What do you call 600 people gathering to talk about zoning policy, parking mandates, and point access blocks?
If you guessed “nerds,” well, that’s hard to dispute.
Nevertheless, I spent several days this past week among them at YIMBYtown, a national gathering of “Yes In My Backyard” pro-housing advocates, experts, and politicos that took place right here in my backyard in Austin. As a member of the conference organizing committee and the Board Treasurer of co-host AURA, you could say I was in good company. My personal highlight was moderating a panel discussing Austin’s recent housing reforms featuring some of my favorite local YIMBYs, but I thoroughly enjoyed meeting so many fellow travelers, discussing our challenges and successes, and getting into the weeds of policy reform.
Nerdy, yes. But what if it was something more? What if it was the future?
One of the themes the organizing committee chose to celebrate and lean into was the “big tent” nature of the YIMBY movement, deploying the Texas-inflected slogan “Y’all In My Backyard.” As a single-issue coalition, the movement spans the political spectrum, bringing together Texans and Californians, Democrats and Republicans, libertarians and Democratic Socialists, homeowners and renters, anti-sprawl environmentalists and property rights enthusiasts, homelessness activists and the politically homeless—and everyone in between who cares about housing.
Single-issue politics makes for strange bedfellows, and YIMBYism requires a bed large enough for an orgy of political perspectives.
While I care deeply about the issues of the movement, I also care a lot about the state of our civil discourse, and so I find the nonpartisan nature of YIMBYism really appealing. In an era in which “bipartisan” is a four-letter word and we seem unable to find any common purpose nationally, the YIMBY movement is a welcome rejection of the tribal warfare that has made our national politics so polarized and dysfunctional. In practice, the big-tent aspect of YIMBYism shows that politics can be a means for achieving real if incremental progress—and progress is sexy.
But not everybody I encountered was as enthusiastic about the open relationships in our coalition.
The movement, which has its origins in blue cities suffering from long-time housing shortages, has since grown to include many conservatives in red states, where housing unaffordability is a more recent phenomenon. This puts some people who have long seen themselves as political enemies in uncomfortable positions—one attendee even described it as “painful.”
For strange bedfellows, it goes both ways.
To wit, the YIMBYtown stage was shared (virtually) by both California State Senator Scott Wiener—a noted progressive—and Montana Governor Greg Gianforte—a noted conservative. On nearly every political issue, the senator and governor would otherwise be at odds, and on social issues, the two could not be further apart, yet Sen. Wiener and Gov. Gianforte have both championed pro-housing reforms in their respective states.
Though Sen. Wiener and Gov. Gianforte represent opposite poles on the continuum of the American political mainstream, on housing, they are speaking the same language. Yet outside of housing politics, Americans can barely talk to each other these days even when they are espousing views within the mainstream. So I suppose it is natural, as the movement stretches across the mainstream, for some to ask: how big is the tent?
Who gets to call themselves a YIMBY?
To say “yes in my backyard” is to say “yes” not only to all types of housing, but to all types of people—it’s inherently a message of abundance and inclusivity. So the bar for exclusion ought to be pretty high. It’s easy to say that we wouldn’t want Nazis, terrorists, or rapists on board. But our political discourse becomes easily sloppy from there. The phrase “literal Nazi” is so overused that you have to add an extra “literal” if you’re trying to distinguish between somebody who actually holds Hitlerian views versus somebody who somebody else just doesn’t like.
I can understand why a progressive woman would be especially uncomfortable working with a politician who voted for an abortion ban. As a married gay man, I can’t say I relish working with people who have declared their intent to abolish gay marriage.
So that raises a more fundamental question: does somebody holding a viewpoint that I think is morally bad make them a morally bad person? And vice versa?
That’s the unspoken question at the heart of much of our broken political discourse. While many have decided that disagreement is automatically the difference between good and evil, YIMBYs have been willing to say “no” to moral condemnation for the sake of the cause. In finding a way to work with people without the moralizing, perhaps that’s how we’ve found the good in each other.
Could we find the good in each other elsewhere?
The reality is that bipartisanship happens all the time in politics. In Montana, Gov. Gianforte signed into law a suite of pro-housing legislation that “gained wide bipartisan support in the Republican supermajority legislature.” And in California, Sen. Wiener introduced two important housing bills that passed in a Democratic legislature with—you guessed it—bipartisan support. Many other pro-housing bills would not have passed without a coalition that crossed the aisle.
Even though we Americans are largely at odds with ourselves, we can still find ways to achieve bipartisan ends. The disparagement, problematizing, and othering that typify our political discourse seem largely to be a feature of the intractable, cynical culture war, where solutions go to die. So, it would be a shame for the YIMBY movement, and especially for Americans struggling with housing affordability, if some people’s discomfort with a broadening tent led to the movement fracturing along partisan, culture-war lines. As uncomfortable as some YIMBYs might be with other members of our coalition, we should all be uncomfortable with going down that dead-end route.
Truth is, the only way to make our housing reform wins durable is to keep the coalition broad, and the only way for a broad coalition to survive is for people to live with a certain amount of discomfort. And that means doing something that most of us have forgotten how to do: to accept the premise that a person can hold an opposing moral viewpoint in good faith.
Nobody said pluralistic democracy would be comfortable.
After spending an amazing few days with people with whom I share at least one particular political end, but perhaps not others, I have to wonder: if YIMBYs can find a way to get along on housing, might we Americans find a way to see past our differences on other issues, and find some place where we can come together on common ground, around some common vision for the future of our country?
Can we build a broad coalition of Americans who are future-oriented, solutions-oriented, and abundance-oriented while accepting that on the particulars we may quibble, and on some topics we might just not agree? And still remember there’s good in each other?
I think it’s possible—in large part because the big-tent YIMBY movement is showing America the way to be Americans again.
And isn’t America the biggest tent of all?
Looks like the NYTs is picking up the story:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/business/economy/yimby-housing-conference.htm