Chapter 2: What YIMBYs Actually Do | Building YIMBYs of NoVA
You need a MacGuffin!
76 people are receiving this post via email (I added some friends to the list, no hard feelings if you remove yourselves).
Special thanks to my 2 paid subscribers.
Welcome to Chapter 2 of the Building YIMBYs of NoVA series, which covers:
Chapter 7: Recruit Like Crazy (Plus Thoughts on Social Media)
Chapter 8: Think And Talk About Opponents As Little As Possible
YIMBY groups are unique among advocacy organizations because they focus on policies that increase overall housing supply while also being truly grassroots. For example, in addition to all of us being unpaid volunteers, only a few members of our leadership team, particularly our president Jane Green, had prior housing advocacy experience. I certainly did not. I discovered urbanism about two years ago, which I hope inspires others to jump in headfirst. Folks often assume they have to be housing experts to be housing advocates, which is absolutely not the case. Even YIMBY organizations whose primary model for change is lobbying rely on a ground-up network of volunteers, regular people from all walks of life. YIMBYs of Northern Virginia engages in four broad categories of advocacy, which I think are generally representative.
Grassroots activism is the classic model of turning out the everyday people who comprise our membership for public comment, handing out flyers at farmers markets, and the like. It works well in our suburban context, but Washington, D.C., for example has an entirely different, hyperlocal political environment that requires an almost entirely different advocacy approach.
Our group advocates for systemic reforms, such as Missing Middle housing, when they arise. We also advocate for specific development projects, which grows our visibility through direct exposure in public hearings and via media coverage. Getting on the radar of potential allies and members as well as public officials is important. During the Missing Middle campaign in Arlington, Jane worked with other members of our team to prepare high-level talking points and host informational sessions to help regular people feel comfortable publicly testifying.
My big thesis about U.S. society is that we are having a crisis of purpose and meaning. Many of us are socially alienated because we feel unnecessary in our own lives. I bring this up because in-person gatherings that cultivate a sense of community and make YIMBY social and fun seem to be the key to turning out large volumes of people. This is one of many reasons to maintain a positive mindset focused on your own vision.
We engage in grasstops advocacy, a term for cultivating relationships with and lobbying political decision makers, namely local elected officials. We are, via our parent organization, a legally registered 501(c)(4) entity, so we avoid the gray areas 501(c)(3)s can face. Our interactions with electeds are always cordial and productive, the normal stuff of local politics. As noted below, reaching them is surprisingly easy.
I think being pathologically honest and sincere has been an asset to me in this area. Public officials know exactly what I think and see that I want to help them achieve our shared policy goals. They also come to us because they recognize that we activate the widespread public support for housing being affordable and abundant. We have good relationships with electeds, but the nice thing about politics is that if you have results, it does not matter if stakeholders like you, they have to respect you.
We are branching into electoral politics, sending out candidate questionnaires, conducting a members-only straw poll, and soon activating our email subscribers to vote in local elections and volunteer for pro-housing candidates. We are just getting started with this so I do not have much to say about it. Although we are doing things our own way, our parent organization YIMBY Action has been a huge help.
Important to note, all of this is time-intensive, but it costs very little money, through the magic of free labor. Our operating expenses comprise software including a CRM, website platform, and Slack. We periodically spend a few hundred dollars, maybe a thousand, to print out flyers. The developer shill conspiracy theory is just that.
The fourth category of YIMBY advocacy is through the news media, what YIMBY Action calls building narrative power. Our members submit letters to the editor and op-eds. Our communications team issues press releases and fields media inquiries. And both discrete project advocacy and big initiatives such as Missing Middle yield plenty of organic media coverage, as noted. National outlets such as VICE Motherboard and Business Insider have approached us thanks to the Arlington Missing Middle housing fight, which brings us to our next topic.
Identify A Campaign
In some ways this is the most important consideration. A MacGuffin is a sometimes contrived plot device that keeps a movie or other story moving forward. Recover the stolen item, find the key to the safe, rescue the princess. “Dude, where’s my car?” Having a MacGuffin, or campaign, to organize around is essential. I have been reliably informed, and totally believe, that veteran organizers will make one up if necessary.
Missing Middle housing in Arlington forced us to formalize our organization and develop a capability of turning people out. It also accelerated our membership growth, certainly in Arlington, and gave us regional and national visibility. That all happened in less than eleven months. The draft framework dropped two months or so before we expected it, and we did not feel prepared. But it turned out to be a blessing. It was a big thing to rally around. It built our brand and increased local officials’ desire to work with us. It added gravity to everything we did and do.
As a YIMBY leader, you will probably always have a MacGuffin in the form of housing development projects. The original YIMBY herself, Sonja Trauss, preaches the value of project advocacy, which builds your organization’s muscles with minimal stakes. Reporters seize on the other side of a usually one-sided story and will often quote a pro-housing comment. This is how our group is becoming visible in Fairfax County.
Your Voice Matters, Use It
Showing up is 80% of success, especially in local politics. If you send an email or show up at a public meeting, it instantly puts you in a small minority that local officials are obliged to be aware of. Public engagement is a battle of attrition, with huge amounts of time and energy expended for marginal gains. However, in an important sense, time individual housing advocates spend on public comment is never wasted, especially if you are the only person making the case for housing. One positive voice is the difference between, "Everyone hates this," and, "There's a conversation,” or, “The community has multiple perspectives.” An elected underlined that point to me.
Policy staff and like-minded public officials may practically beg you to be active. A few short years ago it was unimaginable that ordinary citizens would speak out in favor of housing and growth and upzoning. An organized grassroots effort to do so may have seemed even more improbable. Your participation and leadership truly matter. That is the point I always highlight to folks who are interested in YIMBY.
A modest number of individuals can have a huge impact. The Bay Area is the cradle of the YIMBY movement and gets a lot of attention. But one leader of the movement there estimated there are only 100 highly active YIMBYs in San Francisco, doing housing advocacy on a daily basis. They built a network of thousands of regular people who have completely changed that city’s politics. In other cities, a handful of YIMBY activists can completely change the local housing debate. You can too.
If you enjoy this series or want to work together, I would love to hear from you at lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I am glad to answer questions from readers, ideally in future blog posts. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia at yimbysofnova.org.