It Shouldn't Have Been This Hard

My reflection on the left-liberal (in-)fighting that went on during the rise of the YIMBY movement as I leave the advocacy world

After several years as a policy analyst at California YIMBY, I got a new job as a data analyst at Terner Labs — a sibling but seperate nonprofit of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. After five years of partisan politics in Sacramento, transitioning to the research field where politicians and activists are replaced with more objective analysts and scientists is a welcome change. Since I started at California YIMBY, the pro-housing movement blossomed from a small group to a prominent force in Sacramento, winning the prevailing opinion among most voters and researchers. I must admit that I’m still disturbed by how such a basic, common sense idea such as building homes to reduce housing costs, became such a contentious topic.

The entire concept of a “YIMBY” or “pro-housing movement” always struck me as unnecessary. A whole group exists in opposition to density limits on high-demand areas, with very little else binding those who refer to themselves with these labels. While the idea of allowing housing to be built and in infill locations is decades old, the label “YIMBY” originated in Sweden in 2007. Stockholm had the world’s strongest tenant protections and rent control, but the land-use regime prohibited new housing construction, especially of high rises. The price controls make it so that the shortage is not reflected in high rents but severe rationing, often stretching to 20 years long in the city center. My Swedish classmate in high school once told me he was put on an apartment waitlist when he was 2 years old to receive when he would be 20. The “YIMBY” party was formed to encourage public and private infill housing construction to remedy these waitlists. While bouncing around the world, the “YIMBY movement” wouldn’t be introduced to the United States until eight years later by a teacher in San Francisco named Sonja Trauss, controversially responding to a city undergoing its fourth cycle of gentrification.

At this time, I was out of high school and focused on public transit policy, but I was curious about the homelessness crisis as tent cities grew around the Bay Area. I regularly tweeted into the void about how my local BART station in North Berkeley should have housing over its parking lot. I didn’t think it was a big deal but a city council member did and appointed me to the city’s Housing Advisory Commission (a panel for allocating subsidies to low-income housing). I naively put forward an item suggesting the BART station for development and was swarmed by homeowners asking what right I had to attempt such a re-zoning. Several months later, in response to my and my friends’ social media agitation, and the proposal of a politically radical but substantively moderate and failed transit-rezoning bill, the mayor of Berkeley and city councilmembers hosted an “open discussion” on the topic. I believe it was my first housing meeting, where I and several other people were outnumbered by many hundreds screaming about height, too many people, evil developers, and would-be standard tropes on housing politics.

I didn’t give zoning much thought until I snagged a job at Resources for Community Development, a large nonprofit builder of subsidized, low-income housing in Berkeley, California. We received funding for a new low-income housing project in Hayward and I was working on real-estate acquisitions and spatial data analysis. When I gave my boss a list of environmentally sound and for-sale vacant parcels in high-resource areas we could buy, she disqualified every single one after checking the zoning map because their single-family designations made them illegal. I didn’t think zoning was important and argued we could petition it to be rezoned. She rightly argued it was not financially worth the risk or hassle of a contentious rezoning with a dense building that would certainly cause ire, let alone the low-income population we’d bring. The only parcels we went forward with were in former industrial areas, congested commercial strips, or parcels near freeways, which struck me as a very obvious form of publicly-dictated environmental prejudice.

At the same time, a contentious proposal for senior housing development right outside UC Berkeley in a tony neighborhood had been killed by the local city council. This project spoke to me a little personally as my grandmother had recently passed from Alzheimer’s and the lack of any vacancy in modern, ADA-accessible senior housing in the city had made life difficult for four years. My mother had also illegally converted our den into a dwelling space to accommodate the care services for my grandmother. When I checked the municipal code and discovered this was illegal and required thousands of dollars worth of permits and permission from the city council, I was offended by the idea. Sure, dwellings should require permits but why is the density limited to a single-family home with this much yard space? If housing is a right, why is the city curtailing it arbitrarily?

As a curious onlooker, I attended my first “YIMBY” meeting which at the time was a very small group of housing experts, ideologically diverse, politicians, and professionals, all organized by these young trans organizers. Upon arriving, some fanatical protesters were making death threats to attendees. I met Brian Hanlon, founder of California YIMBY which was then a tiny organization. After some thought, I took what I thought would be a short-term break from low-income housing development and joined CA YIMBY, with the intent to fix the state’s land use problems in a year or two. When state senator Scott Wiener proposed for California the typical land-use practice of most cities outside of Anglophone countries of densifying public transit areas, the intensity of backlash was astounding. I anticipated backlash from conservative homeowners of course and people obsessed with California suburbia, but the amount of conspiracy-mongering from progressives caught me off guard. 

This largely originated from the progressive left in San Francisco and Los Angeles, notably not progressives in the suburbs, but urban progressive opposition to laws like Senate Bill 35 and Senate Bill 827 was severe. This got my ire since I was raised among progressives in Berkeley and expected more evidence-based approaches from them. Today, a lot of left critics of YIMBYism charge that it's ultimately an elite persuasion project (as opposed to a mass movement campaign), but this is indicative of most organizing in this political realm in general. The speculations of mass evictions and displacement arising from re-zonings and increased housing production were mostly conjured by social science academics and well-educated nonprofit leaders and told to vulnerable tenants. In contrast, building more housing through zoning and permitting reform consistently polled very favorably with a majority of renters, Democrats, young people, Hispanic and Black residents in California, and not with white, older and homeowning residents. Yet if you listened to the media discourse during this time, you’d think it was the opposite.

In fairness, up to that point, there hadn’t been a large library of research on supply impacts on rents. There is now a strong consensus among researchers that building housing reduces rents and costs at all income levels and little evidence of gentrification-inducing housing construction when zoning is not planned in a hyper-local and exclusionary way. But much of that research was initiated in response to these provocative housing debates in Sacramento. Even I initially thought market-rate development had caused the gentrification crisis in San Francisco’s Mission District, until not only did emerging research dispute it, but I discovered that S.F.’s bipartisan support for exclusionary zoning focused most development in highly gentrifying areas. It was easy to make a correlation-causation error without that knowledge. Despite the intensity of their arguments, I’m not angry about people’s perceptions and fears of housing construction.

Things did improve. After many years of failure to pass housing reform laws, YIMBYs and groups like the low-income tax-credit developers, found their allies in the labor movement and radically reformed the state’s land-use. When the “rent gap theory” that statewide zoning reform would focus development in low income areas did not materialize, I get the impression many in anti-poverty and renter advocacy lost their ire towards zoning reform. Laws ending single-family zoning was taken advantage of by homeowners in wealthy areas, Builder’s Remedy projects almost exclusively were proposed in higher-income enclaves, and wealthy cities bore the brunt of greater housing requirements. Senate Bill 35 streamlined low-income housing throughout the state in record time and has become one of the most valued laws among the nonprofit housing community.

By no means is the work over, but the YIMBY / pro-housing space is much more crowded with wise thinkers and activists, so I don’t feel as much need to be in advocacy. I was a computer science student and research is my calling. Many of the laws passed in the legislature have not yielded anywhere as much housing foretold, due to political and economic issues beyond just zoning. These are the more fascinating conversations that should’ve captured the state’s attention for the last five years. However, the intensity of the debate over the merits of low-density zoning does reveal something about Americans and the Anglosphere broadly, whose love of low-density property ownership generates unusual bedfellows and alliances.

Upzoning and permitting reform alone will not produce universal, affordable and easily accessible housing for all. Filtering, while effective for a lot of people, and consistently demonstrated across the income spectrum, isn’t a solution to many low-income housing problems. Filtering is essentially a housing “hand-me-down.” Low and no-income people need modern homes that are accessible just as middle-class families can afford under a better zoning regime. Most progressives in California are basically at this point in understanding the current zoning debate and that’s good. But as many progressives like myself pointed out years ago, this was the true argument and critique of market-rate housing reforms, rather than vacant housing, rent gap theories and so on that haven’t manifested when investigated.

YIMBY really shouldn’t be an identity and offline it barely functions as one. It’s a lot of people with many different opinions along the ideological spectrum that agree on one fundamental issue of land use. My introduction to YIMBY was mostly by young, leftist trans activists in Oakland tired of paying high rents. Yet even the transphobic governor of North Dakota made popular remarks complaining that car-centrism ruined American cities. (Transphobes are still dangerous to trans people even if they get a urbanism take right.) The inverse is also true and well documented of conservatives and progressives who happen to align on one issue: NIMBYism or anti-density initiatives. Simply agreeing on a land use issue does not make for functional coalitions outside of that one issue. Good people need to understand and own these reforms that are essential to our climate and affordability problem, which we’ve seen by more and more young progressives owning the pro-housing and YIMBY label.

A lot of YIMBYs — mostly morons online with no real world influence — say idiotic stuff on social media that does no one any good. Yes, their opponents have done it too but I can’t influence that side. I’m just always amazed by people who don’t do anything, proudly slapping that YIMBY label onto themselves, and insulting community groups, jumping into issues they don’t understand locally, making bigoted remarks and just being obnoxious. It serves no purpose other than self-righteousness for the poster and sabotage for pro-housing activists that actually have to work with people. I get wary when someone’s sole political identity is YIMBY, because its a neutral term on one issue that can hide regressive ideas on everything else. They suck and contribute to toxic housing discourse in California. The good news is it’s gotten much better since the early days of the late-2010s in part because normal people have embraced the brand.

It’s good that the YIMBYs and tenant activists in New York, like in Seattle and Portland, are working together and against the anti-renter real estate interests and NIMBY lobby. The big difference seems to be that the East Coast had more time to witness the showdowns going on in California before it came to them. Renter groups and pro-housing organizations in New York and up north avoided California’s left and liberal infighting by not elevating the biggest loudmouths, insulters, narcissists, wreckers to decision-making positions. It also helps that there’s more influence from federal progressive figureheads like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose team is trying to make the groups work together and endorse both planks. Someday California housing groups may accomplish that but there’s a lot of bad blood right now, and at least they’re mostly avoiding each other rather than fighting.

Anyways, I had my fill in the advocacy world for a while. I dedicated my late teenage and early-mid twenties to this and when I see SB-35-streamlined housing complexes going up next door, I’m proud of it. I’m still going to write about it but the housing space is so large now. I feel much more comfortable going to the research world and making all sides of the housing debate feel uncomfortable with their positions.