How a former Forest Service employee changed the future of housing in California
One April night eight years ago, two tech leaders sat down with a former Forest Service employee at Terroir, a natural wine bar in San Francisco. Then they started sketching out a plan that would eventually reshape California’s housing policy. Landmark housing reforms that passed in the state in 2025, one that allows more housing to be built near transit stops, and another curbing the use of environmental law to block new housing—and which many believed would never succeed—can be traced back to that night, five bottles of wine, and crucial backing from Silicon Valley executives. An unlikely new leader Brian Hanlon, the Forest Service employee, was an unlikely leader for a new housing movement. Hanlon moved to the Bay Area in 2010 after dropping out of a Ph.D. program, and got a job managing grant paperwork for USFS. He wasn’t planning to work on housing; he considered becoming a winemaker. But he soon saw the impact of California’s housing policy directly. When he first arrived in the area, apartments were still relatively affordable. Within a year, he saw demand spike: every open house he visited had 20 to 30 people competing for the same apartment. Over the next couple of years, as rents in the city continued to rise, Hanlon got involved with rental advocacy groups, but quickly saw the limitations. He felt advocates weren’t engaging with what he saw as a basic problem: restrictive policy made it too difficult to build housing, and the shortage of housing—not just landlords trying to extract higher rents from renters—was what was driving up prices. “Even then, I was like, ‘It’s not landlord greed.’ There aren’t enough homes. Landlords are just as greedy in Houston, Texas, or wherever else,” he says. “I kind of got excommunicated from that movement because I believed in more housing.” A friend introduced him to Sonia Trauss, a math teacher who had started advocating for new housing development at planning meetings—a YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) counterpart to the resistance to new construction that was common in San Francisco, which is commonly characterized as NIMBY (“not in my backyard”). This resistance came largely from two separate, but sometimes aligned, groups: first, homeowners who believe new constructions of apartments around their homes will lower the resale value, obstruct their views, and otherwise affect “the neighborhood character”; and second, advocates for low-income tenants who believe that the new construction pushed by the YIMBY movement in gentrifying working-class neighborhoods will accelerate the damaging process of pricing out long-time residents. The first group is more powerful politically at the state level, but at the start of Hanlon and Trauss’s advocacy in San Francisco, many of the fights were with the second, leading to vitriolic conflict in the city (and online). Trauss faced intense criticism for comparing tenant advocates to Trump voters during a speech at hearing. And in one incident, Hanlon was at a public film screening about the eviction crisis, talking with a resident who was fighting a plan to demolish his apartment building, when an activist forced him out of the event, screaming “Get the fuck out!” As the conflicts continued in San Francisco, Hanlon decided he needed to do more than tackle one planning meeting—and one building—at a time. After he and Trauss secured some funding, they founded a nonprofit, California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, and filed a lawsuit against a Bay Area suburb for not building enough housing. They lost the suit, and Hanlon realized that they needed to change direction. “I was like, alright, well, we’re going to fail as a nonprofit if we don’t change the law,” he says. Rewriting the law With help from a likeminded developer he’d met, Hanlon brought together a group of land-use attorneys, planners, and other developers and explained why the lawsuit had failed and how he wanted the law to change so cities would have to allow more construction. Hanlon copied the existing law into Microsoft Word, rewrote it based on feedback from the group, and then gave it to a lawyer to draft a real version of a potential bill. Then he started heading to Sacramento, meeting with anyone who’d talk. A lawyer from the Building Industry Association told him that he was wasting his time. “I’m like, alright, thanks for your feedback,” he says. “And then I just kept going.” At the time, he had little money and few connections. At a housing conference, he entered a contest to meet the new chair of the state’s Department of Housing Development—the competition involved guessing the number of Monopoly houses in a giant jar. “I remembered a little bit of middle school geometry or something, and I just looked at the jar and did the right math and guessed the right number of houses,” he says. He won a lunch with Ben Metcalf, the new chair, and peppered him with questions about housing reform in the state. Meanwhile, he was starting to make more connections in the tech industry. Trauss had already gotten some support from tech CEOs like Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppleman, who saw that the housing shortage could hurt their industry since it was so hard for employees to find a place to live. Like others, he’d read a viral article in TechCrunch from Kim-Mai Cutler explaining how housing policy restricted development. “That story really helped put everything in perspective—like, oh, this is actually by design,” Stoppleman says. “[It was] many years of decisions to specifically constrain housing production, density, and growth. That created a real point of frustration as a person leading a business with thousands of employees here in the Bay Area.” Hanlon met Zack Rosen, CEO of the WebOps platform Pantheon, on Twitter. “I got in a fight with him on the internet,” Rosen says. “I got into one of those things where it was back and forth, back and forth, and by the third time, I’m like, man, I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He suggested to Hanlon that they meet up for coffee, and they became friends. Rosen, too, wanted to invest in a solution to the housing crisis. “The tech industry didn’t create these terrible housing policies, they predate us,” Rosen says. “However, the success of our industry and these terrible housing policies are a train wreck. The net effect of that train wreck is immiseration for the state of California—you know, teachers teaching [while] homeless in San Francisco. I mean, it’s insane. So for me, it was like, look, the tech industry has a special responsibility to help solve it.” A few weeks later, Hanlon ran into Rosen in Sacramento, along with Nat Friedman—the former CEO of Github, now head of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, who had come to Sacramento to talk about housing with an assemblymember. They started walking through the capital building, and knocked on the door of the governor’s office, where they managed to wrangle a meeting with staffers on the fly. Policymakers wanted to act, but the issue was complex, and they needed help understanding what laws could truly help. On the drive back home, Rosen started thinking about partnering with Hanlon. Making a bet on a new startup nonprofit They stayed in touch, and nearly a year later, Rosen, Friedman, and Hanlon met at the wine bar to talk about the potential for a new nonprofit. They talked for hours, closing out the bar. Hanlon pitched them on the vision of a new housing advocacy organization for the state that would work on new policy, build coalitions and a grassroots movement, and massively scale up homebuilding. At the time, Hanlon was still working on a shoestring budget, helping shepherd a housing bill called SB 167—based on what he’d drafted earlier—through the committee process. “Imagine all that we could do if I had a real team and a real budget?” he said. They didn’t know exactly how the new organization would work. “We ended up with more questions than answers,” says Rosen. “But we had a direction. We had a strategy.” They were sold on the idea. “It was reminiscent to me of the beginnings of a great startup,” he says. “It just felt like hey, here’s this obvious idea. No one’s doing it. Is it possible to do? Absolutely. Is it incredibly difficult to do? Absolutely. Let’s go do it.” Within a couple of months, they had raised hundreds of thousands for the project. Hanlon resigned from his previous nonprofit with Trauss. Rosen joined the new organization, California YIMBY, as a cofounder. It’s something that probably only would have happened in San Francisco. “I don’t think I ever would have raised this sort of philanthropic capital just given my profile—I’m some guy who was working for the Forest Service and moved to the Mission because I was really into wine, fixed gear bikes, and shows,” Hanlon says. “That doesn’t sound like someone I’d want to make a big bet on to try to rebuild the built environment of the world’s fourth largest economy.” But his vision resonated with them, and with friends of Friedman’s who gave to the new nonprofit. “Brian’s a mile a minute—very fast on his feet, very thoughtful, had clearly done tons of research, knew his stuff,” says Stoppleman. “It was a really unique strategy that he was laying out. For me, it’s exciting to meet people at that stage when they’re just getting going. Obviously brilliant, lots of energy, a lot of passion, probably some naivete. There is a parallel, 100%, to the startup world.” The tech leaders who put in money also were willing to try something new. “I don’t mean to just make a paean to enlightened tech leaders, but I will say, San Francisco’s entrepreneurial tech leaders don’t treat the status quo or entrenched power as immutable reality,” says Hanlon. “They treat it as problems to be solved and building a new future. And that’s rare and uncommon….I think there’s this real sense that we’re not on this Earth for very long, it’s good and right to work quickly to solve your problems. And also, that failure isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is not trying, or trying and not being ambitious.” Sweeping changes in policy After the nonprofit was founded in 2017—as a 501(c)(4) organization, so it’s allowed to lobby full time—it led advocacy for SB 167, a bill that made it harder for cities to fail to comply with state laws designed to force cities to approve more housing. The organization also fought for new laws that make it easier to build ADUs and “missing middle” housing like duplexes. But the biggest victories, after earlier failed attempts, came this year. First, the state passed a set of laws that reform CEQA, the California’s environmental law, which has sometimes been used as a method to stop development. Some housing now has a faster review process under the law. When the nonprofit first began working on CEQA reform, they were told that it was impossible. This fall, the state also passed SB 79, a law that legalizes large apartment buildings near major transit stops throughout the state—even when local laws restrict density or height. That can help significantly shrink the state’s housing shortage. In L.A., alone, by one estimate, it will eventually zone for 1.46 million new housing units. Along with CEQA reform, it was something they’d first talked about at the wine bar. “That was really was got Nat and Zack excited that night,” Hanlon says. Earlier attempts to pass the law, including a bill introduced in 2018, helped change the conversation about housing. Academics had long argued for more housing near transit, but this type of policy was new. “That’s the first bill, to my knowledge, that had actually been commensurate with the scale of the problem to actually solve it,” Hanlon says. It died quickly in committee, but got people talking in other cities. In New York City, the planning office held a meeting to discuss it. Other advocacy groups in other states started considered new changes to state policy. The latest version of the bill barely passed. It’s likely the only bill in the history of the state, Hanlon says, to become law after “rolling” the first two policy committee chairs, meaning it passed over their objections. The bill had to make it through nine votes, and then the governor’s vote. At each step, it barely made it. “This was incredibly, incredibly hard fought.” Still, he says, despite fierce opposition to the bill, including citizen protests and formal opposition from dozens of city councils, the debate was less heated than it had been in the past. Previous bills had faced widespread, statewide activism in large town halls and protests—many of which were organized by Livable California, a group of homeowners founded by a former oil executive that fights zoning changes and regulations that would make it easier to build apartemts—along with a deluge of op-eds and even a study with false data that argued that Los Angeles could meet its housing needs with vacant apartments. Now, the ideas behind the YIMBY have now become more mainstream. Policymakers have largely accepted the idea that the housing shortage is a supply problem, and that policy has held back development. “YIMBY benefits from being correct,” says Rosen. “It’s real. It’s substantive. It’s right. It also benefits from taking what should be an obscure issue like zoning, and turning it into something that’s real and personal for people—housing. And that was clear from the beginning.” When the YIMBY movement started to take off, “what wasn’t clear was how you would translate that movement that was getting attention into change of government that would enable a boom in housing,” he says. “There’s a huge leap between those things. We’ve got a long list of modern-day political movements that capture attention and don’t deliver the outcome. it’s not that any of the work of translating attention in a movement into outcomes is like rocket science. But it’s tremendously difficult work. And it’s very deliberate kind of work, very strategic work. It’s very stage sequenced. To me, it feels like kind of like scaling a company.” The work isn’t done. The next big battle, Hanlon says, is the steep fees that local governments impose on new developments, which can make building infeasible even when other barriers are taken away. But 2025 has “absolutely been a breakthrough year,” says Rosen. “We have a lot left to do. But I don’t know that there’s going to be a political lift that heavy.”
One April night eight years ago, two tech leaders sat down with a former Forest Service employee at Terroir, a natural wine bar in San Francisco. Then they started sketching out a plan that would eventually reshape California’s housing policy. Landmark housing reforms that passed in the state in 2025, one that allows more housing to be built near transit stops, and another curbing the use of environmental law to block new housing—and which many believed would never succeed—can be traced back to that night, five bottles of wine, and crucial backing from Silicon Valley executives. An unlikely new leader Brian Hanlon, the Forest Service employee, was an unlikely leader for a new housing movement. Hanlon moved to the Bay Area in 2010 after dropping out of a Ph.D. program, and got a job managing grant paperwork for USFS. He wasn’t planning to work on housing; he considered becoming a winemaker. But he soon saw the impact of California’s housing policy directly. When he first arrived in the area, apartments were still relatively affordable. Within a year, he saw demand spike: every open house he visited had 20 to 30 people competing for the same apartment. Over the next couple of years, as rents in the city continued to rise, Hanlon got involved with rental advocacy groups, but quickly saw the limitations. He felt advocates weren’t engaging with what he saw as a basic problem: restrictive policy made it too difficult to build housing, and the shortage of housing—not just landlords trying to extract higher rents from renters—was what was driving up prices. “Even then, I was like, ‘It’s not landlord greed.’ There aren’t enough homes. Landlords are just as greedy in Houston, Texas, or wherever else,” he says. “I kind of got excommunicated from that movement because I believed in more housing.” A friend introduced him to Sonia Trauss, a math teacher who had started advocating for new housing development at planning meetings—a YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) counterpart to the resistance to new construction that was common in San Francisco, which is commonly characterized as NIMBY (“not in my backyard”). This resistance came largely from two separate, but sometimes aligned, groups: first, homeowners who believe new constructions of apartments around their homes will lower the resale value, obstruct their views, and otherwise affect “the neighborhood character”; and second, advocates for low-income tenants who believe that the new construction pushed by the YIMBY movement in gentrifying working-class neighborhoods will accelerate the damaging process of pricing out long-time residents. The first group is more powerful politically at the state level, but at the start of Hanlon and Trauss’s advocacy in San Francisco, many of the fights were with the second, leading to vitriolic conflict in the city (and online). Trauss faced intense criticism for comparing tenant advocates to Trump voters during a speech at hearing. And in one incident, Hanlon was at a public film screening about the eviction crisis, talking with a resident who was fighting a plan to demolish his apartment building, when an activist forced him out of the event, screaming “Get the fuck out!” As the conflicts continued in San Francisco, Hanlon decided he needed to do more than tackle one planning meeting—and one building—at a time. After he and Trauss secured some funding, they founded a nonprofit, California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, and filed a lawsuit against a Bay Area suburb for not building enough housing. They lost the suit, and Hanlon realized that they needed to change direction. “I was like, alright, well, we’re going to fail as a nonprofit if we don’t change the law,” he says. Rewriting the law With help from a likeminded developer he’d met, Hanlon brought together a group of land-use attorneys, planners, and other developers and explained why the lawsuit had failed and how he wanted the law to change so cities would have to allow more construction. Hanlon copied the existing law into Microsoft Word, rewrote it based on feedback from the group, and then gave it to a lawyer to draft a real version of a potential bill. Then he started heading to Sacramento, meeting with anyone who’d talk. A lawyer from the Building Industry Association told him that he was wasting his time. “I’m like, alright, thanks for your feedback,” he says. “And then I just kept going.” At the time, he had little money and few connections. At a housing conference, he entered a contest to meet the new chair of the state’s Department of Housing Development—the competition involved guessing the number of Monopoly houses in a giant jar. “I remembered a little bit of middle school geometry or something, and I just looked at the jar and did the right math and guessed the right number of houses,” he says. He won a lunch with Ben Metcalf, the new chair, and peppered him with questions about housing reform in the state. Meanwhile, he was starting to make more connections in the tech industry. Trauss had already gotten some support from tech CEOs like Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppleman, who saw that the housing shortage could hurt their industry since it was so hard for employees to find a place to live. Like others, he’d read a viral article in TechCrunch from Kim-Mai Cutler explaining how housing policy restricted development. “That story really helped put everything in perspective—like, oh, this is actually by design,” Stoppleman says. “[It was] many years of decisions to specifically constrain housing production, density, and growth. That created a real point of frustration as a person leading a business with thousands of employees here in the Bay Area.” Hanlon met Zack Rosen, CEO of the WebOps platform Pantheon, on Twitter. “I got in a fight with him on the internet,” Rosen says. “I got into one of those things where it was back and forth, back and forth, and by the third time, I’m like, man, I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He suggested to Hanlon that they meet up for coffee, and they became friends. Rosen, too, wanted to invest in a solution to the housing crisis. “The tech industry didn’t create these terrible housing policies, they predate us,” Rosen says. “However, the success of our industry and these terrible housing policies are a train wreck. The net effect of that train wreck is immiseration for the state of California—you know, teachers teaching [while] homeless in San Francisco. I mean, it’s insane. So for me, it was like, look, the tech industry has a special responsibility to help solve it.” A few weeks later, Hanlon ran into Rosen in Sacramento, along with Nat Friedman—the former CEO of Github, now head of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, who had come to Sacramento to talk about housing with an assemblymember. They started walking through the capital building, and knocked on the door of the governor’s office, where they managed to wrangle a meeting with staffers on the fly. Policymakers wanted to act, but the issue was complex, and they needed help understanding what laws could truly help. On the drive back home, Rosen started thinking about partnering with Hanlon. Making a bet on a new startup nonprofit They stayed in touch, and nearly a year later, Rosen, Friedman, and Hanlon met at the wine bar to talk about the potential for a new nonprofit. They talked for hours, closing out the bar. Hanlon pitched them on the vision of a new housing advocacy organization for the state that would work on new policy, build coalitions and a grassroots movement, and massively scale up homebuilding. At the time, Hanlon was still working on a shoestring budget, helping shepherd a housing bill called SB 167—based on what he’d drafted earlier—through the committee process. “Imagine all that we could do if I had a real team and a real budget?” he said. They didn’t know exactly how the new organization would work. “We ended up with more questions than answers,” says Rosen. “But we had a direction. We had a strategy.” They were sold on the idea. “It was reminiscent to me of the beginnings of a great startup,” he says. “It just felt like hey, here’s this obvious idea. No one’s doing it. Is it possible to do? Absolutely. Is it incredibly difficult to do? Absolutely. Let’s go do it.” Within a couple of months, they had raised hundreds of thousands for the project. Hanlon resigned from his previous nonprofit with Trauss. Rosen joined the new organization, California YIMBY, as a cofounder. It’s something that probably only would have happened in San Francisco. “I don’t think I ever would have raised this sort of philanthropic capital just given my profile—I’m some guy who was working for the Forest Service and moved to the Mission because I was really into wine, fixed gear bikes, and shows,” Hanlon says. “That doesn’t sound like someone I’d want to make a big bet on to try to rebuild the built environment of the world’s fourth largest economy.” But his vision resonated with them, and with friends of Friedman’s who gave to the new nonprofit. “Brian’s a mile a minute—very fast on his feet, very thoughtful, had clearly done tons of research, knew his stuff,” says Stoppleman. “It was a really unique strategy that he was laying out. For me, it’s exciting to meet people at that stage when they’re just getting going. Obviously brilliant, lots of energy, a lot of passion, probably some naivete. There is a parallel, 100%, to the startup world.” The tech leaders who put in money also were willing to try something new. “I don’t mean to just make a paean to enlightened tech leaders, but I will say, San Francisco’s entrepreneurial tech leaders don’t treat the status quo or entrenched power as immutable reality,” says Hanlon. “They treat it as problems to be solved and building a new future. And that’s rare and uncommon….I think there’s this real sense that we’re not on this Earth for very long, it’s good and right to work quickly to solve your problems. And also, that failure isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is not trying, or trying and not being ambitious.” Sweeping changes in policy After the nonprofit was founded in 2017—as a 501(c)(4) organization, so it’s allowed to lobby full time—it led advocacy for SB 167, a bill that made it harder for cities to fail to comply with state laws designed to force cities to approve more housing. The organization also fought for new laws that make it easier to build ADUs and “missing middle” housing like duplexes. But the biggest victories, after earlier failed attempts, came this year. First, the state passed a set of laws that reform CEQA, the California’s environmental law, which has sometimes been used as a method to stop development. Some housing now has a faster review process under the law. When the nonprofit first began working on CEQA reform, they were told that it was impossible. This fall, the state also passed SB 79, a law that legalizes large apartment buildings near major transit stops throughout the state—even when local laws restrict density or height. That can help significantly shrink the state’s housing shortage. In L.A., alone, by one estimate, it will eventually zone for 1.46 million new housing units. Along with CEQA reform, it was something they’d first talked about at the wine bar. “That was really was got Nat and Zack excited that night,” Hanlon says. Earlier attempts to pass the law, including a bill introduced in 2018, helped change the conversation about housing. Academics had long argued for more housing near transit, but this type of policy was new. “That’s the first bill, to my knowledge, that had actually been commensurate with the scale of the problem to actually solve it,” Hanlon says. It died quickly in committee, but got people talking in other cities. In New York City, the planning office held a meeting to discuss it. Other advocacy groups in other states started considered new changes to state policy. The latest version of the bill barely passed. It’s likely the only bill in the history of the state, Hanlon says, to become law after “rolling” the first two policy committee chairs, meaning it passed over their objections. The bill had to make it through nine votes, and then the governor’s vote. At each step, it barely made it. “This was incredibly, incredibly hard fought.” Still, he says, despite fierce opposition to the bill, including citizen protests and formal opposition from dozens of city councils, the debate was less heated than it had been in the past. Previous bills had faced widespread, statewide activism in large town halls and protests—many of which were organized by Livable California, a group of homeowners founded by a former oil executive that fights zoning changes and regulations that would make it easier to build apartemts—along with a deluge of op-eds and even a study with false data that argued that Los Angeles could meet its housing needs with vacant apartments. Now, the ideas behind the YIMBY have now become more mainstream. Policymakers have largely accepted the idea that the housing shortage is a supply problem, and that policy has held back development. “YIMBY benefits from being correct,” says Rosen. “It’s real. It’s substantive. It’s right. It also benefits from taking what should be an obscure issue like zoning, and turning it into something that’s real and personal for people—housing. And that was clear from the beginning.” When the YIMBY movement started to take off, “what wasn’t clear was how you would translate that movement that was getting attention into change of government that would enable a boom in housing,” he says. “There’s a huge leap between those things. We’ve got a long list of modern-day political movements that capture attention and don’t deliver the outcome. it’s not that any of the work of translating attention in a movement into outcomes is like rocket science. But it’s tremendously difficult work. And it’s very deliberate kind of work, very strategic work. It’s very stage sequenced. To me, it feels like kind of like scaling a company.” The work isn’t done. The next big battle, Hanlon says, is the steep fees that local governments impose on new developments, which can make building infeasible even when other barriers are taken away. But 2025 has “absolutely been a breakthrough year,” says Rosen. “We have a lot left to do. But I don’t know that there’s going to be a political lift that heavy.”
One April night eight years ago, two tech leaders sat down with a former Forest Service employee at Terroir, a natural wine bar in San Francisco. Then they started sketching out a plan that would eventually reshape California’s housing policy.
Landmark housing reforms that passed in the state in 2025, one that allows more housing to be built near transit stops, and another curbing the use of environmental law to block new housing—and which many believed would never succeed—can be traced back to that night, five bottles of wine, and crucial backing from Silicon Valley executives.
An unlikely new leader
Brian Hanlon, the Forest Service employee, was an unlikely leader for a new housing movement. Hanlon moved to the Bay Area in 2010 after dropping out of a Ph.D. program, and got a job managing grant paperwork for USFS. He wasn’t planning to work on housing; he considered becoming a winemaker. But he soon saw the impact of California’s housing policy directly. When he first arrived in the area, apartments were still relatively affordable. Within a year, he saw demand spike: every open house he visited had 20 to 30 people competing for the same apartment.
Over the next couple of years, as rents in the city continued to rise, Hanlon got involved with rental advocacy groups, but quickly saw the limitations. He felt advocates weren’t engaging with what he saw as a basic problem: restrictive policy made it too difficult to build housing, and the shortage of housing—not just landlords trying to extract higher rents from renters—was what was driving up prices. “Even then, I was like, ‘It’s not landlord greed.’ There aren’t enough homes. Landlords are just as greedy in Houston, Texas, or wherever else,” he says. “I kind of got excommunicated from that movement because I believed in more housing.”
A friend introduced him to Sonia Trauss, a math teacher who had started advocating for new housing development at planning meetings—a YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) counterpart to the resistance to new construction that was common in San Francisco, which is commonly characterized as NIMBY (“not in my backyard”).
This resistance came largely from two separate, but sometimes aligned, groups: first, homeowners who believe new constructions of apartments around their homes will lower the resale value, obstruct their views, and otherwise affect “the neighborhood character”; and second, advocates for low-income tenants who believe that the new construction pushed by the YIMBY movement in gentrifying working-class neighborhoods will accelerate the damaging process of pricing out long-time residents.
The first group is more powerful politically at the state level, but at the start of Hanlon and Trauss’s advocacy in San Francisco, many of the fights were with the second, leading to vitriolic conflict in the city (and online). Trauss faced intense criticism for comparing tenant advocates to Trump voters during a speech at hearing. And in one incident, Hanlon was at a public film screening about the eviction crisis, talking with a resident who was fighting a plan to demolish his apartment building, when an activist forced him out of the event, screaming “Get the fuck out!”
As the conflicts continued in San Francisco, Hanlon decided he needed to do more than tackle one planning meeting—and one building—at a time. After he and Trauss secured some funding, they founded a nonprofit, California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, and filed a lawsuit against a Bay Area suburb for not building enough housing. They lost the suit, and Hanlon realized that they needed to change direction. “I was like, alright, well, we’re going to fail as a nonprofit if we don’t change the law,” he says.
Rewriting the law
With help from a likeminded developer he’d met, Hanlon brought together a group of land-use attorneys, planners, and other developers and explained why the lawsuit had failed and how he wanted the law to change so cities would have to allow more construction. Hanlon copied the existing law into Microsoft Word, rewrote it based on feedback from the group, and then gave it to a lawyer to draft a real version of a potential bill. Then he started heading to Sacramento, meeting with anyone who’d talk. A lawyer from the Building Industry Association told him that he was wasting his time. “I’m like, alright, thanks for your feedback,” he says. “And then I just kept going.”
At the time, he had little money and few connections. At a housing conference, he entered a contest to meet the new chair of the state’s Department of Housing Development—the competition involved guessing the number of Monopoly houses in a giant jar. “I remembered a little bit of middle school geometry or something, and I just looked at the jar and did the right math and guessed the right number of houses,” he says. He won a lunch with Ben Metcalf, the new chair, and peppered him with questions about housing reform in the state.
Meanwhile, he was starting to make more connections in the tech industry. Trauss had already gotten some support from tech CEOs like Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppleman, who saw that the housing shortage could hurt their industry since it was so hard for employees to find a place to live. Like others, he’d read a viral article in TechCrunch from Kim-Mai Cutler explaining how housing policy restricted development. “That story really helped put everything in perspective—like, oh, this is actually by design,” Stoppleman says. “[It was] many years of decisions to specifically constrain housing production, density, and growth. That created a real point of frustration as a person leading a business with thousands of employees here in the Bay Area.”
Hanlon met Zack Rosen, CEO of the WebOps platform Pantheon, on Twitter. “I got in a fight with him on the internet,” Rosen says. “I got into one of those things where it was back and forth, back and forth, and by the third time, I’m like, man, I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He suggested to Hanlon that they meet up for coffee, and they became friends. Rosen, too, wanted to invest in a solution to the housing crisis.
“The tech industry didn’t create these terrible housing policies, they predate us,” Rosen says. “However, the success of our industry and these terrible housing policies are a train wreck. The net effect of that train wreck is immiseration for the state of California—you know, teachers teaching [while] homeless in San Francisco. I mean, it’s insane. So for me, it was like, look, the tech industry has a special responsibility to help solve it.”
A few weeks later, Hanlon ran into Rosen in Sacramento, along with Nat Friedman—the former CEO of Github, now head of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, who had come to Sacramento to talk about housing with an assemblymember. They started walking through the capital building, and knocked on the door of the governor’s office, where they managed to wrangle a meeting with staffers on the fly. Policymakers wanted to act, but the issue was complex, and they needed help understanding what laws could truly help. On the drive back home, Rosen started thinking about partnering with Hanlon.
Making a bet on a new startup nonprofit
They stayed in touch, and nearly a year later, Rosen, Friedman, and Hanlon met at the wine bar to talk about the potential for a new nonprofit. They talked for hours, closing out the bar. Hanlon pitched them on the vision of a new housing advocacy organization for the state that would work on new policy, build coalitions and a grassroots movement, and massively scale up homebuilding. At the time, Hanlon was still working on a shoestring budget, helping shepherd a housing bill called SB 167—based on what he’d drafted earlier—through the committee process. “Imagine all that we could do if I had a real team and a real budget?” he said.
They didn’t know exactly how the new organization would work. “We ended up with more questions than answers,” says Rosen. “But we had a direction. We had a strategy.” They were sold on the idea. “It was reminiscent to me of the beginnings of a great startup,” he says. “It just felt like hey, here’s this obvious idea. No one’s doing it. Is it possible to do? Absolutely. Is it incredibly difficult to do? Absolutely. Let’s go do it.” Within a couple of months, they had raised hundreds of thousands for the project. Hanlon resigned from his previous nonprofit with Trauss. Rosen joined the new organization, California YIMBY, as a cofounder.
It’s something that probably only would have happened in San Francisco. “I don’t think I ever would have raised this sort of philanthropic capital just given my profile—I’m some guy who was working for the Forest Service and moved to the Mission because I was really into wine, fixed gear bikes, and shows,” Hanlon says. “That doesn’t sound like someone I’d want to make a big bet on to try to rebuild the built environment of the world’s fourth largest economy.”
But his vision resonated with them, and with friends of Friedman’s who gave to the new nonprofit. “Brian’s a mile a minute—very fast on his feet, very thoughtful, had clearly done tons of research, knew his stuff,” says Stoppleman. “It was a really unique strategy that he was laying out. For me, it’s exciting to meet people at that stage when they’re just getting going. Obviously brilliant, lots of energy, a lot of passion, probably some naivete. There is a parallel, 100%, to the startup world.”
The tech leaders who put in money also were willing to try something new. “I don’t mean to just make a paean to enlightened tech leaders, but I will say, San Francisco’s entrepreneurial tech leaders don’t treat the status quo or entrenched power as immutable reality,” says Hanlon. “They treat it as problems to be solved and building a new future. And that’s rare and uncommon….I think there’s this real sense that we’re not on this Earth for very long, it’s good and right to work quickly to solve your problems. And also, that failure isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is not trying, or trying and not being ambitious.”
Sweeping changes in policy
After the nonprofit was founded in 2017—as a 501(c)(4) organization, so it’s allowed to lobby full time—it led advocacy for SB 167, a bill that made it harder for cities to fail to comply with state laws designed to force cities to approve more housing. The organization also fought for new laws that make it easier to build ADUs and “missing middle” housing like duplexes. But the biggest victories, after earlier failed attempts, came this year.
First, the state passed a set of laws that reform CEQA, the California’s environmental law, which has sometimes been used as a method to stop development. Some housing now has a faster review process under the law. When the nonprofit first began working on CEQA reform, they were told that it was impossible.
This fall, the state also passed SB 79, a law that legalizes large apartment buildings near major transit stops throughout the state—even when local laws restrict density or height. That can help significantly shrink the state’s housing shortage. In L.A., alone, by one estimate, it will eventually zone for 1.46 million new housing units.
Along with CEQA reform, it was something they’d first talked about at the wine bar. “That was really was got Nat and Zack excited that night,” Hanlon says.
Earlier attempts to pass the law, including a bill introduced in 2018, helped change the conversation about housing. Academics had long argued for more housing near transit, but this type of policy was new. “That’s the first bill, to my knowledge, that had actually been commensurate with the scale of the problem to actually solve it,” Hanlon says. It died quickly in committee, but got people talking in other cities. In New York City, the planning office held a meeting to discuss it. Other advocacy groups in other states started considered new changes to state policy.
The latest version of the bill barely passed. It’s likely the only bill in the history of the state, Hanlon says, to become law after “rolling” the first two policy committee chairs, meaning it passed over their objections. The bill had to make it through nine votes, and then the governor’s vote. At each step, it barely made it. “This was incredibly, incredibly hard fought.”
Still, he says, despite fierce opposition to the bill, including citizen protests and formal opposition from dozens of city councils, the debate was less heated than it had been in the past. Previous bills had faced widespread, statewide activism in large town halls and protests—many of which were organized by Livable California, a group of homeowners founded by a former oil executive that fights zoning changes and regulations that would make it easier to build apartemts—along with a deluge of op-eds and even a study with false data that argued that Los Angeles could meet its housing needs with vacant apartments.
Now, the ideas behind the YIMBY have now become more mainstream. Policymakers have largely accepted the idea that the housing shortage is a supply problem, and that policy has held back development. “YIMBY benefits from being correct,” says Rosen. “It’s real. It’s substantive. It’s right. It also benefits from taking what should be an obscure issue like zoning, and turning it into something that’s real and personal for people—housing. And that was clear from the beginning.”
When the YIMBY movement started to take off, “what wasn’t clear was how you would translate that movement that was getting attention into change of government that would enable a boom in housing,” he says. “There’s a huge leap between those things. We’ve got a long list of modern-day political movements that capture attention and don’t deliver the outcome. it’s not that any of the work of translating attention in a movement into outcomes is like rocket science. But it’s tremendously difficult work. And it’s very deliberate kind of work, very strategic work. It’s very stage sequenced. To me, it feels like kind of like scaling a company.”
The work isn’t done. The next big battle, Hanlon says, is the steep fees that local governments impose on new developments, which can make building infeasible even when other barriers are taken away. But 2025 has “absolutely been a breakthrough year,” says Rosen. “We have a lot left to do. But I don’t know that there’s going to be a political lift that heavy.”