I want to share a tweet I wrote, which got a lot of engagement, and which I think is an underrated element of why YIMBY really broke through in the world of housing policy and advocacy. Maybe this is just a different way of describing the supply-side focus of YIMBY, but I think it’s a distinct point. I wrote:

Thought: YIMBY broke through because it framed housing fundamentally as a consumer advocacy issue, not as a social justice/interest-group issue, or as a particularly city issue.

What I mean is that, prior to the YIMBY movement and the shift towards a supply-side focus—i.e., build more housing as the major key to the housing crunch—“housing” was kind of seen as a poverty issue, or an issue for the nonprofits, or as of a piece with anti-gentrification efforts, or a weird wonky policy area. Activism around housing was often both left-wing and urban. Remember that HUD stands for “Housing and Urban Development,” which twins the housing issue with cities, and also, at least in the white suburbanite mind, with nonwhite and poor people.

In other words, the way that housing as a political and policy issue played out just did not touch or resonate with the average middle-class person, especially in the suburbs. My sense is that it did not at all feel obvious, as housing prices climbed throughout the last few decades, to say “Of course prices are going up, we aren’t building and developing enough!” That would have sounded like the opinion of a very narrow interest. The broad view would probably just be “We’re building too much!”

That’s often how skeptics of the YIMBYs see it: that YIMBY is about letting developers or real-estate interests do whatever they want, and that it’s basically just a subset of the building industry.

What I see in YIMBY is different: it took housing out of the realm of being a subset of poor people’s interests or being an “urban” issue, and it mainstreamed housing by casting it as a consumer advocacy issue. (The consumer is the renter or the homebuyer, not the homeowner, which complicates things a bit, of course.)

It seems to me like the YIMBYs kind of saw that we had been focusing on all these other tangential elements of housing, without attacking head-on the artificial housing scarcity we had imposed on ourselves so completely that we didn’t even notice it. The YIMBYs basically said, you should be able to afford a home, and there are specific, alterable policies that are preventing that. And that resonates with everybody. Or at least everybody at a certain point in their lives. Every comfortable homeowner did once have to search and buy.

There’s a more conceptual element to consumer advocacy in general, which is that scarcity and hardship are not inherently virtuous, and that demanding something is not necessarily “entitlement.” It all depends on whether we are, in fact, entitled to the thing. Consumer advocates have often been seen as anti-business, or as patronizing to the dumb, poor, consumer. Oh yeah, let’s sue McDonald’s because nobody knows hot coffee is hot, right? But I think consumer advocacy is distinct from a progressive anti-business attitude. It just posits that “buyer beware” is not a law of the universe, and that consumers are, yes, entitled to certain protections and expectations.

And I guess my theory is that the whole narrative about the entitled Millennials and the avocado toast and the oh you just want a nice place to live and don’t want to put in the elbow grease on a fixer-upper or starter home and oh you want a house, nice to want and all the moral hectoring is really just a way to reverse-engineer some purpose to the housing famine we imposed on ourselves in the latter half of the 20th century.

The fact is, there is no purpose in it. And even if housing scarcity is good for some people, it has obviously not been good for young people, or for land use patterns, or for regional economies. In what world is “we should drive down the price of a consumer product by making more of it” some kind of moral softness or bratty entitlement?

NIMBYism is the principle that the world revolves around you transmogrified into public policy. YIMBYism is the principle that people should be able to reasonably afford one of the most basic things they need, and that if that means a slight decline in equity for legacy homeowners, or if it means that developers get to make money, well, you know what, there are worse things. And if you don’t want it? Nice to not want.

Related Reading:

The Housing Famine

What Housing Crisis?

Which Housing Is “Housing Crisis Housing”?

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,200 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!

Share