He’s great from downtown. Just don’t make him live there.
Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry has become the latest celeb to say no to a new residential project near his house. In a January letter to the mayor of Atherton, California, the San Francisco suburb where the four-time NBA champion and his wife Ayesha live with their kids, the Currys voiced their objection to a proposed rezoning of a parcel at 23 Oakwood Boulevard. The property is currently a single-family house, but the town wants to allow the construction of up to 16 new townhouses there, four of them affordable, with a height limit of 40 feet.
Coming off Steph’s 41-point performance against the Wizards on Jan. 16, the Currys wrote:
We hesitate to add to the “not in our backyard” (literally) rhetoric, but we wanted to send a note before today’s meeting. Safety and privacy for us and our kids continues to be our top priority and one of the biggest reasons we chose Atherton as home. … We kindly ask that the town adopts the new housing element without the inclusion of 23 Oakwood.
As far as celebrity NIMBYism goes, this is a pretty mild brew. Compare Curry to Dave Chappelle, who threatened to cancel his investments in his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio, if the town approved a multifamily housing project. The Currys are asking nicely, and besides, they add, if the town does go ahead with the rezoning, maybe they could include a taller fence or some landscaping?
Steph also comes off favorably in comparison to his venture capitalist neighbor Marc Andreessen, who along with his wife complained about the same project last summer in a letter that read, in part:
Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!
I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
As the Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas observed then, Andreessen’s stance was particularly rich since he had written a widely lauded 2020 essay called, literally, “It’s Time to Build,” in which he criticized slow housing growth in cities like San Francisco for “making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future.” Indeed, objections from the Andreessens and others got Atherton to remove three proposed rezoning areas from their housing plan last summer.
On Tuesday, however, the 23 Oakwood project came back from the dead. The thing that’s interesting about the Currys’ NIMBYism isn’t that they didn’t want new neighbors. That’s all too typical. It’s that they didn’t get their way.
Not coincidentally, Tuesday was the deadline for many Bay Area cities to submit a plan to the state showing how they plan to make room for more housing, with the relevant land-use changes expected within 12 months. For more than 50 years, many California suburbs have treated this plan, called a “housing element,” as something between busywork and comic performance art, suggesting that new homes might get built on sites such as supermarkets, post offices, fire stations, and luxury hotels, instead of doing the unpleasant work of rezoning to legalize apartments.
In 2021, however, faced with a homelessness crisis and population flight driven by the country’s most expensive housing, California got serious about scrutinizing those documents, which in turn guide zoning codes, height limits, parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, and other housing restrictions. “A housing element is no longer a paper exercise—it’s a contract with the state of housing commitments for eight years and the Housing Accountability Unit will hold jurisdictions to those commitments,” Megan Kirkeby, deputy director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, said in a statement.
What’s the state going to do about it? Apparently, activate an obscure provision called “builder’s remedy,” which strips away all zoning regulations for mixed- or moderate-income housing developments if a jurisdiction falls out of compliance with state housing law. Santa Monica found this out the hard way, when it accidentally abolished its zoning code last year and wound up with 4,000 new permits filed—two decades’ worth of housing in eight months. Several other Southern California cities also found themselves out of compliance.
Now it’s Northern California’s turn. Keeping track of all the various jurisdictions is complicated, to say the least, but Atherton has attracted attention for reasons that go beyond its famous residents. For one thing, it usually ranks as the most expensive ZIP code in the United States. It has not a single building with five or more housing units, despite the fact that land goes for $8 million an acre—downtown prices.* You would be hard-pressed to find a community with a higher ratio of home prices to architecture.
After neighbors revolted over the 23 Oakwood concept, Atherton sent in a draft housing element last August in the old style—which is to say, an unserious proposal. None of the detached single-family homes that make up 98 percent of the city would be rezoned, new multifamily housing would be “built” on the grounds of local schools, and more than 80 percent of the state housing goals would be met by creating hundreds of accessory dwelling units in back yards and garages. In October, the state rejected the plan, taking issue with just about all of it.
Which is how Steph Curry wound up writing to the city’s mayor. In a new January draft of the housing element, 23 Oakwood was back on deck, along with another bundle of 18 properties the city thought could be rezoned to provide 19 multifamily dwellings, subject to an inclusionary zoning ordinance requiring that 20 percent of units be affordable. Atherton City Hall knew they had to get into compliance with the state’s housing officials, or risk Manhattanization.
“Recognizing the extreme housing shortage in California and the San Francisco Peninsula,” the document states, “the Town desires to do its part in meeting the assigned RHNA [state-mandated] production through rezoning nineteen single family properties to multifamily. This is a dramatic departure from the Town’s historic development pattern.”
Or, it would have been dramatic, anyway. After a four-hour, jam-packed afternoon meeting on Tuesday in which residents donned matching protest T-shirts and tears were shed, Atherton leaders abandoned the second rezoning project, Angela Swartz at Almanac reported, leaving the city rezoning just one single-family property to help build 348 units over the next decade: 23 Oakwood. (The rest of those units, the city says, will come from ADUs, split lots, and private schools.) It took 20 to 25 public meetings over two years, 10 community engagement sessions, and a number of resident-hosted meetings with invited city staff, and Atherton is going to rezone one (1!) parcel.
Here is where one begins to feel a tiny bit of sympathy for Stephen and Ayesha Curry. Why did a city of 7,800 people select this particular neighbor of the Curry family for its lone multifamily “district”? Nominally, because the owner has expressed interest in redevelopment—fair enough. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that 23 Oakwood has something else going for it: It’s literally on the town line, adjacent to Redwood City, and therefore its eventual development will only annoy Atherton residents half as much as, say, an apartment building at the center of town.
In fact, some of the most trenchant commentary at the Jan. 18 meeting to discuss this plan came from a Redwood City resident, who said he had attended meetings for more than a year and opposed the 23 Oakwood project because he lived nearby. “The modus operandi in here seem to be, ‘How can we meet this mandate and change as little as possible?’ I feel like y’all tried to sharpshoot this instead of thinking ahead and doing the really hard job of broadly rezoning your town. That’s what [HCD] called for. You declined to include any property the town owns, no skin in the game, and instead opted for one actionable project that’s gonna net you three low-income units.”
As a result, the neighbor suggested, the housing element would fail to pass muster with the state—and Atherton would fall into a builder’s remedy bonanza. Two developers have already contacted the city manager about that.
Correction, February 1, 2023: This article originally stated Atherton has a CalTrain station. The station closed in 2020.
