Origin Stories

Well, I don't want to make Brianna the only one talking, but I know that we wanted to go through basically what South Bay Forward is and what they've been able to accomplish as a group.

I'm fairly new here, so I can only talk about some of the fun stuff I've gotten to be a part of, of some of the events and the the transit summit that's happened a couple of times now.

But I'd love to hear from anyone on here, maybe some stories that you want to share of specific events that you've got to be a part of or initiatives that you've been able to make progress on through this organization.

Sounds good.

So I'll start off with kind of our South Bay Forward origin story, and then I'll invite others to share about how you've been involved.

So we started in 2023, in the summer of 2023, so two years ago now.

And we actually started out of a Twitter group chat.

And for context, this is back when Twitter was an acceptable place to be.

And so I think that, yeah, we found each other just within what was called Housing Twitter.

And that was kind of a grouping of just folks in the housing space, including scholars, researchers, policy experts, and analysts, and then regular advocates.

And so we're part of the YIMBY movement, which stands for Yes In My Backyard, which is a grassroots movement that has its origins actually in the Bay Area and in San Francisco in particular around housing and basically folks kind of coming together and realizing we actually have to say yes because in so many situations we have points that are veto points where whether it's neighborhood organizations, HOAs, city councils that are denying housing.

And so the movement grew out of that frustration and quickly kind of became a statewide movement with statewide organizations and policy leaders.

And so I would say that Southern California and the LA area has always kind of been like lagging behind the Bay Area on the housing movement.

But we are thankful to have an organization called Abundant Housing LA, which started several years prior.

And the model that Abundant Housing works off of is having local chapters.

So we realized that there was no local chapter for the South Bay.

And kind of around 2022, as we had this Twitter group chat, we were adding folks who we realized were in the South Bay and who are also aligned with us on our housing ideals.

And we started a group chat and then we had more formal conversations where we said, OK, we should actually establish an organization and branding and kind of put ourselves out there so that we can accomplish more when we're organized and together and we speak with one voice.

So we reached out to Abundant Housing LA.

We formally started a chapter online.

We held a few kickoff events, and we were also pretty focused on advocating for the C-Line extension to Torrance, which I'm sure we'll talk about, if not in this episode, but in future episodes as well.

That was a key part of our early advocacy, but we've always been focused on the three pillars of housing, transit, and mobility because we find that each of these areas are interconnected and And we can't solve one without the other.

And so it's important to push on all three fronts.

And so in that time, we have built up our advocacy power, our people power.

We grew pretty quickly from like 50 to 200 members.