YIMBYs Need to Prioritize
Not everything can be the best use of time and energy
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.
YIMBYtown was inspiring. The advocates gathered in Austin were incredibly focused on the task at hand, with an almost universally positive mindset. The determination I encountered, and the warmth of these individuals fighting to make their communities more welcoming and affordable, was wonderful.
I reached two conclusions by the end of the second day. Good people across the country are doing good, productive work of all types, accomplishing a lot. Yet the task ahead is vast, requiring more than a decade of disciplined effort. Consider the elements of supply-side reform, setting aside subsidies and tenant protections:
Land use deregulation, presumably requiring multiple rounds of state legislation
Reforming zoning, broadly defined (or eliminating zoning as we know it)
Reforming permitting to be efficient and non-discretionary
Reforming building codes to reduce cost and allow more housing types
Legal enforcement to ensure localities comply with state law, as in California
Legislative work to block anti-growth laws and safeguard hard-won reforms
Navigating the headwinds of anti-reform lawsuits
Our necessarily complex agenda will require a cohesive strategy, executed by YIMBY and YIMBY-adjacent organizations with significant capacity. As inspiring as it is and successful as it has been, the disparate work housing advocates are doing cannot all be the best use of time and energy. That is impossible, even granting the wisdom of an eclectic, all of the above approach.
We face a political economy problem. We must build enough political power to win reform, while also implementing policies that have the greatest positive impact on land use and housing production and affordability. Policies that build the most power and policies that build the most housing are not necessarily the same. So there will be trade-offs. We can take some comfort in that ambiguity, but the sheer scale of the American housing shortage, probably tens of millions of homes, requires YIMBYs to move toward an understanding of what is most important — to prioritize.
The political side of the equation is difficult to pin down and will engender some serious disagreement, as
recently examined. Big-tent, single-issue advocacy can be uncomfortable, but as I have written before, urbanism and YIMBY do not require any notable ideological commitments. That is beautiful, Ryan and I agree.It is clear that coalitions will continue to be central to YIMBYs’ political success. I saw this in YIMBYs of NoVA’s work to help end single-family-only zoning in Arlington County and Alexandria City. After growing up in South Carolina with reverence for the NAACP, partnering with local NAACP leaders in Arlington was a huge honor and, at first, a little surreal. Big tent thinking helps us see the full picture: The YIMBY majority extends to folks who believe in social justice, property rights, healing the world, environmentalists, faith and good works, and on and on.
We can also make educated guesses about which housing policies to prioritize — what juice will be worth the squeeze, to borrow from one YIMBYtown workshop. I put the question to Henry Honorof, a veteran housing advocate from Portland and true mensch who runs Welcoming Neighbors Network, a collaborative confederation of local and regional independent land use reform advocacy groups.
I have to note that Henry is not the kind of person to present his word as gospel, though his answers made a lot of sense to me. He advised that if an area is not housing-constrained and has a reasonable amount of land (the sunbelt comes to mind), multiplexes can make a big difference over time, compared with homogenous single-family development. However, where we want to make a big impact — the vast majority of American cities where housing affordability is a serious problem — Henry identified these housing typologies to prioritize:
As many ADUs (accessory dwelling units) as you can get, preferably two per lot
A path to mid-rise housing (5 to 12 stories per Freddie Mac)
And he mentioned a third with some caution:
TOD (transit-oriented development — towers near train stations) if you can get it
It is useful for us to consider the political economy of these three reform targets.
ADUs are a relatively easy sell politically, a non-threatening starting point for rolling back exclusionary zoning. You can build a narrative around families using them to house relatives. I used to look down my nose at ADUs as a reform, but I now see they can overcome initial political inertia. Perhaps more importantly, California’s ADU boom shows they can add up to a lot of new housing.
I do not want to make ADUs sound like low-hanging fruit, however. California had to pass many laws across roughly two decades to unlock ADU production. Virginia’s legislature just sent an ADU bill to a study committee after the idea went nowhere during last year’s session, because that bill had not been widely socialized and environmental groups were caught off-guard. This year I hope to help build the coalition that gets legalizes ADUs across the commonwealth, in name, at least.
Two ADUs per lot is a concept I had not heard of before YIMBYtown but it makes complete sense, especially because of how large U.S. suburban lots can be. Many backyards can fit a full-size house!
I assume Henry was referring to by-right mid-rise residential development as the other big ticket YIMBY policy goal. The reasoning here is simpler. The politics are tough but workable. And they have to be, because we need lots of mid-rises to meaningfully address our massive housing shortage. To make the numbers add up, we would probably have to allow mid-rises pretty much everywhere (note that only a limited percentage of a city's properties will redevelop in a given year).
Here is the thing: A three or four or, yes, five-story building can sit across the street from a single-family home, or side-by-side, without anybody noticing as they walk by. Simple things like street trees can make a huge qualitative difference. Saying that mid-rises should be allowed in what have become archetypical suburban areas is just another way of saying that we should meaningfully move on from restrictive zoning. A thirteen-story apartment block towers over my home, and it is Fine with a capital F.
Henry’s TOD comment, “if you can get it,” is, to me, revealing. The DC area where I live is arguably the national leader in TOD; Mercatus housing economist Emily Hamilton has an excellent piece exploring that history. So our local perspective on TOD is skewed. Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor was conceived in the early 1960s, as a political grand bargain to concentrate density near transit and leave single-family neighborhoods’ character, as it were, intact. Even I have to admit suburban Arlington’s embrace of transit was pretty forward-thinking, certainly compared with other Northern Virginia localities’ posture.
“Transit-oriented development is not enough,” I wrote in an op-ed last year, arguing that tying density to transit too rigidly can and does become a pretext for restricting housing. The high-rises that loom over me as I write this blog post are nowhere near Metro, our subway system, and receive fairly unremarkable bus service by regional standards. We live near I-95, sure, but my neighborhood has remarkably little traffic.
I provide that background because I was surprised by how negatively folks at YIMBYtown from other regions viewed TOD. As a target for state-level reform it apparently has a poor track record. The political fights around it have been bruising. That is, on balance, disappointing. Yet it reaffirms my conviction that we must make an unapologetic, though tactful, case for dense housing, and for our neighbors.
If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the all-volunteer grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.