The Henry George Program

Kelsey Banes is a leading voice for housing production in Palo Alto, while working in supplying support for our neediest: the homeless. How are the systems of supplying both affordable and market-rate housing related to the needs and struggles of those who are housing insecure, and what can we do to help?

Does landownership matter in agriculture? Turns out it does! Crop scientist and podcaster ("Farm to Taber") Sarah Taber is on the program to talk about how landownership drives power dynamics, creates inefficient classes of exploitative family farms, while destroying the environment. Showcasing approaches and technologies that deliver more productive and more sustainable results, from labor practi...

The legendary book about a fatal love of highways, the drive for land acquisition, and the seductive world of municipal bonds.

Diego Aguilar-Canabal comes on the show to speak on his article about how an anti-public-housing movement began with Oakland homeowners , and Jordan Grimes discusses how the constitutional amendment that came out of this movement still affects affordable housing programs today. We talk about the unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge to this amendment, and rant for a while about how dumb dead-ends i...

Ray Wang, a Cupertino planning commissioner, threatened to get Richard Mehlinger fired, after a hubbub over a NextDoor post in which Mr. Wang called YIMBYs "fascists". We discuss the story, what it means for participation in local democracy, with some tangents, on the real nature of fascism.

Talking politics, both with the exciting new white paper with all the best policy proposals (including land value tax), and some fun discussion on the dem candidates' housing plans.

It's easy to take highway funding and construction as a natural and unavoidable fact, but in reality it's *people* behind it. In Clayton Nall's book "The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities", the nitty-gritty of what this did to our politics is explored in depth. We are joined with Alex Baca, who explores the relationship of highway funding t...

SB50 is stalled for a year, but we recorded this *just* before, as we see efforts to block it underway by our favorite Palo Alto NIMBYs, aided by ostensibly woke anti-gentrification groups in direct coordination with homeowners. But mostly, about Lydia Kou being bad on twitter.

Lenny Siegel served on the Mountain View City Council from 2014-2018, serving one term as mayor, and has been a lifelong activist for progressive causes. How has Mountain View been able to address equitable solutions for housing better than its neighbors, and how can it do more? We also debate the contentious issue of local control, with Pardis Beikzadeh and David Watson of South Bay YIMBY saying...

Sasha Perigo is co-chair of the Homelessness Working Group for SF DSA, and has worked in the past for fair housing in Marin County. What can we learn from sharing this perspective with Darrell Owens's activism in the East Bay, as well as a view from Silicon Valley, where the show is recorded? Plenty to talk about regional issues, as well as tenant solidarity as well as other socialists views on ho...

What's mightier, redistributing land vs building more housing? Are these ideologies necessarily at ends, and what's their respective roles in the current housing scene? Sonja Trauss of SFBARF/SF YIMBY/CaRLA makes the case that georgists are too focused on taxing the land to see that zoning needs reformed. Other topics are broached, from property rights, political orgs, and whether sweeping wealth...

It's been about a year since the Stanford land-use/housing justice activism group SCoPE 2035 (Stanford Coalition for Planning an Equitable 2035) has been on, and there's a lot to catch up on: campus protests against university lawsuits, more challenges for housing Stanford employees, university dealings with Palo Alto, and more; we hear all about the challenges and advantages of being a group made...

Holly Balcom tells us how, compared to the Bay Area, Portland, Oregon does so many things better: better cooperation between land-use groups and tenant groups, coherent regional government, an anti-sprawl Urban Growth Boundary, and even the exploration of land taxes. However, pushing back against suburban conformity and exclusion, NIMBYism, and unaffordability is very much an active challenge, and...

Chris Beiser runs the facebook meme group "Georgist Memes for Land Value Taxation Teens", and comments both upon the modern phenomenon of Image Macros as a way to spread ideas, as well as the functional value of ideology, the implications of modern technology with the evolution of ideology, and the special role of Georgism to navigate ideological rifts in the modern landscape.

We continue the CASA talk by talking about the infighting, the disappointments, and most importantly, the cartoonish villainry we've seen. Rants about the CAA, Realtors, ranking NIMBY cities into a hierarchy of awfulness, and picking apart why some YIMBYs can't figure out how to get onboard with tenants rights.

The CASA Compact is the "grand bargain" that could transform housing and tenant protections throughout the Bay Area. But what are the details? We pick apart the ten pillars and anticipate some of what we'll see in Part II of this series: CASA, the Drama.

We've talked Cupertino on the program before, but never with a native.... until now (!) JR Fruen talks about the relationship between council and Better Cupertino, Mayor Scharf's comments on "building a wall around Cupertino", irregularities around commission appointments, and what all those lawsuits are all about.

Alex Baca has plenty to say about the shortcomings of the Green New Deal platform, with respect to the waste that comes from our land use decisions. We're also joined by Ollie Zhu, as we probe key questions about equity (for whomst?), chat about rust belt urbanism, and talk about the challenges of grow-the-pie solutions being balanced against zero-sum battles.

Quakers (The Religious Society of Friends) have for centuries combined a radical commitment to personality morality with works in the world, including reforming economic life. This continues today, as we talk to Olivia Hanks, program manager for the Quaker Peace & Social Witness "New Economy" project, looking at overturning the inequities of modern economic life, looking to bring natural resources...

Vancouver is a city with housing policies that are the dream of the Bay Area, with an recent end to single-family zoning as well as stronger tenant protections, but yet exclusion and tenant instability still persist. What more could Vancouver do to address this, and could a move by City Council to introduce a Land Value Tax help? Jennifer Bradshaw talks about this, her work in housing activism, wh...

Alex Schafran discusses his new book, which is about the new style of segregation we see throughout the greater Bay Area (even beyond the Altamont Pass), how even well-meaning people helped create it, and what changes to our politics we need to find our way out.

Max is back on, and we talk about the grievance culture of those fighting to preserve "Local Control," focusing on the extreme measures being taken by the League of California Cities to preserve the rights of Beverly Hills and Palo Alto. Nuttiness ensues.

Darrell Owens, housing advocate wunderkind travels from the East Bay to share his experiences dealing with class and racial segregation reinforced by our land-use policy, and also finds time to rant about transit, blind spots in otherwise progressive policy, and so much more...

So, the election happened. Diego comes on the show (via a telephone submerged in molasses, sorry listeners) to talk about the good news in the East Bay and disappointing news in SF (including how this was tied to the shocking failure of Mayor Breed and Scott Wiener to endorse Prop C). Some South Bay election updates, though expect more in future weeks for all the in-depth details...

We cover city council elections in the major Santa Clara County cities, along with local measures, county-level elections, and the state propositions. Jason Uhlenkott is here to explain how South Bay YIMBY endorsed all the races, and we try to analyze all the major policy decisions.