Chapter 3: Center Yourselves Only When Necessary | Building YIMBYs of NoVA
Visibility and influence are not the same thing
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Welcome to Chapter 3 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
A veteran West Coast YIMBY organizer recently shared a quote from one of his mentors that neatly captures my mindset building YIMBYs of Northern Virginia:
“You can either have scale or control; you can’t have both.”
On August 20, 2021, literally as I was setting up the Facebook group, I knew that the task ahead of me would take years or decades of hard work, and I needed to build something big and powerful enough to meet that task. I needed to build a culture and a team with scale in mind. There was something beautifully clarifying about that goal. Raising the stakes so high has helped me set aside my ego and think long-term. The group could not be about me, despite my strong, assertive personality, extroversion, and high energy level. I resolved to create space for others and empower them.
Ambition has become even more important, for myself and among YIMBYs generally, with our growing recognition that state-level preemption of local authority will ultimately be needed to let the housing market function. The costs, real or imagined, of new development are highly concentrated, while the benefits of a healthy economy and a workforce liberated from long commutes are realized at the regional level. So we will have to build large organizations and large coalitions with many grassroots members. The West Coast organizer noted that as you move from parcel to city to state, the politics get easier, on balance, even if the work does not.
You personally, as a leader, may not be the best spokesperson or public face for an initiative. I live in Alexandria, a different jurisdiction from Arlington, to the chagrin of Arlingtonians who opposed Missing Middle housing. So I kept a low profile, deferred most media inquiries, and even limited my involvement behind the scenes. Now that Missing Middle has passed and as we grow into a bigger, more regional organization, I am adjusting my role, but we will still expect our members to limit their participation to their own locality. And I will continue to rely on and empower the people in our leadership team closest to the action, since they have the most local credibility and, in all likelihood, the highest quality information.
That point is worth drilling into. I used to be a congressional reporter, which taught me that the player with the highest quality information has a winning edge. I also determined that only someone who has been on Capitol Hill in the previous 24 hours knows what is happening in Congress. Information decays quickly in politics, and politicians are good at telling people what they want to hear, so you have to build up a pretty extensive network of contacts to have any clue what is going on. Bits of intel will contradict each other and flimsy rumors will take on a life of their own.
Not centering oneself extends to our group as a whole. We were glad for leaders of the NAACP Arlington Branch to make the moral case for Missing Middle and against exclusionary zoning rules created to segregate. We did not center ourselves as YIMBYs. There was no reason to. Visibility and influence are not the same thing. Power is not a synonym for notoriety. We served as the connective tissue in the coalition of organizations we helped build, multiplying our own effectiveness. Likewise, you as a leader must think beyond yourself to maximize your impact.
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.