckily the information is now on /~megablade, for those curious. (I believe you'll have to be logged into Neopets to see it)
Basically, you could build a bot to find stuck Neopets, but the bot-detection is pretty good so you'd risk being banned. One user figured out how to get around it: by creating image URLs of Neopet names and inputting them into an HTML file, you could preview their icon. They then created a spreadsheet that let you create thousands of these image previews (usually by tacking on additional numbers/characters to the pet's name), as well as linking them to the pet's webpage. The result looks like this. All you had to do was search through the icons for uncustomized UC pets, which were easy to spot, and then check if they had owners.
Now, UC trading is notoriously hard to get into, often requiring months upon months of trading to even get to a shitty one. Like everyone else in the community I thought "oh wow, this is my chance!" and spent a lot of time with the Tileset method.
The results? Absolutely nothing. Or at least, absolutely nothing for most people. A few people found some mediocre pets, and one user managed to get a UC Plushie Uni, a pet so rare that there are probably less than twenty on active accounts. It was an exciting time, with people who found UCs getting reported under the pretense that they were lying and had bought their pets. But the general mood was excitement; maybe we could get our dream Neopets if we just searched hard enough.

And then, someone posted a list of 700 UCs stuck in the pound

November 22nd, 2019.
"Enjoy or something, IDK," began the page. "I just want to see the PC go crazy." Approximately 700 pets. The vast majority of them were fairly common, but there was some crazy rare stuff as well. I never did the math, but it was upwards of $2000 worth of pets on the black market. It was a mad dash; everyone went for their dream pets first but settled for whatever they could grab.
Someone then bragged that they had grabbed 12 UCs from the list. The gifter responded to them to "get fricked and commit sudoku, greedy btard :)" and was promptly banned.
I was at work when this happened and completely missed the original drop. But it was pretty obvious from general reaction (on discord, reddit, facebook, forums, on-site and off) that people were salty.
People often joke that Neopets is dying. But there are a lot of active users. 700 wasn't even enough to placate the trading community, much less everyone who wanted a UC but was too scared to get into trading. Thousands of people, suddenly, wanted UCs; they flocked to the trading boards in droves. That night was the craziest I've ever experienced on neo, winding up in a 30-person discord call in which a well-known hacker converted a UC Darigan Wocky, one of the rarest UCs.
The trading community was in an uproar for a few days. Regulars on the trading boards lambasted the new UCs devaluing their pets; new players entered the trading scene; some people got their dream pets and stopped trading entirely. The big question was: what will happen to the trading market? Well, a year later, I can say: pretty much nothing. But it was a big talking point for quite a while.
The original gifter was nicknamed UC Santa; lots of boards were made saying things like "I've been so good! Bring me a UC for Christmas UC Santa!" Then you had people getting mad at the begging boards, people mad at the people mad, an endless spiral of salt.
Things calmed down, slowly, until early December.

UC Santa Returns

A few weeks later, a new user named johanna_barker (Sweeney Todd reference) appeared claiming to be the UC Santa. Whether or not they actually were is a question for the ages. They dropped a few more pets to let people know they were legit, then said they wanted to help people out with finding as many dream pets as they could.
The community, again, went nuts. Lots of begging, lots of salt; big lists were made up of people's dream pets for UC Santa to look at. A few people reported receiving pets, but not many. johanna_barker turned off their mails so no one could directly contact them, but that didn't stop people from trying. Lots of people asked how they did it: the Spreadsheet method couldn't work that well, could it? We never really got an answer.
Then, johanna_barker mentioned that Something would happen on December 28, 2019. The first few boards mentioned it just in passing, before making a bigger and bigger deal about it. By the later boards, they were kicking things off with "December 28th, 6:00 pm NST, don't forget!" Word spread fast, everyone waiting with bated breath.
Even if we didn't get our dream pets, the drama was going to be something worth witnessing. Hell, someone even made a bingo sheet.

December 28th, 2019

A couple of boards were made in advance by johanna_barker, posting a few more stuck pets for people to snatch up. They requested that people didn't spam/beg (which they did, of course) and just to be patient. The pets would be posted on the page /~can_i_haz_ucs, and johanna_barker said that there were over 8,000 pageviews on that day alone. Note that we're not sure if that's unique pageviews or not, but even if people were refreshing that's a lot.
6:00 pm. All of us refresh to find this on the page.
[Img description: "MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA / Syke you bunch of beggars / if you want your dream UC just buy it with USD / [list of cheat sites]"]
The final viewcount clocked in around 21,000. johanna_barker left us with one final message before being permanently banned for mentioning cheating.
There was salt, anger, laughter, and, mostly, disappointment. UC Santa was never heard from again. We'll never really know what their motives were; maybe it was all planned by someone who owns the cheat sites. Maybe after the first drop, UC Santa was contacted by a UC seller about doing this. Maybe UC Santa and johanna_barker are two different people. Or maybe UC Santa started out with good intentions and just got tired of people begging, posting those sites as a joke.
A year later it's mostly a fond memory, a weird story to tell. But you do have to wonder if more people illegally bought UCs as a result. And, well, I'm not going to out any cheaters, but...yeah. Yeah, probably!
EDIT: for those trying to get back into their old neopets accounts after reading this! If you can't get in, your best bet is to email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) with all of the information you remember from your account, such as the town you made it in or if you ever bought neocash/when. Best of luck!

Up to £244.55 profit in cashback through gambling offers with TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh
TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh always have a number of gambling offers available, with the offered amounts often changing daily or weekly. There are currently quite a few offers available on each where the cashback amount is more than the required deposit or wager amount. I've done most of these and always keep an eye out for when the amounts increase, to make sure I can get the most for my money. The offers they have on today are some of the best I've ever seen for each of them.
The first step is to sign up for the cashback sites if you haven't already. If you use a referral link to sign up then you can get an extra bonus once your cashback becomes payable:

• TopCashback referral link (£5 bonus / non-ref link (no bonus)
• Quidco referral link (£5 bonus) / non-ref link (no bonus)
• OhMyDosh referral link (£2 bonus) / non-ref link (no bonus)

Then the next step is to work through the offers. These are all only available for new customers, so if you already have an account with one of the sites then you won't be eligible for the offer from them unfortunately. It's also worth checking the terms as some have specific wagering requirements, for example Betfair Poker must be completed within 3 days of opening your account and low risk roulette bets (covering 25 or more of the 37 outcomes) are excluded from counting towards the wager.
Offers

#	Site	From	Cashback	Deposit/Wager	Profit
1	Betfair Poker	Quidco	£50	£10	£40
2	Pokerstars	TCB	£45	£25/£10	£35
3	Coral Casino	TCB	£42	£10	£32
4	Ladbrokes Casino	TCB	£42	£10	£32
5	William Hill Casino	TCB / Quidco	£54	£25	£29
6	Paddy Power Games	TCB / Quidco	£20	£10	£10
7	Lottoland	TCB	£20	£10.01	£9.99
8	Lottomart	TCB	£18	£10	£8
9	Foxy Bingo	OMD	£5	£12.50	£7.50
10	Gala Bingo	OMD	£5	£12.50	£7.50
11	Tombola	Quidco	£17.32	£10	£7.32
12	BingoPort	TCB	£3	-	£3
13	LottoGo	OMD	£4.50	£2	£2.50
14	Free Slots Genie	OMD	£1.25	-	£1.25
15	Profit Accumulator	TCB	£1.05	-	£1.05
16	The Best Free Spins	OMD	£1	-	£1
17	Free Spins Wizard	OMD	£1	-	£1
18	Pick My Postcode	TCB	£0.82	-	£0.82
19	Search Lotto	TCB	£0.82	-	0.82
20	Free Spins Loopy	OMD	£0.80	-	£0.80
21	Mr Free Slots	OMD	£0.80	-	£0.80
22	Lotto Social	TCB	£0.60	-	£0.60
23	FreeBingoGenie	OMD	£0.60	-	£0.60
24	Cheeky Bingo	OMD	£10	£10	-
25	bgo	OMD	£10	£10	-

Notes
If you complete all these offers then you should make £232.55 cashback in profit through the offers alone. If you are new to the cashback sites and sign up through referral links then this will be £244.55 instead. There's also a chance you can make a profit on any or all the offers and walk away with even more.
There's also a final few key points:

• Make sure you have all adblockers and tracking protection switched off as otherwise this may lead to issues with the cashback tracking correctly.
• I've listed the highest paying in terms of deposit/wager to cashback offers here, but if you have a preference for one cashback site over the other then they often offer very similar amounts if you'd rather go with the other instead.
• Similarly, some sites (OhMyDosh in particular) offer a lower cashback amount but also a lower deposit/wager amount, which may be more appealing to some.
• I don't like to say the cashback is guaranteed as all the cashback sites say it never is, but I've never had an issue with any of these sites, whether through gambling or other offers.
• Please be aware that these all these offers all are gambling, so I'd highly recommend depositing and wagering only the mimimum amount required to get the cashback, then withdrawing any profit you may have made.
• Please Be Gamble Aware when using these sites.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of these offers :)

Digest (tl;dr)
It may not be cool, but politics is for people who care, people who believe in things, and people who place their hope in other human beings.
We trust our police to be able to cope with this change, we trust our local businesses to sell liquor and tobacco products responsibly, and we trust the Chandler City Council to represent us, to do no harm our local business economy, and to allow us our reasonable freedoms as Arizonans.
Ordinance 4949 seeks the most extreme prohibition allowed by the law. Please send this ordinance back to the drawing board and consider an approach that involves citizens like a volunteer board for review, permits, or even individual council review, instead of this preemptive strike against our consumers and our local economy.
#LetChandlerChoose #Prop207
To see how to participate, check the bottom of the post.
The long discussion of it
The Smart and Safe Act (Prop 207) affords a new category of business the opportunity to germinate and for citizens to responsibly grow their own plants for personal use. The only dispensaries that will have the ability to grow and learn will be the ones that are already established, and are usually based out of state. These businesses already have grown beyond what most Arizonans consider “small,” and have hundreds of employees and the ability to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying. Please think about how impossible it felt the first time you tried to start a big new business, but also how those who persist through the approvals and permitting and invest in their ideas are the very small business innovators and entrepreneurs that Chandler wants to attract, and their tax revenue helps Chandler balance the budget while giving us the best facilities in the valley. To only allow the existing established dispensaries in place to grow and profit is anticompetitive and suspect. Without any process or pathway forward, no roadmap ever mentioned before this maximal, draconian ordinance against recreational uses and businesses, it seems that the management of Chandler expects the Council to acquiesce, but make no mistake that we as citizens will hold Council’s members accountable.
Arizona’s state Legislature has already projected at least $22,000,000 the first year from cities’ Transaction Privilege Taxes, and that’s not including micro-economies that local businesses indirectly support. That also doesn’t include the tens of millions of dollars in additional funding that could head Chandler’s way for specific grants from the Smart and Safe Fund, which receives 16% of sales, earmarked for public safety, education, and public health. These are millions of dollars available, and our share of those dollars grow along with the local economy, and that local economy would be stifled by this law. Chandler goes to great lengths to get even small four- and five-figure grants, and Chandler works hard to promote the “I Choose Chandler” mantra, but this seems to be an exception on both fronts.
Chandler has a permit process for liquor stores, tobacco stores, adult video stores, massage parlors, escort bureaus, peddlers, horse track wagering, and even bingo, not to mention public participation in what goes into our neighborhoods from zoning to parks. Liquor licenses are individually reviewed by the city and by the council, including at this very meeting. The information that’s posted publicly and available for public comment, including maps of how many other liquor licenses exist nearby and business plans for safety and security, are examples of how this involves our community in a broader way and in an open discussion.
It’s a mistake to enact this law when Arizona voters already made their opinions heard, in record numbers, that they want these iterative changes to marijuana regulation.
Even more gross, they have tried to bury that this ordinance is about undoing Prop 207 by merging it with a wholly unrelated graffiti ordinance. What does graffiti have to do with THC? Beats me. Insulting at best, but dishonest and misleading at worst.
As a community of responsible consumers of firearms, beer, and cigars (and apparently even escorts according to Chandler’s specialty permits website), we expect Chandler to allow us the rights afforded by law and by vote without preemptive limitations.
How do I show up to be heard?
Chandler’s City Council will be meeting for several meetings on December 7th at 6:00PM, and this being an ordinance (a permanent law) for the city has to be discussed at one meeting before the meeting where it is approved, so they will meet again on December 10th.
These are two opportunities to voice your concern over:

• Further limits on when and where marijuana can be consumed
• Further limits on dispensaries
• Economic impact from loss of business opportunities
• Community impact from loss of tax revenue
• Messaging to the community that marijuana “isn’t wanted here”
• Messaging to the community that recreational marijuana isn’t “safe” or “responsible”
• Prohibition-style attitudes
• Putting the opinions of law enforcement ahead of the voice of the people
• Contradicting the voters in Maricopa County and Chandler who voted for Prop 207
• Unfair anti-competitive advantage being given to existing dispensaries
• Further limits on private activities like growing plants or sharing seeds/plants/marijuana crop
• Further limits on access options like delivery

But how do I contact them?
Anyone can go to a city council meeting. They are held in an open public building at 88 E. Chicago St., Chandler, AZ: https://www.google.com/maps/di/Chandler+City+Council+Chambers+Chandler,+AZ+85225
Once there, you can choose how to participate:

1. Show support just by being there
2. Write your thoughts in a letter and hand it to city government officials to be given to the city council
3. Make sure your voice is heard by reserving a slot to speak.

Reserving a slot to speak gives you not only a chance to speak directly to the council members who will vote on the ordinance, but to the audience, which includes hundreds of people watching via live stream on YouTube (and public access TV): https://www.youtube.com/usechandlerarizona/feed
You can also submit a public comment through the city’s web form here: https://www.chandleraz.gov/government/departments/city-clerks-office/city-council-meetings/city-council-agendas/public-comment-form If you go this route, keep in mind that there’s no guarantee that they are going to read them, but if they get hundreds of comments, they may be more likely to read a few of them, or at least look at the numbers of “for” and “against” comments/emails.
Here is an email distribution list for mayor and council: [email protected]
You can also tweet your support with the hashtag #LetChandlerChoose and contact mayor and council via twitter:
Kevin Hartke, Chandler’s mayor who ran unopposed in 2018, and who focuses on budget and economic development and shopping local: [email protected] https://twitter.com/chandlerazmayor
Rene Lopez: [email protected] https://twitter.com/jrlopezrep
Sam Huang, a PhD whose bio-line talks about personal liberty and pursuit of happiness, and who has been a campaign manager for the Green Party and a small biz owner: [email protected]
Jeremy McClymonds, who has claimed his top 3 priorities are developing Chandler’s economy, reducing government waste, and technology innovation: [email protected] https://twitter.com/chandlerloyal
Matt Orlando, a retired colonel who campaigned on supporting veterans: [email protected]
Terry Roe, former cop who is on a board about youth substance abuse and surely knows that re-criminalizing pot isn’t going to change or help anything for kids, but revenue for Chandler’s budget actually might: [email protected] http://twitter.com/roe4rizona
Mark Stewart, small biz owner and tech innovator: [email protected] https://twitter.com/chandlerazproud
The two council members who have been elected since August but whose terms don’t start until 2021 - both of whom are people of color and small business owners - won’t get a chance to vote on this or speak to the public, but they may be interested to know what you think of Chandler rushing this through in between Prop 207 passing and before they are even inaugurated:
Christine Ellis, small biz owner: [email protected] https://twitter.com/christi96394242
OD Harris, military veteran and entrepreneur: [email protected] https://twitter.com/odharrisaz
You can also tweet your support with the hashtag #LetChandlerChoose and get the word out.
Here is the agenda for the meeting, which has some details about meetings (language interpreters including ASL can be requested): https://www.chandleraz.gov/sites/default/files/20201210_STUDYSESSION.pdf
Here is the Memorandum about the Police-drafted measure: https://www.chandleraz.gov/sites/default/files/20201210_27.pdf
Here is Ordinance 4949 as proposed: https://www.chandleraz.gov/sites/default/files/20201210_27B.pdf