Housing Justice AF, a column by Josh Ishimatsu
The Cicero Institute, based in Austin, Texas, has been supplying the blueprint for many cities’ policy response to homelessness. Their legislative template has been used for crafting policies in a growing number of states, including Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin. Per their website, their policy is focused on 4 main proposals:
- Ban street camping for unhoused people,
- Defund “Housing First” models, including permanent supportive housing,
- Restrict payment to nonprofit homeless service providers based upon strict performance metrics,
- Increase involuntary civil commitment.
Taken together, these policies represent an explicit and intentional shift from a housing-based model for addressing homelessness (a successful, bi-partisan, data-based model that was piloted and implemented under the George W. Bush administration) to one that is centered around criminalization and institutionalization. For those of use tracking these issues in Silicon Valley and in other Bay Area and California cities, this direction is all too familiar.
So, FYI, I wanted to spend a few inches of this column to shed some light on the Cicero Institute and its main founder, given how influential they’ve become. Most of this information is easily available online from reputable sources (see for e.g., this NYTimes article or this Rolling Stone article) but I wanted to pull a few things together and put them all in one short piece.
The Cicero Institute Family of Companies
The Cicero Institute was founded by Joe Lonsdale and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. According to their publicly available 2022 tax filings, the Cicero Institute had total revenues of $14.8 million in 2022, an increase of approximately $1.8 million from their 2021 budget. There also is an affiliated 501(c)(4) organization – Cicero Action – with a reported annual revenue of $2.2 million. And Arpinum (named after the city in ancient Rome where the historical figure of Cicero was born) an affiliated for profit entity incorporated in Virginia, received $2.2 million in 2021 from the Cicero Institute for what looks to be for payroll and administrative services. In addition, the University of Austin (founded by Joe Lonsdale) received an additional $6.7 million from the Cicero Institute in 2022. Joe Lonsdale is the biggest donor to and is on the boards of all these organizations, the chief executive of most, and there are other people with the last name of Lonsdale sprinkled across the boards of directors and staffs of these entities.
Cicero, the ancient Roman politician and philosopher, was a member/proponent of the Optimates (roughly translates to aristocrats or the elite from Latin) political faction who were the day’s conservatives and who believed in rule by the best/wealthiest ones (i.e., the aristocracy) over all the rest. Again, all too familiar in our current time and place.
Lonsdale’s Broligarch Pedigree
The Stanford Review
As a Stanford student in the early 2000s, Joe Lonsdale was editor-in-chief of the university’s student-run, arch-conservative newspaper, the Stanford Review. The Stanford Review was founded by Peter Thiel, when he was a Stanford student back in the mid-1980s. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and noted opponent of women’s right to vote, was the first tech-bro billionaire to become a Trump mega-donor, way back in Trump’s first run for president. Peter Thiel took a direct interest in Lonsdale, as he has with other arch-conservative Stanford students. Other Stanford Review staff who became Peter Thiel protegees include Josh Hawley (mega-MAGA US Senator from Missouri), Ken Howrey (Trump’s ambassador to Sweden), and Blake Masters (failed mega-MAGA US Senate candidate).
PayPal and Palantir
After graduating Stanford, Lonsdale went to work for Peter Thiel at PayPal and then, shortly thereafter, co-founded the company Palantir with Thiel and a couple others. Palantir, named for an all-seeing crystal ball from JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, was founded to do big data analysis for intelligence/counter-terrorism (the CIA was one of the original investors in Palantir). Palantir made Lonsdale very rich, setting him up with the funds to become a venture capitalist and eventually be able to start the Cicero institute. Other notable tech-bros in the PayPal/Palantir orbit include Elon Musk (an early PayPal employee after PayPal acquired his first start-up; also, Thiel was an angel investor in multiple, subsequent Musk start-ups), JD Vance (another Thiel protege, “for Peter, Vance was a generational bet”), and Mark Zuckerberg (Thiel was an early Facebook investor and longtime Meta board member and is allegedly a big influence in Meta’s current rightward shift).
Leaving California
Lonsdale grew up in Fremont, went to Stanford, and then Silicon Valley made him rich. But, instead of staying in the place that nurtured him and made him wealthy beyond the average person’s imagination, Lonsdale abandoned Silicon Valley for Texas, complaining that California has become too woke. Like many many other ex-Californians (like Elon Musk), he still has an ax to grind and, unlike most other ex-Californians, he has the money and the platform to push his retrograde views upon us.