Recently I’ve seen a number of articles on YIMBYs’ ascendancy (or, alternately, NIMBYs’ decline). These pieces track the remarkably rapid rise of a new strain of thinking on housing policy and catalogue its legislative and social successes. They focus, in other words, on how the YIMBY movement has succeeded. With this post, I’d like to do something in a similar vein, but instead present an account of why the movement has succeeded—why YIMBY arguments have proven so persuasive to so many different kinds of people.
First and foremost, YIMBYism offers an optimistic mindset. The NIMBY mindset, whether on the left or the right, frames itself as an increasingly desperate fight to protect the interests of incumbent residents against the threat of development. For the right, this is a fight to maintain high home values and abundant parking and, in its nastier iterations, to keep out poorer and darker-skinned residents. For the left, it’s a fight to stop development that will bring gentrifiers to the neighborhood, displacing existing residents and raising rents. Both left and right are also, often, strongly motivated by a desire to maintain neighborhood character. These motivations lend themselves to a darker view of the world, where the dangerous and powerful forces of immigration, population growth, and/or gentrification must be fought tooth and nail lest those who live in a threatened neighborhood be robbed of what they have. According to this worldview, moreover, housing policy is a zero-sum game: any gain for people who want to move into the neighborhood represents a loss for those already there.
The YIMBY solution, by contrast, sees the game as positive-sum: legalize more housing, and housing gets cheaper for everyone—and the increase in land values that comes with looser land use policy offsets the decline in home values, protecting homeowners’ investments. More broadly, the YIMBY wants to welcome new neighbors, whether refugees or hedge fund managers, while the NIMBY wants to restrict opportunities to live in their neighborhood to only those who deserve it. (For right-NIMBYs, that means rich (white) people. For left-NIMBYs, that means working class people already in the neighborhood.) Parking abundance and neighborhood character will change when more people move in—that is unavoidable—but YIMBYs respond that improvements to public transportation can more than compensate for scarcer parking, and walkable neighborhoods are more pleasant anyway. We can have a world with lower rents, less displacement, better neighborhoods, and wider opportunities for everyone—all it takes is for us to build more housing.
YIMBYs’ affinity for denser neighborhoods also makes them ready allies of the urbanist and environmentalist movements, and city governments looking for fiscal sustainability. If you’re an urbanist, you like walkable neighborhoods and good public transportation—and it just so happens that legalizing more housing types is crucial to both of those. Without dense housing, public transit lacks a strong ridership base and costs more to implement. Without dense housing, there isn’t a sufficient customer base to support a wide variety of businesses within walking distance. If you’re an environmentalist, you hate auto-oriented transportation systems’ natural inefficiency, and you recognize that apartment buildings use less energy than single family homes. And if you’re a municipal government struggling to balance its budget (or just a wonk for local budgets), you know that building too many single-family homes will bankrupt your city, while promoting denser development boosts your city’s tax base.
Looking further afield, YIMBY politics have lured libertarians and other fans of deregulation, as well as millennials watching housing prices skyrocket out of reach and worrying their incomes will barely keep pace. It’s a big tent because the YIMBY message is both optimistic and not strictly partisan: YIMBYs simply want more housing and will welcome new neighbors.
Finally, and most importantly, YIMBYs’ arguments about affordability are backed by the weight of empirical evidence. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll summarize: new housing, including new market rate housing, exerts downward pressure on local rents and reduces evictions. Study after study after study after study confirms the conclusion. This research has been crucial to swaying former left-NIMBYs to the YIMBY side: it’s hard to argue we should restrict new housing construction when you know that doing so will hurt the people you want to protect. Jabari Brisport, a DSA affiliate and New York State Senator, recently tweeted that he had been persuaded, after exploring the issue further, that new market rate housing had a salutary effect on rents and displacement. Tiffany Cabán, another New York City progressive, has voiced support for a large housing project in her city council district. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now a YIMBY.
The YIMBY argument is gaining steam. Its optimism in the face of NIMBY pessimism, its reliance on robust and thorough research, and its natural connections to other powerful political movements have served it well. With its success, we can—I hope—look forward to a better future.