The YIMBY Movement: Where is it headed?

Michael Goff
Jul 23, 2017 · 5 min read

Earlier this month, pro-housing YIMBY advocates, who say “Yes In My Back Yard”, descended on Oakland, California for the second YIMBY Town gathering. The Bay Area is ground zero for what Richard Florida calls the “New Urban Crisis”: the distressing phenomenon of the most economically prosperous cities, such as San Francisco, New York, and London, becoming so expensive that only the wealthy can afford to live there. The cause of the problem is obvious — excessive regulation and opposition against new housing — but the solutions remain tantalizingly out of reach. In this essay I share some of my thoughts on where the YIMBY movement is heading, and where I think we need to head if we are going to be successful in solving the housing crisis.

One of the great strength of the YIMBY movement is that it does not fit squarely within the usual left/right political taxonomy. Granted, one who hangs around YIMBYs for any length of time will readily notice that the group leans to the left overall. This should not be a great surprise. The housing crisis is most severe in the wealthy, majority liberal coastal cities, and so it there that one will find the greatest urgency in addressing the crisis. Within this framework, though, one will find YIMBYs with attitudes ranging from social justice advocacy to socialism to libertarianism. Successful political movements don’t operate by making everyone think the same way; they operate by organizing people with very different value systems to work toward a common goal.

The astute reader will have noticed two things by now. First, there is a lie in the first paragraph, and second, that in so telling this lie I have given away my own values. The cause of the housing crisis is not so obvious. Others have blamed the tech industry, immigrants, institutional racism, and avocado toast. By choosing to diagnose the problem as one of excessive regulation, I have pointed toward deregulation as the most sensible solution. The way we frame the issue matters, and in the heterogenous YIMBY movement, the broadminded ability to understand the issue in many different ways will widen the scope of potential solutions. Given the severity of the housing crisis, we can’t afford too much rigidity.

So, if the goal is more housing, what are the values and concerns that animate the YIMBY movement? I would suggest that the following list, though overlapping and non-comprehensive, is a good overview of why so many people have invested so much effort into the cause.

  1. Housing affordability. The cost of housing in many markets has been outpacing wages for decades and has reached a point where many recent college graduates are no longer able to afford a place to live. Half of Americans are cost-burdened, meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. The high cost of living presents genuine hardships to families, particularly with low income. It does not take much background in economics to understand why a median rent of $3270/month for a 1-bedroom apartment in San Francisco causes problems. Many YIMBYs have become active out of sheer frustration with the housing costs and the personal hardship that has resulted.
  2. Economic dynamism. At a time when the United States still has not shaken the malaise of the Great Recession, the dysfunctional housing market is a prime suspect for low growth. The economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti have estimated that over the last half-century, housing regulations have constrained US economic growth by 50%. This happens because people living in lower income cities are unable to move to take better jobs because those jobs are to be found in unaffordable cities. Furthermore, as cities grow, they generate new wealth. This phenomenon is known as urban scaling. Larger cities increase the potential for fruitful interaction and specialization of workers and products. This is why we have cities in the first place. And from the standpoint of economic freedom, zoning laws are just plain offensive.
  3. Equity. High levels of inequality in the United States are of great concerns, and zoning has played a major role in enforcing inequality. Zoning in the United States has explicit racism in its history, and even though explicit racial segregation is no longer legal, the discriminatory function of zoning lives on. Zoning is tied with local school districts and is a major factor in educational inequality and insuring intergenerational inequality.
  4. Environmental concerns. Climate change, driven in large part by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, is a major environmental problem that will diminish future quality of life if unchecked. Urban density has significant environmental benefits by reducing transportation distances, need for materials, and other negative impacts. Many YIMBYs are interested in capturing these benefits by reducing zoning barriers to growth within cities.
  5. Lifestyle preferences. Most YIMBYs identify in one way or another as urbanists, who prefer the lifestyle of dense, mixed-used cities over the suburbs or small towns. Cities provide shopping and cultural amenities that are not readily available in lower density areas. The density of cities allow for easier cycling. Zoning that blocks urban density constricts the lifestyle preferences of urbanists.

It is this diversity of motivations that brings together a strong coalition in favor of building more housing. None of these motivations are “better” than the others. However, the difference of perspectives can create a challenge in building a cohesive movement, and we should not paper over the fact that above concerns are often in tension.

For example, should we build more exurban housing and the roads to serve it? From an affordability standpoint, sprawl increases the housing supply just as well as densification, and blocking outward expansion could raise prices further, but sprawl is well known to have environmental costs.

Likewise, should mandatory inclusionary zoning — which requires that developers provide a fraction of their new housing stock at below the market rate — and rent control be on the YIMBY agenda? These policies have social equity benefits, allowing lower income people, who might never be able to afford market rate housing under any circumstances, to have access to the city’s opportunities. However, inclusionary zoning has been shown to increase housing costs for everyone else as the cost of the regulation is priced into the market. Rent control can cause shortages and cause the “slumlord” phenomenon.

The purpose of this article is not to argue what the proper YIMBY position ought to be on all issues, though I have my opinions. Rather, it is to urge that we are more aware of the tradeoffs between different policy options and are better able to acknowledge them. All difficult policy questions have tradeoffs; if there were no tradeoffs, they wouldn’t be difficult. Acknowledging that our own policies might have unintended consequences makes us more willing to work with people with different views and thereby come to better solutions.

Just as YIMBYs could do better in recognizing tradeoffs in internal discussions, so could we do a better job when working externally. Liberalizing zoning regulations entail their own costs, particularly on homeowners who rationally fear the economic consequences of loss of property value. Acknowledging the tradeoff does not mean that zoning should be retained and development halted, but it does increase the likelihood of finding mutually agreeable solutions.

I very much hope the YIMBY movement continues to pitch a big tent. The way we build our cities is one of the most important economic, social, and environmental questions of our time, and the housing crisis is much too urgent a problem to leave to a single political ideology.

Michael Goff

Written by

Researcher into Energy and Environmental Systems

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