Housing Shortages Create an Alternative to NIMBYism

Editor's Note: This article appears in Governing's Winter 2025 magazine. You can subscribe here.

Instead of saying “not in my backyard,” more places are starting to say yes. The YIMBY approach to housing development has expanded from a small band of Bay Area activists sitting at their keyboards to a sophisticated nationwide movement. Their diagnosis of the country’s housing crisis — that housing is too expensive because there isn’t enough of it being built — has become taken-for-granted wisdom for lawmakers in both major political parties and much of the news media. “This is not a hard question, policy-wise,” says YIMBY pioneer Sonja Trauss. “Right, left, center, it’s just obvious: More people, more housing.”

The basic argument that the supply of housing should be expanded is compatible with a broad range of political ideologies. Liberals want more housing for low-income people. Conservatives want fewer government regulations. The YIMBYs claim to provide a way forward for both sides. “The thing with YIMBYism is it cuts across from left to right,” says California state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat. “Housing is not a partisan issue.”

The YIMBY approach has spread far beyond California. Its favored policies — legalizing accessory dwelling units, promoting denser housing near transit stations, allowing multifamily housing in areas traditionally reserved for single-family homes — have since been taken up in multiple states including New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, Utah, Colorado and Montana.

Oregon passed a law to break down single-family zoning in 2019; California followed suit in 2021. City and county governments around the country have voted to approve “gentle density” bills that allow duplexes and triplexes in formerly all single-family-unit neighborhoods. Not every effort has been successful, but there are more successes each year.

All this represents a stunning success for a movement whose original iteration went by the acronym SF BARF. Trauss, a transplant from Philadelphia, started the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation in 2014 out of shock at the city’s fast-rising rents. She was equally befuddled by the way many people talked about the region’s population growth as an existential threat. Trauss had lived in a string of cities that were desperate for the kinds of growth-related problems the Bay Area had.
Still, the idea of changing laws to allow denser housing needed to be threaded through dozens of local governing bodies predisposed to say “no” to housing. Many municipalities in the Bay Area set tight limits on the types of housing that could be built, essentially excluding everything but single-family homes on large lots. That approach was shored up by a hodgepodge of interest groups, including existing homeowners who wanted to keep neighborhoods as they were and environmentalists who tended to oppose new development on principle.

The early success of the movement was tied to unique conditions in the Bay Area, where tech-industry transplants were finding it impossible to find low-cost housing, and therefore paid rents that drove up the cost for everyone else. Still, their bosses had incentives to push for more, lower-cost housing, too. “How do you end up in a housing crisis?” asks Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp and an early funder of the YIMBY movement. “You don’t have homes.”

Stoppelman was introduced to YIMBYism through social media. An article in TechCrunch by Kim-Mai Cutler, called “How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained),” galvanized Stoppelman and many others in the tech industry who took an interest in the Bay Area’s development permitting process. Stoppelman donated to Trauss’ early efforts. He and other tech moguls later invested in California YIMBY, a statewide advocacy group formed in 2017.

As YIMBYs began to get organized, they started showing up at planning commission and city council meetings, expressing support for new housing projects. All of a sudden, there was a countervailing force to the NIMBYs politicians were used to hearing from. “It wasn’t an effort to be super creative,” says Matt Lewis, communications director for California YIMBY. “It was: We’re going to be the opposite of these people who are clearly causing a problem.”

Brian Hanlon, California YIMBY’s president and CEO, was a disaffected academic when he moved to San Francisco in 2010. After being evicted from his apartment, he joined anti-displacement protests alongside housing activists in the tenant movement. But he quickly became disillusioned with the way those groups demonized developers who are the people who actually create housing. He became convinced the way to make meaningful policy change is through professionalized advocacy. “My thought was, well, policy is not responsive to the median voter,” Hanlon says. “What really matters are organized interests.”
Hanlon and Trauss formed a group called CaRLA in 2015, the sole purpose of which was to sue suburban communities that failed to meet their obligations under the state’s Housing Accountability Act, which had been adopted in 1982. When CaRLA lost one of its early lawsuits, against the city of Lafayette, Hanlon realized they wouldn’t have much success in litigation under existing law. So he put together a legislative package and shared it with Sen. Wiener, a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. That bill would have overhauled local zoning by requiring cities to permit denser housing near transit stops, among other things. It represented a big-swing attempt to remake the state’s housing rules, but failed. Out of that defeat has arisen a series of narrower bills passed by the Legislature year after year, gradually but deeply cutting away at restrictive zoning in California cities. “If we passed all our bills, that means our bills aren’t ambitious enough,” Hanlon says.

In the Bay Area, there were fights early on between YIMBYs and anti-displacement activists farther to their left. Since then, the YIMBYs’ willingness to make common cause with traditionally conservative interests has been part of a shift to the right in San Francisco and altered the politics of the Bay Area. Although YIMBY organizations have condemned the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision last summer, allowing local governments to use police to break up homeless encampments, they’ve also supported candidates who applaud that decision.

At this point, the YIMBY approach has transcended its Bay Area beginnings. U.S. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, introduced the Yes In My Backyard Act, which would tie some federal funding to local policies allowing denser housing. In November, more than two-dozen House members formed a bipartisan YIMBY caucus. “That goes to show you that we are committed to a bipartisan approach, where Democrats and Republicans agree on this issue, as we understand that building housing is critically important,” said Congressman Robert Garcia, a California Democrat. NIMBYism is an old and well-established force in American politics. But its counterpart continues to gain steam.