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...

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