Billionaire VC Marc Andreessen advocates YIMBY insurance policies, however he is NIMBY about his hometown

In 2020, when the pandemic was going robust, billionaire Marc Andreessen turned heads by publishing an essay on his company website titled “It’s Time to Construct.” 

“I count on this essay to be the goal of criticism,” he wrote whereas expressing a mindset that has come to be known as YIMBY, for “sure in my yard.”

“You see it in housing and the bodily footprint of our cities,” he wrote. “We are able to’t construct practically sufficient housing in our cities with surging financial potential — which ends up in crazily skyrocketing housing costs in locations like San Francisco, making it practically inconceivable for normal individuals to maneuver in and take the roles of the long run.” Then he expressed dissatisfaction with the state of city structure. “We should always have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular dwelling environments in all our greatest cities at ranges method past what we now have now; the place are they?”

Andreessen additionally lives in Atherton, California, America’s richest city, which has held the title of the most expensive ZIP code in the U.S. for 5 consecutive years, in line with knowledge from Property Shark. Atherton additionally topped Bloomberg’s Riches Places annual index for 4 years, till 2020. And as a distinguished native citizen, new reporting by the Atlantic reveals that he could also be extra of a NIMBY.

Andreessen, co-founder of the enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz, is thought for being an early investor in main tech corporations together with Meta, GitHub, Skype, and Twitter. In June, Andreessen and his wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen wrote an email expressing their opposition to a proposal that might enhance zoning capability for multi-family dwelling building in Atherton. 

“I’m scripting this letter to speak our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” the 2 wrote of their electronic mail, signed by each, as reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning initiatives from the Housing Factor which might be submitted to the state in July. They may MASSIVELY lower our dwelling values, the standard of lifetime of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY enhance the noise air pollution and site visitors.”

The remark, which was additionally reviewed by Fortune, was printed on July 14 by Atherton’s planning division. Andreessen didn’t reply to The Atlantic or Fortune’s request for remark.

In his unique essay, Andreessen tied the necessity to construct extra housing to the American dream. “The issues we construct in big portions, like computer systems and TVs, drop quickly in worth,” he wrote. “The issues we don’t, like housing, faculties, and hospitals, skyrocket in worth.” With proudly owning a home out of attain for thus many, he mentioned, the American dream was in peril.

His essay additionally included a call-to-action, citing the necessity to “break the quickly escalating worth curves for housing, schooling, and healthcare, to guarantee that each American can notice the dream.” The one method to try this, he wrote, is to construct.

Elsewhere within the Bay Space, pro-housing city council candidates are dropping out of races as a result of they’ll’t afford to stay there, whereas the final lack of recent constructing initiatives has spurred others to hunt out innovative solutions. Atherton particularly has an issue staffing its hearth and police departments as a result of civil servants can not afford to stay there and are delay by the lengthy commute. The Bay Space public transit is quite underbuilt, along with its housing.

Andreessen was removed from the one Atherton resident to precise robust opposition to the housing proposal. “Practically all of the feedback obtained expressed opposition to using overlay zones,” wrote the city’s planning division when publishing the slate of public feedback it had obtained on the topic. 

In his 2020 essay, Andreesson pinned the explanation that there’s any housing disaster in any respect on the query of need. “The issue is need,” he wrote, referring to the need to put money into main constructing initiatives. “We have to *need* these items.”