Building the Abundant City

Urbanist Politics Requires More than YIMBYism

Cities are inherently political places—after all, the word “politics” is derived from “polis,” the Greek word for city—but urbanism itself is not inherently partisan. As

Diana Lind

notes, quoting the inimitable New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, “There’s no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the garbage.”

So as current New York Mayor Eric Adams introduces a revolutionary new technology to pick up the trash—the garbage can—it’s tempting to mock this as yet another example of urban dysfunction at the hands of Democrats. Yet if one investigates why America’s most important city is only now adopting a trash solution known to lesser cities for decades, I’m not sure one will find anything specifically partisan there. Incompetence knows no party.

What you won’t find there is more fundamental: the city and its leaders have lacked a big, abundant vision for a better New York that has made it struggle to deal with even basic problems long solved by other cities.

Perhaps what’s missing is political partisans who can chart and champion that big, abundant vision.

Mayor Eric Adams fidgeting with new technology (Source: NYC.gov)

I’ve been thinking about this since

Rob Saldin

and

Steven Teles

of the

Niskanen Center

published an essay describing the rise of the Abundance Faction. This faction is a nascent political movement focused on solving seemingly intractable problems in America, including those facing cities, and it’s attracting strange bedfellows. 

The Abundance Faction is coalescing around an ideologically diverse group of “supply-side” progressives, “state-capacity” libertarians, alienated Republicans, and social moderates, among others, that when put together doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional left-right divide. Instead, this group is generally oriented toward problem-solving and economic growth, and supports (to varying degrees): 

building housing, clean energy, and infrastructure by reforming our creaky, captured systems of governance at all levels, and building a simpler, more effective and democratically legitimate welfare and regulatory state.

They may disagree on the policy particulars, but the Abundance Faction is united by a belief in both the power of free markets and effective government, one that seeks neither to destroy global capitalism nor eviscerate the state. Perhaps not surprisingly, the authors plant the “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement within this coalition, noting YIMBYs’ success at organizing, fundraising, and scoring legislative wins outside of the typical left-right binary.

I am of two minds about this. 

On the one hand, the success of the YIMBY movement has been the result of its “big tent,” single-issue nature—a monomaniacal focus on legalizing the building of more housing, not on problematizing the political leanings of housing champions. Despite attempts from some on both sides to drag housing onto the battlefields of the culture war, advocates have strived to keep housing from becoming a left- or right-coded issue. YIMBYs are interested in making progress on housing problems and recognize that the culture war is where solutions go to die. 

For that reason, I think it would be preferable for YIMBYism not to be closely associated with a particular party or faction, but to remain a broad-based, baseline plank for any party—like the idea of the American Dream used to be a shared goal among the major parties.

On the other hand, in my essay “Building a Bigger Tent,” I wondered if YIMBYism could perhaps show the rest of America a better way to get along, to find some common ground and unite “around some common vision for the future of our country.” I asked:

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 left the door open to the possibility that perhaps there is indeed a bigger agenda to be embraced by the YIMBY movement. Indeed, the “The Housing Theory of Everything” links the housing shortage to low productivity growth, less innovation, increased ​​inequality, falling fertility, obesity, and climate change—possibly even to the culture war itself. The call to build more housing is a powerful one in part because it helps to solve so many other things. 

But YIMBYism has been so successful mostly because it monomaniacally seeks to solve one problem: people need places to live—and that turns out to be the locus of its broad-based support.

On the other hand, our cities are faced with more problems than just housing affordability. So what should we make of all this?

The way to reconcile these two ideas is to distinguish between YIMBYism and urbanism. The YIMBY movement has grown as the housing problem has spread from blue cities to red states, which explains its growing appeal across the political and geographical divides. But those political and geographic divides are still very much intact on other issues, showing that the concerns of rural or suburban people are not entirely the same as those of urbanites.

So while YIMBYism is a necessary part of urbanism, it is not the whole story of cities—it’s just one plank of an urbanist platform. 

Writing at the must-read

The New Urban Order

, Diana Lind argues that we should have an urbanist political party to take up that fuller urbanist platform. She laments that we are “obsessed with philosophical debates rather than pragmatic matters [and] grappling with the basics of taking out the trash” when we should be building things like housing and infrastructure, which we can’t seem to do with thrift or speed.

Also invoking the nonpartisan, big-tent success of the YIMBY movement, Lind argues that an Urbanist Party could unite the well-educated elites “who think obsessively about the built environment” with the people who build and service the city. Such a party could even attract those outside cities “who want to see their rural and suburban areas preserved through better land management and more sustainable transportation options.” Such a party would be founded on what Lind describes as “a set of beliefs centered on sustainable transportation, dense and attainable housing, environmental sustainability, and social equity, among other aspects [that] has no particular home in politics.” 

While urbanism may have no explicit home in politics, I’d counter that Lind’s framing of urbanism aligns pretty well with the priorities of many Democratic voters—which is likely why, as she concedes, “the people who live in cities tend to vote Democrat at higher rates than their suburban or rural counterparts.” Lind is right that “there’s no iron clad connection between the people who care about cities and the Democratic party,” pointing to Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s eleventh-hour deep-sixing of the city’s congestion pricing plan on behalf of suburban voters. Nevertheless, as Pew shows, the urban-rural split is these days pretty well-established along party lines.

Saldin and Teles argue that our electoral dynamics favor a two-party system and believe that current party dynamics mean that an Abundance Faction is likely to emerge within the Democratic Party. For the same reasons, I am skeptical that a standalone Urbanist Party would find much success, but an urbanist faction within the Democratic Party seems like a possibility. 

Historically, our two parties have been coalitional, but we are in a moment where those coalitions are realigning. The longstanding Reagan coalition of free marketeers, social conservatives, and anti-communists has broken apart under Trump; the Democrats seem to be shedding working class and social conservative members of its coalition; and the Libertarian Party doesn’t seem to know what the hell it’s about. This has left many political moderates, classical liberals, and small-l libertarians feeling politically homeless, and perhaps surprised to find themselves in alignment with supply-siders and moderates among the Democrats.

So there is an opportunity for something new. 

Lind suggests a first step is an urbanist political action committee that “could demonstrate that there is a base clamoring for better transportation, land use, and environment management” and that can “support a nationwide slate of candidates who champion not just one or two topics related to cities, but the full array of issues — from housing to picking up the trash.”

While I’d agree that a galvanizing force like a PAC is necessary, I don’t think it’s likely to evolve into a standalone Urbanist Party. Nevertheless, Urbanism is more than YIMBYism, and there is a need for a better, more abundant vision of what our cities could be—after all, the project of City of Yes is to explore what that looks like. So I do think there is very much a need for a more expansive and coherent urbanist movement or faction within one of the parties, a faction advocating for an Urban Abundance agenda.

That faction would itself be coalitional. As Saldin and Teles point out, the Abundance Faction is not monolithic—and so neither would an Urbanist Abundance Faction. Lind has indicated that better land use, transportation, and environmental policy would be planks of such an agenda, but the full platform for an abundant urbanism would—or should—also include better public administration, better public safety, better municipal finances, and better urban planning and design. Surely urbanists will disagree on the particulars of all these issues, but there will have to be some baseline, shared agreement that we want to improve all aspects of urban life.

For the sake of people struggling with housing affordability everywhere, YIMBYism can and must remain nonpartisan, but our cities are desperately in need of partisans who support a bigger, broader, better vision of what they can and should be—and who are willing to take political action to fight for all of it. To build abundant cities—the City of Yes, perhaps—urbanists should embrace a forward-looking, solutions-oriented, and pro-growth politics that is progressive in that most essential sense, that sees that our cities could be much better if we realized our abundance of problems is only missing an abundance of vision.

May the urbanist votes go to the party that embraces that vision first.

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What do you think about an Urban Abundance agenda?