San Mateo was the one Bay Area body with significantly more YIMBY than NIMBY public speakers
San Mateo City Council had 56 of 100 public speakers coded YIMBY against 17 of 100 coded NIMBY. In the other 14 bodies drawn, public speakers showed no significant difference. Officials had significantly more YIMBY than NIMBY speakers in 11 of the 24 bodies drawn.
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Methods. A speaker is one voice at one stretch of a meeting. Each statement was scored from -2, opposing more housing or transit, to +2, supporting more of it. A speaker is YIMBY when their statements average +0.5 or higher and NIMBY at -0.5 or lower. The likely range is a 90 in 100 interval from 2,000 resamples of meeting stretches. Significantly means the likely range excludes zero. A body is drawn when it has at least 10 speakers with a stance in that group. Transit boards are placed at their headquarters city and the county board at the county's center. Exploratory analysis. Stance and tone were coded by a large language model and have not been validated against human coders. All figures are copied from the project's published data of 2026-10-25.
References
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