Chapter 9: Build A Coalition By Being Authentic | Building YIMBYs of NoVA
Remember to smile!
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Welcome to Chapter 9 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
If you live in Fairfax or Arlington, make sure you vote for pro-housing candidates in the Democratic primary elections ending today. I am also posting early this week since I am vacation. I recently realized I was moderately burned out, so take care of yourselves!
I will try to continue posting once per week, and have a hopper of essay ideas. But I may need to back down to posting every two weeks. I would love to hear from you, dear readers. Please tell me what you would like me to write about at lucagattonicelli@substack.com! I mean it!
Core to our successful campaign for Missing Middle housing in Arlington was a coalition we built with the interfaith grassroots network VOICE and the NAACP Arlington Branch. Our three organizations led the charge and we all see that each of us played an invaluable role. We covered that in a Smart Growth America blog post. I have to mention the wonderful affordable housing nonprofit umbrella group Alliance for Housing Solutions, which held the torch for Missing Middle housing for years.
YIMBYs of NoVA recruited other allies including the local Sierra Club, coordinated strategy across organizations, and turned out its members. VOICE deployed 15 years of organizing expertise to turn out dozens of Arlingtonians to hearings and events. The NAACP was indispensable, grounding Arlington’s Missing Middle debate in the historical context of the county and country’s systemically racist housing policies.
Putting a coalition together is a lot of work, but also fairly straightforward. You meet with folks, you ask questions, you try to find common ground. The foundation is our group’s authentic focus on our issue and vision. Our attitude is: We are doing our thing; if you want to be part of it, great, if not, that is fine.
In a spirit of humility, we seek out organizations with shared values, explain what we believe in, and ask if they want to work together. Importantly, I like to direct the conversation toward helping partners achieve their goals. The NAACP wants to advance racial equity and social justice. VOICE wants to advance social justice on a systemic level and serve the interests of our most vulnerable neighbors. The Sierra Club wants to preserve nature and reduce GHG emissions, and recognized that sprawl drives both. During outreach, our YIMBY team leaders in Arlington emphasized our shared values, and found plenty of common ground to build partnership and fellowship on. We also worked extremely hard and showed up, earning their respect.
I understand that some local regions have political climates that lean farther left. If tenants’ rights groups have real power where you operate, you as a YIMBY will feel a lot of pressure to embrace their positions. With the caveat that this is easy for me to say and much harder to actually do, I would resist that temptation. If you honestly believe that, say, rent control is a well-intentioned policy with a track record of failure, especially for the most vulnerable members of a community, then do not support it. Find other ways to partner with those groups. If they impose litmus tests on you, just make sure you are not imposing litmus tests on them. (Virginia is a Dillon Rule state and purple to boot, so rent control is not politically viable here; our group is officially neutral.) Do not support policies you honestly think will hurt poor people.
We certainly advocate for committed affordable housing, for example, but making it central to our identity would be a mistake. We are not quite the only grassroots housing advocacy group in our area, but we are unique in focusing on the root cause of constrained supply that drives the housing shortage and affordability crisis. We are unique in focusing on regulatory failures that make all types of housing difficult to build, especially multi-family and committed affordable housing. I could never imagine giving that up. Our focus has, if anything, strengthened our partnerships, because other organizations know exactly what we believe in. And we come by our grassroots power honestly. People respect authenticity. It ends up influencing them.
Final Thoughts
Remember to smile, and remind your members to smile, when you testify in public. Smiling projects confidence. It makes your movement seem attractive and welcoming. We are the people who say, “Yes!” We want to welcome new neighbors, we want our communities to grow and thrive. We have an inherently positive, optimistic vision, and should make sure that comes across.
How to summarize YIMBY? All of this might seem like a lot of work, because it is. It requires sacrifices, but is also the most rewarding thing I have ever done outside of my family. Remember, you cannot do great things alone. I really do think our big team is the most unique and important aspect of YIMBYs of Northern Virginia. I put a lot of intention into how I manage everything, because I want it to be something people feel good about sinking their time into. Our ambition has also been an asset to us.
I hope this series is helpful to people elsewhere trying to make housing more affordable and abundant. Thank you for your time and your readership. If you build something great, great people will want to be a part of it. Best of luck.
I asked my team, “What do you think the keys to our success have been?” They replied:
“A policy initiative to rally around in [Arlington], a region expensive enough that most people are hurting, involvement by leads who know how to make the argument to a wide variety of audiences, having a positive vision for our localities’ futures.”
“A sense of urgency.”
“Kind humans expressing their opinions with civility.”
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.