YIMBY

Based on Wikipedia: YIMBY

In San Francisco during the 2010s, something unusual happened in American politics: renters started showing up to city council meetings. Not to complain about a specific landlord or fight an eviction, but to demand that their city build more housing. They wanted apartment buildings in their neighborhoods. They wanted density. They wanted—and this was the truly radical part—their property values to potentially decrease.

They called themselves YIMBYs, which stands for "Yes In My Back Yard."

The name is a deliberate inversion of NIMBY, or "Not In My Back Yard," the pejorative term for residents who oppose virtually any new development near their homes. NIMBYism has shaped American cities for decades, producing sprawling suburbs, restrictive zoning laws, and housing costs that have spiraled far beyond what ordinary people can afford. The YIMBY movement arose as a direct challenge to this status quo.

The Economics of Scarcity

To understand why YIMBYism emerged, you need to understand a basic economic reality: in many American cities, it is illegal to build enough housing for the people who want to live there.

This sounds almost absurd when stated plainly. But it's true. Single-family zoning—laws that prohibit anything except detached houses on individual lots—covers the majority of residential land in most American cities. In places like San Jose, California, over ninety percent of residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. You cannot legally build an apartment building, a duplex, or even a modest townhouse on most of the city's land, no matter how much demand exists.

The result is predictable. When population grows but housing supply cannot keep pace, prices rise. And rise. And rise.

The San Francisco Bay Area became ground zero for this crisis because of a particular mismatch. The technology industry created hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs in a region where local governments had made it extraordinarily difficult to build new housing. Tech workers bid up prices for the limited housing stock. Long-term residents found themselves priced out. Homelessness surged. And yet, at city council meeting after city council meeting, neighbors showed up to oppose new apartment buildings, citing traffic concerns, neighborhood character, or simply the disruption of change.

A Movement Takes Shape

The first explicitly political YIMBY organization, California YIMBY, was founded with substantial backing from technology executives. Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife Cari Tuna donated half a million dollars through their philanthropic foundation. Nat Friedman, who would later become CEO of GitHub, contributed alongside other tech figures. The online payments company Stripe donated a million dollars.

This funding source has been both a strength and a vulnerability for the movement. The money allowed rapid organizing and sophisticated political campaigns. But it also invited suspicion from tenant advocates and housing activists who questioned whether a movement funded by wealthy technologists truly had the interests of low-income renters at heart.

What makes the YIMBY coalition unusual is its ideological breadth. The movement draws support from across the political spectrum, united by the belief that housing scarcity is the core problem—even if adherents disagree about almost everything else.

Progressive YIMBYs frame housing production as a civil rights issue. They point to research showing that strict zoning regulations perpetuate racial segregation, with whiter communities more likely to have restrictive land use rules. They argue that allowing more housing in wealthy neighborhoods is essential for integration and opportunity.

Libertarian YIMBYs see the issue through the lens of property rights and free markets. To them, zoning represents government interference with what property owners should be allowed to build on their own land. If someone wants to build an apartment building and other people want to rent apartments in it, why should the government prevent this voluntary exchange?

Environmental YIMBYs emphasize that denser cities reduce carbon emissions. When people can live close to where they work, they drive less. When homes share walls, they require less energy to heat and cool. Urban infill development, they argue, is far more sustainable than sprawling into farmland and forests.

The Research Question

Does building more housing actually make housing more affordable? This question might seem to have an obvious answer—of course more supply lowers prices—but economics is rarely so simple when it comes to housing.

Housing is not like most consumer goods. It's durable, lasting decades or centuries. It's immobile—you can't ship a house from a cheap market to an expensive one. It's heterogeneous—no two homes are exactly alike. And it exists within a web of local regulations, financing structures, and social meanings that complicate simple supply-and-demand analysis.

The academic research on housing supply has yielded some clear findings, though not always the ones that either YIMBY supporters or their critics might hope for.

Studies consistently show that strict land use regulations reduce housing supply and raise prices. A 2019 analysis by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti estimated that restrictive zoning in high-productivity cities like New York, San Francisco, and San Jose lowered aggregate United States economic growth by thirty-six percent between 1964 and 2009. The mechanism is straightforward: when people cannot afford to live where the best jobs are, they take worse jobs elsewhere, and the economy as a whole suffers.

Research on what happens when cities actually allow more construction is more nuanced. In Auckland, New Zealand, upzoning led to increased housing construction and a measurable expansion in supply. In Portland, Oregon, a seventeen-year analysis found that parcels in upzoned areas had significantly higher probabilities of development.

But one study of Chicago found that upzoning without additional construction actually raised prices—perhaps because the zoning change signaled that an area was desirable for future development, attracting speculative investment. The author cautioned against generalizing too broadly from this finding.

The Filtering Question

Here's a puzzle that often comes up in housing debates: new construction is almost always expensive. Developers don't build cheap apartments. They build luxury units with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, marketed to high-income renters. How does this help anyone else?

The answer, if it exists, lies in a process economists call "filtering." When new luxury housing is built, wealthy renters move into it, vacating their previous homes. Those vacancies allow moderately wealthy renters to move up, freeing their units for people with more modest incomes. In theory, new construction at the top of the market eventually improves affordability throughout the housing stock.

A 2006 study in the journal Urban Studies examined Canadian cities and found this filtering process to be painfully slow. Older housing took decades to become significantly more affordable. The author concluded that relying on filtering to produce affordable housing was unrealistic, especially in the most expensive markets.

More recent research has complicated this picture. Some studies found that while newly constructed units sold or rented at high prices, the increase in supply at the high end of the market did push down prices elsewhere—providing material benefits across income groups.

Research in several cities—New York's outer boroughs, San Francisco, Helsinki, and others—found that new housing units did not accelerate rent increases in nearby existing buildings. In California, new market-rate housing was associated with reduced displacement and slower rent growth in surrounding areas.

But none of these studies found that new construction caused rents to actually fall. In every city examined, housing became less affordable over time. The new construction may have slowed the rate of increase, but it did not reverse it.

The Opposition

Not everyone embraces the YIMBY agenda. Opposition comes from several directions, often for contradictory reasons.

Some tenant advocates and socialists reject the focus on market-rate housing altogether. They argue that private development primarily benefits landlords and investors, not renters. They're skeptical that building luxury apartments will meaningfully improve affordability for low-income residents. Some prefer a "PHIMBY" approach—Public Housing In My Back Yard—emphasizing government-built affordable housing rather than private development.

There's a genuine tension here. Subsidized affordable housing is expensive to construct—often more expensive per unit than market-rate housing, due to regulatory requirements and financing structures. Cities that require developers to include high percentages of below-market units often see less housing built overall. The trade-off between affordability requirements and total housing production is real and unresolved.

Traditional neighborhood preservation groups oppose new development for different reasons. They worry about traffic, crowding, and changes to neighborhood character. Some are explicitly concerned about declining property values—though research suggests that new housing construction often increases nearby property values rather than decreasing them.

The politics of housing development are peculiar. Surveys show that most people, when asked in the abstract, support building more housing. But when a specific project is proposed near their home, opposition materializes. Studies of local elections find that voter turnout among homeowners nearly doubles when zoning issues are on the ballot. The people most affected by housing scarcity—renters, young people, those priced out of desirable neighborhoods entirely—are least likely to participate in the local political processes that determine what gets built.

Research from California illustrates this dynamic. Statewide polling shows broad support for allowing more housing construction. But when specific apartment buildings are proposed in specific neighborhoods, opposition from immediate neighbors is intense. A statewide bill to allow more housing has more popular support than a single new building has from the people who would live next door to it.

The Racial Dimension

Housing policy in America has never been racially neutral. From explicitly racist deed restrictions in the early twentieth century, to redlining by federal mortgage agencies, to the urban renewal programs that demolished Black neighborhoods, housing decisions have shaped and reinforced racial segregation for generations.

Research shows that strict land use regulations continue to contribute to racial housing segregation. White communities are more likely to have restrictive zoning, and white residents are more likely to support those restrictions when surveyed.

The Bay Area's Regional Housing Needs Allocation process—which assigns housing construction targets to different cities—has been found to correlate with racial demographics. Cities with larger white populations receive smaller affordable housing allocations. When pressure mounts to build somewhere, development is often directed into downtown areas or neighborhoods with higher concentrations of nonwhite residents, while affluent white suburbs remain untouched.

This pattern is not unique to the Bay Area. Across the country, suburban residents frequently support housing development in principle, as long as it happens somewhere else—preferably in neighborhoods that are already denser and less white.

Beyond Housing

While housing is the core YIMBY concern, the movement's logic extends to other infrastructure. YIMBYs have advocated for high-speed rail lines, bike lanes, pedestrian safety improvements, homeless shelters, and schools. The common thread is support for investment in shared public goods, especially in urban areas, against neighborhood opposition.

The environmental case for urbanism goes beyond housing. Dense cities with good public transit allow residents to live without cars. In the United States, transportation accounts for twenty-nine percent of greenhouse gas emissions—the largest single sector. Every person who can walk, bike, or take transit instead of driving represents a direct reduction in carbon output.

This creates an interesting political alignment. Environmentalists have traditionally been associated with preservation—protecting wilderness, limiting development, maintaining open space. But a growing faction of environmental advocates argues that dense urban development is actually more sustainable than low-density sprawl. Building housing in existing cities reduces pressure to develop farmland and forests at the metropolitan fringe.

A Global Movement

Though the modern YIMBY movement emerged in San Francisco, it has spread internationally. Housing affordability is a crisis in cities around the world, and similar organizing has taken root wherever prices have spiraled beyond reach.

In Australia, Greater Canberra formed in 2021 to advocate for denser housing in the national capital. YIMBY Melbourne and Sydney YIMBY followed in 2023. These groups, along with Greater Brisbane, now constitute the Abundant Housing Network Australia.

Toronto has had YIMBY organizing since 2006, when community members responded to development proposals in the West Queen West neighborhood. An annual YIMBY festival has been held there since. More recently, groups like HousingNowTO and More Neighbours Toronto have pushed for policy changes to increase housing supply.

Vancouver's Abundant Housing Vancouver formed in 2016. Ottawa's Make Housing Affordable launched in 2021.

In Europe, similar movements have emerged with local characteristics. A blog called YIMBY Bratislava launched in 2014 in Slovakia's capital, later rebranding as YIM.BA. The Netherlands has seen platforms emerge in Rotterdam, Eindhoven, The Hague, and Utrecht, documenting and advocating for urban development.

Perhaps most notably, Sweden has Yimby as a formal independent political party network, founded in Stockholm in 2007. It advocates for densification and physical development in Swedish cities.

The Connection to Homelessness

Any discussion of housing affordability in America eventually leads to homelessness. The connection is more direct than many people assume.

Research consistently shows that homelessness rates correlate with housing costs. Areas where rent exceeds thirty percent of median income see higher rates of homelessness. This makes intuitive sense: the higher the cost of housing, the more people will be unable to afford any housing at all.

A 2023 survey of homeless individuals in California found that many people were driven into homelessness specifically by high rents combined with low incomes. When the gap between what housing costs and what people can pay grows too wide, some fall through entirely.

California's high housing prices are directly tied to insufficient supply. The state has among the most restrictive land use regulations in the country, and among the highest housing costs. This is not a coincidence.

Homelessness has many causes—mental illness, addiction, domestic violence, job loss. But it is far more difficult to address these underlying issues when there is simply not enough housing available at prices people can afford. Substance abuse treatment is more effective when patients have stable housing. Mental health interventions work better when people aren't living on the street. The shortage of affordable housing makes every other homelessness intervention harder.

What the Future Holds

The YIMBY movement has achieved notable policy victories since its emergence in the 2010s. California has passed multiple state laws limiting local governments' ability to block housing development. Oregon has effectively banned single-family-only zoning statewide. Minneapolis became the first major American city to eliminate single-family zoning, allowing duplexes and triplexes throughout the city.

Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen increases in housing construction. Whether these increases will ultimately stabilize or reduce housing costs remains to be seen. The crisis was decades in the making; resolving it will not be quick.

The movement's unusual political coalition—combining progressive housing advocates, libertarian property rights supporters, and environmentalists—has proven both an asset and a vulnerability. It allows YIMBYs to find allies across partisan lines at a time when such alliances are rare. But it also means the coalition can fracture when members disagree about specifics: Should inclusionary zoning be required? Should development be focused near transit? Should public housing be expanded?

The fundamental YIMBY insight is simple, even if its implementation is complex: when more people want to live somewhere than there is housing available, prices rise, and people suffer. The solution, in broad strokes, is to build more housing. Everything else is details.

Whether American cities will actually do this—whether they will overcome the political power of incumbent homeowners, the procedural obstacles erected over decades, and the genuine concerns about neighborhood change—remains the central question. The YIMBY movement has made that question impossible to ignore. Answering it will shape the future of American cities for generations to come.