Asian residents in S.F. are often cast as NIMBYs. Some are sick and tired of it. 

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While many in San Francisco’s Asian community opposed closing the Great Highway in favor of a park and are alarmed by upzoning the Westside and adding housing, a group of Asian urbanists are organizing to prove that they exist, too.

“There are definitely a lot of us who do want more apartment buildings, who do want better public infrastructure and biking as well,” said James Wen, 28, at the inaugural meetup for “Asian Urbanists” in San Francisco on Irving Street on Tuesday night. 

“I do feel like there is a pervasive narrative where Chinese Americans on the Westside are generally anti-urbanist, generally don’t want to see growth,” said Wen, an AI scientist and a volunteer lead at SF YIMBY who’s lived on the city’s Westside his entire life. “I’m here to change that.”

Chang Sun, 31, a data engineer and another volunteer lead at SF YIMBY, agreed. “We want to make it easier to organize.”

Wen and Sun were among roughly two dozen like-minded Asian San Franciscans who met at Sunset Commons, a three-month-old public gathering space on Irving Street. Most arrived on public transit or bikes and described themselves as “super environmentalists.”

Many were officially affiliated with various YIMBY groups. Nearly all were well-versed in Mayor Daniel Lurie’s upzoning plan, and familiar with city zoning codes.

“We got to talk about these urban issues. We’ve got to talk about housing, transportation, everything,” said Janelle Wong, the former executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. Wong said it was “important for us, as Asians” to get involved in housing debates.

As the Joel Engardio recall campaign heated up earlier this year, Wong said she pushed Brian Quan, the organizer of Tuesday’s meetup, to put the event together.

“Because the voice that’s being talked about for Asians or specifically Chinese voters in San Francisco — I don’t know about all of you, but it doesn’t fit for me,” she said.

“There are people that exist in our community, young people, old people … that care about these things,” Wong added. “We’re not invisible. We do have an opinion.”

For Quan, organizing the Asian urbanist meetup was a natural evolution of the Stop Asian Hate gathering he hosted at his Richmond District house during the pandemic. 

A former president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, Quan recently served as the treasurer of Engardio’s anti-recall campaign, which failed to prevent the emphatic ousting of a supervisor who supported converting the Upper Great Highway into a park. Asian residents played a leading role in ultimately recalling Engardio.

“For me, it’s — how do we reverse that reputation of being against things and actively promoting what we see the community developing as?” Quan said.

Most of those who attended Tuesday night’s meetup were 30-something tech workers who live on the Westside. One sipped a bowl of Shin Ramyun instant noodles. 

Many already knew one another from various urbanist groups, on campaign trails, or when making public comments at the City Hall. Lian Chang, who was a campaign manager of Engardio’s anti-recall campaign and currently an organizer at Abundant San Francisco, was there to advocate for Lurie’s upzoning plan.

The crowd cheered when one of the two speakers of the night, BART board member Janice Li, said, “We don’t get cool shit in San Francisco if we don’t have really good transit.” 

Li, who’s been on the BART board since 2018 and is a member of the city’s progressive faction, said she has no intention to run for another term next year. (She welcomes anyone interested in the seat, which represents a swath of the city from Balboa Park station to Embarcadero station, to reach out.)

She said in an interview Tuesday that she has often felt a lack of belonging in the Asian community groups that are supposed to represent her.

“A lot of the more organized groups that have ‘Chinese’ in their name, or ‘Asian’ in their name don’t necessarily represent the community as a whole, but they say that they speak for the community,” she said.

The other speaker, Mike Chen, is a more moderate YIMBY who was appointed to the SFMTA board last year. He walked the group through the transit agency’s work, including sharing a spaghetti-like map he created in Microsoft Paint showing the public transit lines connecting Asian neighborhoods across the city. 

Li and Chen, who don’t usually caucus together in politics, shared a common passion for public transit Tuesday night.

Participants asked questions about whether it’s possible for the state to fund BART, what a utopian future for the local public transit system might look like, and whether Lurie has abandoned a lot of street projects after Engardio’s recall (Chen said no).

The Tuesday night group, mostly second- and third-generation immigrants with limited Chinese-language skills, also faced a challenge that many other organizing efforts — including Engardio’s anti-recall campaign — have struggled with. 

They’re trying to build a broad coalition that includes monolingual Chinese-speaking seniors who might actually support some of their ideas, such as improving public transit. “That’s why we are starting this up,” said Quan. 

The group plans to hold its next meet up early next year, said Quan, when it will go into the weeds of SB 63, a bill aimed at addressing the long-term funding shortfalls for public transit in the Bay Area. In the future, they hope to move the gathering towards the east side, making it “more equitable,” said Quan. 

And on this night, long after the discussion had ended, the group lingered in a neighborhood that had already fallen quiet. No one seemed in a hurry to go home.