[Noisebridge-discuss] Bay Area Renter's Federation @ Noisebridge

[Matt Stone]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 12:19 PM, yar <yardenack at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 9:09 AM, subbes <subbes at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Would hosting a rent/housing/construction policy teach-in and debate -
> with
> > representation from multiple viewpoints - at NB fall afoul of the
> "political
> > events jeopardize our 503(c)" issue?
> >
> > Law experts pls weigh in.
>
> It won't. Most of us are used to a broad understanding of politics -
> "the personal is political" - but the government defines politics very
> narrowly, to mean advocating for a specific political candidate, party
> or ballot measure. Almost everything that we call politics, the
> government calls "educational", which is one of the catch-all
> categories that nonprofit law is specifically meant to include. So I
> wouldn't worry about that.
>
> I personally hate SFBARF with a passion. There are some smart people I
> respect in SFBARF, and they're the ones pushing to focus on fighting
> NIMBYs for dense market-rate housing only in very wealthy
> neighborhoods (Hillsborough, Atherton, Cupertino, Orinda) while
> leaving poor neighborhoods alone. But they will never succeed. SFBARF
> will continue pulling its sleight of hand by taking policies which
> should be limited to rich peoples' neighborhoods, insisting they be
> applied in everybody's neighborhood, and then fighting for it in a way
> that will only ever succeed in poor peoples' neighborhoods, leading to
> actual displacement, no significant change in the supply-demand
> equation, no dent in the power or land-use patterns of the biggest
> NIMBYs, and accelerating rich-straight-white-dude-ification of the
> whole Bay Area, whether they like it or not.
>

You know, thank you for that analysis.  I had been pretty sympathetic to
the SFBARF agenda, but this really crystallizes the issue for me. Very
interesting food for thought.


>
> But no, I don't think it will threaten your 501c3 status.
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