Where next for the YIMBY movement?
Stay narrowly focused on housing and zoning reform, or branch out into a multi-purpose urbanism movement?
Flush with victory in several states (and tasting potential victory in a number of others) many people in the pro-housing or zoning reform movement are looking ahead and thinking about how to best position our movement for the future.
This has certainly been a question of interest to my employer, the Institute for Justice, where I have been working on zoning reform legislation across the country as part of our Zoning Justice Project. With a few states now having completed many of the “bare minimum” reforms encompassed in our own model zoning reform legislation, the HOME Act, we have been looking ahead to next-generation reforms to further expand property rights - things like single stair reform, single room occupancy (SROs) and accessory commercial units (ACUs) in the context of home-based businesses.
But others are thinking even more aggressively. Chris Elmendorf and David Schleicher, writing in the Niskanen Center’s Hypertext blog, have ignited an interesting discussion within our movement, questioning whether Team YIMBY, in order to be maximally effective, should broaden its scope much further, and seek to take fixed stances on more issues in the wider urbanism policy space. In the great question of whether we should potentially shrink the tent and cohere around a narrower set of core urbanist principles or keep a big tent by hyper-focusing on overturning the land use restrictions that contribute most to the housing crisis, Elmendorf and Schleicher support the former position.
In fact, they go so far as to suggest that the YIMBY movement should transfigure into something more akin to a political party, with set policy positions across a range of interconnecting issues:
The YIMBY movement will go farther if it evolves into a broader “livable cities” coalition.
Or as Elmendorf puts it on X:
[B]ig-city YIMBYs should endeavor to forge a cross-issue, party-like faction & drive an urban quality of life agenda.
From the article:
The “Yes in my Backyard” prohousing movement has scored a remarkable string of legislative wins while behaving as a single-issue group. Speaking of property rights and deregulation to Republican lawmakers, and of racial equity and climate change to Democrats, YIMBYs have pushed through major, bipartisan bills both in red states like Montana, Arizona, and Florida, and in blue states like California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.
Even so, a few YIMBYs have begun striking out in more party-like directions. In San Francisco, YIMBYism has spawned both a conventional interest group (SF YIMBY) and a cross-issue, campaign-oriented group (GrowSF) that publishes an influential voter guide and backs slates of candidates aligned with its “livable cities” vision. For GrowSF, housing abundance rides together with public safety, clean streets, rigorous public schools, better transportation, and a friendlier business climate.
I have some thoughts on this issue, which I will caveat with the disclosure that I work at a nonprofit civil liberties law firm engaged in statewide zoning reform legislative efforts from a pro-property rights perspective, and that I have only been engaged in this work for little more than a year, while the authors have been laboring in this particular field for much longer.
That being said… I somewhat disagree with their thesis.
To be clear, Elmendorf and Schleicher are upfront in conceding the drawbacks of their argument and the benefits of my own:
The signal advantage of one-issue groups is that they can work with almost any legislator. By not taking stances on peripheral issues, they avoid making enemies.
But I think they discount the degree to which this matters when it comes to statewide efforts. Let’s take Texas as a paradigmatic example (though the lessons certainly apply to other states such as New Hampshire or Montana, where I also spent time testifying and lobbying in support of zoning reform during their respective legislative sessions).
Joshua Fechter at the Texas Tribune came out with a good piece yesterday profiling Nicole Nosek, the founder of the Texans for Reasonable Solutions housing reform campaign group, and someone with whom I coordinated closely during the recent Texas legislative session. As the article notes:
By the time state lawmakers were ready to dedicate attention to tackling the state’s housing woes this year, Nosek had already spent the better part of four years laying the groundwork for them — pulling together a slate of proposals from a broad bipartisan coalition of groups that, on their own, may not have worked together to tackle the housing problem.
That coalition ranged from conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation on the right to social justice group Texas Appleseed on the left. And on this issue, they were all rowing in the same direction.
“Because the coalition was diverse and robust, there might have been a lot of people that you wouldn't necessarily be on a call with normally,” said Felicity Maxwell, a longtime Austin housing activist who leads the group Texans for Housing. “But that was okay, because we had the same ideas and all wanted the same outcomes, and Nicole was the one who put that together and reinforced those relationships throughout the session.”
Exactly so. It’s not often that you get groups as diverse as Habitat for Humanity, Texas Appleseed, Americans for Prosperity and the Institute for Justice working as part of the same coalition in support of a suite of coordinated, mutually reinforcing zoning reform legislation. This was only possible because we fixated dogmatically on the issues that united us, and avoided distraction by potentially complementary but also divisive peripheral issues.
How our Texas housing coalition worked and brought its collective influence and expertise to bear on the state legislature during session is probably worth a longform article (if not a book!) of its own, but for now, suffice it to say that it required replicating the kind of nimbleness and agility of a close-knit team (or yes, a political party) while knowing which coalition members to call upon to help solve each problem or setback as it arose.
This involved all of the tactics that you would expect when coordinating an effort of this kind (I’m not giving away any state secrets here) - multiple WhatsApp chats, rapid response contact lists, pre-arranged lobby days at the Capitol here in Austin, targeted outreach to staffers, and more. Having a big tent wasn’t enough on its own. What made the difference is knowing which fellow tent-dwellers had the right relationships, or could bring the right influence or persuasion to bear on the right members at the right time. More than once, several of our Texas housing bills were rescued from impending doom (either timing out without receiving a hearing, being derailed by poison pill amendments, or otherwise being scuppered in one of the thousands of ways that a bill can die in a state legislature) by deploying the correct coalition member to complete the correct action at the correct time.
None of this would have been possible if our Texas statewide housing reform effort had sought to expand its aims by embracing a much broader set of pro-urbanist principles, no matter how much certain coalition members (including myself in some cases) may have personally supported them. Expanding the policy remit of the coalition would have pushed certain members out of the tent, or at least to the periphery. This would have hampered our coordination significantly at a time when it was vital that we were all on the same page. Indeed, this very fate befell another coalition working on an economic liberty issue at the Texas legislature this session. By shrinking the tent (in that case, by seeking to rack up an incremental policy win at the expense of longer term policy and ideological goals), certain members withdrew their support, and suboptimal legislation was passed.
But is a big tent always better? No, I don’t think so. My arguments pertain to the playing field that I know best - working on state-level reforms in state legislatures. The situation could well be different when it comes to city or county-level work, and indeed I strongly suspect that this is the case. Anecdotally, it seems that many of the city-level urbanist groups (certainly including those in Texas) skew progressive, and take positions on a much wider range of issues than the land use and building code reforms that preoccupied our statewide coalition this session. And that approach probably works fine for them!
At the city level, there is often less need to maintain a big ideological tent. Not only do most cities skew Democratic in their governance, the majority of city dwellers tend to do likewise. And while NIMBYism is certainly endemic within progressive circles (see California, or even Austin’s local history, until some fairly recent turnover on the city council), expanding the policy goals of local urbanist groups is unlikely to alienate potential activists or allies (read: conservatives or libertarians) in the same way that doing so would torpedo more fragile statewide coalitions.
Ultimately, I think our disagreement is one of tactics rather than strategy. A broader urbanism-based movement can work very well at the city level (and indeed is already doing so in places like my home city of Austin, Texas). This is particularly the case in cities with more of a political monoculture, or where pro-housing leaders have already come to dominate the council, and where an insurgent urbanist movement can build and flex its clout without worrying so much about alienating necessary allies from across the political aisle. But at the statewide level, even in one party rule states, the fact that the issue of housing bisects traditional party lines (making ad hoc coalitions necessary to move legislation forward) means that shrinking the tent is the last thing we should want to do.
Hopefully, there will come a time when all of the low-hanging housing and zoning reform fruit has been picked, and YIMBY activists will have the luxury of casting around for new policy ideas, pushing the envelope as they seek to optimize a regulatory landscape that is already very friendly to private property rights and the easy building of much-needed housing. But I don’t think we are going to reach that blessed day any time soon, and until we do, I would counsel sticking with the formula that yielded such a good legislative session for our Texas housing coalition. And at least as far as statewide zoning reform efforts go, let’s keep the tent big and our goals narrow.
That said, I’m still fairly new to this policy area, and may be missing important lessons from other states that I didn’t have the chance to visit or testify in during the most recent legislative sessions - or which enacted significant reforms prior to me taking on my current role. If so, I would be happy to be educated or challenged on any of my assumptions or strategy suggestions. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments!