Dismantling the False Dichotomy Fueling the NIMBY/YIMBY Feud
Anyone who dares to enter a “housing Twitter’’ conversation quickly realizes there is no conversation at all: there’s one side throwing accusations and invectives at the other. On the one side are NIMBYs (not in my backyard), typically older adults, many homeowners or long-term renters, railing against their neighborhoods being upzoned (i.e. permitting higher density in an area) and overtaken by predatory developers. On the opposing side are YIMBYs (yes in my backyard), typically young men identifying as “urbanists” railing against housing policies trapped in bygone eras. Both sides are driven by a combination of valid, questionable, and ludicrous ideals, and both sides are responsible for the breakdown of productive discourse that could prevent many cities from falling to ruin.
[Author’s notes: this piece relies heavily on generalizations gleaned from countless online and real world conversations. No self-identifying NIMBY or YIMBY embodies all of the generalized traits I describe below, but these traits are pronounced enough to overshadow the good each side brings to the housing conversation, and therefore warrant criticism. In the spirit of promoting discourse, I included a Google Doc link for this piece at the end that enables people to comment on specific points made in the piece. Lastly, if you enjoy what I wrote, please consider making a financial contribution to help me pay for my expenses, mostly housing, that will enable me to keep writing.]
NIMBYs in a Rent-Controlled Nutshell
By and large, NIMBYs are real people living in specific cities, neighborhoods, and homes. This may sound like an obvious statement, but, as I’ll explain shortly, their YIMBY foes lack these tangible qualities. In this way, NIMBY concerns tend to hold more weight than YIMBYs, since they’re protecting real people in real homes, not advocating for change to help theoretical ones.
NIMBYs are often from diverse backgrounds, but the most vocal ones tend to be older (45-plus) and live in homes secured when housing was affordable and/or could be locked into rent-controlled or stabilized leases. Their homes are often the only things permitting them to live in otherwise unaffordable places like New York City, San Francisco, or Seattle — places they may have lived for decades and have deep community ties with.
Sometimes, NIMBYs are motivated by their opposition to the cultural and commercial changes that upzoning and new development bring. In this sense, I am a quasi-NIMBY, having witnessed how communities, culture, and businesses were leveled in New York City, my home for 19 years, due to rising cost-of-living brought on by overdevelopment.
But NIMBYs can often seem close minded and unsympathetic to people today wanting to live in a culturally dynamic city within today’s economics. The majority of people affected by a lack of affordable housing options or living-wage jobs aren’t anonymous trolls on Twitter advocating for zoning reform — they’re just like the NIMBYs when they got to town a few decades earlier or existing populations who missed their chance to lock in an affordable home. Often, when these house-poor people do find housing in a city, it’s unsafe, inconveniently located, and/or unaffordable — often, they are priced out altogether within a few years. The failure to accommodate these underhoused, often-young people has made many cities culturally barren relative to eras when housing and jobs options were plentiful.
Perhaps the most off-putting NIMBY trait is their invocations of the past to mark the path forward — invocations that typically omit past problems and current realities. Many NIMBYs seem like they won’t be satisfied until cities are teeming with rent-controlled apartments, cheap co-ops, parking spaces, and $150,000 editorial jobs. But factors like global warming, globalized economics, and digitization make the world too different to go back to. And by trying to return to a time when their individual lives were better, NIMBYs can appear self-serving, not principled, in their protests. For example, if a NIMBY lives in a single family home, they will oppose multifamily housing upzoning in their area. If a NIMBY relies on a car, they will oppose things like congestion taxes and investing in bike infrastructure. Conflating issues like the right to equitable, affordable housing and the right to free parking make it easy to cast NIMBYs as uncaring coots trying to stop the future from unfolding.
YIMBY Jeers
Unlike NIMBYs, YIMBYs are generally not advocating for their homes, neighborhoods, cities, or livelihoods. Many — not all — YIMBYs are anonymous Tweeters living far from the places they “advocate” for. Many parrot talking points ripped directly from The Creative Class, The Triumph of the City, a Conor Dougherty article, and other treatises on the unalloyed glory of high-density urban living. They transpose the “more units” ideology onto any region with housing problems (read: all), convinced affordability is a matter of supply not keeping up with demand, regardless of external economic or environmental forces.
The few non-anonymous YIMBYs are typically young white dudes defending corporate, institutional investor, and cronyistic political interests. Names include:
- Ben Thypin, cofounder of Open New York, NYC’s YIMBY lobbying group, cofounder of Quantierra, a “quantitative real estate developer,” whose stock and trade is redeveloping distressed properties in low-income neighborhoods. Ben is also the scion of Thypin Steel.
- Nolan Gray, CA Yimby research director and fellow at Charles Koch-backed Mercatus Group.
- Matt Yglesias, a 41 year-old son of a famous playwright, who, after graduating Harvard, bounced from jobs at global media outlets to jobs at institutional lobby groups with multimillion dollar coffers like Saudi-supporting neoliberal lobbying group, Center for American Progress.
Few of these YIMBY stars have held positions outside large institutions. Few lack Ivy League degrees. Few understand how top heavy economic and housing development has left the bottom nowhere to go besides the street. Few seem to have deviated from their career paths to take “jobs,” which is why they display little understanding of the needs of a city’s “uncreative class” struggling to survive — the immigrant busboy taking the bus shuttle in the middle of the night when the L train is down, the family struggling to raise kids without a nanny, or the fixed-income septuagenarian facing eviction because her building was purchased by an multinational investment firm. They don’t understand, or acknowledge, how the new housing units they promote will never, ever help these people, and often how they harm them. They don’t understand, or acknowledge, market tricks like holding units offline to artificially constrain supply and keep rents high.
Critically, few mainstream YIMBYs understand climate change and the limits of growth. Yglesias’ last book was entitled, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. It’s tough to imagine a worse take than a one-billion person America in an era of water scarcity, climate migrations, disappearing coastlines, and widespread fire and extreme heat.
And yet YIMBYs aren’t always wrong. Low density real estate, especially single family housing, is the enemy of the environment, and it prohibits social, racial, and economic equity. Sprawl and single family zoning should be outlawed everywhere, especially in cities, full stop. And cars are a scourge on people and the planet, increasing geographic and social distance between communities, prompting endless foreign wars for gas and oil, and spewing toxic microplastics and fumes in the air. Cars should never have been introduced as mainstream transit, and YIMBYs are right to ridicule NIMBY defenses of private car ownership when atmospheric CO2 concentration is 417 ppm.
And yes, density is a good thing…within reason. There are countless reasons why it’s beneficial to have people near each other, their workplaces, amenities, and transit options — it’s the way every human settlement was organized prior to cars. Upzoning is often needed to make this possible, particularly in metropolitan areas like Seattle and LA, where most developable land is hogged up by sprawling, single family and low-density housing. Unfortunately, many YIMBYs don’t seem to grasp the difference between Hong Kong and Copenhagen density, which makes them easy targets for NIMBY ridicule.
Maybe In My Backyard
Like bipartisan politics, the NIMBY-YIMBY war rages in the absence of a common objective, which should be developing equitable, sustainable cities. In fact, the war’s main battlefield, Twitter, is optimized to increase conflict. Like bipartisan politics, the housing wars are maintained to keep normal people polarized and infighting while predatory developers and investors keep building commodity real estate that dramatically increases cost of living and erodes communities and culture.
If real estate policy and development were approached pragmatically and from a spirit of cooperation rather than conflict, if it were responsive to the best data, even when that data conveyed extremely unpleasant realities, if either side were willing to concede a point or two, the housing discussion could move beyond nostalgia and academic theory to constructive action. This is where I’d start:
- Declaring a climate crisis. LA is on fire. Miami is drowning, and many coastal cities are not far behind. Climatic forces will nullify every subordinate issue, and it’s way past time for incremental change. Every city should have its own science-backed Marshall Plan-like plan to deal with climate — a plan that overrides existing policies. These climate plans would prohibit developing climate vulnerable areas, impose building codes to prepare structures for worst-case climate scenarios (heat, moisture, draught, etc.), and require a carbon neutral or carbon sinking infrastructure — and not doing so through the use of cheap, imported, non-regenerative renewable energy sources or carbon offsets.
- Declaring a housing/affordability crisis. The White House reports over 500,000 people experiencing homeless and Pew reports 46 percent of Americans are paying over 30 percent of their incomes (the commonly accepted threshold for affordability) on housing. These strapped people are running shops, teaching and caring for children, making art, and handling the countless things wealthy folks won’t. Their lives and welfare cannot be shrugged off for a second longer.
The acknowledgement and declaration of crises could enable municipalities to do the following:
- Stop zoning and begin planning. Zoning treats tracts as discrete socioeconomic and environmental structures, whereas planning looks at interrelations of the whole system. Zoning lets wealthy areas depend on imported labor from poor people living in distant areas. A comprehensive city plan could enable a unified response to climatic and economic crises, designing neighborhoods to include a range of proximal housing options and economic opportunities instead of moated, economic monocultures.
- Imposing maximum unit sizes and minimum density. Most cities have density controls limiting the number of units in a building as well as minimum unit sizes, but lack prohibitions on maximum sizes and minimum density (units per building). This situation enabled the proliferation of low-unit high rises and conversions of older, high-density buildings into one-unit-per floor luxury towers. These low-density buildings and enormous units — accessible only to the super-consuming wealthy populations — make cities more unaffordable and unsustainable and inflict more damage on cities than hyper-density.
- Impose vacancy taxes that are comparable to a unit’s market-rate rent. One source found 68.5 percent of available rentals are held off market; this is done to drive prices up on existing units, while letting the vacant ones act as appreciating assets on their balance sheets. Many of these vacant units were underwritten by federal and municipal funds doled out to increase housing supply. There should be meaningful economic ramifications when those units have an opposite impact.
- Impose minimum occupancy laws and penalties. Holding costs for second and third homes, Airbnb rentals, empty hotels, and other minimally used properties should be made prohibitively expensive in order to make those homes available to people working close to those units and who will use them as primary residences.
- Deregulate single-use real estate. Office, retail, and hospitality real estate markets are tanking and associated real estate sits empty because its use-case is limited by zoning. These lagging buildings, which exist but are not productive, represent tons of embodied energy and sunken costs and should be adapted for practical purposes like housing wherever possible.
- No displacement without replacement. Any replacement of substandard or unsustainable real estate, especially housing, must be accompanied by comprehensive plans for replacement real estate at similar or lower price-points for those displaced.
- Distribute housing according to need. In NYC, my home for two decades, I met many older people, ones who purchased homes when they were affordable, paying less for large homes than small, market-rate studios in the same area. What did they do with their extra space? Many rented out rooms or units to make their homes free or revenue generating. Some repeatedly refinanced their homes to extract cash against massive property gains, often purchasing second homes with the proceeds. Some, like a former landlady, used her prime UWS brownstone to hoard junk. Just like imposing a pied-à-terre tax on mostly vacant second or third homes, there should be penalties for people using way more space than they need.
- Impose income-based rent and tax controls. Rent control and stabilization and property tax freezes can be a great way of protecting disenfranchised and low income populations from being displaced by housing cost-variability, but these financial safeguards are too often used by people who don’t need the steep discounts they enjoy, which can make housing practically free. Periodic income audits could ensure discounted rents or property tax breaks are being used for those who need them, not those gaming the system.
- Promote fine-grained vs. coarse-grained urbanism. I learned these terms from Strong Towns, and they refer to building cities via combining smaller, varied buildings with diversified ownership versus building cities through massive developments on large lots.
- Make Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication mandatory reading for everyone weighing in on housing issues. Finding agreement and consensus is as much a linguistic challenge as an economic one. When people communicate to reinforce their views or to dismiss the views of others, when people start every statement with a “but” or a refutation — made easier with online anonymity — it prohibits discussion, learning, and compassion. Everyone needs to knock if off and learn a new skill called “communication.”
I know there’s stuff I missed, which is why I’m linking to this piece’s draft, where you — yes you — can further the conversation.
