Sonja Trauss, the charismatic founder of the YIMBY movement, recently spoke at a conference of fellow travelers about the importance of supporting small home builders. “Most neighborhoods are still zoned low-density, and so if you’re seeing new housing, it’s going to be small projects,” she said at Austin’s YIMBYtown 2024, a gathering of people who believe that saying “yes in my backyard” to private development will fix America’s housing crisis. Trauss bemoaned the onerous regulations, fees, and paperwork—not to mention meddling homeowners—that make it so hard for small firms to build. Her organization, YIMBY Law, sues cities that create barriers to new construction. “What we’re doing, a lot of it is really for the small developers,” she said, quickly adding, “I mean, and the future residents, of course, guys.” The audience laughed.
So the YIMBY story goes: What’s good for the industry is good for the tenant. In recent years, this viewpoint has become enormously influential. Some adherents are unsurprising, like the Koch-backed Mercatus Center and industry titans like Airbnb, both of which funded the conference. But the idea is politically bipartisan. YIMBYtown featured both Julián Castro, President Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development, and Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, a Republican who appeared virtually at the conference to advocate “red-state YIMBYism.” Young, progressive-minded activists are also in on the action, and the conference held panels not just on wonky stuff like minimum lot size and parking reform but also anti-racism and ending homelessness.
The policy that unites YIMBYs—from orthodox free-marketeers to grassroots social housing boosters—is “upzoning,” in which cities reform local land-use policy to allow for more, and bigger, development. This change, YIMBYs argue, drives developers to fill cities with “abundant housing,” spurring competition and putting “downward pressure” on prices. The appeal is obvious: a “one weird trick” to solve the housing crisis—without upsetting the market.
If only it worked. A decade since the YIMBY movement launched, there’s little serious evidence that its policies are the magic supply-increasing bullet that proponents claim, nor that they meaningfully decrease rents for working families. The YIMBY agenda can’t solve the housing crisis. But there are solutions: ones that provide the homes we need without ceding power to the profiteers who rigged the system.
The housing shortage is real. Households are forming faster than developers are building new homes, and by some estimates the country is short 2.3 million units. For several decades this problem has been squeezing renters in big coastal cities like San Francisco and New York, but in recent years it has mounted into a national crisis, reaching formerly affordable bastions like Spokane, Boise, and Reno. The result is an increasingly brutal market, where the typical American tenant is rent-burdened and homelessness is on the rise.
According to YIMBYs, the big problem is exclusionary zoning policies: in short, laws that restrict the size and type of buildings in many neighborhoods, often those dominated by single-family homes. Cemented in place in the twentieth century by segregationists and maintained for decades by NIMBY—“not in my backyard”—homeowners who resist any changes that might compromise their “neighborhood character,” these rules........