HousingWiki:About

HousingWiki is a open resource for gathering, developing, and discussing housing and land-use issues. Particularly, to gather ideas, research, and strategies for creating more inclusive, affordable, equitable housing and communities. It was formerly YIMBYwiki, and began as an affiliate project of YIMBY Action, which is a member of the SFYIMBY coalition, San Francisco. 

 

Mission 

Build the most usable, complete, and open online resource for understanding housing and land-use issues, and for working to create more inclusive and affordable communities. 

(informal): the rebuttal, explainer, meme, & proposals factory.
@YIMBYwiki, 2 Dec 2017. 

YIMBYwiki‏ @YIMBYwiki 5:31 AM - 9 Aug 2017
Replying to @TimLundSE26
"yes, 'let the front lines build the strategies, we will systematize & internationalize.' is YIMBYwiki's imperial design."
 

Sponsorship

YIMBYwiki was supported in 2017-18 by a grant from Better Boulder and Boulder Area Realtors Association. We invite further financial support to continue and expand this project, please contact us at editor (at) yimby.wiki if you're interested. 

 

Development Roadmap

Development Roadmap:
to-do items and proposed or planned developments.

 

Background

This project grew out of a October 2016 discussion on the YIMBY Town mailing list (US national YIMBY email list/forum): "The Opposition in Portland has Arrived" (subsequently moved to "YIMBY knowledgebase/wiki (was The Opposition in Portland..). in October 2016.

However, as noted in thread, there have been various previous discussions about idea, and prior related efforts such as the YIMBY Sweden's YIMBY Wiki (see also English version via Google Translate), and the SFBARF FAQ created by San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation) on Reddit. In 2014, San Francisco housing-finance expert (and SFYIMBY friend!) Fay Darmawi suggested a "HousingWiki" in her article "How Affordable Housing Can Make a Name for Itself (and Why)” (Affordable Housing Finance, March 19, 2014).

On YIMBY Town list, Mike Schiraldi (San Francisco) wrote: 
"I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent, but one of the reasons it's so exciting to see nationwide YIMBY collaboration is that we can jointly build up a body of answers to frequent objections (both good-faith and bad-faith)....Any suggestions as to what sort of storage system might work for such a knowledgebase?"

Following on these conversation, SFYIMBY member Tim McCormick proposed and launched YIMBY.wiki, and continues to lead its development. 
 

Please support YIMBYwiki.

 

Admin/editors:  

Editor / Admin:
Tim McCormick, Portland. (on site: Admin / Tmccormick )
Email: editor (at) yimby.wiki. 

Contributing Editor: 
Elise Aymer, Toronto.
+ You. 

 

Editing/Creating pages

open to anyone, requires account with email confirmation. 
New content/edits go live immediately, though may be reviewed and changed by editors later.  Change logs are reviewed regularly. 
 

Editing tips & tricks

To stop text from flowing around an image: edit page in Source view place:

<div style="clear: both"></div> 

before the text that should start below the floating image.

 

Thanks for input & help from: 

Miraheze, UK-based non-profit "with a mission to provide a free community-centric wiki farm," for excellent support in relaunching and hosting HousingWiki, March/April 2020, and ongoing help.

Laura Clark - Executive Director of YIMBY Action (member org of SFYIMBY). 
Mike Schiraldi
Jesse Kanson-Benanav - Chairman, A Better Cambridge.
Laura Loe Bernstein - Founder, YIMBY Seattle. 
Ken Hotard - SVP at Boulder Area Realtor Association.
Zane A. Selvans - YIMBY Town, Better Boulder, Boulder Housing Coalition, etc. 
 

Installation details

To see current complete installation details, see special page: https://housing.wiki/wiki/Special:Version.

Summary: 

 

Manual backup procedure

Note, backup currently running automatically daily using a Crontab job on server, except for the part of transferring backup files back to a personal account for personal and Google Drive backup copy. But if you need to do it manually or reset up the Crontab job, below are the commands,  shown prefaced by the shell prompt '%': 

%  ssh yimbywiki@yimby.wiki

now enter password for account 'yimbywiki'. 

% php yimby.wiki/maintenance/dumpBackup.php --full | gzip > ~/backup/wiki-yimby_wiki-XML-$(date +%Y%m%d).xml.gz

that puts a date-labeled backup file X.xml.gz into /backup

% cd backup 

% tar -zcvf "$(date '+%F').tar.gz" /home/yimbywiki/yimby.wiki

% mysqldump -u yimbywiki --password=XXXXXXXX --host=mysql.yimby.wiki yimby_wiki -c | gzip > ~/backup/wiki-yimby_wiki-$(date '+%Y%m%d').sql.gz

[note: replace XXXXXXXX with real database password]. 

To then retrive these backup files to personal computer, to store backups there and automatically on Google Drive: 

Open terminal window. 

Change to correct local directory, e.g. 

% cd ~Users > tim > Google Drive > Tim > YIMBYwiki > site-backup

Now sftp to server:

% sftp yimbywiki@yimby.wiki
sftp>   cd backup
sftp>   get [1st backup file just created] 
sftp>   get [2nd backup file just created] 
sftp>   get [3rd backup file just created] 

These will then in turn get backed up automatically by Google Backup and Sync / Google Drive, at least on Tim's computers.