Bluesky

Housing costs in fast-growing cities around the world have quadrupled since 1950. In the United States, that means nearly half of the country’s renters are paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing—an outlay that eats into already overstretched budgets for other essential expenses such as food, healthcare and transportation.

Nowhere has the affordability problem been worse than in San Francisco. Between 1980 and 2019, the city’s housing costs increased by as much as 600 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and records from the San Francisco Rent Board. That increase is more than double the national average over the same time span.

Democratic policy wonks have embraced the deregulatory “abundance” movement—kickstarted by the 2025 book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—as a solution to the housing crisis. The central mandate here was to institutionalize an ethos of  YIMBYism — short for Yes in My Backyard — in order to ramp up the housing supply and drive down costs. The argument was seductive since it offered a simple proposition to a pressing problem: Remove barriers to housing development — from red tape, and community and environmental review, to limits on building height—and a housing boom would ensue, ensuring at long last that cities would be able to meet a rising demand for housing.

But San Francisco illustrates another dynamic, which saw  the city’s political scene rapidly transformed into a playground for the ultrawealthy. The YIMBY movement did not merely push for relaxed zoning— it became a stalking horse for Bay Area tech titans who used it as a political vehicle to seize local power. 

As documented in a recent report by the Phoenix Project, San Francisco’s YIMBY uprising became in short order the vanguard of an emergent astroturf network. Starting in 2020, the ultrarich began backing a new welter of political pressure groups sporting warm, pro-housing monikers such as Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, Together SF, and Abundant SF (which later became Abundance Network) to oust progressives from local government. University of California, Santa Cruz Sociology professor Katharyne Mitchell and PhD candidate Gregory Woolston have described this local political takeover as revanchist populism, plying a brand of“revenge” politics funded by conservative elites. And it’s clearly working: according to an analysis from the San Francisco Chronicle, the composition of the city’s board of supervisors shifted decisively rightward in 2024.

Positioning themselves as sensible moderates in a progressive metropolis allegedly drunk on its own regulatory powers, the members of San Francisco’s abundance power elite include Mayor Daniel Lurie and supervisors Bilal Mahmood and Stephen Sherrill, as well as former supervisor Joel Engardio. They’ve campaigned   for reactionary  policies like cuts to LGBTQ assistance and public health programs, gutting environmental review, defunding free legal aid, and blocking a one-off wealth tax. And after winning office, they’ve worked tirelessly to roll back progressive gains on criminal justice, renter protections, and environmental regulations.

Now, Silicon Valley is running the same playbook in an effort to take over the national Democratic Party. Internal fundraising materials obtained by the Phoenix Project and first reported on by one of us in The American Prospect detail how Zack Rosen, co-founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, and his allies have amassed a funding stream of $260 million annually from wealthy benefactors. (Rosen told the Prospect that these numbers were incorrect. He pointed to a figure citing a $120 million donation from John Arnold, saying that it was closer to $40 million annually; our follow-up queries about the group’s  other “capital commitments” cited in the memo went unanswered.) The group’s aim, detailed in a self-styled  historical manifesto, is nothing less than to “scale this work across all 50 states” and “build the Abundance faction bottoms up, city by city.”

To that end, the Abundance Network has expanded elsewhere in California, as well as Washington, Vermont, and New York. In his organizing memo, Rosen brags that by enlarging “the moderate faction” in the Bay Area, he and his allies have “flipped [the] San Francisco Democratic Party,” “flipped [the] San Francisco Board of Supervisors,” and “flipped [the] Santa Monica City Council.” These are not idle boasts. San Francisco’s moderates have strung together an impressive series of political victories against progressive elected officials, including the recall of reform-minded District Attorney Chesa Boudin in June 2022. 

Rosen calls these wins  the beginning of a “multi-decade” project. He goes on to explain that the YIMBY-abundance model of power-seeking is after nothing less than the “renewal” of liberal institutions — in cities, states, and, eventually, the whole country. “Our goals are ambitious, and our core beliefs run counter to how left institutions — the Democratic party, left philanthropies, advocacy organizations — think and operate today,” Rosen writes. 

This top-down revolution had initially taken root during the Biden era, but launched in earnest as a pitch for Democrats during the second Trump administration. A year before Rosen’s call to arms, the Niskanen Center, a  libertarian-leaning think tank, released its own broadside calling for a cross-party coalition to preach the abundance gospel. The first order of business was to challenge progressive power within the Democratic Party. Over the past year, the abundance movement has taken that mandate to heart as it tries to replicate the  “hostile takeover” of San Francisco politics at scale

What permits this policy-driven putsch to come across as common-sense reform is the YIMBY movement’s own careful branding as a quasi-populist insurgency. In the 2010s, the nascent movement’s standard bearer was Sonja Trauss, a 24-year-old newcomer to the Bay Area living in rapidly gentrifying West Oakland. By 2014, Trauss, who had founded the San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation (SFBARF), was a fixture at government meetings around the Bay Area, calling for new initiatives to increase the region’s housing supply. SFBARF eventually split into several groups, the largest of which became YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law. They were, however, far from the first organizations to argue for zoning reform; the NAACP and racial justice allies had been fighting restrictive zoning since before Trauss was born. Even the term YIMBY was not new; it was used in planning literature by the early 1990s.

Trauss became the most tireless lobbyist for the local YIMBY movement. Her efforts benefitted greatly from early support from an influential and moneyed member of the tech elite: Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman, a member of the storied PayPal Mafia. 

Trauss ran for a seat on the Board of Supervisors in 2018, seeking to represent the Tenderloin and South of Market Street (SOMA), two of San Francisco’s most diverse, working-class neighborhoods. Her campaign raised more than $1 million, more than two-thirds of which came from Progress San Francisco, a political action committee chiefly funded by tech executives, corporate real-estate investors and venture capitalists. Yet for all this fundraising clout, Trauss lost the race to Matt Haney, a former School Board trustee.

Undeterred, Trauss still courted favor with California’s power elite. Current San Francisco state Senator and U.S. congressional candidate Scott Wiener met the young activist during his tenure on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The relationship proved mutually beneficial: Trauss formed a political action committee that bankrolled Wiener’s first run for the state Senate. In turn, Wiener endorsed Trauss’s 2018 race. Her volunteers served as foot soldiers in his successful campaign to unseat  progressive Supervisor Jane Kim.

Once he was elected to the state senate in 2016, Wiener wasted no time advancing the YIMBY agenda. At his side was CA YIMBY and its affiliated organizations — YIMBY Law, YIMBY Action and the Housing Action Coalition.These groups founded in part by Rosen, the political director for Abundance Network, former Wiener aide Todd David, and Trauss. In his memo proposing a national YIMBY-abundance political takeover, Rosen boasts of this synergistic relationship, noting that “we built our San Francisco operation with Scott Wiener’s policy and political team.” Several months ago, Wiener announced his bid to replace retiring U.S. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Wiener’s allies in the tech and real-estate industries have since donated nearly $4 million to his congressional campaign.

As Wiener climbed the political ladder, the YIMBY movement continued to accrue power in the state. To date, CA YIMBY and its affiliates have raised nearly $15 million from Open Philanthropy (now called Coefficient Giving), a fund created by tech billionaires Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, as well as $1 million from the payment processor Stripe. Wealthy tech titans quickly grasped YIMBY’s potential as a tool to gain political power and influence against  San Francisco’s progressive political order. Perhaps its most significant win in the city  was its ouster of Democratic Socialist Supervisor Dean Preston, a tenants rights attorney and champion of progressive taxation and criminal justice reform. He was replaced by Bilal Mahmood, a candidate who ran to Preston’s right on both issues.  Preston laid out the pivotal role the abundance faction played in his electoral defeat in an essay for Current Affairs in 2025.

In addition to ousting Preston, San Francisco’s wealthy abundance network defeated reformist District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and other progressive elected officials. The movement’s lead funding vehicles all bear innocuous good-government names sounding names like Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, or GrowSF, but draw support from tech barons, real-estate interests, and other major donors. Headlining this group are a key clutch of big-money backers: billionaire cryptocurrency executive Chris Larsen, billionaire venture capitalist William Oberndorf, Y Combinator’s centimillionaire chief Garry Tan, and billionaire former venture capitalist Michael Moritz.  Their network has steered more than $100 million into San Francisco politics since 2020–and they’re making similar plans for the rest of the state, and the country at large. 

Rosen’s Abundance Network is at the forefront of this charge. “One way to think about Abundance Network is the liberal answer to the tech elite joining the MAGA faction,” Rosen declares. 

However they might characterize themselves ideologically, their money is speaking loudly. According to Rosen’s document, they are raising more than quarter billion dollars annually for organizing. Among its top donors are hedge-fund billionaire and former Enron executive John Arnold, who committed a staggering $120 million  in 2025 , former Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who pledged an equally impressive $100 million a year, and Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who committed $40 million.

Not included in that accounting are two $120 million grant programs: The Abundance and Growth Fund run by Coefficient Giving (partially launched with $60 million from Stripe’s Patrick Collison) and the Recoding America Fund (started, in part, by the Abundance Network and run by its senior advisor, Jen Pahlka). All told, Abundance-aligned groups could log as much as $300 million in annual capital commitments. 

In his memo to prospective big donors, Rosen describes his  five-year quest to refine the abundance ideology. Now, to galvanize big money behind the abundance agenda, he presents this pro-business deregulatory package as the cure for the “root disease” that’s “crippling left politics and rotting our American democracy.” 

In reality, Rosen’s prescription is for a political scene dominated by the big-tech oligarchy. He writes that as a result of the failure of progressive governance, “Maslow’s monsters are now here: Urban conflagrations, floods, deteriorating norms, and the rebellion against elites.” He likewise equates an uptick in economic populist sentiment against wealth with full-fledged natural disaster, while attributing the rise of other social ills to the “abdication of elites.” Warming to this theme, he offers a preposterous reading of the reforms achieved by the early 20th-century progressive movement, claiming that they were the top-down handiwork of wealthy industrialists rather than the hard-won gains of organized labor, suffragists, peace activists and social reformers. 

The Abundance Network’s success in San Francisco rested on the mobilization of big money “to take down the exaction-machine”—a piece of right-wing pseudo-economic jargon designating alleged on-the-make public-interest concerns—“of equity groups, labor (unions), and NIMBYs.” In Rosen’s view, organized labor and grassroots community organizations are not engines of progressive change, but obstacles to the rightful seizure of power by the wealthy seers of big tech. He bemoans the rise of small-dollar fundraising, saying that it has “made politics dumber.” 

Indeed, everything about this vision of abundance—from its garbled reading of American history and its paean to industrialists to its pitch to the ultra-rich—is about re-entrenching elite control over politics. All that stands in the way of abundance, apparently, is the people.