This series shares major takeaways and specific lessons from YIMBYtown 2024, a pro-housing advocacy conference held February 26-28 in Austin, Texas. Roughly 600 advocates and policy experts gathered from across the U.S. and Canada, and as far away as Australia.
I finally burned out on advocacy. You might have predicted this from my piece on the imperative for the YIMBY movement to professionalize. I simply ran out of energy, needing and wanting to simplify my life and focus elsewhere. As I said then, mine is not a sob story. Actually it is a hopeful and happy one. The transition was gradual and organic, largely because the individuals on our leadership team are so steady, so competent, and so self-directed.1 And I have not completely let go of local advocacy. Last night I wrote to the Alexandria City Planning Commission about my neighborhood’s small area plan (SAP). The note is below, in case you are interested.
My main message was that the status quo approach to housing policy is unserious. We must chart a new course to address the harsh reality of the shortage and the bad policy causing it. Our housing system is designed to keep people out, limit building, and inflate home values. It is a completely broken way to manage a basic necessity.
YIMBYtown 2024 gave me a fuller sense of that disconnect. I did not get the feeling that my fellow attendees and I were all brainwashing each other or reveling in group think or confirmation bias. However positive and joyful, the mood was matter of fact.
We had come together because we saw the full scope of the housing crisis. We understood the fundamental importance of the shortage. We knew that reforming outdated zoning laws would be essential to fixing it. And we fully grasped the huge political undertaking of building coalitions and passing corrective legislation.
Before I returned from Austin, I realized that I would no longer be able to stomach NIMBYs’ grousing or bad faith arguments or solipsistic denial of the need for change. Or, in my patented formulation, I could no longer pretend that it is at all reasonable to give people political power over where other people live. Our land use system is a moral house of cards that reduces property rights to a joke. Admitting that to ourselves does not mean we get to give up. Nor should it give us a false confidence or blinding arrogance. The game is chess, not checkers. We must educate and persuade.
It is still frustrating though. I have not been able to find much information about Alexandria’s 1992 citywide downzoning. But a senior planning official from my local government told me that to the best of his understanding, the policy process took about two years. I do not even know if current state law would allow the city to reverse that policy change in two years. And how … Orwellian that to discard zoning explicitly created to segregate, and which did so more and more effectively over time, we are expected to conduct careful equity studies. The tail really is wagging the dog.
The good news is, we know how to win these fights. Keep doing the work, it will eventually pay off. Organizations like YIMBY Action and California YIMBY prove it.
I see three keys to YIMBYs of NoVA’s success: Our large team, our values, and our coalitions.
By happenstance, a few housing advocates from other states have recently asked me what has made YIMBYs of NoVA effective. I see three keys to our success:
A larger team than most other local YIMBY groups, made up of great people.
A disciplined commitment to our four core values: respect, issue focus, action orientation, and pluralism.
Building large coalitions to render our political opponents irrelevant.
You do not beat NIMBYs by engaging with them. You do it by building coalitions.
For those interested, below is what I sent to my city’s planning commission last night.
Dear Planning Commissioners,
I address you as the founder emeritus of YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, as a proud and largely content Alexandria West resident, and as the father of three young children. With our all-volunteer YIMBY organization thriving, my responsibilities at home growing, and my energy flagging, I stepped aside from day-to-day civic involvement. So I must salute you for your years of dedicated public service, as housing commissioners and in various other official capacities. I can honestly say I am not sure how you keep it up. Thank you for the sacrifices you have made.
I live in a townhouse directly abutting Southern Towers. Without romanticizing or exoticizing them, I like living so close to so many people from a kaleidoscope of cultures and national origins. My neighbors and I exchange pleasantries and joke with each other in the checkout line at Aldi. Our kids play together in Fort Ward Park. Walkable amenities like that are why my wife and I chose our home, without knowing anything at the time about density or urbanism. I heard someone at a charette complain that density is “dumped” in our part of Alexandria. As you encounter such awful characterizations of other human beings, in this process and in all of your public service, I trust you will respond appropriately, by disregarding that negative-sum thinking.
It is obvious that an enormous amount of thoughtful, diligent, well-intentioned work went into this SAP. Analyzing and responding to it was a significant undertaking for my fellow YIMBY leaders here in our fair city. However, we have all come away disappointed. And I wonder if some folks who worked on this plan are disappointed too. I could understand why.
I must quote my local leadership team’s official comment on the plan: “According to the staff report, the AlexWest SAP will result in 1000 additional committed affordable units, and 1000 fewer market affordable units, resulting in a net increase of zero affordable homes. This is simply not acceptable.” And, I might add, everyone involved in the policy process knows it.
That net-zero change in affordable housing units, whether we call it an estimate or a goal, is a fiasco. But such failure is unfortunately embedded in our land use regulatory apparatus, by design, from our zoning paradigm with its rancid, racist history meticulously documented by Housing for All, to public comment processes that self-evidently grant people with money and power, not to mention copious leisure time, real influence over where other people live.
The plan also seems to envision that Southern Towers, high-rises built some 60 years ago, will stand for another 20 or 30 years, despite their decrepit condition and lack of sprinklers or modern fire control systems. Even if, somehow, the management company were willing and able to address the basic quality of life issues in these buildings, from roaches to water and mold to old stoves that catch fire, they would remain fundamentally unsafe. The buildings will have to come down, sooner than is comfortable for any of us to contemplate.
Because in confronting the precarious state of Southern Towers, we must confront the harsh reality that the people living there have, practically speaking, nowhere else to go. Our region, much less our city, would struggle to absorb the displaced residents from one of the five buildings, which total, according to the best information I could find, 2,346 apartments.
The positive spin I can put on our region’s housing crisis is that other U.S. “superstar metros,” such as New York, face even worse situations, because DC and some Virginia jurisdictions, including Alexandria, built a bit more housing than they did, and our median incomes are much higher, which is no consolation to folks who live here on an income closer to the national norm.
In some ways my neighborhood is a model of success, or at least of what is possible. We have so many high-rises so far from Metrorail, but traffic is close to a non-issue. Our average incomes are low, many households’ English fluency is limited, but Alexandria West is safe (especially by national standards) and my neighbors seem to be doggedly pursuing their American dream.
Yet this plan, with its careful assumptions and calculations, shows that we, as a neighborhood, city, and region, are not on a sustainable trajectory. We must chart a new course, and the responsibility to help lead us there has fallen to you, dear commissioners. The second-best time to plant a tree is today.
And so with respect and admiration, I challenge you to summon up all of your wisdom and judgment and experience, and to embrace this moment as an opportunity. It is time for a more honest and sober, yet also constructive and hopeful conversation about our city’s unmet housing needs. We should stop dreading the future and start working toward a housing market that makes sense, where the numbers add up to more than zero, and residents are not a problem to be solved. The only answer is to allow a lot more housing to be built, in Alexandria West, and in the rest of Alexandria. Please, help us make room for everyone.
Sincerely,
Luca Gattoni-Celli
Founder Emeritus, YIMBYs of Northern Virginia
Resident, Alexandria West
Thanks to my 506 subscribers, especially my 11 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.
I hope this perspective is helpful, and that I am not descending too far into self-indulgence.