Brian Hanlon
@hanlonbt
I co-founded @cayimby and @housingdefense to make California affordable and accessible for everyone. Support pro-housing candidates: http://cayimbyvictoryfund.org
The California legislature has the power to break the NIMBY stranglehold on cities. Donate to the California YIMBY Victory Fund. Support legislators who fight to build a California for everyone. secure.actblue.com/donate/cayimby…
"NIMBY activists and their allies are engaged in a fundamentally conservative project: helping a landowning elite hoard wealth by preserving an unfair status quo." theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
“The dataset, which includes the top 65 metropolitan areas in the United States, reveals that cities that have recently enacted pro-housing policies have experienced the most significant year-over-year decline in rental prices nationwide.” reason.com/2025/07/22/ren…
Deadline to apply for these roles is Sunday, July 27 (less than a week away!) — time has never been better to try to unlock supply constraints on energy, housing, healthcare, state capacity, etc.!
Highly recommend applying to our two new Abundance and Growth roles at @open_phil ! We are looking for up to 4 new team members including specialists in areas like energy, housing, clinical trials, etc. as well as broader generalists to help us direct $120M+ in the coming years
Housing per adult is the best measure of a housing shortage and almost perfectly correlates with cost burden
Rephrasing this: The most effective housing policy is one that makes it more profitable to add supply than it is to renovate old buildings and hike up rents
If you want to get technical about it, the problem for housing regulators is how to get the risk-adjusted returns to development up above the risk-adjusted returns to lipstick on a pig value-add. If you can do this while credibly promising not to screw with the regulatory…
AB130 is already bearing plentiful fruit! Today the City of Beverly Hills confirmed in writing that 4 of our builders remedy projects are eligible for the AB130 CEQA exemption. Before the law was enacted the city demanded full EIRs. This will save us years not months.
SB 79 passed its final policy committee! Next steps: Assembly Appropriations -> Assembly Floor -> Senate concurrence -> Governor
Chair recommends an AYE vote. Vote... Carrillo: AYE ✅ Ta: Not voting 👎 Hoover: AYE ✅️ Ramos: AYE ✅ Ransom: Not voting 👎 Pacheco: Not voting 👎 Rubio: Not voting 👎 Stefani: AYE ✅️ Ward: AYE ✅ Wilson: AYE ✅️ PASSED!!!
And we're live! It's the last policy hearing for SB 79, a California YIMBY co-sponsored bill to legalize multifamily housing near transit. I'm excited to share that at least a third of the audience is volunteers activists who made the trip out to speak in favor! 💪🏘
Upzoning wealthy areas delivers housing: (There are more homes under construction in the two block radius of this formerly single family West LA neighborhood than all of DTLA)
It's hard to start a family when you can't afford a home, and it's hard to afford a home when the government makes them illegal to build.
The Bay Area is facing a doom loop. It’s just not the one we usually think about. The Bay Area is getting old fast and it’s accelerating. No other region is growing older at a quicker pace. Read the story ⤵️ sfchronicle.com/projects/2025/…
In addition to be being good policy, leading on pro-housing policy is a good way to be recognized by your peers as a leader. A recent survey recognizes pro-housing leaders Assemblymember @BuffyWicks and Senator @Scott_Wiener as two of the top legislators in Sacramento.
New Jersey's "Mansion Tax" isn't perfect, but it's a LOT better than L.A.'s Measure ULA. NJ's tax aims primarily at -- you guessed it! -- mansions. Apartment buildings and industrial properties are exempt. We have to fix Measure ULA. nj.gov/treasury/taxat…
Cities are failing families, and parents are opting out. NYC lost 17% of its under-5 population since 2020. SF has more dogs than kids. Meanwhile, birthrates plummet. The US won't succeed without fixing this. Yesterday I published an 8-part "Abundance for Families" agenda: 🧵
This is a tour-de-force article on homelessness in Los Angeles that really sticks the landing, placing blame where it belongs: The single-unit, exclusionary housing that the City defends with all its might. Extraordinary journalism from @LATlands @geholland:
To be clear: my posts weren't meant as criticism of @cayimby or @Scott_Wiener! They're just notes on how progs. in CA keep reinforcing a market that's evicting "their people" to other states. Progs elsewhere aren't so self defeating (WA, Baltimore, Portland, etc).
The Abundance and Growth Fund at Open Philanthropy is hiring! We’re looking for 2-4 people to help expand this new $120+ million program to accelerate economic growth and reduce the cost of living through strategic grantmaking and research. (1/4) openphilanthropy.org/research/annou…
Totally agree - and we need housing density to support neighborhood-serving cafes. Paris is 3x as dense as San Francisco.
Hear me out… These should be legal to build and opperate in every neighborhood in the US:
I wish progressive electeds would listen to “value-add” real estate operators - they are able to turn shitty old apartments into less shitty old apartments and jack up the rents because California doesn’t build enough new market-rate apartments.
Thought you might appreciate seeing this slide, which we have used to raise capital for small discretionary value-add apartment funds in the past. (Note that I'm not raising for anything right now.) Unfortunately, for various reasons, LA rentals have under-performed these past…
America's housing crisis contains two problems: Above-cost housing & low incomes YIMBYism can cut rents down to construction costs, but it can't help poverty. Or can it? Turns out an Austin-style 15% rent drop would cut Californian poverty by as much as the Child Tax Credit 👇
New report by @ZParolin: Housing costs, especially in high-cost states like California, are a massive driver of poverty. A few of Zach's key findings ⬇️ 🧵
➡️ If California’s rental prices matched the national average, its poverty rate would fall from the highest in the nation to near the U.S. average.