Old Wisdom, New Movement
YIMBYs are forced to turn an ur-issue into a political movement
I frequently point to stuff on Twitter here at this newsletter. I do that not because Twitter is great or a reflection of real life, but because stuff I see there jumpstarts a lot of thinking for me. Often, something I see or say over there turns out to be the germ of a newsletter piece or an article.
Last week, someone on Twitter asked, “Would you consider YIMBY a political or social moment? Or something totally different?” (I think he meant “movement”; YIMBY, “Yes in my backyard,” is sort of a movement and a slogan, the purposeful opposite of NIMBY or “Not in my backyard.” There’s a very good chance you know this if you’re reading my newsletter!)
Now, YIMBY, or YIMBYism (if it is an “ism”) definitely is both a political and social movement of sorts. But I’ve always found it irksome when people talk about YIMBYs as if they’re just another modern interest group. I reviewed Max Holleran’s book on YIMBY movement, Yes to the City, awhile ago, and while I generally liked it, I offered this critique:
Holleran’s overall framing of YIMBYism is roughly accurate, but is perhaps influenced more by its technocratic, very-online aura than the actual substance of its recommendations. Holleran suggests several times that the YIMBY movement is something new or unique in housing discourse: with its focus on generation rather than class, or with its supply-side emphasis of “build more housing” rather than focusing on controlling prices directly or subsiding public housing.
But is it really new? Most YIMBYs would like to deregulate land use, at least to some extent, and make organic urban growth easier—as it was when most American towns and cities were substantially built. The idea that YIMBYs are highly educated technocrats who seek “capitalist solutions to the housing crisis” may be true, but what many understand themselves to be doing is tweaking the current morass of land-use regulation in order to reverse-engineer, or at least approximate, the pre-zoning American status quo of building cities.
And I think a lot of folks make this error. So my answer to that Twitter question, which I wrote in a quick moment of inspiration, was this: