Why the YIMBY Endorsement Should be a Dealbreaker for Santa Monica Voters

YIMBY-backed Caroline Torosis and Doug Trussler are no votes for Santa Monicans who care about the city’s present and future

The movement’s billionaire backers have bragged about “flipping” a majority of the Santa Monica City Council in 2024; now they’re coming to finish the job

Many Santa Monica voters are familiar with the YIMBY movement, which stands for “yes in my back yard.” YIMBY California, YIMBY L.A. and affiliated groups like Abundant Housing L.A. pose as scrappy grassroots movements born out of the state’s housing affordability crisis. In reality, they are corporate backed astroturf organizations. To say they cannot be trusted is like saying the Hindenburg had a little mishap.

Though they haven’t declared it outright, the YIMBYs are Santa Monica’s sworn enemies. Waving the false flag of affordability, their policies are in the process of destroying what’s left of the city’s character, and what makes Bay City special, in the name of profit. They envision a city of Monopoly style stack and pack apartment complexes with ground floor retail.

It’s important to note that most of the YIMBY action is in Sacramento. Over the last decade YIMBY allied lawmakers have passed hundreds of new laws that override local zoning and land use rules. They’ve also weaponized the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation, converting it from advisory to mandatory.

Still, there are plenty of officials at the local level who are complicit in their own cities’ destruction. As of 2024 Santa Monica is a prime example.

Selling a city’s soul, one parcel at a time

These days, downtown Santa Monica is an example of a nearly finished YIMBY — oh, let’s call it a “community.” Dozens of soulless, barely distinguishable four and five story apartment buildings in which many units have views of the soulless, barely distinguishable building next door or across the street. None of them have open space or green space, as developers build out every square inch to maximize profit.

Studio apartments start at nearly $3,000 a month and two bedrooms fetch upward of $7,000. If you want a three bedroom for you and your spouse and your two kids, you’re looking at $10,000 a month or more. You can rent a house with a yard on a quiet tree lined street in Sherman Oaks for that kind of money.

So much for affordability.

As for the YIMBY claim that Santa Monica, like the rest of California, hasn’t built enough housing over the last 25 years to keep pace with demand, according to the state Department of Finance the city has a residential vacancy rate of just under 10%. That’s well above the 5%-7% that economists consider healthy. Moreover, the vacancy rates in many of those new downtown buildings are considerably higher, with anecdotal evidence suggesting some could be as high as 25% or even 50%. Owners are offering months of free rent, gym memberships, even cash gift cards just to get people in the door. Suffice it to say, landlords in the quiet streets north of Wilshire don’t need to hock Equinox memberships to attract residents.

The pro-YIMBY blog UrbanizeLA maintains an interactive map of new housing developments throughout Los Angeles County. There are some 130 buildings either recently completed (last five years), under construction or in the planning process. Most are mid-sized and large buildings with 50 or more units, and several top out over 200 units. That means that somewhere between 6,500 and 7,500 units are either complete or in the pipeline, representing between 75% and 85% of the city’s current state Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) mandate. Also, the map is comprehensive but not complete, missing several buildings with several hundred more units that either are under construction or have been approved, such as a 360 unit affordable housing project on L.A. Metro property adjacent to the 17th Street/Santa Monica College light rail stop.

All of this stands as a rebuttal to those who argue that city leaders’ “hands are tied.” With a bit more effort, the city will easily reach, and likely surpass, its mandate. Meanwhile, with a rental market already saturated with a supply of market rate and luxury rentals and a teetering local economy, it’s hard to see how all of those new units will be filled. Rather than an “abundance” boom the likely outcome will be a market collapse. Indeed, several recently completed buildings already are in foreclosure. That’s a harbinger of things to come.

That is an excellent recipe for crashing a housing market: build more of the kinds of units that most people either don’t want, cannot afford, or both. High end rentals overwhelmingly are occupied by young, college educated professionals. You’ll see nary a stroller on the streets of downtown Santa Monica. I speak from experience: in the early 2010s I had an apartment in one of those buildings. Of the 50-odd units, there was exactly one family with children. They were Ukrainian, and previously lived in a Soviet-era apartment block in Kyiv. A Santa Monica stack and pack might as well have been a Bel Air estate to them.

Active measures

The story of the YIMBY assault on Santa Monica isn’t just figures and statistics. It’s about the city’s soul. In 2024, the YIMBYs backed the slate of Dan Hall, Ellis Raskin, Barry Snell and Natalya Zernitskaya. All four were elected with barely a thousand vote margin among them (which is a whole different conversation). The YIMBYs also have endorsed current mayor Caroline Torosis and businessman Doug Trussler this year.

All five YIMBY backed electeds are dutifully doing the movement’s bidding. Last month they voted to sell out part of the historically black and Latino Pico neighborhood under SB 79 even though city staff had provided an alternative that would have spared the historically working class single family neighborhood and resulted in even more housing.

Let’s repeat that: they had a chance to spare Pico, and instead they effectively voted to destroy it. In their endorsement of Torosis in particular, YIMBY-LA specifically cited this vote and noted that she’ll do it again if re-elected. Again, that’s a deal breaker.

Does anyone have any questions? This is how YIMBYism plays out on the ground, in the real world (to her credit, councilwoman and current candidate Lana Negrete was the sole vote against the motion).

The real agenda

They claim to be in favor of affordable housing (or “abundant housing”). In reality, they’re funded by some of the most powerful interests in big tech, venture capital, private equity and other institutional grade investors. Don’t take my word for it: read the leaked 2026 California YIMBY fundraising memo written by the organization’s co-founder, Zack Rosen. Rosen also co-founded the Abundance Network (Abundance and YIMBY are two sides of the same coin).

The document is, suffice it to say, educational. Rosen reveals that California YIMBY is funded to the tune of some $240 million per year, the vast majority from a small handful (fewer than ten) of tech billionaires, including former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former Enron executive turned billionaire venture capitalist John Arnold. Meanwhile, he belittles individual small donors – that is, you and me – as nothing but “gamblers” who are “mak[ing] politics dumber.” You can read the complete story in an American Prospect article from this past June.

Rosen would just as soon the unwashed masses stay out of the conversation altogether and let the Masters of the Universe call the shots. As far as the YIMBYs are concerned, the prols shouldn’t have a say in how and where they live and raise their families. They are the equivalent of a religious fundamentalist movement that brooks no dissent and envisions nothing short of total domination.

The real YIMBY agenda is an agglomeration of money and power to elites, at the cost of the neighborhoods 39 million Californians call home.

The YIMBY endorsement should be a dealbreaker for Santa Monica voters. Caroline Torosis already has demonstrated her willingness to sell out and sacrifice neighborhoods. There’s no reason to think Doug Trussler would be any different.

Just say no to the hostile takeover.

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