A group of YIMBY Big Tech donors have taken control of San Francisco politics. They are now turning to the rest of the country.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie at a January press conference announcing a new homeless treatment initiative.
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) 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 pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing – an expense that eats into already overstretched budgets for other essential expenses such as food, health care and transportation.
Nowhere has the affordability problem been worse than in San Francisco. Between 1980 and 2019, housing costs in the city increased by as much as 600%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and San Francisco Rent Board records. This increase represents more than double the national average over the same period.
Proponents of Democratic politics have embraced the “abundance” deregulation movement—started 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 a philosophy of YIMBYism – short for Yes in My Backyard – in order to increase housing supply and reduce costs. The argument was appealing because it offered a simple proposition to a pressing problem: remove barriers to housing development — from red tape, through community and environmental review, to building height limits — and a housing boom would ensue, finally ensuring that cities would be able to meet growing demand for housing.
But San Francisco illustrates another dynamic, one that has seen the city’s political scene quickly transform into a playground for the ultra-rich. The YIMBY movement didn’t just push for relaxed zoning: It became a battleground for the Bay Area’s tech titans who used it as a political vehicle to seize local power.
As documented In a recent report from the Phoenix Project, San Francisco’s YIMBY uprising has quickly become the vanguard of an emerging astroturf network. Starting in 2020, the ultrarich began supporting a new host of political pressure groups sporting cozy, 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. Katharyne Mitchell, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Gregory Woolston, a doctoral student, described this local political takeover as a revangelical populismpracticing a policy of “revenge” financed by conservative elites. And it clearly works: according to one analysis of the Chronicle of San Franciscothe composition of the city’s board of supervisors has shifted significantly to the right in 2024.
Positioning themselves as no-nonsense moderates in a progressive metropolis supposedly drunk on its own regulatory powers, members of San Francisco’s power-of-abundance elite include Mayor Daniel Lurie and Supervisors Bilal Mahmood and Stephen Sherrill, as well as former Supervisor Joel Engardio. They campaigned for reactionary policies like cuts to LGBTQ Assistance and Public Health programs, gutting environmental reviewdefinancing free legal aidand block a single wealth tax. And after gaining power, they worked tirelessly to roll back progressive progress on criminal justice, tenant protections, and environmental regulations.
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Today, Silicon Valley is applying the same model in an effort to take over the national Democratic Party. Internal fundraising materials obtained by the Phoenix Project and first reported by one of us in The American perspective details how Zack Rosen, co-founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Networkand its allies have amassed a funding stream of $260 million a year from wealthy benefactors. (Rosen told Perspective that these figures were incorrect. He pointed to a figure citing a $120 million donation from John Arnold, saying it was closer to $40 million a year; our follow-up questions about the group’s other “capital commitments” cited in the memo remained unanswered.) The group’s goal, detailed in a so-called historical manifestois nothing less than “expanding this work to all 50 states” and “building the Abundance faction from the grassroots, 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 boasts that by expanding “the moderate faction” in the Bay Area, he and his allies have “turned the tide.” [the] Democratic Party of San Francisco”, “overthrown [the] San Francisco Board of Supervisors” and “inverted [the] Santa Monica City Council. These are not empty boasts. San Francisco moderates have stringed together an impressive series of political victories against progressive elected officials, including the recall of reform-minded prosecutor Chesa Boudin in June 2022.
Rosen sees these victories as the start of a “multi-decade” project. He goes on to explain that the YIMBY model of power-seeking abundance aims for nothing less than the “renewal” of liberal institutions – in cities, states and, ultimately, the entire country. “Our goals are ambitious, and our core beliefs run counter to the way left-wing institutions — the Democratic Party, left-wing philanthropies, advocacy organizations — think and operate today,” Rosen writes.
This top-down revolution initially took root in the Biden era, but was 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, published its own lined calling for a cross-party coalition to preach the gospel of abundance. The first order of business was to challenge progressive power within the Democratic Party. Over the past year, the Abundance Movement has taken this mandate to heart as it attempts to replicate the “Hostile takeover» San Francisco politics on a grand scale
What allows this political putsch to pass as a common-sense reform is the fact that the YIMBY movement itself is qualified as a quasi-populist insurrection. In the 2010s, the flag-bearer for the nascent movement was Sonja Trauss, a 24-year-old newcomer to the Bay Area living in rapidly gentrifying West Oakland. In 2014, Trauss, who founded the San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation (SFBARF), was present 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. However, they were far from being the first organizations to advocate for zoning reform; the NAACP and its allies for racial justice had fought against restrictive zoning since before Trauss was born. Even the term YIMBY was not new; it was used in planning literature in the early 1990s.
Trauss became the local YIMBY movement’s most tireless lobbyist. His efforts benefited greatly from early support from an influential and wealthy member of the tech elite: Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman, a member of the notorious PayPal mafia.
Trauss ran for a seat on the Board of Supervisors in 2018, seeking to represent Tenderloin and South of Market Street, two of San Francisco’s most diverse working-class neighborhoods. His campaign raised more than $1 million, more than two-thirds of which came from Progress San Francisco, a political action committee. mainly funded by technology executives, corporate real estate investors and venture capitalists. Yet for all this fundraising influence, Trauss lost the race to Matt Haney, a former school board administrator.
Undeterred, Trauss still sought favor with California’s power elite. Current San Francisco State Senator and candidate for U.S. Congress 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 funded Wiener’s first bid for state Senate. In turn, Wiener supported Trauss’s run in 2018. His volunteers served as foot soldiers in his successful campaign to unseat progressive Supervisor Jane Kim.
Once elected to the state Senate in 2016, Wiener wasted no time advancing the YIMBY agenda. Alongside him were CA YIMBY and its affiliated organizations: YIMBY Law, YIMBY Action, and Housing Action Coalition. These groups were founded in part by Rosen, the political director of Abundance Network, former Wiener aide Todd David, and Trauss. In his memo proposing a national political takeover of YIMBY abundance, Rosen boasts of this synergistic relationship, noting that “we built our operation in San Francisco with Scott Wiener’s politics and political team.” Several months ago, Wiener announced her candidacy to replace outgoing U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Wiener’s allies in the tech and real estate sectors have since donated almost 4 million dollars in his congressional campaign.
As Wiener rose through the political ranks, the YIMBY movement continued to gain power in the state. To date, CA YIMBY and its subsidiaries have raised almost 15 million dollars from Open Philanthropy (now called Coefficient Giving), a fund created by tech billionaires Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, as well as $1 million from payment processor Stripe. Wealthy tech titans quickly saw YIMBY’s potential as a tool to gain political power and influence against San Francisco’s progressive political order. Perhaps the city’s most important victory was ouster of democratic socialist supervisor Dean Prestona tenant rights attorney and champion of progressive taxation and criminal justice reform. He was replaced by Bilal Mahmood, a candidate who ran to the right of Preston on both issues. Preston exposed the central role played by the abundance faction in his electoral defeat in a test For Current Affairs in 2025.
In addition to ousting Preston, San Francisco’s affluent network defeated reformist district attorney Chesa Boudin and other progressive elected officials. The main financing vehicles of the por movement all try innocuous good-government names resembling names like Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, or GrowSF, but enjoy the support of tech barons, real estate interests and other major donors. Headlining this group are a big backers key pouch: Billionaire cryptocurrency executive Chris Larsen, billionaire venture capitalist William Oberndorf, centimillionaire head of Y Combinator Garry Tan, and former billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz. Their network has pumped more than $100 million into San Francisco politics since 2020 – and they are do similar projects for the rest of the state and the country as a whole.
Rosen’s Abundance Network is at the forefront of this trend. “One way to think about Abundance Network is the liberal response to the tech elite’s embrace of the MAGA faction,” Rosen says.
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However they characterize themselves ideologically, their money speaks loudly. According to Rosen’s paperthey raise more than a quarter of a billion dollars each year for recruiting. Among its top donors are hedge fund billionaire and former Enron executive John Arnold, who pledged a whopping $120 million in 2025, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who pledged an equally impressive $100 million a year, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who pledged $40 million.
This accounting does not include two $120 million grant programs: The Abundance and Growth Fund managed by Coefficient Giving (partially launched with $60 million from Patrick Collison of Stripe) and the Recoding America Fund (launched, in part, by the Abondance Network and managed by its senior advisorJen Pahlka). In total, Abundance-aligned groups could see up to $300 million in annual capital commitments.
In his note to potential major donors, Rosen describes his five-year quest to refine the ideology of abundance. Today, to galvanize large sums of money behind the abundance agenda, he presents this pro-business deregulatory agenda as the cure for the “root disease” that is “paralyzing left-wing politics and rotting our American democracy.”
In reality, Rosen advocates a political scene dominated by the Big Tech oligarchy. He writes that because of the failure of progressive governance, “Maslow’s monsters are now here: urban fires, floods, deteriorating standards, and rebellion against elites.” He also equates the rise of anti-wealth economic populist sentiment with a genuine natural disaster, while attributing the rise of other social ills to “the abdication of the elites.” Addressing this theme, he offers an absurdist reading of the reforms carried out by the progressive movement of the early 20th century, arguing that they were the work of wealthy industrialists from above rather than the hard-won gains of trade unions, suffragettes, peace activists, and social reformers.
Abundance Network’s success in San Francisco relied on mobilizing large sums of money “to bring down the exaction machine” – right-wing pseudo-economic jargon for so-called ongoing public policy concerns – “equity groups, unions) and NIMBYs.” According to Rosen, unions and grassroots community organizations are not engines of progressive change but obstacles to the legitimate seizure of power by the wealthy seers of Big Tech. He laments the rise of small fundraisers, saying it has “made politics dumber.”
Indeed, everything about this vision of abundance – from its distorted reading of American history and its paean to industrialists to its pitch to the ultra-rich – aims to reassert elite control over politics. Apparently all that stands in the way of abundance is people.
Julie Pitta Julie Pitta is the president of the Phoenix Project, a San Francisco-based organization that tracks dark money in elections. She is a seasoned journalist, with over 30 years of experience.
Dylan Gyauch-Lewis Dylan Gyauch-Lewis is a principal investigator on the Revolving Door project.